Volume 2, Issue 2
May 2009
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It’s hard to imagine our sleepy little village being the entertainment capital of Corfu … but it was. Oh yes, forget about your Ipsos’s & your Kavos’s because when Roda’s ‘Skouna’ club & disco existed, it left all others floundering in its wake with nightly visitors from Kassiopi, Sidari, Corfu Town and beyond, packing the place out together with the tourists. Sited behind where Roxanne’s bar now stands, in a tiny street, most current visitors know nothing about it, its low-key stone entrance hiding the amazing world we were about to experience. The first thing to hit you was, of course, the excellent music looked after by ‘Little Dimitri’, a lovely, quiet, unassuming lad from Athens that most female visitors, eventually, aggressively, wanted to ‘deflower’. The superb mix of Greek & European disco sounds provided the backdrop for ‘Big Dimitri’, in charge of the bar situated in a small courtyard adjacent to the dancing area. His continual display of ‘high-ice’ antics, accompanied by supernaturally accurate tossing and catching of open bottles & glasses put the still-to-be-seen Tom Cruise movie ‘Cocktail’ to shame and there was no, repeat
no, request that he couldn’t and didn’t accommodate. The girls serving tables were both pretty & efficient, rapidly weaving their way through the milling throng of merry-makers almost as if they were dancing (at least that’s what I thought after about ten G & Ts). The guys on the door were good value as well – Costas, a huge young Canadian/Greek body-builder with a smile and a pat (some pat!) for everyone except the most offensive miscreants. Rocco, of ‘Top Gear’, also took a turn on the door, his super-cool image giving the place a certain style. And then there was Giorgio, (‘Sunriders’ head mechanic), also a fitness fanatic who got himself so pumped up with adrenalin until six or seven in the morning that, when he turned up for work at 8:30 am, he had to be shut up in the workshop for the first hour in case he flattened any tourist who said a word out of place.
The owners of this bit of early-morning heaven, Vassilis from Athens and Iannis – a local lad from Karousades village, certainly possessed entrepreneurial flair hosting a start-of-season beach party outside the Roda Inn with a massive PA thudding out rock & pop, the two Dimitris doing their thing and sometimes dancing on
The owners of this bit of early-morning heaven, Vassilis from Athens and Iannis – a local lad from Karousades village, certainly possessed entrepreneurial flair hosting a start-of-season beach party outside the Roda Inn with a massive PA thudding out rock & pop, the two Dimitris doing their thing and sometimes dancing on
the water-sports platform anchored twenty metres from the shore. In fact, one year, they investigated the possibility of getting the ‘Gypsy Kings’ over to Corfu to play live at their party and, being Greek, were furiously outraged at the internationally acclaimed group’s ‘capitalistic inflation’ of their fee for so doing.
Yes, it was wonderful fun, yes, it put Roda on top of the ‘all-nighters’ party list and sadly, yes, it has all now faded into legend with the new noise abatement laws and the ban on open-air discos. But to those of us who ‘strutted our stuff’ there, it’s an old friend fondly remembered.
Yes, it was wonderful fun, yes, it put Roda on top of the ‘all-nighters’ party list and sadly, yes, it has all now faded into legend with the new noise abatement laws and the ban on open-air discos. But to those of us who ‘strutted our stuff’ there, it’s an old friend fondly remembered.
