The café
Cor-rupt is hard to define: Some locals called it a student hangout; others called it a neighbourhood bar. Many English called it their local, their pub. It wasn’t a political café but there was a lot of talk about politics. It wasn’t a music café but nevertheless an awful lot of music was made. It wasn’t a typical Amsterdam café but a lot of Amsterdammers frequented it. It wasn’t an international café either, but it attracted a crowd from all over the world. The nationalities of the guests changed through times. One year it would be more Irish, the next it would be more Dutch, with Dutch card games and Punch and Judy. There was a solid core but even that diverged. The only constant was perhaps the fact that the vast majority was aged between 20 and 35 and therefore mobile.
The customers
The customers were mainly individuals. Cor-rupt attracted one specimen from almost every possible group, one plumber, one police officer, one inventor, one bricklayer, one bass player from the philharmonic, one professor, one dentist… Or small groups came in; a few civil servants or squatters, a couple of entrepreneurs (small business owners, mostly), an artist, a photographer, and a grandmother…. They were more often not mainstream, not an ordinary plumber, not an ordinary dentist, no ordinary civil servants and no ordinary granny. Because you had to love the vibe of Cor-rupt, chaotic and full of (folk) music, humour and ambiguous rules. A bit of a mess, to be honest.
Of course, larger groups also visited the café. Hilton’s white and black brigade, the medics working the AMC’s IC, the people from the printing house, the IT nerds, the tram crew driving line 16, journalists working at Nieuwe Revue to name a few. They turned up as a group but in most cases because one of them had already known Cor-rupt.
Discovering Cor-rupt
The café was not very widely known. Most people heard stories about it or accompanied regular visitors. A few just strayed in. Sometimes that came with a good story. Three explosives experts (two Australian and one American) that worked 24/7 in Saudi Arabia used to go on a holiday together every six months. Their choice of destination was determined by darts. They would throw a dart at the world map that hung in their mobile home and wherever that landed, they would go. And so one time, it landed in Amsterdam. They stayed in a small hotel on the Ceintuurbaan and…. two of them found romance in Cor-rupt. One of them married, had a son, and moved back to Australia with his wife and child. Another ‘stray cat’ saw a sticker of Cor-rupt in a toilet at Kennedy Airport and thought, “Why not Amsterdam?” Another staying temporarily in Amsterdam, for instance, to exhibit ‘the Irish Gold’ at the Rijksmuseum, walked in for a beer and kept on coming back for years after.
You never knew……