Jazz Cafe, Pink Lane

Owned by the famously cantankerous Keith Crombie, the Rendezvous Jazz Cafe was a corner of Newcastle that was forever 1962. An earlier attempt to recreate the debauchery of 19203 Paris at Josephine's on Forth Lane had brought him to the attention of the magistrates, who described him as being "not a fit and proper person" to hold a drinks licence. Pleased with this ringing endorsement, he acquired much larger premises a few yards away on Pink Lane, and the legendary Sixties club The Downbeat where he'd worked as a doorman, was reborn.

This meant live jazz and late drinks in surroundings that were civilised in every respect, apart from their proprietor. It attracted the same studenty and Bohemian types as The Downbeat, and thespians and musicians were admitted for free. Hence you may find Shakespearean actors arm-wrestling on the bar with the likes of Huggy Bear out of Starsky & Hutch, while Harry Connick Jnr sat in with the band. Crombie was himself a landmark in Newcastle, leafleting every day outside the universities. When he was carried out of the Jazz Cafe in a coffin in 2013 after almost quarter of a century on Pink Lane, hundreds of his friends and admirers marched through the streets behind a New Orleans jazz band to St Thomas' church in the Haymarket.