Café Swaf
For 25 years, one small café has been fighting its unique solitary struggle against predictability, against uniformity and against scale.
After a year of tenant test runs, Nico Danenberg and Kees Ruijter started their own café Swaf on 1 April 1985. Swaf had to be a sanctuary: a place for the musically dissimilar, for the fashion-deviant, for the unbound mind. A place where the anarchist takes place next to the VVD'er, where a song by System Of A Down can be followed with impunity by a song from the Cats, where the cockscomb is just as common as the sleeveless t-shirt.
Swaf is known far beyond the region, with bands even far beyond the national borders. That loose mentality, that close club-house feeling, the solidarity among the out-of-the-box visitors, the irresistible good music, the cryptogram and the coffee before the beer: together, the average Swaffo stays just a few years longer in puberty and just a little later finally ends up in front of the picture tube than visitors of other locality.