Author: jimmyc1968

Leeds Venues 4 to 5

Our initial destination en arrival at our first attendance at the Live at Leeds multi venue event in May 2014 was the huge Leeds Arena about 3pm to collect our all-important wristbands. As is my responsibility at these events I checked the timetable and map and swiftly morphed into my ‘sherpa’ role.

The first port of call was the Leeds Belgrave Music Hall and Canteen and what a great inaugural venue it turned out be. It is located in the Northern Quarter and as you know, any aspiring city needs to have a Northern Quarter! It first opened in 1934 as Leeds Children’s Palace, dually serving a function as a recreation hall and nursery school.    

   

Leeds Belgrave Music Hall and Canteen. Image Credit Yorkshire Evening Post.

The three-storey building fell into repair until it was restored under its current guise in 2013. It is an Aladdin’s cave as it contains two kitchens, two bars and most importantly a 300-capacity multipurpose event space as it hosts comedy, art exhibitions, films alongside live bands. There is also a fine roof terrace which we visited briefly after purchasing a terrific local cask ale from one of the bars.

The venue itself had a good vibe and contained a decent vantage from all angles to the stage. It was about two thirds full even at this early point in the afternoon perhaps due in part to its proximity to the ticket outlet point but also due to the quality of the venue.

We saw half the set of Pet Moon from Oxford. The band is essentially Andrew Mears, a former member of the city bedfellows the Foals and of prog band Youthmovies Soundtrack Strategies. You could discern those clear influences in the math rock derived sounds emanating from the stage.

Prior to attending our next venue, a quick football score check was required as it was the last day of the football reason with my team Preston’s play-off opponents being confirmed as Rotherham United. As any regular subscribers would know by now you don’t need to ask who subsequently won the play-off match!

Still contained within the Quarry Hill district you would find the Leeds College of Music which moved to its current location in 1997.This establishment has had many different names since it was founded in 1965 and it is now listed as Leeds Conservatoire. In 2011, it was awarded All-Steinway School status, becoming uniquely the only conservatoire in England to have 90% of its pianos from the renowned Steinway family.

Leeds College of Music. Image Credit konsultanpendidikan.com

As with many institutions of this ilk, they have a list of previous alumni including many from the jazz domain but also Badly Drawn Boy and Ryan and Gary Jarman from local combo The Cribs. In a slightly more obscure vein, the members of We Are Domi, who represented the Czech Republic at the recent 2022 Eurovision Song Contest met and formed whilst in attendance at the College of Music.

The Conservatoire hosts an annual programme of concerts in its 350 seated auditorium which has the highly original title of ‘The Venue’. Three years after our attendance in 2017 the performance space was revamped with a rooftop extension.

The band on stage when we arrived were Arc Iris, an indie band from Rhode Island and contain Jocie Adams, a former member of the Low Anthem who was also briefly a NASA technician. To be fair, the music was too loungecore and wonky structure for my tastes, which then presented the conundrum of  how to shuffle out politely as there weren’t many attendees and it was not one of those venues where you could watch from the back and head out accordingly.

In those circumstances I always adopt the approach of leaving mid-song whilst the band are in flow and distracted, which is exactly what we did, heading on to the next venue and continuing the gig journey!

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.