The Radium still glows
There’s only one venue in town where you can listen to the classic 18-piece jazz band The Fat Sound – the popular Radium Beer Hall in Orange Grove. They’ve been playing there for the past 14 years.
“The Radium”, as it is colloquially called, is owned by Manny Cabeleira, and he calls it “the last surviving decent watering hole in Louis Botha Avenue”. Besides The Fat Sound, this great pub and restaurant has been host to a parade of “captains of industry, supreme court judges, celebrities, actors, media personalities and other well-known overseas visitors”.
Cabeleira believes that popular short story teller, Herman Charles Bosman, used to drink at The Radium, his last drinking stop before going home to Lombardy East.
You’ll have to queue from around 10.30am on the first Sunday of each month to catch The Fat Sound for their 12.30pm show. The band owes its continued existence to The Radium, and according to leader Jake Pressley, the sheer size of the band precludes it from performing around town.
He says: “It has some of the best jazz musicians on the Reef, but there is not much call for jazz at the moment.” About half the members, including Bruce Cassidy (formerly of Blood, Sweat & Tears), are professional jazz musicians, others teach music, but all are professionals – there’s a nuclear physicist, a research chemist, an engineer, an optometrist . . . Pressley, now retired, says he just “wants to help kids to play jazz”.
The Radium retains its early Victorian features: attractive pressed steel ceilings and strip wooden floors. The ceilings and walls are painted a shiny olive green, with red detail. The walls are adorned with pictures of old posters, sailing ships, cartoons, soccer teams and newspaper headlines. The menu appears on blackboards, and good food it is.
Originally from Madeira in Portugal, Cabeleira devised a menu with “a bit of everything”, but with great Portuguese specialities like piri-piri prawns, grilled Portuguese sardines, or grilled fish done the Portuguese way, on a cast iron griddle.
The Radium has, in the last 20 years, become a favourite community meeting place, the local pub and watering hole. Cabeleira says he has customers who have been frequenting the bar for 40 years, others who have a daily meal there, and from before he took over, it’s been multiracial.
Its large, impressive Burmese teak bar has a history. It’s around 100 years old and came from the original Ferreirastown Hotel, demolished to make way for the Magistrate’s Court in 1944, says Cabeleira. It is believed that trade unionist Mary Fitzgerald stood at this bar in the hotel, making rousing speeches in the build-up to the miners’ strikes of 1913 and 1914. The Radium got its name from the discovery of radium in 1898 by Marie Curie. According to Cabeleira, in the early days of its opening, people used to say they were “going for some radium treatment”, when they were going for tea at The Radium.
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Courtesy of www.joburg.org.za
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