In August 2014 I made another trip up the scenic West Coastline to Glasgow to see Mogwai with the usual ‘Mog trio’ of Uncle George, John Dewhurst and I in tow. It was a late arranged sojourn, so I had secured some slightly unusual accommodation as I recall it was linked to a church and located somewhere near Bath Street.
We fancied heading to a couple of different places on this trip but naturally prior to that it had to be music part 1 first, thus our initial port of call was Glasgow 13th Note Cafe. This bar was originally a pub on Glassford Street before moving to its current home on King Street in Merchant City in 1997, the original site has now become Bar Bacchus. The franchise subsequently then hoovered up a bigger club venue on Clyde Street and the 13th Note was then taken over by the Barfly group in 2002.
13th Note Cafe. Image Credit wee-dundee.co.uk
Many of the local bands of the time, namely Bis and Urusei Yatsura played there, and it was famously the location of one of Mogwai’s very early gigs as detailed in Stuart Braithwaite’s engaging autobiography ‘Spaceships over Glasgow’ which I have recently consumed. The chap who booked the bands was Alex Huntley who latterly changed his name to Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand fame, many of the gigs in the early days were free of charge.
The ground floor is a bar and a thriving vegan café, and the basement room is the music venue with gigs virtually every night. I had heard the local act The Vex were undertaking a Saturday afternoon residence so down we headed into the sweat box. They were a punk/new wave band and playing an epic 2 hour set which in our 30-minute portion we caught an excellent cover version of Cure’s ‘The Forest’, one of my fave tracks of theirs.
We jumped on the subway at St Enoch’s station for a foray out to the West End of Glasgow where after a sally around the Botanical Gardens we visited the very grand building of Oran Mor for a beer, I have never yet managed to attend a gig there in the music room located upstairs. We then visited the ‘Harry Potter’ style street of Ashton Lane before undertaking the return journey and randomly jumping off at Bridge Street station.
Glasgow Oran Mor. Image Credit Pinterest.
We decamped into the Lauriestown Bar by the river, the Mogwai gig was taking place at Glasgow Richmond Park but when we asked for directions in the pub, we drew blank expressions from the resident punters. We decided to obtain a taxi number and our transport duly arrived. The taxi driver was also lacking in local knowledge and more intent on imparting his current employment woes on us, but we persuaded him to ‘do his job’ and we finally found the park about ten minutes before the show started!
Laurieston Bar. Image Credit tripadvisor.ca
Richmond Park was opened in 1899 and is a huge location of 12 hectares in size, and it appears the area is closed for major investment works at the moment as part of a regeneration programme. The event was part of a two-day shindig called the East End Social Last Big Weekend.
There was a partial marquee where Mogwai took the stage and apologised for drinks availability during the earlier sets, though they stated it had been beyond their control. They were as enjoyable as ever and post gig due to a dearth of taxis we undertook the long walk via Glasgow Green back up to Sauchiehall Street where we ended the evening with ‘one for the ditch’!