Sela Bar Leeds: Inside the bar and music venue celebrating 20 years in the city

The Lower Briggate bar and music venue is celebrating 20 years in the city.

Transcript

00:00 Hi, my name's Mark. I'm the owner of Cellar Bar. We opened in 2004 with my family.

00:07 We wanted to create a welcoming space for artists of any kind to come and enjoy.

00:14 An independent venue or independent bar where they could kind of showcase their talents with art on the walls

00:22 or playing live music or DJing or poetry.

00:28 As an independent venue, our focus became very much on music, whether it's DJs or live music.

00:38 We offer a lot of, all of our gigs at Pay As You Feel. We have DJs on weekends.

00:47 It's all centred around the kind of funk, soul, jazz genre. Our live music kind of extends into rock and roll as well.

00:56 Our customers throughout the last 20 years have just been incredible.

01:00 We still have regulars that come in that have been coming here since the first week that we opened,

01:04 which has just been nice to kind of grow the bar along with them and share their life stories through that kind of period.

01:15 It's always nice to see old regulars and make some new friends along the way

01:22 without them being so supportive over the last two decades. We certainly wouldn't still be here.

01:28 They seem to like what we do and we'd like to host them and hopefully sort of show them new music

01:36 and serve them up some nice cocktails.

01:40 So for our 20th birthday celebrations, we're having a series of parties.

01:45 On the 22nd of February, we have live band karaoke with one of our resident bands, Louis Louis Louis.

01:53 They will play rock and roll classics and let an audience come up and choose a song and help them sing it to all of their pals.

02:02 On the 23rd, we have the seller original DJs, resident DJs, that's myself, Mark and Leon.

02:11 On the 23rd, our manager, Emily, is hosting a noughties party because we opened in 2004.

02:18 She would like there to be fancy dress, expect a lot of sort of noughties funk classics and just a general good times.