On a heady weekend at the end of June 2014 I completed a flurry of 4 gigs in the city of Nottingham. On the Friday night, we headed over to the Guitar Bar on Clumber Avenue, sometimes also known as Hotel Deux. I recall it as a two roomed venue with a stage in the left-hand room and was an intimate venue and very sparsely attended on the night of our visit.
Massey Ferguson were an alt country bar band from Seattle led by the distinctive vocals of Ethan Anderson named after a farm equipment company. They sit in the Springsteen/Tom Petty Americana fold, they were highly accomplished musicians and their songcraft was very evident and were very enjoyable, though I was slightly embarrassed on their behalf by the low turnout.
After watching Brazil beat Chile on penalties in the World Cup, the Saturday night musical entertainment commenced with a trip to the Forresters Inn, a traditional boozer located on Huntingdon Street behind the Victoria Shopping Centre. It is a Victorian corner pub established in 1868 and is currently independently owned. There was particularly limp act playing in the corner with perhaps their most interesting element being their stage name of Pegefoe and Maria Metalie.
En route to the second venue we discovered that Columbia had eliminated Uruguay 2-0 with a wonder strike from James Rodriguez. Delving deep back into my memory I recall that the first ever two pubs I visited in central Nottingham were the famous Ye Olde trip to Jerusalem, with the other being the nearby Ye Olde Salutation Inn located on Hounds Gate. It is a Grade II listed public house with components of it allegedly dating back to 1240 and it is built above Anglo-Saxon caves dating from the 9th century which was at one-point home to a colony of lepers. It is also noted as one of the most haunted pubs in the whole country, with reports of 89 separate apparitions.
It is an archetypal heavy rock biker pub and reminds me of the Dog and Partridge pub in Preston where on any given Friday night in the 1980’s there would be a plethora of bikes located outside. Upstairs they have a stage and there was a heavy metal act called Enormity Falls playing that night.
They were already underway and as we traversed up the steps, I could hear an unmistakeable cover version being played, though as I processed it, I was very surprised by their choice. The record itself was a noisy doom-laden version of Electric Six’s ‘Gay Bar’, and it went down a storm with the audience. They were a home-town band who had just released their debut EP ‘Voices’.
We then searched out a pub for a final beverage or should it perhaps be better quantified as the fateful ‘one for the ditch’! As we passed a hostelry we have never previously visited, we could hear the strains of a vibrant noisy local band called Misspent Youth throwing out some decent indie and punk covers.
The pub in question was the Royal Children on Castle Gate, another old pub dating back to the 17th century and is reputedly named after Princess Anne, daughter of King James II who took refuge there in 1688. It appeared everyone in the venue was pie-eyed, including us, but this only served to create a terrific bouncing atmosphere!
