Category: Manchester

Manchester Venues 65 to 67

Continuing the circular route of the Sounds from the other City Festival brings us to the historic Kings Arms on Bloom Street. It is situated deep in the old industrial quarter of Salford, and it is an easy five-minute jaunt from Salford Central train station. The pub was first licensed in 1807 and the original building initially resided on the other side of the street.

Lucy Davis was a landlady there in the 19th century and after throwing her husband out for being a drunken lout, she created a profitable dance hall and den of ill repute upstairs! It has been the base for many interesting clubs, namely the North of England Irish Terrier Club, the Knitting Club and the Salford Friendly Anglers Society, the world’s oldest angling club and a sign of the final listed club is still visible on the gable end of the pub.

Many pubs fell by the wayside in this area, but the Kings continued to flourish being famously taken over in 2011 by Zena Barrie and Paul Heaton of Housemartin’s and Beautiful South fame. They embellished the artistic undertakings and a pot pourri of arts exhibitions, vaudeville, comedy, poetry nights and gigs took place under their tutelage. They were also apparently regularly heard rehearsing in the upstairs function room.

Paul Heaton. Image Credit Hull Daily Mail.

The pub has also been used as a location for music videos and TV shows like Cracker, Fresh Meat and the Hairy Bikers and was always a good gathering point to commune with like-minded souls on the SFTOC monorail, much like the other central hubs of the festival such as Islington Mill and the Old Pint Pot.

It is an olde world pub with a large main bar room area downstairs with seats dotted around the perimeter. At one of the festivals, I saw a Chinese dragon parade the room, it is that kind of quirky place. They are a renowned real ale venue and have been in the Good Beer Guide for the last decade and are a keen supporter of small local breweries. There is also a small beer garden accessed from the back of the pub.

Stairs led you up the Manchester Kings Arms Events Space.  It is a theatre style space and has a standing capacity of 120 and seating capacity of 50.  The venue even holds a wedding licence.

My first visit there was on 06/05/12 was to see Meddicine from London. An appropriate act considering the industrial history of the area as he resembled a lo-fi Death in Vegas though a single released last year sounded more like Eminem.   The other act that day was a good fun two-piece local scuzzy garage rock band called Brown Brogues. 

Five years later I witnessed Manchester electronic artist Vacuumorph and in 2018 I saw AYA, a Manchester rapper and producer who formerly recorded under the moniker LOFT.

Kings Arms. Image Credit kingsarmssalford.com

In a room adjacent to the main bar was Manchester Kings Arms Downstairs Stage where acoustic gigs occasionally took place. In 2012 an act called Yule FM played there and six years later in 2018 a local chap with the vaguely unpleasant moniker of DJ Acid Rephlux performed on that stage.

At the 2017 festival they excelled themselves by creating a third stage putting them on a par with Chorlton Irish Club and the Adelphi in Preston as the only other venues where I have attended three stages.

The only issue was that nobody could find the third stage, before we eventually realised, we had to traverse down the stairs past the kitchen and into the beer cellar. Thus, Manchester Kings Arms Basement became and remains the smallest venue I have ever attended, with about 10 people crammed in and myself outside with my head craned around the entrance peering into the dark interior. The band on the tiny stage was an act called Maeve Rendles 9 Victims, and despite an extensive search I can find no back story behind their mysterious and sinister name! 

The continuing joy for me of these festivals is the chance to visit these types of different venues that in any other context you would not normally attend.

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.