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 50th 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.
