April 2022 – jimmysgigapedia.com

Manchester Venue 59 Sound Control – Part 2

An early blog posting for you this week.

The Sound Control venue is in the perfect classic mould of being located within bumbling distance of the nearest train station. Others to fit these criteria locally are the Star and Garter (Piccadilly), Rebellion Bar (Deansgate), MEN Arena (Victoria) and Kings Arms (Salford Central).

So, much like Esha Ness’s ‘win’ in the Grand National and therefore discounting the ‘gig that never was’ outlined in the blog last week, I have attended the Sound Control Music Room a grand total of seven times.

My first attendance was on a warm sunny June evening in 2011. On the journey over the train was extremely busy with gig goers and the reason for this significant commuter increase was that the reformed Take That were on a run of comeback dates over at the Etihad Stadium.

Our band of choice that night was the shoegaze gurus Pains of Being Pure at Heart. Now I saw this band five times in total during their career and a couple of those gigs stood out, an initial gobsmackingly fine performance in Chorlton which sat alongside this appearance as an absolute belter.

The reason that this duo of gigs succeeded was that the guitars were ramped up to 10 capturing the intended beautiful sonic fuzz that their sound clearly deserved. The set was in a good way still leaning very heavily on their astonishingly good eponymous debut record, which in my view is all killer no filler. They were supported by a local band called Raffles. Uncle George had to scoot off prior to the end of their set as he was unfortunately on an early shift the next day, but we stayed for the duration before trekking up and catching the last train from Piccadilly.

Four months later, I saw the Canadian hardcore punks F##&£d Up who with their effervescent lead singer Pink Eyes and surging guitars certainly pack a punch. They are somewhat of an anachronism as their sound could be quantified in the category of intelligent hardcore music and they even start one album with a cheeky flute before the track morphs into something infinitely noisier!

See the source image — Pink Eyes in full flow. Image Credit Dreamstime.

Their big energetic tsunami of sound sucked me into the moshpit but that was curtailed prematurely as I toppled over, and I was proper sore and battered in the morning. Some naysayers may say moshpits should be avoided at the age of 43, but I eschew that point of view and eleven years on I will still partake if the mood takes me! Train constraints again meant we missed the tail end of the performance; a pattern was beginning to develop here at this venue.

Mainly due to the ongoing issues around enforced early departures we decided at our next attendance on 01/12/12 to grab a room for the night at Old Trafford Cricket Club, this being in the days when hotels rooms in Manchester were just about affordable, before they morphed into London prices.

The band in question was the rather terrific Raveonettes, the Danish shoegazing duo who had recently released their excellent sixth album Observator and they played a selection of tracks from said record with ‘Young and Cold’ being the highlight. It was a glacially cold night and after the gig we encountered the busiest ever metro in the whole of Christendom when commuting back to the digs.

At the 2013 Dot to Dot event, we saw a singer songwriter called Billy Lockett from Northampton, who is a classical pianist. He was in the faux familiarity bracket that I can never warm to, in the mould of Newton Faulkner and Beans on Toast and a certain Ed Sheeran who appears to have made a career out of this genre!

Manchester Venue 57 to 59 Sound Control – Part 1

If you turn right at the base of the Manchester Oxford train station steps and go past the Thirsty Scholar pub you would find the Sound Control music venue. It was in a brilliant location with easy access to the station and surrounded by a plethora of adjacent boozers.

My friend Ellie Goodman, now Ramsbottom’s finest was a huge aficionado of this venue, and she is evidently an outstanding judge of character as it remains one of my Top 5 favourite Manchester venues. The venue opened on 16/12/09 and despite many great bands crossing the threshold it sadly closed exactly eight years later on 16/12/17, the final night being a celebratory Oasis disco. It has since been demolished with the intention of building student flats.

One regret was missing the timeless Buffalo Tom when they played there one Friday night as it was announced a couple of days after I had booked a weekend away, despite that fact that I have seen them before it was a real shame as they rarely hit these shores nowadays!

The venue consisted of three main areas, the initial being the Sound Control Bar which you accessed instantly on entering the venue. Its primary function was obviously to purchase beverages but also very occasionally the 150-capacity area doubled up as a music room. In 2013, within the remit of the excellent Dot to Dot festival, I saw a decent acoustic singer called Sam Bradley, who was from London but had spent part of his childhood soaking up the diverse musical influences of Nashville.

At the same festival in 2013 I discovered for the first time that there was also the Sound Control Basement Club complete with stage and a decent capacity of 350. The band I saw was Satellite Stories but that is only half the story though as reading about them now, they were cited at the time as the most universally popular indie group from Finland and received considerable press acclaim.

They were also remarkably recorded as the second most blogged artist in the World in August 2012. Much to my shame, or not as the case may be, I can barely remember anything about them apart from them having a clean accomplished poppy sound, it looks like the band disbanded in 2018. I have noted also that this was my 50^th different venue in Manchester.

Dot to Dot is unfortunately not taking place in Manchester this year, but hopefully they will be reintroduced to the roster next year alongside their Nottingham and Bristol counterparts.

From the bar there were a choice of staircases up to the Sound Control Music Room, where you could always garner a decent vantage point and a large dancefloor made it a stellar mosh pit venue.

My first attendance there on 06/02/10 was in the end an aborted gig due to a combination of circumstances. There was a highly touted double bill of upcoming bands The Drums and Surfer Blood. Both bands had performed at the Academy that evening and as Sound Control was the second gig of the night, all the stage times got pushed back.

We arrived at the upstairs venue, liking it instantly and punters were waiting patiently for the support act, but rather oddly in the format of a school disco by all being stood backed against the outer walls with nobody brave enough to venture forward to the stage!

Further conspiring against a successful gig-going evening was the fact that at this point in time on Saturday nights the last train turned into an interminable bus, so we were forced to catch the earlier 10.30 train. The band unfortunately did not appear before our departure time, so we did even not hear a note, a very odd night and to complete the sorry tale, I have never managed to see either band in a live setting since.

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