Tag: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

London Eleventh and Twelfth Trips

I have travelled a few times down to London with work and at one stage was visiting a company who were based nearby to Moorgate station and adjacent to London Finsbury Square. In 1784 the Square witnessed the first successful attempt of a hot air balloon flight and there is also a memorial installed there to commemorate the 1975 Moorgate tube crash where 43 people perished.  

Finsbury Square. Image Credit londonplanning.org.uk

In the summer of 2017 after leaving a meeting I was headed back to the tube for the journey home and heard music playing. In the early 20th century, the square was home to the London Royal Yeomanry and on that day the Band of Royal Yeomanry (Inns of Court & City Yeomanry) were playing a gig.

Their regimental history dates to 1548 and the band formed in 1961. They perform at many events, including D-Day memorials in Normandy and 6 Nations matches at Twickenham. They still maintain their original ceremonial uniform of French blue jacket and trousers, chain mailed shoulders, George boots and spurs and Chapka helmets.

Band of Royal Yeomanry Band. Image Credit flickr.com

I have always been a huge fan of Hold Steady and have now seen them nine times in total and they sit in bronze medal position of my bands most seen list. That figure would undoubtedly be higher if not for the fact that they have not played a Manchester date since 19/10/14. The reason for this dearth is that they have chosen since then to just play an annual three-day residency in London with no other regional dates.

As a result, we decided to make a pilgrimage down to the smoke in 2019 as I was missing my Hold Steady fix! Their base for their seasonal jaunt is in the thriving Camden suburb of the city. I met Uncle George and John Dewhurst off the train, and we dropped our bags at the handy location of Euston Premier Inn.  We then headed off on the Northern tram line to find our first hostelry, the Dingwalls pub on Camden Lock overlooking the canal.

My first visit to that establishment was in 1987 when I saw Brilliant Corners supported by a yet undiscovered Happy Mondays. The pub has certainly gone through a regentrification phase since then, but they still have live music there on a regular basis.  We also had a foray to the Old Eagle public house and to refuel we hit a local pie shop but there were unfortunately no butter pies on sale!

The Hold Steady show took place at London Camden Electric Ballroom. The Ballroom is a long-established venue and has been in place for 80 years. It began its days as an Irish club where the crooner Jim Reeves used to play and adopted its current name in 1978. There used to be a weekend indoor market staged there and was in place until 2015. It survived potential demolition in 2004 when there was a proposal to redevelop Camden Town underground station.

Camden Electric Ballroom. Image Credit Electric Ballroom

There are two dance floors and four bars contained within and it has a capacity of 1500 and there was good viewing of the stage from any vantage point.  They launched straight in with the vibrant ‘Stuck Between Stations’ and didn’t let up for the next 24 tracks, it was another thoroughly enjoyable performance.

It was also appropriate as a milestone event as it was Uncle George’s and I 500th gig together, a mere 32 years since our first, a staggeringly good Pogues show at Manchester International 2. Our 100th was also a belter with Black Rebel Motorcycle playing the Mill, a small club in Preston.  

After the set had finished, George and I progressed onto London Camden Monarch for number 501. The original Monarch prior to 2000 was in another area of Camden which then became the music venue Barfly. The new Monarch opened in 2008 in a new site on Chalk Farm Road and the DJ on the opening night was none other than Amy Winehouse!

The pub subsequently closed in 2020 but reopened the following year under the new moniker Monarchy retaining the live music in a downstairs events space called the Vault.  On the night we visited a local indie band called Stay Club took to the stage.    

Manchester Venue 87 Albert Hall – Part 2

One of the undeniable quirks of Albert Hall is the sheer size of the building and the multiple floors. A case in point is the extraordinary distance to access the lavatories which are situated in a veritable Bermuda Triangle maze of corridors in the basement, where it is rather easy to lose your bearings!

On 17/05/14 I recall us having a chippy tea on Cross Street and then watching the end of the FA Cup final between Arsenal and Hull which the former team won in extra time, before heading down to Manchester Albert Hall to watch the enigmatic Neutral Milk Hotel.

I had first discovered the band years after their breakup via reading an annual review pamphlet distributed by Piccadilly Records which listed them in several subscribers influential list. They hailed from Louisiana and their driving force was Jeff Mangum and their initial period of existence was from 1989 to 1998 before reforming for a couple of years in 2013.  

Their popularity in their initial phase resulting in them dropping off the map and heading into a hiatus and Jeff becoming a virtual recluse. Their music is ‘marmite’ to many punters, as it contains many unusual instruments such as a singing saw, uilleann pipes and the lesser spotted ‘zanzithophone’ which translates as a Casio digital horn. It also contains strange otherworldly lyrics, and they were cited as a resultant huge influence on bands that followed such as Arcade Fire and the Decemberists.  

My view on their landmark second album ‘In the Aeroplane Over the Sea’ is that is idiosyncratic, life affirming but also in equal parts deeply unsettling. It was fascinating to hear it converted to a live setting and some of their tracks had moments of genius about them.

Neutral Milk Hotel’s unique album cover. Image Credit Pinterest.

Because they had literally disappeared for such a sustained period and gained a degree of mythical status, many of their fans in the interim had developed into ardent zealots of their art, to the point that Uncle George observed on the evening that it felt a tad ‘insidious’. It was all in all a fascinating evening and the resultant people watch was almost as entertaining as the band.       

The following June I saw the ever-excellent Black Rebel Motorcycle Club for the fifth time with my personal favourite being when they astonishingly played five minutes’ walk away from where I lived in a small club in Preston called the Mill.

It was a glorious summers evening and despite being in an indoor venue the sun was angling through the many decorative windows to provide an elegant backdrop to their performance on stage. The band revel in long performances, quite often over two hours and flip consummately between straight up rock tracks like ‘Whatever Happened to my Rock N Roll (Punk Song)’ to countrified acoustic tracks such as ‘Complicated Situation’. They were in fantastic form on the evening and all things combined it resulted in becoming my gig of the year for 2015.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Image Credit myfreewallpapers.net

My next visit was as part of the Dot-to-Dot festival roster in 2018. To add to the many things Covid was responsible for is the fact that it sadly cancelled the Manchester leg of the Dot-to-Dot event, and it is now only held in Bristol and Nottingham. I really miss this event as it provided a great opportunity to visit some more obscure venues and also achieve some serious steps totals as it encompasses venues all across the city in one day!   

The other unusual element it allowed was to visit venues during daylight hours when they are at times virtually deserted which is slightly disconcerting as you are so used to venues being busy just prior to an evening show. The band on stage were No Hot Ashes from Stockport who had been receiving some hype locally but for me they didn’t justify it. The following year they released their only album ‘Hardship Starship’ and in 2020 decided to take an unspecified hiatus but Covid intervened again to cancel forever their two planned farewell shows.

In 2019 I saw Suede for the first time, and I have always been a tad ambivalent about the music but many gigs I have attended in the last five years are because we are now just down the road from Manchester, so why the hell not! Brett Anderson remains quite an engaging front man and they put on a decent performance without really moving me. I was left with the conundrum afterwards of whether I respected him or not for having the temerity to still wear tight leather pants at his age!