Manchester Venues 65 to 67

Continuing the circular route of the Sounds from the other City Festival brings us to the historic Kings Arms on Bloom Street. It is situated deep in the old industrial quarter of Salford, and it is an easy five-minute jaunt from Salford Central train station. The pub was first licensed in 1807 and the original building initially resided on the other side of the street.

Lucy Davis was a landlady there in the 19th century and after throwing her husband out for being a drunken lout, she created a profitable dance hall and den of ill repute upstairs! It has been the base for many interesting clubs, namely the North of England Irish Terrier Club, the Knitting Club and the Salford Friendly Anglers Society, the world’s oldest angling club and a sign of the final listed club is still visible on the gable end of the pub.

Many pubs fell by the wayside in this area, but the Kings continued to flourish being famously taken over in 2011 by Zena Barrie and Paul Heaton of Housemartin’s and Beautiful South fame. They embellished the artistic undertakings and a pot pourri of arts exhibitions, vaudeville, comedy, poetry nights and gigs took place under their tutelage. They were also apparently regularly heard rehearsing in the upstairs function room.

Paul Heaton. Image Credit Hull Daily Mail.

The pub has also been used as a location for music videos and TV shows like Cracker, Fresh Meat and the Hairy Bikers and was always a good gathering point to commune with like-minded souls on the SFTOC monorail, much like the other central hubs of the festival such as Islington Mill and the Old Pint Pot.

It is an olde world pub with a large main bar room area downstairs with seats dotted around the perimeter. At one of the festivals, I saw a Chinese dragon parade the room, it is that kind of quirky place. They are a renowned real ale venue and have been in the Good Beer Guide for the last decade and are a keen supporter of small local breweries. There is also a small beer garden accessed from the back of the pub.

Stairs led you up the Manchester Kings Arms Events Space.  It is a theatre style space and has a standing capacity of 120 and seating capacity of 50.  The venue even holds a wedding licence.

My first visit there was on 06/05/12 was to see Meddicine from London. An appropriate act considering the industrial history of the area as he resembled a lo-fi Death in Vegas though a single released last year sounded more like Eminem.   The other act that day was a good fun two-piece local scuzzy garage rock band called Brown Brogues. 

Five years later I witnessed Manchester electronic artist Vacuumorph and in 2018 I saw AYA, a Manchester rapper and producer who formerly recorded under the moniker LOFT.

Kings Arms. Image Credit kingsarmssalford.com

In a room adjacent to the main bar was Manchester Kings Arms Downstairs Stage where acoustic gigs occasionally took place. In 2012 an act called Yule FM played there and six years later in 2018 a local chap with the vaguely unpleasant moniker of DJ Acid Rephlux performed on that stage.

At the 2017 festival they excelled themselves by creating a third stage putting them on a par with Chorlton Irish Club and the Adelphi in Preston as the only other venues where I have attended three stages.

The only issue was that nobody could find the third stage, before we eventually realised, we had to traverse down the stairs past the kitchen and into the beer cellar. Thus, Manchester Kings Arms Basement became and remains the smallest venue I have ever attended, with about 10 people crammed in and myself outside with my head craned around the entrance peering into the dark interior. The band on the tiny stage was an act called Maeve Rendles 9 Victims, and despite an extensive search I can find no back story behind their mysterious and sinister name! 

The continuing joy for me of these festivals is the chance to visit these types of different venues that in any other context you would not normally attend.

Gigs Abroad Part 6 – Hamburg

The annual lad’s trip in March 2011 returned to the fair country of Germany, this time to Hamburg. The city has had its fair share of travails over the centuries, great fires, cholera outbreaks, carpet bombing in WW2 and even a significant flooding in the 60’s which took many lives. It is now a modern cosmopolitan city that it is probably the most touristy place we have visited on our trips.

As we boarded the plane, there was a huge group of lads dotted around in the seats heading out on a stag day, I can’t remember the chap’s name so for simplicity let’s call him Smithy.

We arrived about mid-afternoon on the Friday and passed through the Hauptbahnhof main station en route. Much to our infantile amusement there were posters for Shaun Das Schaf (Shaun the Sheep) and Rory das Automobile (Rory the Racing Car) which we chortled about over the weekend!  

Directly from the hotel we bounced into the first bar we passed whilst heading into the centre of the city. The mein host, on hearing our accents smiled and proceeded to open a back room and ushered us in for us to discover that it was full of dubious war paraphernalia.  

To increase our discomfort, he then proceeded to boot up the jukebox and put the ‘Sink the Bismarck’ track on! We made plans to escape after a quick beer, but due to a communication breakdown we ended up having to have another drink there. It was rapidly turning into a strange start to the weekend.

The centre of town was a little tacky to be fair and Smithy’s stag boys were spotted in the Reeperbahn area. Within that area was the Hamburg Reeperbahn Academy situated on Hans-Albers-Platz.  

Hamburg Reeperbahn Academy. Image Credit www.hans-der-kanns.com

We wandered in and discovered that were was a function room behind the bar which served as a disco, nightclub and live venue and stayed open to the eye-popping time of 7am. They regularly have original or covers bands playing. The place had a decent vibe to it and a band called Darryl and Pals were on stage when we attended.

Directly next door was another bar called the Hamburg Ranch House which we pottered into and saw an act called Wild Touch who were apparently a regular band on the local circuit since 2004.

The overriding news story of the weekend was the disaster at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima in Japan. Around this time, I kept harking back to the prophetic line of Billy Bragg of ‘And the incident at Tschernobyl proves the world we live in is very small’ from his 1986 track ‘Help Save the Youth of America’.

On Day 2, we made a visit to one of Europe’s most famous football teams St Pauli’s stadium, located in the dock area of the city. They are arguably recognised more for their unique social culture than their football and they are quantified as one of ‘Kult’ clubs. They generate a strong affinity from supporters far and wide due to their commendable left-wing politics and have distinctive skull and crossbones on their merchandise.

St Pauli Stadium. Image Credit portalsinfoblog.blogspot.com

Nearby to the ground we found a superb pub, arguably one of the best bars I have ever been into which we christened the ‘St Pauli Bar’ as I cannot recall the actual name. The nearest musical comparison to the St Pauli ethos would be punk and ska and this was booming over the sound system and the clientele had such character and there was a nice modicum of ‘edge’ to the place.

St Pauli had just recently managed to gain promotion to the Bundesliga, the highest division, where they were now playing their city rivals Hamburger SV in the Hamburger Stadtderby. I was chatting to a genial local lad who had attended the derby only twenty-three days earlier where they had remarkably beaten their much bigger rivals in their home stadium, this was locally such a big deal that he was almost in tears while reciting the memories of the match.

To grab a local comparison, it would be on the scale of Stockport reaching the topflight and going on to win at Man City or Man United. We spent a terrific couple of hours in this establishment. When we boarded the flight home the next day, it was abundantly clear that Smithy’s stag do crew had been pushing the envelope all weekend and they were literally shells of their former selves!