Jane Bom-Bane plays the harmonium while wearing beautiful mechanical hats, which illustrate her songs, such as ‘I’ve Got A Goldfish Bowl On My Head’. She had the idea to open a café while running musical evenings at the Sanctuary in Hove with her then partner, the multi-instrumentalist, Nick Pynn. After she bought 24 George Street in March 2006, they spent six months restoring the building and creating the café.
“It was a wing and a prayer,” says Jane. “A lot we did ourselves. People who helped us were friends and gave us really good prices. For a lot of years after, we were giving people free sausage and mash.” Here she’s talking about stoemp and sausage, one of the café’s great Belgian dishes created by Andre Schmidt, the first chef. It’s still on the menu today.
Jane and Nick built seven mechanical tables inspired by table-related wordplay. These are the mirrored Tablerone, the Water Table (a model of the Palace Pier with working rides standing in a rippling sea) and two Aesop’s Tables, showing 1920s animal fable cartoons. The Uns-Table, the Turntable and the 27 Chimes Table all have delightful surprises which I leave to you to discover.
“Until the day before we opened, I still hadn’t worked out a way of putting water in the Water Table. I knew it had to be an oil because water would evaporate. I wanted a transparent oil, but the things I ordered on the net were yellow. And I was in Boots just around the corner and do you know what it was that I spotted? Baby oil! And that baby oil’s been in there for 18 years!”
The front wall of Bom-Bane’s has a bust of Jane with a revolving tray on her head with its own story to tell. Made in 2007 by her brother-in-law, Johnny Justin, it was stolen in 2012, later found in a student garden, minus its hat, and restored in 2017.
Go down the spiral stairway and you reach the basement, the main performance space, its walls covered with paintings and instruments. Although there’s only room for 25 people, it’s a room performers love. Stewart Lee, Bridget Christie, Jerry Dammers and Rich Hall are among the many who have played here.
Bom-Bane’s has a tradition of singing staff, beginning in 2008 with the waitresses Rosi Lalor and Candy Hilton, who Jane discovered were wonderful harmony singers. “I thought I’ve got to harness this, and so I wrote a musical. It was all about the café and how we cooked things, and how I got parsley and coriander mixed up.”
This was the start of the Bom-Bane’s Family Players, who would perform a folk musical written by Jane every May fringe and at Christmas. These often used the whole building, with an audience of just five following a promenade performance from the attic to the basement.
Puppeteer Daisy Jordan, fresh from art college, joined Bom-Bane’s as a dishwasher in 2010, and soon found herself singing and performing puppetry as a member of the family players. Today she says, “I wonder if I would be a performer/puppeteer if it weren’t for Bom-Bane’s.”
Isobel Smith, another puppeteer, had only made one puppet when Jane invited her to put on her first show here. Rosi Lalor, encouraged by Jane to write and perform her songs, has gone on to make two solo albums.
To celebrate the centenary of the crossword in 2013, Jane turned the building into a big crossword puzzle, 5 Down and 20 Across. Her sister, the crossword setter Pegleg, wrote puzzles which were placed on the building’s 20 doors, which had all been turned into black and white paintings by different artists.
I painted one of the doors with the story of the explorer Sir John Franklin’s mysterious disappearance in the Arctic in 1845. By a curious coincidence (or Bom-Bane magic?), Sir John’s ship was discovered a year after I did the painting. This led to me hosting a series of Franklin Disaster Mystery evenings, with Arctic food, Inuit testimony, whale song and Jane as Sir John’s widow singing Franklin ballads.
The current chef is the singer-songwriter, Eliza Skelton. Unlike the waitresses who became singers, she was a singer to begin with. She performs here in the musicals, which she now co-writes, and as a member of the Silver Swans, a madrigal group with Jane and Emma Kilbey. She learned to be a great chef by working in Bom-Bane’s.
In 2008, Eliza and David Bramwell first staged Sing-a-long-a-Wickerman here. Audience members, invited to dress in character, were given a ‘Pagan Hymn Book’, which allowed them to sing along with the songs from the film. Eliza and David take this to festivals and theatres around the country, and still host Folk Horror film screenings in Bom-Bane’s.
Today, Jane spends midweek with her mum in Coventry, and so the café is only open at weekends. It’s staffed by Jane, Eliza and recent recruit Kate Holden. Jane says, “Kate is helping me in the kitchen. She says she’s not musical, but I’m teaching her to play the guitar, and I think she can sing. Most people can sing.” That very evening Kate made her stage debut, accompanying Jane in a song.
We ended by talking about plans for the future. On the anniversary, 1 September, there’s a coming-of-age celebration, with 18 songs sung by Jane and her family of players. “There was a couple in last week who I got talking to. Somehow we got talking about when we first opened here and he said, “Was there anything that you planned to do that you didn’t do?” And I said “Yes, I wanted to make a tap with water music so that when you turned the tap on music came out with your water, but I never got around to it.” And he said, “I’ll do that for you!””
I tell Jane that I think the cultural impact of this little building has been massive. “When you look at it like that, yes, it’s been a springboard for a lot of people that normally wouldn’t do it. It’s because it’s so little and friendly, and that’s what Brighton’s like, isn’t it? It catches you if you fall.”
l Bom-Bane’s, 24 George St, Kemptown, BN2 1RH
For bookings email janebombane@yahoo.co.uk
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