Following on from the Festival blog last week I am going to concentrate on some Dot to Dot festival venues on and around Oldham Street in the Northern Quarter that I visited at the event which took place on 28/05/16.
COW is a two-floor vintage clothes shop on the same block of Piccadilly Records and is an archetypal shop for this area of town. From a very unusual vantage point of standing behind a clothes rack we witnessed a young Manchester acoustic artist called Miranda Amess who had a decent voice with a smidgeon of a KT Tunstall vibe about her. It was also my 250th different venue.
The Black Dog Ballroom is a downstairs New York style bar situated underneath Affleck’s Palace on the corner of Tib and Church Street. I had only previously been in for a drink and a burger once before prior to another gig. The venue was behind a further door off the main room and had a little bar and stage within. We saw Love for Zero, an electro synth band from Manchester who were in the Editors mould.
Traversing from the basement to the top floor of Affleck’s you find the Black Milk Dessert Café. The local band on stage were Bright Young People and they had a nice scuzzy Stooges crunch about them. Their debut single was produced by Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen.
Their performance exemplified the uniqueness of the chosen venue as the American style diner on the third floor with windows overlooking Oldham Street was in great contrast to the sturdy guitar led sound on stage.
The unassuming orange signed Koffee Pot is located at the Swan Street end of Oldham Street. It is very near the Crown and Kettle pub which unfortunately ever appeared only on a festival roster for one day when I couldn’t attend as I was ensconced at Uncle George’s 60th hootenanny, and as a result my friends Jez Catlow and Moggy have beaten me to the punch there.
We saw a three-piece garage rock band called the Slovaks and they were good value.
I recently read that the Koffee Pot was collaborating with the reborn Deaf Institute by providing the food for the ground floor restaurant space.
Just off Oldham St lies the 57 Thomas Street Beer House. It is one of several pubs linked to the local Marble Brewery who also have their original flagship Marble Arch pub nearby. They had some devilishly strong ales on display in the ground floor bar and the venue was situated upstairs.
The band Psyblings were a terrific five-piece psych rock combo from Warrington who had met at Manchester University. Unfortunately, we only had time for a couple of tracks, but I made a mental note of their capability and as a result ensured we caught their full set at another event the following year.
I caught another local band called Easter at the venue later that year.
The bar has very recently been taken over by Fierce Beer, an award-winning craft beer brewery based in Aberdeen, enabling them to open their first bar North of the border.
