How did all this start?
In the late 1990s, there was an electronic music group in Pamplona called Los Caracoles. Lots of people. We prepared touring parties. This group was formerly called the alternating club. We organized parties in different bars. In the 1999 New Year’s Eve, the topic of taking our bar started. At first we were three partners. The third had a gay bookstore in front of the San Martin winery, today bar La inopia.

Until it was a bar, we organized the festival in the winery San Martin de San Fermín. When they finished the day party we entered to organize ours at night and as the typical pintxo of that place were snails, we took the name of the snails.

And how did you receive Nicolette?
When I was working in Nice, there was a legend that said that if I put a candle on St. Nicholas three Mondays in a row, I would do well to work.

And then Santos saw me how I went to a Chinese store that is now closed, in Zapatería, to buy a candle and how I entered the church of St. Nicholas. And then we thought we'd put St. Nicholas in this room, but locked up and in French, that's Nicolette. And from the beginning we put Nicolette this venue, comes Nicolette, Nicolette has come. French, Basque, Spanish.

How did you get such fine music every week?
We were a lot of people, but we didn't have a fixed site. There were bars, they always played the same music, and then there were dance halls. We belonged to the Casco Viejo, in other neighborhoods there were modern people, but in the Casco Viejo there was no bar of good music. Now look at the year 2000, and it may seem that by then there were wheel-free cars on the streets, but no, it was prehistory. There were no alternatives and we had a great social base.

In these years Txabi has led music programming, acted without any blackmail or mortgage, did what he wants, carried all programming with rigor, he knows people in that music world.

After 23 years, few bars with fine music in Pamplona, right?
We do not know. When you're on the mountain you don't see the mountain. People come in saying, what piece of music you have, what piece of bar. But you are in the day-to-day, fixing what has been broken, moving the drinks, seeking the solution to the problem that has arisen, with the afix of the following month... And when you're younger, you get out of work and you love it. We've been nonstop for 23 years.

We got it right, but it could have gone very wrong. We have also had bad times, I remember the crisis of 2008 when they put the carpenter in the Casco Viejo. But we've always followed, for example, the posters a good designer made every month. Monthly.

Nicolette has been a musical referent, but also as an atmosphere bar. How did you feel?
Look, this has been considered an ambient bar because two of the three creators were Marichitos. And all right, people put toy penises on their heads, and porn movies were shown on the walls. And there's been a lot of maritxu here, but it's actually not a room bar. Yes and no.

If it's an environment bar, Nicolette is a marichos bar, but it's not an environment bar. In Pamplona there were bars of atmosphere (A la cargo, El 40), the most maricítical. But these are unique places for men, with very precise codes, and it's a very common territory. I'm going to tell you if I want to go to the jet, but I'm not interested in a place where you're going to find who you're going to do it with.

In addition, a bar only with men or with women is disgusting. Or just a bar is fed up with heterosexuals. There are problems. If women don't go to a bar, the bar won't work. And girls have to be comfortable. There are no four men behind. And here are people of all genres and all hobbies, and if you don't like what's here, come to the park. I mean, if you like it, welcome it, but don't like it, go because you have to behave well. It seems to me to be a very conservative bar. I don't want to.

Moreover, Maritxu has come a long way and has left. But to us, it seems like an old-fashioned, ambient bar concept, boring.

Have you had problems?
We've always cut the shit as soon as we start. And then it's very useful if in some of the projections there are some upright penises. If a fool comes in, she turns around and goes. That's what they are for. It works against ginger. This ginger has all the bars of Pamplona for your environment. In addition, it develops a sixth sense and knows what attitude comes in.

What was it for you Nicolette?It was
our house, above all. We've been very demanding with the people coming in and with the aesthetic. In our house we have been so comfortable with our rules.