Month: September 2025

Preston Venues 61 to 62

I am returning to the area of my hometown and birthplace of Preston this week by delving into the nearby town of Chorley which is a short ten-minute train ride away. It is the home of the Chorley cake, certainly not to be confused with Eccles cakes! Previous famous residents include Pauline Clare, UK’s first woman chief constable, comedian Phil Cool, speaker of the house Lindsay Hoyle, League of Gentleman’s Steve Pemberton and musicians John Foxx and Starsailor.

My pal Jez Catlow has been a member of various bands over the years with one of the latter ones being Deadwood Dog. The lead singer Mick Pike recently took over a bar in Chorley town centre and obviously was always going to stage music there, including spots for his own bands!  

Chorley Foxtails. Image Credit tripadvisor.co.uk

So, situated on a street called Pall Mall, you will find Chorley Foxtails Bar and Music Club, which is a fine cosy friendly establishment, and is a family run bar. They are open between 3 and 10 from Thursday to Sunday, but those hours can be extended as and when desired.

They have Thursday night community events incorporating music quizzes and craft & draught and games evenings. They stage regular gigs, normally on either a Saturday night or Sunday afternoon, mostly free but with the odd pay event. Stourbridge punk balladeer Jess Silk is playing there this very evening at a sold out gig.       

Gill, Uncle George and I decided to make a sabbatical over to this new bar to see Deadwood Dog in action on the last day of February this year. As Preston North End had a big FA Cup tie at high noon the next day, we sought alternative approaches as it made no sense to return home in the interim. We landed on the option of finding some cheap digs nearby and Chorley North Premier Inn met that brief perfectly.

So, on the Friday we navigated the M60 rush hour traffic to land at the hotel which had the very busy Malthouse Farm pub located right next door. We then purloined an uber into the town centre and purchased some tea at Calico Lounge near the train station.

Chorley North Premier Inn. Image Credit lancashire-hotels.com

We met George off the train and had a couple of refreshing sherbets before gravitating over to Foxtails. We sampled a couple of local ales and chewed the fat with Jez and Hughie who was also in attendance. The opening act was a decent blues covers band called Mojo Rising followed by an enjoyable set from Deadwood.  

After the gig we gravitated to the award-winning Chorley Shepherds Hall Ale House & Victoria Rooms. Itwas the first micro pub to open in Chorley in August 2014 and became a trend setter that many others have followed. The driving force behind it were three brothers named Stuart, Graham and Thomas Hardyman (no it is not the start of a joke or a Harry Potter script line!). 

Shepherds Hall Ale House. Image Credit tripadvisor.in

The name derived from the ancient order of Shepherd’s friendly society that used to be based in the building in the 19th century. It is located on Chapel Street near to the bus station and took over the former S&F Newsagents and is open seven days a week. It was refurbished in December 2020 and in the tail end of 2021 it expanded by taking over the adjacent larger shop unit next door.

It is an inviting establishment with a plethora of ales on tap and one we regularly visit when carousing in the town. It has a traditional Tap room, and the adjoining newer Victoria room is a larger space with extra seating dotted about. They now have sporadic music acts and are part of the Chorley Live roster. On the night of our visit a very noisy punk covers band were playing.

After encouraging George to head off and catch the midnight train, we encountered a delay before managing to bag a cab back to the hotel. We were both rather jaded in the morning but were revived by the chirpy staff and a belly busting breakfast and lashings of hot tea.  

I then went to pick up my father-in-law and then onto the match where we had a famous 3-0 victory over local rivals Burnley to reach the quarterfinals of the FA Cup for the first time in 59 years, and thus the first time in my lifetime.

Michael Palin playing Golden Gordon in Ripping Yarns. Image Credit BBC.

On arriving back, the result and achievement felt momentous enough to consider an impersonation of Michael Palin in the Ripping Yarns episode ‘Golden Gordon’ where he reappears after the football and when asked the score, he shouts out ‘eight -one, eight bloody one’ before trashing the crockery in celebration!

Stockport Venue 12 – Viaduct Park

Contained within Stockport’s £1billion town centre regeneration is the creation of a modern transport hub and one of the key elements of the scheme was to replace the old, dog-eared bus station which was built back in 1981.

So, in 2024 the new Stockport Interchange was opened with eighteen bus stands that can facilitate up to 164 bus departures per hour. There has been space left in the design to accommodate a metro link tram stop if the proposed metro extension to Stockport ever comes to fruition at a later date.  

Stockport Interchange. Image Credit alamy.com

It is a fine set up and has walking links to the shopping areas and the nearby train station and cycling links to the River Mersey and onto the Trans Pennine Trail. There is also a 17 storey, 196-unit Build to Rent residential building with two floors of basement parking located adjacent.

Above the Interchange is a two-acre rooftop green space, Stockport Viaduct Park which is also available for community events. The whole site was officially opened on 17/03/24 and the following weekend events were set up as part of the Stockport Town of Culture Weekender.

A local musician called John Unwin had an idea to recruit and set up a Stockport Community Steel band. He is a very experienced steel band player and community teacher within this musical art. He arranged some preliminary sessions for February, and a fledgling band was created with their debut taking place at Viaduct Park on 23/03/24.

Gill and I decided to support this local initiative and there were over 50 free events at over 25 separate locations in the town over the two-day shindig including opening up the Air Raid shelters and the newly refurbished Hat Works Museum. We initially landed into Stockport train station before gravitating over to have a proper look at the impressive park. Unfortunately, it was a brutal ‘brass monkey’ cold kind of day, but it was at least thankfully dry.  

Stockport Viaduct Park. Image Credit feeds.bbci.co.uk

There were about 50 band members playing that day and the experienced ones were providing direction to the newer recruits. It was great fun, and they played three extended tracks and perhaps naturally one of them was ‘Soul Limbo’.

That song was originally recorded by Booker T and the MGs in 1968 and features a marimba (similar to a xylophone but with a lower range) solo by Terry Manning who was a renowned recording engineer, record producer and musician across a fifty-year time span working with artists such as Led Zeppelin, Otis Redding, Big Star and Shakira.

It also contained cowbell playing by Isaac Hayes, one of the driving forces behind the Southern soul Stax Records label in the 1960’s alongside writing the musical score for the iconic 1971 film ‘Shaft’ and being the voice of the Chef character in South Park.

There is naturally, as ever a riotous cover version of the ditty by Snuff and the original song derives from the band’s sixth album which also features the title track to ‘Hang Em High’, a Clint Eastwood movie released that very year.

‘Soul Limbo’ is perhaps most famous though for being the recognised theme tune for BBC Television’s cricket coverage and BBC Radio’s Test Match Special. In 1999 the Barmy Army England cricket supporters recorded ‘Come on England’ which was set to the same tune and the sister video featured cricketers Ian Botham and Ronnie Irani, umpire Dickie Bird and somewhat bizarrely Chris Tarrant!     

Isaac Hayes. Image Credit dustygroove.com

The steel pan (or drum) derived originally in Trinidad and Tobago in the 1930’s and was built on the template of African drumming. Basically, anything at the musician’s disposal was used to create the sound including metal objects such as dustbins and plant pots.

An important discovery was then made as the addition of convex dents battered into the sides of a 55-gallon oil drum allowed different musical pitches to be created. I adore the tales of those innovations and always muse on the combination of events that results in these breakthroughs!  

I have always been a fan of the mournful evocative sound of the pedal steel guitar and first heard it via a key proponent of the instrument, Ben Keith. He learnt his trade in the Nashville country music scene in the 1950’s and 1960’s and his first participation on a hit record was on Patsy Cline’s 1961 track ‘I Fall to Pieces’.

Ben played with Neil Young for over forty years, featuring on his iconic 1972 album ‘Harvest’ and also played the part of Grandpa Green in a film called Greendale which accompanied Neil’s 2003 record with the same name. He was inducted into the Musician’s Hall of Fame and Museum four years after his death in 2014.