Mal Evans

Age: 44
Originally from: Manchester
Profession: Bar operator
At: Manchester

The legendary northern England bar operator - and winner of multiple CLASS magazine awards including Good Times Bar in 2011 - on the origins of his passion for bartending, why kissing customers is a good idea, and his recipe for a great night out.

There are two stories from Mal's early days at TGI Friday's in Sale, south Manchester, in the early 1990s, which seem to have defined his bartending ethos, and his career in general.

The first reveals his humanist, emotional outlook on life. "I remember there was a hen party in, and I was looking after a dozen ladies," he says. "The mother of the bride was there too, and I leant over the bar and gave her a kiss. She must have been in her 60s, and they all left very happy. But then I was told not to fraternise with the customers. They thought it was too intimate. I never did understand that. For me, intimacy is good: people are human."

The second story illustrates the origin of his self-professed bartending OCD. "I remember learning my cocktails and one night thinking I'd done brilliantly on the service bar, that I had served every drink perfectly, then found out the GM had said the station was a mess, that this and that needed restocking. I realised there was an awful lot more to this business."

Ruthless training

Mal might have been brought down a peg or two, but his bosses had obviously seen something in him, and even though TGIs had an over-21s policy for staff, they decided to take him on aged just 18. He'd already been working in pubs for three years - he says he was just collecting glasses but we can't imagine he never got behind the bar and pulled a few pints.

"TGIs I knew was aspirational, that it was renowned for its training, that nothing was bought in - everything was super fresh. I had heard they had jobs coming up and this guy Dominic Dunning interviewed me, he was fabulous, very kind, and he seemed to like my personality. Back then they still had this ruthless American trainer coordinating all the training and you had to repeat everything, all these systems, in military fashion. It was a fun place to work and good discipline." He can still repeat much of it.

It was at TGIs that Mal would strike up a crucial friendship with one of the other bartenders. In fact, it was the start of a legendary partnership. "Roger Needham was five years older than me, he'd come from Hard Rock Cafe in Sydney and we just got on with each other.

"Roger was actually at TGIs undercover. There was a rock 'n' roll bar due to open in Harrogate and he had got a job to go to there, so he was working in TGIs to learn about it from the inside."

Milkshakes and Hamburgers

When Roger left to open Jack 'n' Danny's in Harrogate, he took with him a few waitresses from Sale and bartenders from some other branches of TGIs. Three months later, Mal, still working in Sale, got a phone call from Roger asking him to join too. So he did.

"It was pretty cheesy, a classic theme bar of the late 80s/early 90s with wall-to-wall milkshakes and hamburgers. Back then it was about attitude - now it's all about people and being human - but we used to race Harley Davidsons round the bar, set fire to the bar with petrol, that sort of thing.

"It was rocking, people danced on the bar, drinking lots of blended ice cream strawberry Daiquiris and Long Island Iced Teas. We were very strong and actually seen as a threat by TGIs. We heard that anyone with a Jack 'n' Danny's badge on their braces would be dismissed. We were like rogue outlaw bartenders."

It all went well for a few years before going out of business in the mid-1990s, but the double act resumed with a stint together in a Mexican chain of restaurants in Yorkshire - one that confirmed their roles in their partnership. "Roger did the operational side, I did the drinks."

After that, Mal went to the Bahamas - "I had friends in the Bahamas, that's where my love for rum comes from. I went for two weeks and stayed for three months" - and Roger went off to a restaurant in Harrogate. They knew they wanted to open their own place but they knew they had to make it work and waited for the right site. "For two or three years we looked at sites, but there was always something wrong, with the licence, with planning, with conditions on the building. Trying to get all the monkeys to stay in the box to make it happen was difficult."

Cocktail revolution

It was a small hairdressers on Merrion Street in Leeds that finally caught their eye. They asked the council where they could open up - somewhere where they wouldn't disturb the neighbours. Despite their enthusiasm, there was nothing to suggest that Leeds drinkers in the mid 1990s would take to cocktails, but MOJO opened its doors in September 1996, so-called because of the cross-cultural references of the word.

"There wasn't a cocktail scene in Leeds at all back then. Manchester had Dry bar and Atlas but in Leeds there was just Arts Cafe. Roger got a local business woman to buy this old hairdressers and we leased it off her. We had to smash up the old sinks ourselves - maybe we should have left one in there. We didn't have much money so we sold the copper piping to buy fish and chips for lunch and did a lot of the build ourselves.

"It was all about Roger's music and my drinks. He has an anal, OCD appreciation of music, and I was OCD with alcohol. He would come up with the name, and I would make the drink. A lot of the drinks are the style of drinks we would make in other bars: rum and ginger served in Collins glasses, Daiquiris on the rocks. It's funny looking back as we could see our drinks being emulated around the city. It saw a resurgence in Leeds with similar cocktail lists to ours, serving the same beer. Skippy [Robert Jupp] and Jake Burger have both been through our doors - Oporto, say, opened with dance music then changed to rock."

Other local operators agree that MOJO's influence was critical to the development of a credible cocktail scene in the north. "It's hard to imagine now, with the diversity of the northern drinking scene," says Ged Feltham, a partner in the Leelex group which owns Jake's Bar, Oporto, the Neon Cactus and The Hummingbird, "that it was my friend and rival Mal who back in the mid 90s was responsible for wrestling the cocktail away from something cheesy and into the cool venues that are MOJO's."

Mal's cocktail prowess was spreading - and to the highest culinary circles. He remembers hearing that one of his cocktails had been referenced in Larousse Gastronomique encyclopaedia. Mal got hold of a copy, and sure enough, there was reference to the Magic Bus. "It stated, as if it was a long-established fact, that if a Margarita was made tall with cranberry and orange juice it was known as a Magic Bus. They took it as history, but they can only have seen it in an early edition of CLASS magazine."

"The appropriate application of alcohol"

The combination of rock 'n' roll and mixed drinks doesn't exactly sound like rocket science today, but Mal and Roger honed the music selection and drinks choice to the extent that their operation stood out amid the dance bars of the time. "The key is the way it is delivered. You can have the right tunes but you can't play them in the wrong order. You can't walk into Rage Against The Machine at 7pm and you don't want Damien Rice on at 2am. It's definitely an argument against having a jukebox in a bar. We made all these cassettes mix tapes, they were all numbered, and we had playlists drawn up. We worked out that certain sequences worked particularly well one after another.

"And you combine that with what I call the 'appropriate application of alcohol'. The easiest way to describe is, just like Rage Against The Machine being inappropriate early doors, so is drinking absinthe, even though it is acceptable to ask for both at 2am in the morning. We've never played songs louder than they should have been played, and nor can you play loud songs quietly. It also means no draught beer, DJs or alcopops."

MOJO wasn't an instant success and three months in they wondered if they should, in fact, start playing dance music and serving alcopops and pints (and stop turning away the stream of DJs who kept approaching them). "We resisted and that very weekend it upturned. It just went bananas. It was during the second coming of the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays, and people were dropping pills but they didn't want dance music in bars, they wanted rock 'n' roll.

"We still served a lot of B52s and Woo Woos, things like that. Absolut was really popular and its brand managers couldn't be more helpful - there was this light stick of LEDS that just looked like a string of lights in Perspex, which we put on top of an American fridge we had painted red, but when you shook your head you could read 'Absolut vodka'."

At the end of their first year MOJO - and Mal - were becoming a phenomenon. Mal got through to the final of a cocktail competition at Dick Brasell's eponymous bar at the Atlantic and then he went to see him at Detroit. "We started to take a real interest in the change in cocktail culture. And people started paying attention to us. We were written about by Irvine Welsh in a couple of his books, we had Mr Nice, Howard Marks himself, in. We were having a rock star time."

A couple of years in, a couple of former colleagues and friends relocated to Barbados, and asked if they could take the MOJO name with them to the Caribbean. A sister bar was born in Christchurch, Barbados, kitted out with equipment from the UK mothership. Ten years on, it's still going strong. Although Mal and co don't have a financial stake, the fact they have built an international brand extension is quite the mark of success.

Integrity, unadulaterated

A change in the partnership saw a new entrant in the shape of Martin Greenhow stepping in to control the finance side of the business. He'd been working on the door and studying MOJO while working towards a business degree. "That's when we started making money, and that enabled Manchester to happen. He did the bit we couldn't do. Up to this point we just covered each other's backs and if something needed doing we just did it. For our next place I wanted to be ready for it. We needed a bar manual, a training structure. Martin stopped us running before we could walk."

Manchester has just celebrated its seventh birthday. When they took over the site, Mal and Roger ignored bailiffs who told them it was in a dead area of town - hence the previous occupants' repossession. The gap in the market was between the high-end (but hushed) cocktail bars and the music bars that served flat lager. "Soon we had 200 people queuing around the block to get in. Sunday nights were particularly popular as people realised that bars could be late-night venues, with good music, and they didn't need to go to a club. And we made better quality drinks.

"We'd go to Gerry's in London to buy liquor: Jägermeister, Apfelkorn, añejo tequilas and things, then take them back up north on the train. It seemed like we had more integrity than our competitors: while everyone else was creating nuance, twists, their versions of cocktails, nobody was doing it unadulterated. Ours was a brasserie-style cocktail menu, with the very best expression of a spirit for the price."

One of the key aspects of MOJO is that each venue appeals to a huge range of drinkers. Look in on any night and you'll see students rubbing shoulders with solicitors, bikers and bankers. They like the broad menu and the 'Music for the People' ethos. There's no snobbery, so yes, Rufus Wainwright does get played, and you can order a Woo Woo, but there's also a Corpse Reviver No. 2 and you're just as likely to hear Elvis or Guns 'n' Roses later on.

"I have this picture in my mind of when there was this fetishist in, with a bolt through his nose, sat next to our solicitor. One was drinking milk and the other beer," says Mal. "The way I think about it is why alienate any potential customer? The whole point is that it's supposed to be open to everyone. You never got rejected on the basis of who you are or what you're wearing.

Hairy bikers, White Russians

"Whenever we've redesigned the menu we've done consumer tastings and for me it's not about having one-in-a-hundred drinks, it's about having something for everyone, so it's never been about sneering or forcing the issue or getting most of the group to say that they like something in particular - if everybody said they like something different from the next I think I've got it right.

"Musing about how many times we stir our Sazeracs won't pay for the heat and light, whereas hairy bikers knocking back ten White Russians actually pays the bills."

The ethos obviously extends to MOJO staff too: here it's not about persuading someone who orders a Slippery Nipple to 'upgrade' to a Negroni (both are on the menu), but accepting that different customers have different tastes. "I always prefer it if my bartenders have other interests as that suggests they have a balanced life. I look for contrasting personalities, so not everyone has the same haircut, and they appeal to a wide customer base. They've got to be humble enough to understand that that old guy in the corner might have been a drummer for Elvis. It's not about being guarded - it's about opening up."

MOJO extended its footprint to Liverpool in 2008, opening in a former stables belonging to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool. For Mal, a Liverpudlian by birth, it was something of a homecoming, though it was a decision that he agonised over for some time.

"There isn't the money here that there is in Manchester, and it's definitely more difficult to do business here, even four years in. It did feel weird to come to Liverpool, which seemed to be constantly failing to deliver its promises when I was younger - it was hopeless, in decline. In contrast, Scousers said Manchester had everything.

Refining the mojo

"Then, in 2008, Liverpool was named European Capital of Culture. Liverpool won all this investment, they started on the regeneration and everything changed. It seemed sensible to come back. Now they need to be getting on with enjoying it. No excuse."

A still-difficult trading environment forced Mal and Roger to think differently about how to succeed in Liverpool and live music was introduced last year, but it's been a short-lived experiment. "We made the decision to try live music, and employed a prolific promoter to book gigs in on quieter nights. What we realised was that live music detracted from the core value of MOJO: people were standing watching the bands and stopped engaging with bartenders and listening to our soundtrack."

Now the live music's gone, and a few new things are happening which are designed as a 'starter motor' to people the cavernous Liverpool site - Mal reckons you need at least 50 people in it to make it start feeling busy. In addition to the drinks on the menu soon you'll see food 'from a famous food operator' (he won't say which one) and you can also find details of four cocktail-making masterclasses - Disco, Tropical, Speakeasy and Advanced courses - and their success shows how thirsty the population is to hone its stirring and shaking skills. "Master classes are really filling the room. We took £100,000 on deposits alone last year.

"We are also introducing cocktail waitresses for the first time in our history. It's about easing drinkers into the whole environment, making them feel comfortable, especially when it's early doors and making it feel less like it's 'us and them' - that the bartenders and customers are two separate entities. "It's not about pouting, but complete openness," says Mal, who often sounds strangely Zen-like.

MOJO itself, in a wider sense, is also at a new turning point now. Mal and Roger are dissolving their partnership and finally going their separate ways, with Roger relinquishing any operational role in the business's future. But one thing that's unlikely to change is MOJO's mojo - its welcoming, accessible and fun-loving ethos. "Other people can emulate what we do, play the music that we play and serve the drinks that we serve," says Mal. "What can't they do that we do? That's the human element."