Location: Grande Route des Mielles, St Ouen
Period: Late 1980s
Fate: Closed down, demolition planned
Regular Tunes: Heavy Metal
Scan the vista of St Ouen's bay and you'll see an extended coastal stretch dotted with a few houses, some car parks, a couple of pubs, a cafe or two and a big pile of sand dunes. It's hard to imagine this relatively sedate corner of Jersey being a thriving focal point of the island's nightclub scene, yet once upon a time, from La Pulente to L'Etacq, the bay was punctuated by pubs and clubs. Most of which are today gone.
To the Northern end of the bay is one of the last of the latter to remain standing, the Chateau Plasir, but even this has recently been earmarked for demolition.
The Chateau had a very basic layout. The entrance was at the side of the building (facing L'Etaq), opening into a slim corridor. In the wall of the left hand side of the corridor was a small "window" for the till, beyond which was a small passage leading to the left and into the main room.
The main room was nothing fancy, rectangular in shape, taking up the right hand corner of the building nearest the main road. The DJ booth faced you as you entered the room (bench seating either side), with the bar facing opposite. The dancefloor was slightly off centre. Either side of the dancefloor were chairs and small tables. A row of flashing disco lights lined the ceiling above the DJ booth.
During the 1980s the Chateau was the place for Metal and Rock. When Iron Maiden stayed at the nearby Le Chalet Hotel to write and rehearse for their Piece of Mind and Powerslave albums they were regulars at the club. A local Biker gang had their clubhouse in a wartime bunker on the headland at L'Etacq, just up the road from the Chateau, and in some quarters tales still circulate of their antics at the venue.
The Chateau saw no competition when it came to Rock music. Bonapartes was the only other club in Jersey devoted to that genre, and they arrived on the scene during the final couple of years of the Chateau's life as a club, and only lasted a couple of years themselves.
But the wider history of the Chateau had much less in common with "the hammer of the gods".
In the 1930s there was a holiday camp on the site, with rows of wooden chalets (garden shed size) running from the roadside up to the base of Lewis Tower. It was advertised as "The holiday camp really on the sea edge". The camp's communal sun terrace and lounge area was in a building abutting the sea wall next to the tower (where the German bunker now stands) with a set of steel steps giving beach access.
The current Chateau building covers just half the area originally taken up by the camp. It was originally constructed sometime around the 1950s as a cabaret venue, whereupon it thrived for the following 30 years. During the summer season tourists would arrive by the coachload each evening to see comedians, dancing girls, magicians and family-friendly musicians. It wasn't uncommon for pre-fame comedy stars to perform summer seasons in Jersey as they worked their way up the ladder, with cabaret venues like the Chateau employing now legendary names such as Shane Ritchie and Joe Pasquale during their formative comedic years.
By the late 1980s tourism in Jersey was beginning the slide into freefall. As the 80s melted into the 90s the island's cabaret circuit was becoming an increasingly distant memory and the bar attached to the Chateau was being kept afloat by local residents. The venue's cabaret room was kept alive by the weekly Rock night, although by this time even that wasn't what it used to be. With the decline of St Ouen as a home to after-dark hotspots the Chateau found itself marooned on the edge of the map, to compound which Rock was developing in new directions (Grunge, Nu-Metal etc.) which competitive venues were adding to their playlists. Also, the local Rock community which had been loyal to the Chateau for many years was itself beginning to fragment.
By the mid 1990s the Chateau's time as a nightclub had rolled to a halt, and the cabaret room was taken over by Micro World (I may have got that name wrong). This was an exhibition of the planet's smallest artistic creations, microscopically tiny and each crafted by one man using just his hands and miniscule tools. The cabaret room was perfect to display these exhibits, dark and minimally lit, with focused use of spotlights on small glass cases which housed items such as a replica of the Eiffel Tower sitting inside the eye of a needle, the world's smallest playable violin the size of a fingernail, etc. etc.
By the late 1990s Micro World was gone and the Chateau's cabaret room had become a gift-shop, one which was a distinct throwback to the 1970s. The interior of the club hadn't been changed, they'd just turned the lights up full and placed shelves of souvenir trinkets and racks of outdated postcards on the dancefloor. It was a sad sight considering the vibrancy and life that same space had seen over the decades, made sadder by the lack of tourists to purchase the wares. It was certainly not a dignified end. By the start of the 2000's the gift shop was gone and the Chateau was being kept afloat by a dwindling crowd of locals in the small bar at the front of the building.
In 2012 plans for the complete demolition of the Chateau were announced, with housing to be constructed on the site.
