Tag: Crystal Stilts

Manchester Venues 122 Deaf Institute – Part 2

Nearby to the Deaf Institute Music Hall on the same side of Grosvenor St is the Footage pub (previously Flax and Firkin) which is a large vibrant pub with craft ales and many TV screens showing the latest sports. Just around the corner is the basement Umami Noodle Bar which has been a regular pre-gig eating stop for over 20 years.

The Footage with the Trof Deaf Institute sign in the background. Image Credit Zomato.com.

My first gig there was on 02/07/09 when I saw Nine Black Alps, a four-piece band from Manchester whose original moniker was The Chelsea Girls. The Alps name was selected from a line in a Sylvia Plath poem. I had picked up on them initially via their belting debut album ‘Everything Is’ which I still play periodically to this day.   

A couple of years later I had to cancel at short notice a trip to my brothers in Nottingham thus missing a Kyuss (forerunners to Queens of the Stone Age) gig. I was kicking my heels and a couple of lads were off to see Killing Joke, so I tagged along, but discovered on arrival at the Academy that their gig was sold out. A variant C approach then evolved by quickly checking that night’s gig listings and identifying an event at the Deaf that I could attend and then meet up after with the boys for the train home.

I struck lucky as the act on that particular night was the Dum Dum Girls whose name derived from a Vaselines album and an Iggy Pop song, thereby displaying their musical influences. Originally it was a solo project for Californian Kristin Gundred who then renamed herself as Dee Dee. After she signed up with legendary label Sub Pop three more girls were added into the band including the drummer Frankie Rose who has also been in Crystal Stilts, Vivian Girls and Frankie Rose and the Outs.

Dum Dum Girls. Image Credit Fanpop.

They disbanded in 2016 where Dee Dee then became Kristin Kontrol and her sound morphed more into the synth pop arena. She also around that time provided an excellent atmospheric cover of one of my favourite Jesus and Mary Chain tracks ‘Teenage Lust’. They were enjoyable live with many of the tracks coming off their debut album ‘I Will Be’ and reflecting the geographical location they were playing in, they decided to finish their set with a cover of ‘There is a Light That Never Goes Out’.  

Next up was one of those ‘right place right time’ moments that only occur very occasionally in one’s gig going journey. During my attendance at the Dot-to-Dot festival in May 2013 I had sighted on the roster an upcoming band I had just become aware of, and at that stage had only released two singles. The band in question who were performing in a teatime slot were Wolf Alice.

The venue filled up just before they landed on stage, and they were stunningly good, and rarely have I seen a young band who had such poise and justifiable confidence in their sound and ability.  At one quiet point between tracks a punter at the bar said in an awed voice ‘outstanding, absolutely outstanding’ which received a shy thankyou from lead singer Ellie Rowsell.  They finished with their superb first single ‘Fluffy’ and it was plainly obvious they were destined for great things including subsequently headlining Glastonbury stages and Mercury Music prizes.

As the set arrived at a tumultuous finale and the band left the high stage Ellie was struggling to step down so I proffered a hand to assist her which she gratefully accepted. Musical royalty was touched in that very instance and I am sure Ellie has not washed her hand since!   

Wolf Alice. Image Credit nylon.com

In October 2013 I went to see White Hills for the first time who are a stoner psychedelic rock band from New York and provided a pleasing slab of white noise. They have had a prolific output since their formation in 2003 and have recorded over fifty releases incorporating an impressive twelve studio albums. In their early days they were championed and supported by Julian Cope and were also cherry picked to appear as a live band in a scene of a 2012 Jim Jarmusch movie ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’.  

There then followed a gap of 4.5 years until my next visit in March 2018. Gill and I headed down with our pal Laura Buckley to see an Icelandic dream synth pop band called Vok, the name translating as a ‘hole in the ice’. They had formed in 2013 and gained some instant recognition by winning Musiktilraunir, an annual Iceland music contest and the year before we saw them, they released their debut album ‘Figure’. 

Liverpool Venues 5 to 7

Before I outline the remaining events I have thus far attended in Liverpool, I wanted to provide some detail of all the missed gig opportunities on the other side of the River Mersey from the city centre. The first occurred when I attended my auntie’s wedding somewhere deep in Wallasey territory and there was a pub opposite the wedding reception building, but the name of the establishment evades me now. We visited briefly during the day but only Uncle George grasped the mantle to attend at one point in the evening where there was a band playing.

Following on from that quarter information tale, in July 21, Gill and I were scheduled to attend the Lets Rock 80’s festival at Wavertree Playing Fields (aka the Mystery). The derivation of the mystery moniker is down to the fact that the 104-acre park was donated to the Liverpool corporation by an anonymous well-wisher who subsequently transpired to be a shipping magnet. We were planning to commute in from the local nattily named Wavertree Technology Park train station but in the end, circumstances dictated we could not attend resulting in missing out of the dubious privilege of watching Sister Sledge, Odyssey, Wet Wet Wet and Adam Ant!  

Adam Ant. Image Credit thecurrent.org

I have previously attended gigs at library venues in Lancaster and Wigan and was hoping to tick Birkenhead off this list when we obtained tickets to see the French band Juniore for a chilled Sunday afternoon set, but it was subsequently cancelled and not rearranged due to issues with post-Brexit visa issues and Covid.

Another interesting sounding venue in that area is the Future Yard in Birkenhead. One of my favourite ever bands Sennen were undertaking a very rare tour and had added a date at that very venue. Unfortunately, I had a fixture clash and could not attend, and despite my exhortations to the band they didn’t add a Manchester date, so I have not yet added to my sole sighting of them at Manchester Night and Day in 2010.

Thus, I shall now move away from the hard luck stories onto actual gigs attended. One day in December 2019 I was working out of the Liverpool office and gravitating back down Liverpool Church Street to Lime Street station for my train home. I heard the unmistakable sound of a full band playing a street gig, the combo in question was Keywest.

Keywest band. Image Credit wordpress.com

Keywest are a four-piece folk band from Ireland and their route to success is an unusual one as they learnt and honed their craft by years of busking in the hot bed area of Grafton Street in Dublin. They had obviously decided to take a trip down memory lane by performing on a busy shopping street, I don’t whether that proceeded a gig in a more standard venue that evening.

On Matthew Street, you will find Liverpool Sgt Pepper’s Bar, like many in the area a Beatles themed establishment and the website informs that improbably and in fact impossibly they have music on ‘8 days a week’! In 2017 I caught a chap called John McDonna playing a set there.

In December 2021, I was over in Liverpool for an overnight work event and therefore naturally had to have a gander at the Ents 24 website to see if there were any musical events of note that coincided with my stay, thus discovering there was an interesting act on that very night at Liverpool EBGBS.

After work, we grabbed some tea in the Silk Road tapas and after a couple of drinks persuaded my colleague David Taylor to also attend the gig. David had previously pleasantly surprised me when he stated unexpectedly that he had not only heard of Mogwai but had actually seen them live which was good enough for me!

Heebies Jeebies (known locally as Heebies) has been a popular venue on Seel Street since it first incarnation as a jazz bar in the mid 90’s. In 2016 they opened the 250-year-old basement room as a live and club night venue and named it EBGBS.  Upon entering the establishment, I noted they had nailed the intended vibe as a dingy downstairs biker bar, in a good way! It reminded me of the Merchants pub near Lancaster train station.

EBGB’s dungeon setting! Image Credit architectural-emporium.co.uk

The venue has a capacity of 300 but there cannot have been more than fifty people in attendance that night, I can imagine when the place is full the view of the stage may be impaired due to the numerous pillars in place.

The support band was a post punk band from Oslo in Norway called Mayflower Madame, the main act was New Candys from Venice in Italy. Since their formation in 2008, their singer Fernando Nuti remains their ever-present member. In their early days they had support slots with the likes of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Crystal Stilts.

Their second album was recorded by John Willis, producer, and drummer of legendary psych rock band Loop, who coincidentally I am off to see today (21/05/23) on their comeback tour, 33.33 years since I last saw them at Manchester International 1 in January 1990. New Candys provided an enjoyable slab of gentle shoegaze before we headed back down the vibrant Seel Street, which looked worthy of further investigation at some future stage.