At the tail end of 2005 I read an article in the Friday entertainment section of the Lancashire Evening Post which provided detail of an interesting sounding gig in January 2006. The gig was to take place at Preston St Bede’s Club. I had never heard of the venue and located it on the map to the bottom of Brownley Road off Chorley Old Road in Clayton Le Woods, above five miles outside the centre of town.
I still had limited familiarity of the area so decided to undertake a field trip in the car beforehand to case out the joint and work out feasible travel plans and surrounding hostelries to visit beforehand. I found the building nearby to the Church and attached Presbytery of St Bede’s, the latter sites having been Grade II listed since 1984.
The 125 bus was decided upon as the most practicable commute option. So, on a particularly baltic Friday night I met Uncle George at the main bus station, and we boarded the bus that traversed its meandering way through Bamber Bridge, past Junction 29 off the M6 to our drop off point very near our first watering hole the Halfway House. The bus continues past Chorley Hospital and eventually arrives at its end destination of Bolton a week on Tuesday!
We visited a couple of other pubs, but I forget their names, I recall in one the jukebox had Husker Du ‘Don’t Want to Know if You Are Lonely’ on so that was obviously selected. In the other I encountered local comedian and Phoenix Nights star Dave Spikey in the lavatories!
From there, there was an alley that cut you through to the venue. The concert area was a large, packed room in a social club setting where the audience was very respectful, so you had to tiptoe to the back of the room. George said it resembled folk clubs of old.
The support act was Corb Lund who is a country and western singer from Alberta in Canada. He has been on the scene for many years and a long-standing member of the Corb Lund band. On the night he played a solo set and was very engaging and enjoyable.
The main act who had originally sparked my attention was Chuck Prophet. The Californian had first crossed my radar as a member of the 80’s desert rock band Green on Red. I used to play their records a lot, especially their debut album ‘Gas Food Lodging’.
I recall an interview at the time with Neil Young on the Old Grey Whistle Test where Andy Kershaw played some of the record to Neil, who listened for a few seconds and then drawled ‘sounds like Crazy Horse’! I got a chance to see them once supported by Steve Earle at Manchester International 1 in March 1987, but they produced a crushingly disappointing set.
Obviously, lessons were not learnt as unfortunately, this was little different as the gig was limp and his banter was surreal and unamusing. We left prior to the end of the set and arrived at the bus stop and prepared to wait more in hope than in anticipation, though the gods were smiling on us as a bus arrived within a couple of minutes to take us back into the city. The evening ended with a late drink in the Roper Hall club.
Nearer town on the same bus route on Preston Road, you would find the Preston Pines Hotel. The venue was a famous local establishment and had been open for fifty years for cabarets, functions, school proms and weddings and I had personally attended a couple of weddings there myself and stayed overnight in the thirty-five-room hotel. It was owned throughout this period by the Duffin family before eventually closing in February 2017 and making space for 40 apartments and a Lidl supermarket.
They had a large function room where in 2006 Gill and I were roped in to attending a friend’s birthday party. The ‘entertainment’ on the evening was a local Abba tribute band called Mamma Mia.