Month: November 2022

Manchester Venue 74 Soup Kitchen – Part 1

The Soup Kitchen which has recently been rebranded simply as Soup resides deep in the Northern Quarter on Spear St, within stumbling distance of the Night and Day venue. During the Covid apocalypse an eminently sensible decision was made to pedestrianise the nearby Stevenson Square area to create a European style outdoor seating vibe and thankfully this ethos has been retained post-pandemic.

Manchester Soup Kitchen. Image Credit Pinterest.

The upstairs room is laid out in a canteen style with long wooden benches to create a communal atmosphere. It has decent but slightly overpriced tucker available and has a plethora of craft ales to imbibe. Downstairs resides the venue with a small bar to the right and stage to the left with a 150 capacity. When approaching the room limit, it can get very busy down in the slightly damp cellar setting.  The unisex toilets would be best quantified in the ‘basic’ category, but it all adds to the grungy allure of the place. They have a lot of upcoming bands and DJ’s who frequent their busy live roster.

I have attended Soup fourteen times in total and first heard of the venue when the much-hyped Milk Music from Washington DC played there on 17/05/12. They had only released a couple of early singles by this stage, and they had an engaging slacker vibe about them, despite the venue only being half full. There was little audience participation until they somewhat oddly woke from the slumber on the last song to create an impromptu mosh pit!

I must say since this gig the band completely dropped off my radar until I began researching this article and was surprised to find they are still in existence. I am just now listening to their debut album ‘Cruise Your Illusion’ which has shades of Neil Young, Dinosaur Jr and Meat Puppets therein which sounds like a tidy combination to me. They were supported on the night by an appearance from Eagulls who I cited in last week’s Beacons Festival review. They were my only two viewings of the Leeds based band, coincidentally within a couple of months of each other.

Milk Music. Image Credit VICE.

Many of my attendances have been part of multi event wristband events such as Dot to Dot or Off the Record festivals and one such appearance was a couple of years later to see Remember Remember. The Glasgow band was initially the brainchild of Graeme Rowland who released a 2008 album with participation from other collaborators. By the time I witnessed them in 2014 they had morphed into a seven-piece band and had just released their third album ‘Forgetting the Present’, before they subsequently split the following year.

They were on Rock Action roster run by Mogwai, with whom they had supported. They were also in the fully instrumental post-rock genre, but they were of a gentler variation than their label counterparts and I enjoyed their show.

A year later I saw Worriedaboutsatan from Bradford, their name deriving from a track by Belgium band Deus. They were formed by Gavin Millar around 2006, before being joined by Leeds College of Music pal Tom Ragsdale. They have a crossover post-rock/electronic template and have supported luminaries such as 65daysofstatic and Maybeshewill. They garnered considerable radio airplay, and their music has also somewhat bizarrely been featured on Coronation Street!  

Beacons Festival 2012

Skipton is a traditional historic market town in North Yorkshire, located about an hour’s drive from Preston. It contains a rather fine 14th century castle which was Yorkshire’s last Royalist stronghold when it was besieged during the English Civil War. When we heard about a new festival taking place near the town at Heslaker Farm on the Funkirk Estate, we thought it was well worth a foray over to check it out.

The Moor Music festival was held in Ilkley, West Yorkshire from its inception in 2006 and was a non-corporate sponsored event and had a considerable green eco slant and featured local bands. The shindig moved to Heslaker Farm for the 2009 and 2010 editions before rebadging itself as the Beacons Festival for the 2011 event. It remained there until 2015 before morphing again into a short-lived tri-city event in Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester called Beacons Metro.  

However, the 2011 version which we purchased tickets for was hit by unseasonably inclement weather resulting in its cancellation and our tickets were carried over to the August 2012 festival. We managed to purloin some digs at the hugely inviting Woolly Sheep pub located on Sheep Street which is known locally as the ‘Woolly’. It is owned by the Timothy Taylor brewery, and they stock some very fine beers.  

Woolly Sheep pub. Image Credit c.yell.com

We had a day ticket for the Saturday so on arrival in Skipton we had a wander round the town followed by a hearty lunch before heading over in a taxi to the site. It was a very rural setting and quite a small site literally attached to the working farm, but a 1000 times smaller than what I would envisage the Glastonbury site to be!

You could wholly understand the previous year’s cancellation as despite a batch of decent weather the ground remained a quagmire and there were not many dry seating points on the grass. On the upside though they rather excitingly had the first real ale tent I had seen at a festival before it subsequently became a staple tent item at future events.    

There were two main stages, namely Stool Pigeon and the Noisey/Vice stage and we gravitated between both areas.  On the forenamed stage we initially saw a singer songwriter called Tom Finian.  The next act was 2:54, a decent shoegazey act from London comprised of the Thurlow sisters who had just recently released their self-titled debut album.

An hour later we saw the Japandroids set. They are a punky act from Vancouver and were touring their touted second album Celebration Rock and they created a rather fine racket; and they remain in circulation to this day. They were followed by Obaro Ejimiwe, who is better known as Ghostpoet from London. He has been twice Mercury Prize nominated and I enjoyed his unique sound.   

We saw more acts over on the Noisey/Vice stage, the initial one being Best Friends, a group of pals who met at university and provided some noisy guitar fuzz. Next up was Plank from Manchester who had a 60’s space rock feel about them.  Following them was Paws from Scotland who have now produced four albums of off-kilter guitar tunes in the similar vein to Swearin and No Age. Their first ever show at the Stereo Café Bar in Glasgow in 2010 was supporting the Dum Dum Girls.

Beacons Festival site. Image Credit blogspot.com

We saw Archy Ivan Marshall, a singer/rapper who has many pseudonyms, but that day played under the moniker King Krule.  My favourite band of the day was Swim Deep, a woozy dream pop band from Birmingham, who were later cited as part of the Digbeth-based B-town movement. They had a really nice vibe to them, though the sound could have been a tad louder for my tastes.

The final act we saw was Eagulls from Leeds who were in the post punk mould and the lead singer George Mitchell had an element of Ian Curtis in his stage persona.  They subsequently split in 2019 with George then becoming a painter and starting a new musical project.

We managed to book a taxi back to the digs and reached the pickup point by stumbling through dark fields which reminded me of the early Wickerman festivals.