Year: 2022

Manchester Venues 63 and 64

Located deep in the Northern Quarter there used to reside the Cord Bar. It was situated on Dorsey Street off Tib Street, almost directly behind the Gullivers public house. Apparently at the start of the millennium, it was one of the ‘go to’ places in NQ as it was cited as a favoured DJ venue and like many in this area of town was a visiting spot for an embryonic Elbow.

It suffered declining numbers over the years and a reboot attempt under the name of NYQ in 2018 was unsuccessful, however I visited its latest incarnation a couple of weeks ago prior to watching the Courettes at Night and Day. It is now called Alvarium with a restaurant called Lazy Tony’s Lasagneria where we had a table by the old stage!   

I visited there three times under the auspices of the Dot to Dot and Carefully Planned multi venue festivals and quite liked the establishment as it always reminded of an archetypal New York diner style bar you would see on the American cop shows. The bands played in the downstairs bar, and this could be accessed via a choice of stairs at the front or rear of the venue.

Cord Bar. Image Credit tripadvisor.co.uk

My first attendance on 19/10/14 was accessed from the latter steps and the acts played in an alcove where rather quaintly and somewhat niffily the space for the small number of punters was located outside the lavatories! The artist was a young local acoustic artist called John Ainsworth who released his debut album the following year.

When I landed there a year later, I discovered the stage was in the same place but was now thankfully facing the opposite way into a larger less pungent room. We saw Howie Reeve, who is a self-titled acoustic bass troubadour from the South of Glasgow. In May 2016, on my final visit I witnessed another local musician called Sam Frost. 

Nearby in the famous Afflecks Palace block there is a fine basement bar and live music venue. The club has had a couple of entrances, either from Oldham Street or Tib Street. It has also had a few name changes over the years, originally a singular 500 capacity music venue called Moho, then a hybrid site called Manchester Dive NQ. It is now called Dive Bar and Grill and is more focussed on being a food/sports bar and it appears that live music is now longer on the roster, and it is a late-night DJ location only.   

My first visit in April 2012 was in the Moho moniker era and we accessed the gig from the Tib Street entrance, and I thought the place had a decent layout.

Manchester Dive NQ. Image Credit venuescanner.com

Now, from the starting point of being a humongous Mogwai fan I have always searched out other like-minded bands positioned in the post-rock genre. However, a few of these have turned out to be in the Mogwai lite category, God is an Astronaut and I so I Watch from Afar spring to mind.

An exception to this was the band that night with the vaguely threatening but musically promising name of This Will Destroy You from Texas. They were an excellent live band, and it looks like the band are still operational and under their revised name of TWDY they are scheduled to play the ArcTangent festival later in 2022. It was also jointly my 150th different venue and my 150th gig in Manchester.  

After the change to Dive NQ where they moved the stage to the front of the venue, I attended four other times between 2016 and 2019. The first was to see a local blues-rock band called Turrentine Jones. The second was to see a young Sheffield band called Exhort, who were perhaps unsurprisingly heavily influenced by Arctic Monkeys. This was prior to attending a Julia Jacklin gig.  

On the penultimate visit whilst at the Dot-to-Dot festival we saw local act China Lane led by Reuben Hester who apparently after the band disbanded appeared on the reality TV programme Little Mix the Search. This was just before walking across the road to Night and Day to catch a young astounding Fontaines DC for the first time. My final attendance there was to see Saytr Play.       

Lancaster Venue 3 – Lancaster Library

One fantastic initiative that has appeared in the last 17 years (since 2005) is the award winning Get it Loud in Libraries and Lancaster Library was at the forefront, if not the first to undertake this commendable pursuit. The concept being rather simple to see high quality artists in the unusual intimate surroundings of the local library.

Many heavyweight performers have embraced this ethos as an antidote to playing soulless stadium venues. Many libraries have joined the roster including Coventry, Birkenhead, Barrow and Blackpool. Some of the names who have appeared are Florence and the Machine, Idles and Ellie Goulding. I also recall at Lancaster specifically that Frank Turner and Adele have graced the venue. I had attended one library gig before at Finsbury in February 89 to see Peggy Seeger and Ewan McColl and one after in 2017 to see Honeyblood at Wigan Museum of Life (which was actually a library). 

Lancaster Library resides in the northwest corner of Market Square, where in 1745 Bonnie Prince Charlie was proclaimed regent by the Jacobite Army. This library enterprise first caught my attention 263 years later in 2008 when Robert Forster was booked for a Lancaster slot.

Lancaster Library. Image Credit creativetourist.com

Robert being one half of the co-writing team alongside Grant McLennan in the enigmatic 1980’s Australian band the Go-Betweens. The gig took place in the front portion of the building and once you got used to the quirky setting, he was very enjoyable. There was an intermission allowing us to scamper over to the nearby John O Gaunt pub, and I recall Algarve Ray had also headed over from the gig and we discussed my recent holiday in the Algarve!

The next visit in 2011 was a double header with a difference as there were two gigs scheduled, one on the Saturday night and the other on Sunday afternoon. Due to the highly opportune synchronicity Gill and I decided to grab a cheap room for the night at the Best Western Hotel near the station.

I met Gill after the PNE match, and we caught a train over, and I recall watching Crawley losing narrowly to Man Utd in the FA Cup 5th round when we were getting changed at the hotel. We grabbed some tea at the 1725 Tapas restaurant on the opposite end of Market Square.

In the intervening three years they had created a stage in the larger room of the library to aid an increased capacity. The act that evening was a band from Ohio called Mona, whose driving force was Nick Brown, the band being named after his grandmother. I had seen them on Jools Holland, and I thought they had the look of a young Glasvegas about them.

Mona. Image Credit NME.

They had just won the BBC Sound of 2011 poll though not yet released their debut album. They garnered some stadium support slots later that year with Kings of Leon and the sound was arguably in the same bracket. On the night the lead singer had a decent set of pipes, and I enjoyed their set. 

The following day, we decided to grab some Sunday lunch and a couple of aperitifs at the Borough gastropub before the 3pm gig. Yuck were a London band that were releasing their self-titled debut album the very next day. They were firmly in the grunge bracket and created a fine racket though I think a night-time gig in a more unkempt venue would have been a better fit for them. They subsequently split in 2015 and were supported that afternoon by emo band Pegasus Bridge.            

My final visit there was on Monday 09/07/12 to see Low and a group of us pottered over to watch them. They were still most certainly in their usual soft hushed vein prior to the shift to their more recent guitar led material. One of the crew left halfway through as he found it all too maudlin, but I thought they were in fine form and the venue played to their strengths.

On arrival back in Preston we had a flier at the Vic and Station before someone foolishly suggested we take advantage of the Old Dog down in Church Street which during the week stayed open until 4am. I finally toppled out of said establishment at 2.50am, my one and only visit to the late bar. Thankfully I had booked Tuesday as leave, but it took me quite a while to beginning functioning the next day!