Boom Battle Bar, 12-14 Station Rd, Reading, RG1 1JX (it’s where Revs was).

If you’re over the age of whatever age I am, you’ll no doubt remember how boozers used to be…

Hold up. Fine – I’ll tell you how old I am. In the intervening years since I last wrote one of these things, I turned 40. You may even get a sense of my worsening decrepitude in the way these new write-ups come across. In your early thirties, being snide about things on the internet might not exactly be ‘cool’, but it’s at least excusable. But in your forties? Well, it’s just a bit sad.

So now I’m older and marginally maturer, can you expect these reviews to take on a more Alan Whicker/Alan Bennett/some other Alan approach? Maybe. Although it’s more likely it’ll just be the snide-about-things-on-the-internet-in-your-forties-sad thing. A sad, old, out-of-touch man wandering about pubs and bars, not really understanding what’s going on, getting irritated by all the younger, firmer, more supple and less bald people who are in my fucking way all the time.

It’s fine. I can handle it. Unless they all start queuing in single file at the bar. In which case Thames Valley Police may well need to become involved again.

I suppose the good thing is that you’re all older too. If you’re reading this, it’s likely you remember these reviews or the incredible waste of time and electricity that was Shit Things in Reading. In which case, you’re even older than you were back then (even if you don’t remember them, you’re older than you were in the past – there’s no point arguing you weren’t). Some of you will even be older than me. As I pick these reviews up again, we can be miserable old moaning bastards* together

*and bitches – I know at least half a dozen women used to read these things.

Where were we? Oh yes. If you’re over the age of whatever age I am (40, see above), you’ll no doubt remember how boozers used to be. I’m 40, not 140, so I’m not talking about mead spilling onto sawdust-covered floors that are littered with the corpses of toothless sex workers who’ve choked to death on wooden tankards of poisonous bathtub gin. I just mean the way that they used to be buildings where people would go in, sit down, get pissed, and then go home. It was a simple set-up that worked quite nicely, thankyouverymuch. 

That was until the entirety of the western world developed ADHD. Now, half the people who go out ‘for a few drinks’ need constant distraction and entertainment. The adult equivalent of the toddler that has a tantrum the second its favourite episode of Paw Patrol finishes on its grime-covered neon green rubber-sheathed mid-range generic tablet. Now we need GAMES and FLASHING LIGHTS and PRIZES and GAMES and EVENTS and THEMED NIGHTS and GAMES!

And don’t get me started on everyone’s ‘social anxiety’ stopping them from going out. Of COURSE you have social anxiety. This is BRITAIN. A complete inability to function socially is one of our core tenets. It’s no reason to swerve the pub. In fact, it’s the main reason to go to the bloody pub. You drink booze, then you can talk to people. It’s why everyone else is there. Come out, get pissed with everyone, be sociable, overstep the mark, say something you shouldn’t, misbehave, get a kebab and a cab home and wake up drenched in sweat, chilli sauce, garlic mayo and shame.

How’s that for a rambling load of shit of an introduction, eh? And you thought Edible Reading was incapable of editing.

RIGHT. ‘Boom Battle Bar’, then…

Reading is famously (well, famously here, anyway) the town of ‘the three B’s’: Beer, biscuits and the Broad Street Mall. So it’s very clever how the town’s newest bar, Boom Battle Bar, has adopted a name that reflects that. The fact that the bar is actually a well-established chain, comprising of more than 30 other locations, is neither here nor there.

Does the name really make much sense? No, not really. But does the concept make sense…? No, not really.

The ‘Bar’ bit, I get. It is a bar. And it has a bar. Selling most of the boring drafts you might expect a chain of bars to have. Plus all the swigging bottles and tacky top shelf options you’d imagine a chain bar that’s this neon to stock.

As for the ‘Boom’? Or the ‘Battle’? Can’t really say. Not all words have meaning. You should know, you’re reading this, after all.

Oh, and they also sell ‘cocktails’. And yes, I’ve used inverted commas there to be a sniffy little so-and-so about them.

Full disclosure: I went on an opening launch night. And, to be fair, despite it being very busy, service was quick, despite everyone ordering time-consuming drinks. At one point I counted 12 people serving. Is that likely to be the case every time it’s busy? I doubt it, but who knows.

The bar staff were attentive and knew how to make the cocktails on the menu. Trouble was, those cocktails were almost undrinkably bad. Sub-Wetherspoons stuff; all sickly fruit juices and terrible mixtures of spirits and overly sugary liqueurs. With gummy sweets and popping candy, all that tired old gubbins. Proper 2007 stuff. At one point I started having PTSD flashbacks about an 18-30’s holiday I once went on to Kavos.

Still, whatever. No one comes here for the quality of sauce. Let’s get to it. This place encourages you throw axes about the place. Not only that but it sells you overproof rum and then encourages you to throw axes about the place.

Yes, that’s right. AXES.

It’s a little safer than you might’ve assumed. But then, there are 30+ of these places, all open 12+ hours a day, seven days a week. And with no infamous deaths reported on ITN News, it was never likely to be all that unsafe. You’re in a fairly tight caged metal lane and you’re not allowed to play if you’re visibly pissed-up. Or wearing open-toe shoes. Bad news for boozehounds and Birkenstocks.

Staff watch over axe-chuckers like hawks. In so much as they pay attention – they don’t surveil you from the sky. They also keep score for you, which is nice.

I didn’t chuck because I couldn’t be arsed to wait but I watched a few people having a go. It looked like it might very briefly be quite fun, before rather quickly losing its novelty. From what I saw, it’s about technique, not power. Amusingly, most of the blokes treated it like a fairground strength test and couldn’t land the thing in the target. Whereas most of the women who had a go did so with more precision had more joy. So, y’know – whooooo! Girl Power and all that.

PRICE: £9 per person for 30 mins

The axe hoying is the main reason to talk about BBB. When you’re there, though – you might struggle to get to perform your nervous lumberjack and/or Jack Torrance impression. If it’s busy, that is. There aren’t many places to park your arse, so you’ll have to find something else to do. And there’s plenty of those.

There are a couple of pool tables. I’d scoff at that a little, for being a bit of an obvious choice. But pool tables are an increasing rare sight in pubs and bars, so they’re always welcome. Even if the pair of them here are both American nine-ball tables instead of good old-fashioned honest-to-goodness Nigel Farage-approved BRITISH eight-ball tables.

PRICE: £13 for 40 mins

What else? Well, there’s beer pong on digital tables. Book sessions (you have to book and pay for all the games in advance with staff) and you get a pitcher of beer/cider or a bottle of prosecco to play with.

Is it fun? Maybe. For a bit. Would you want to pay for it? When it’s basically a few plastic cups, a ping-pong ball and a pasting table? Well, that’s up to the kids that go. It’s tempting to say, ‘can’t they just play this at home?’ But most young people will never own their own homes because they spend all their money at Starbucks, so maybe they can’t. The idiots.

PRICE: £30-35 for 45 mins

There’s something called ‘augmented darts‘ too. Which is basically darts with shit arcade-style games overlaid on them.

You fling the arrows at a bed sheet that’s got a projector beaming an image at it. It also didn’t look like much fun. Mainly because, unless you grew up in a provincial social club, a child to obese alcoholics, darts is actually a lot harder than it looks.

PRICE: £40-45 for an hour, incredibly

Obviously, there’s a few shuffleboard tables too. ‘Tables’? Is that what they’re called…? Or are they… Well, I suppose they’re ‘boards’, aren’t they? Shuffleboard boards. Shuffleboards. Fuck it – whatever.

Oh, by the way – don’t eat the sand if you’ve got a nut allergy, yeah?

PRICE: £20 for 30 mins

One more left. The ancient traditional Japanese art of Karaoke (カラオケ – literal translation: ‘microphone spit’). There are two booths with snazzy touchscreen units. They’ve a vast catalogue of songs, settings you can fiddle with and an even a crappy little in-built camera thing. And a box full of inflatable guitars, like you’re at the wedding of your other half’s work colleague. Sadly missing: Plastic moustache on a stick.

Nice touch – there’s a booze button you can hit to summon a staff member. No one came when we pressed it, but it was launch night and it was pretty chaotic in there.

PRICE: £6 per person for 55 mins Sunday to Thursday (min. two people), £9 per person for 55 mins on Friday and Saturdays (min. six people or £54 spend). Got that? Good.

Right, that’s it for the games and daftness. A quick word for the lavs now. They’re fine, all very nice, new, normal and functional. They do have one unusual feature, though. A big ol’ button next to the hand dryers. Not to start the blowers up, though. It’s to turn the bogs into a disco. Complete with fit-inducing lighting and an ear-bleedingly loud blast of La Bamba by Los Lobos, played on a ten-second loop.

In the ladies’, I’m informed that the jarring audio invasion comes courtesy of ABBA’s Dancing Queen.

It’s genuinely quite shocking the first time. Funny the second time and then just increasingly irritating after that.

Look, I get it. It’s all very fun and silly. And there’s nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of other places to sit down and not be fun and silly. And so what if young people aren’t all ardent piss artists and want something a little extra, a little more ‘experiential’ with their nights out?

It’s better they’re all out meeting up and talking and messing about in person and in public than sat at home paying by the minute to to watch a Japanese girl in bunny ears play Legend of Zelda, or writing misogynistic online manifestos and buying zombie knifes and something about skibidi toilets and whatnot. I know what the young people do. I’ve seen Netflix.

As for me? I can do without it, if I’m honest. It’s all just very tiring, all the flashing neon lights, the thumping bass, the throngs of shrieking people and the the stench of cloyingly syrupy drinks.

And you? You may want to give it a go, you may already know you’d hate it. Yet say what you like about this bar or these kinds of bars… But you can no longer say that there isn’t a bar in Reading that lets you drink overproof rum and then encourages you to throw axes about the place.

It’s almost a 100% certainty that I’ll never walk into Boom Battle Bar again. But I’m glad it’s here and I hope young/slightly thick older people enjoy the place.

I’ll see you down The Allied or somewhere. As ever, mine’s a large one.