Stockport Venues 3 to 4

Continuing my journey through the Stockport suburbs brings you to the area of Heaton Moor and the thriving street of Shaw Road with its plethora of restaurants and bars. At the Heaton Moor Road end, you find Leoni’s Italian restaurant who also owned a short-lived pizzeria on the other side of the street. In the building where the restaurant now resides there used to be a Kro Bar branch, their first outside the city centre which ran from 2008 to 2016 before a short stint then as cocktail bar Tusk.

A smidge further down you reach a Stockport institution Kushoom Koly, a curry house that first opened in 1971, known locally as the ‘Kush’. We attended there in late 2018 and the owner Faruk Uddin made a beeline for us as ‘newbies’ to the establishment and was a thoroughly lovely chap and we had a very fine meal. I surmise we would have returned many more times, but unimaginable tragedy struck when the owner’s son Jordan was killed in a road traffic accident and the proprietor felt he could not carry on and the restaurant closed for good in 2019.

  

The Kush. Image Credit facebook.com

On the other side of the street there are two separate ale bars called Pale and Bottle respectively. Beyond those you find Pokusevski’s Mediterranean restaurant which has expanded from its original tiny café when it first opened in 2004. It is an inviting place with dangerously delicious cakes and their own home made ginger tea. It was one of the first places to open locally during the pandemic and I recall our palpable excitement in those surreal times for something as abundantly simple as a takeaway coffee!

Next to there is Hula, a tiki late night dive bar which I have never frequented, however within this location the music venue called the Blue Cat used to reside.  A local chap called Danny Donnelly, a former electrician, spotted a large gap in the Stockport live music scene and bravely opened up the venue in 1996. The premise was to provide a platform for upcoming bands as an antidote to the gruel diet of tribute acts at other local sites and they actually instilled this ethos by having a no covers policy in place. With the opening of the venue, he actually kickstarted the subsequent regeneration of Shaw Road.

The Blue Cat. Image Credit Manchester Evening News.com

Luminaries such as The Blossoms, Johnny Marr, Nick Harper, Ian McNabb, Kiki Dee and 1975 have played there and local acts Haven (from Heaton Moor) and Isobel Heyworth were supplied opportunities to make a name for themselves. Comedy nights were also staged, and John Bishop, Alan Carr, Sarah Millican and Jack Whitehall have graced the stage. He also set up his own record label named Out of the Blue.

As a result of Stockport’s inflexible licensing laws with their 11.30 curfew, the venue was sadly forced to close for good in 2015 after a 19-year residency. The final band to play there was the band Man Made featuring Johnny Marr’s son Nile. I never had the chance to frequent as this was in the pre-Manchester Jimmy period.  

A couple of doors away is Stockport Cassidy’s Bar which was opened by a chap called Martin Cassidy in 2004. It has an odd lay out with a split level from the entrance up to the main bar. There is sport constantly booming on the many screens and they also have music on at the weekend. There have also been karaoke performances with one previous event led by Blossoms frontman Tom Ogden. On the night of our visit in 2019 a local singer called Sally Walters was playing.

Cassidy’s Bar. Image Credit The UK

On a monthly basis the Stockport Heaton Moor Market takes over Shaw Road with its numerous market stalls. On one occasion at the tail end of 2021 there was a set from the Heatons & Reddish Ukelele band who practice every Friday at the local United Reform Church.  

Manchester Venue 129 – Cathedral

In 1215, Manchester Cathedral was built in the centre of the city with additions to the original design being built at periodic intervals over the next three centuries. It survived damage in the Civil War, the IRA bombing in 1996 and the Second World War, the latter causing extensive destruction that required a further 20 years to restore. Following the Arena bombing in May 2017 the Glade of Light memorial was built outside to commemorate the victims. The church is currently one of the fifteen Grade I listed buildings in Manchester and is situated behind the famous Sinclair’s Oyster Bar.

Manchester Cathedral. Image Credit hoteles.com

In the last 15 years the Cathedral has branched out and begun to showcase live music. My first attendance there was in 2012 where I encountered my pal Rick Clegg and his daughter Charlotte on the train over as they were heading on to an alternate Vaccines gig at Manchester Ritz. We parlayed in the pub over a couple of scoops and then headed separate ways.

A couple of years earlier I had attended my debut ecclesiastical event at St Phillips Church in Salford when watching Wooden Shjips. This was a similar set up with slightly more challenges in regard to viewing the stage due to the proliferation of pillars.

The band performing was Dirty Three, an Australian instrumental rock band I had seen once previously 12 years earlier. Their first ever gig took place on ANZAC Day on 25th April 1992 where Warren Ellis utilised a guitar pick up to his violin which created their trademark feedback driven sound which is a sight to behold when they are in their full flow of 10 minute opuses.

Dirty Three. Image Credit fromthearchives.com

Warren was born in Ballarat, Victoria, coincidentally a town Gill and I stayed in when we visited Australia, and he has also been a dual member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds since 1994.  They are a terrific and thunderous live act, and on the night, the journalist/musician John Robb was also in attendance, with whom I had a decent chat.  

The second and currently latest visit was as part of the Manchester Dot to Dot festival in 2016. As ever, my gig ‘addiction’ resulted in a co-ordinated effort to attend all of the twenty geographically disparate city centre venues during the day, which was a logistical challenge.

Never one who has been able to embrace Gordon Gekko’s ethos of ‘lunch is for wimps’; a food stop was taken at the excellent chippy that used to be located at the city end of Oldham Street. This was immediately prior to heading over to the Cathedral, which for the record was number eleven on the venue hit list. The fish and chips were still being munched as I stood outside, and I could hear the band ending their set.

My instant thoughts were that I had made a major tactical error, and this would forever be classed as a ‘missed gig’, but I wandered in any way to pray for a miracle! Due to the nature of the event, there was very strict time periods allocated to each set, but remarkably in this case the gig gods were smiled benignly on me as the band returned to the stage for an unprecedented encore of one additional song.

The act on stage was Sundara Karma, who are an indie band from Reading. I had caught them very early in their career as they had only formed the previous year and were just at that stage leaving secondary school and it was five years prior to releasing their debut album ‘Youth is Only Ever Fun in Retrospect’. They were obviously acquiring some hype as they incited a very enthusiastic crowd reaction. With the near miss thus averted I progressed on to achieve the full twenty venues, ending the gig quest in Manchester Texture in the Northern Quarter.  

Sundara Karma. Image Credit schonmagazine.com

Gill and I had tickets for one other event there which was to see Low in April 2022 however we ended up being double booked so therefore could not attend. This was seven months before Mimi Parker’s tragic untimely death leaving me with memories of previous great Low shows I had been fortunate to witness, particularly at Manchester Hop and Grape and Lancaster Library.