I never felt at place at Bar One. Then again, I never felt at place at the pub at Trent Building in the University of Nottingham either. Not too keen on the ambiance of student bars, even back when I was one of them. Dudes got rowdy, drinks weren’t that good, and the food was passable at best.

Still, Ivan was a dear friend and he was on a budget. He came from Ukraine and was doing this high falutin’ degree on Engineering. He would sometimes regale me with stories from back home and then go into nerdy stuff about his degree. I understood some of the math and some of the physics, but I would tune out whenever fluids came into topic.

At his accommodation room, he had two kegs for fermentation. One for beer, which never got the fizz he wanted, and another one for mead, which was always on point. I think at one point he tried to make kvass, but the rye bread in Sheffield was never of the quality he needed.

2010 didn’t start on the right foot. Both my PhD and my personal relationships were down on the dumps and I felt stuck in a rut. I would sit at the information commons or at the park after school and let that feeling of saturation seep away. One cold afternoon in February, Ivan saw me and suggested going for a beer at Bar One. Some people from Coors Light were doing promo and giving away lanyards. We took a couple and ordered a few Coors since they were two for one.

Neither of us were fans of American beer, but the price was right and our moods were low. Ivan told me about some troubles he had at the lab, something or other about a wing design. Then the people from Coors came to our table and asked us if we wanted a photograph with their stand. Comp was another round, so we said yes. They had prop stuff for skiing/snowboarding (I was a pint beyond tipsy by then, sorry) and we got dressed in gear for the photos. Ivan kept one photo, I kept the other. We then went back to continue drinking until his friends propped by. I don’t remember how I got home.

However I do remember that his friends were massive metalheads, the kind that think that Dimmu Borgir are ABBA level of metal. These dudes were fond of me because at one party I managed to open a couple of red wine bottles with only a pencil (and a lot of effort). While listening their discussion about the true kings of Black Metal (I can’t even pronounce whatever they chose), I remember hearing a wailing on the back. I knew the song and it felt like my exact emotions. Ivan leaned his head and said “Kings of Leon, matey” and I wrote it down. The song was On Call.

Years later, I ran into a friend of Ivan’s at Tramlines. This friend casually mentioned that Ivan had the photo of both of us on skiing/snowboard gear (damn you, Coors!) on a bookcase and at first thought we were brothers. “Ivan really cares about you, Sam”, I heard while sipping on a strong dark roast coffee that was bringing me back to life. “I need all the friends I can muster right now” I said, as that year was also a terrible one.

Ivan finally got his degree and got a cool job somewhere in a cold country. Haven’t talked to him in a New York minute but I hope he’s doing well and that I always thought he was a straight up cool dude.

On call is one of the best Kings Of Leon songs, and I’m pretty sure it was the moment they achieved pop rock success. Because of the Times, released in 2007, was their most accessible album by then, and old school fans did accuse them of selling out. I thought it was a new leaf, a necessary one for them to turn. It was the right balance of their old and new sound, which got refined and packaged for mass consumption for their massive 2008 album, Only by the night, an album that soared thanks to Use Somebody and Sex on Fire, two evergreen singles that still come up at student bars (rowdy or not) up to this date.

-Sam J. Valdés López