Month: January 2023

Manchester Venues 77 to 78

For one of the main city train stations, Salford Central station is somewhat of an anachronism. I currently work very close to this station and have many colleagues who are commuting over from Preston who now don’t have a direct train to Central and have to change at Salford Crescent. They are due to close the station for a few months to upgrade and make the platforms safer, however they have missed a glaring opportunity to open up for wider use the other platforms that are available on the Piccadilly to Victoria station line link, more short sighted thinking relating to Northern based stations and on any initiative that sits outside HS2, methinks!

If you turn left as you exit Salford Central this takes you directly to the Salford Egerton Arms Hotel. The pub has sat at the Gore Street site since at least 1841. It must have been a pacifist venue back in the day as the pub’s coat of arms motto ‘Virtuti – Non – Armis – Fido’ apparently translates as ‘I trust in virtue not arm’s’. It is purported that the name derives from the Egerton family who owned the Tatton park estate around the time of the inception of the pub.

 

Egerton Arms Hotel. Image Credit Geograph Britain and Ireland.

The pub has been owned by the local Joseph Holts brewery, still arguably the cheapest beer in Britain. I first visited there in 2017 as part of Sounds form the Other City festival (SFOTC) in 2017 and we saw a three-piece from Leeds called Autobodies.

There was also a chap in residence on the microphone who was publicising his quizmaster duties later that day and he had the most amusing laconic style in his delivery. That evening we were in the Pint Pot pub preparing to head off for our train home and begun chatting to three lads who we discovered had become the actual quiz winning team and they had received a tidy price of free tickets to next year’s festival. At the 2018 event we witnessed a local band called Perkoset at the Egerton.  

Next door is a decent food establishment called Caribbean Flavas and we have sat in the window a couple of times sampling their wares whilst in the area. There has been an uplift locally with acclaimed Italian and Tapas restaurants opening up nearby the station.

Directly across the traffic lights and the busy Chapel Street you find the Salford Arms Hotel. The pub has the same longevity as the Egerton, and it circles round onto Bloom Street and has also doubled up as a working hotel in the past. I walked past recently, and I have identified that the pub is now permanently closed.

It always had a battered old boozer vibe about the place, and I first visited there when in attendance at the 2012 SFTOC event.  On a makeshift stage in the middle of the pub we saw a thrilling set of shoegazey noise from History of Apple Pie who had not yet released their excellent debut album Out of View. On our way out we saw them loading up their transit band and had a brief chat.

History of Apple Pie on stage. Image Credit NME.

We returned later to see a very early set from Birmingham’s post-punks Victories at Sea. Just checking back on the bill now I see that Lovely Eggs actually headlined the venue that year. In 2017, we saw Manchester based artist Maddy Storm and the following year we ended the festival with a fun set from Leeds party band Crumbs.  

London Eighth and Ninth Trip

As you may have gleaned from my previous blogs, my favourite ever live band is Mogwai. I was fortunate to catch them at a very early stage in their career though I did miss them play at Preston Adelphi in 1997 as I had only just become aware of them. Around that time, I heard Ithica 27/9 off their debut album Ten Rapid and I knew I was smitten for life as I had been searching for that band who would not baulk at the edge of the sonic cliff but were deliriously happy to spring off into the noisy abyss!

My first viewing was at Manchester Roadhouse in 1998 and bar a promo event at Sankeys Soup the following year that I didn’t hear about I have seen every one of their subsequent Manchester dates, which sits currently on 11 in the fair city alone with two more scheduled this year. This will bring my overall attendances up to 36.   

Mogwai live on stage. Image Credit BBC.

They have had a very gradual rise in profile, which in some ways I have been eternally glad about as it has resulted in them never or very rarely progressing to play soulless arenas. Their soundtracks for Zidane and the Returned TV series in the 2010’s eventually led through to their remarkable achievement of a No 1 album in 2021.  

Prior to such infamy, the 15th time I saw them in September 2006 was their biggest gig thus far as they were playing the iconic London Royal Albert Hall. Thus, on that Friday I left work at lunchtime and walked over to Preston train station. En route I bought a student rag mag from a chap who I struck up conversation with when he commented on my band T-shirt.

On arrival in the smoke, we headed over to Holborn and had a leisurely afternoon in a boozer watching the Ryder Cup, we then caught the tube to High Street Kensington tube station. In a pub near the station, we saw the Mogwai boys themselves but left them to their own devices.

PNE were live on TV that night and I did a quick scouting mission to a nearby pub where I identified they weren’t showing the footy, but I did see comedian Helen Lederer enjoying a teatime drink. We subsequently walked down Kensington Road alongside Hyde Park to the venue.  I have always viewed the highly distinctive Royal Albert Hall as the musical Wembley, so I was very excited to attend.

The initial germination of the idea to build the hall was devised at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and it was officially opened in 1871. It is held in trust by the nation and managed by a registered charity which receives no government funding. It has staged the proms since 1941 and there are events held there all year round and it has a capacity of 5272.

Royal Albert Hall. Image Credit Classic FM.

I respected and thoroughly enjoyed the old-fashioned values of tannoy announcements providing a countdown to the performance. We were sat to the right of the stage on the front row of the balcony which provided an excellent vantage point, though it was a tad alarming nipping to the loo mid performance in the dark as it was only a low barrier preventing a significant fall.

It was self-evident that this was a huge event for the band as they had their families in attendance and at two hours remains the longest ever show I have seen them play. They finished their main set with ‘2 Rights Make 1 Wrong’ and ‘Glasgow Mega Snake’ and then on their second encore played their 20-minute opus ‘My Father, My King’. Subsequently they didn’t play this outro track for many years, but they have rebooted it on recent tours.

Three years later, Gill and I were in the same Kensington area and I became aware of a mini festival taking place. So, in the grounds of the nearby London Imperial College we sat in the sunshine and witnessed a set by the Fabulous Boogie Boys.  They were a seven-piece band led by Sarah Warren and the other six members donned in red zoot suits, they played an entertaining set of lively covers of relatively obscure tracks from the 1940s/1950’s.