Month: March 2021

Manchester Venue 31 Night and Day – Part 2

My first visit to Night and Day Café was unusually to see a support band on 02/11/06. The band in question was the terrifically named post-rock outfit Amusement Parks on Fire from Nottingham. I had picked up on them via their second album Out of the Angeles with its distinctive sci-fi sleeve cover. They were a decent noisy live act with the venue only about a third full.

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Amusement Parks on Fire ‘Out of the Angeles’ album cover. Image Credit Discogs

For the main act Mumm Ra I recall there was a hugely overactive guitar tech thoroughly prepping the kit, unfortunately despite the odd moment the headliners were a tad limp and a bit twee for my tastes.

In May 2012 we headed in after another gig at the Soup Kitchen and caught a portion of Rooftop Runners set who were a Berlin based electronic combo comprising two Canadian brothers. We caught a further gig at Gulliver’s that night to complete a commendable trifecta. The following year we saw local act Egyptian Hip Hop who supported The Words.      

I also saw John Steele Singers, a non-descript six-piece from Brisbane in Australia and witnessed a decent fuzzy surf pop set called Get Inuit from Kent in 2015 as part of the Carefully Planned Festival.  

On a cold January night in January 2008 we decided ambitiously to do a double header of gigs which was deemed feasible by the virtue of Night and Day having later set times. So, after witnessing most of the Explosions in the Sky set at the Academy and additionally finding out North End had got an important victory over West Bromwich Albion, we jumped in a cab in true movie style and landed right on cue to see the much touted Glasvegas wander on stage.

The Glaswegians had a real presence about them, and this is surprisingly for me to say but on this occasion, they overcompensated with volume which resulted in them losing a degree of the subtlety of their self-titled debut album material. The song highlights on the night were ‘Geraldine’ and Stabbed’, the latter being a particularly dark heartfelt track.

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Glasvegas on stage. Image Credit GDR.

After the gig we ensconced to the bar and upon suddenly realising the late train was due we smuggled the remaining half bottles of Budvar out of the venue to accompany the walk back. Upon turning the corner to trot up the hill to Piccadilly station there was a young copper who on espying us had a big grin on his face due to the combined age of about 140 between the three of us. His opening riposte was ‘I am not going to have any trouble with you lads am I?’ to which he got three nods of assent and astutely asked us to lose the bottles at the bin 100 yards beyond him before we entered the station, a fine example of community policing if ever I saw one, so well done to him!   

On other visits I saw Low Island, an interesting Wrexham band called Gallops and an experimental project called Self Esteem consisting solely of Rebecca Lucy Taylor who was previously a member of Slow Club. I additionally saw Brad Stark and Seazoo, a quirky Welsh indie band. I witnessed a fine set from an Australian/Danish duo called Palace Winter who as a result of their quality I then made a conscious effort to see them in their own right a couple of years later.

It is now exactly a year to the day (13/03/20) since I saw my last gig of Nada Surf at Hop and Grape, which is naturally my longest ever gap between gigs. But there are now chinks of light on the horizon and I am hopeful of having my first vaccine soon. I have now started booking some gigs for later in the year which is very exciting!

Manchester Venue 31 – Night and Day Part 1

Firmly ensconced in my Top 5 Manchester venues is the Night and Day Café situated halfway down Oldham Street, next to the Dry Bar and opposite the legendary Piccadilly Records in the Northern Quarter (NQ). The venue opened originally as a chip shop in 1991 in what at the point of time was a disreputable area of town, before gradually evolving into a music venue.

The Night and Day capacity is 250 and like many small venues has served to be a launch pad for bands on the ladder up to much larger venues. Local band Elbow were a mainstay in their early days and to support the venue in the current pandemic are scheduled to play a Back to the Roots gig there later this year.  

It is recognised as the first real seminal gig venue in NQ and a forerunner on which the whole area was rebuilt upon. This has resulted in the present-day position where there is a tsunami of small independent venues and bars located in the streets and byways adjacent to the venue.

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Manchester Night and Day venue. Image Credit blog.ticketweb.co.uk

Despite the venue being a mainstay in the area for 30 years, some punter in 2013 moved into the flats above the venue and then inexplicably had the temerity to complain about the decibel levels. A petition with 74,000 signatures was raised in support of the venue and thankfully the council saw sense and only applied some conditions to have a complaints log and set up ongoing quarterly meetings with nearby residents.     

It has a fine geographical location with a 15-minute jaunt to either Piccadilly or Victoria stations to catch the last train home.  

The Night and Day lives up to its name and operates as a café during the day with continental tables outside to watch the comings and goings. It then has an hour crossover period early evening and morphs into a paid gig venue at night.

The set-up is a long thin room with a long bar on the left, DJ stand to the right and the stage down at the bottom. It is a very intimate setting where you can stand right up front though you must carefully navigate the wooden pillars. Alternatively, you can even have the unusual vantage of being up close and personal at the left-hand side of the stage which then leads onwards to the downstairs loos.

There are certain places where I have developed traditions on the drink fronts, any pub up in Kirkcudbright in Scotland (base for Wickerman Festivals) generally incites a Guinness and Raiders nightclub in Preston for many years had Murphy’s Stout as the drink of choice. For Night and Day however, it has always been a cold bottle of Budvar!  

Image result for Budvar Bottle. Size: 204 x 204. Source: www.drinksupermarket.com
A cheeky Budvar! Image Credit www.drinksupermarket.com

I have attended 17 gigs there in totality, placing it at No 7 on my most visited venue list. Ten of those gigs were attended either by blagging our way in following other gigs prior to the last train or part of multi event festivals such as Carefully Planned, Dot to Dot or Off the Record. Quite often it was deliberately the last venue of the night as it is always a cracking place to finish in!