Tag: Edwin

Liverpool Venues 21 to 24

Liverpool Tess Riley’s is a hostelry that is situated on Great Charlotte Street. The history behind the naming of this boozer runs back to prior to the Second World War, so if you are sitting comfortably, I shall begin…

Back in the 1930’s an entrepreneurial lady called Tess Makin developed her initial business acumen when working on her mother’s market second hand clothes stall. On the occasional non-market days, she took it upon herself to travel over to the Wirral to pick up the stock. She became a dab hand at bartering with the affluent traders to obtain the best price before returning to the market and selling on the goods for a tidy profit. In 1947, she marries a chap called Joe Riley and they had four children together. Bear with me, I will get there eventually!

Tess Riley. Image Credit pubsgalore.co.uk

In 1970, when her kids had grown up, she retrained in the pub industry and undertook her apprenticeship at the Pig and Whistle and the Old Mona. She then took over the ropes as The Jester for five years before she bought the freehold of The Beehive in the Mount Pleasant area of the city in 1978.

Her novel approach of installed a free jukebox that only played songs from the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s captured the zeitgeist of the era and the once quite pub was transformed into one of the busiest places in Liverpool. They also staged live music at quiet periods and on Sundays where Tess herself would step up alongside the resident organist to contribute a couple of ditties. She was reportedly very glamorous, and this provided the launching pad for her retirement on board cruise ships.

Her eldest child Joan also moved in the family trade and ran a couple of successful pubs using the same tried and tested template. In 1996 they purchased a unit in the former Blackler’s building and then decided to name the pub in honour of her mother. It remains a lively place to this day thankfully staying away from karaoke, but they do have live music and on my one visit I saw a local lass called Annie perform there.

Directly above Tess Rileys is the Liverpool Central Sports Bar, which is a very popular wall to wall sports viewing establishment, but they also stage live music, and I once saw a local fella called Edwin play there.     

Celtic Corner. Image tripadvisor.co.uk

Nearby to there on the intersection point of Lime Street and Ranelagh Street you would find the Liverpool Celtic Corner. As I am sure you can glean from its moniker, it is another Irish based hostelry. It initially opened in 2017 taking over from the old retail site of the Army and Navy stores. It is a very large establishment with an enormous room downstairs and a function room for hire situated in the upstairs area.

There is an abundance of seating at the front for the sunshine days. It also had a mechanical rodeo bull that kicked into life every Saturday from 3pm but I believe that has been retired and sent to pasture a couple of years ago. There is a sizeable standalone stage, and I saw a decent local singer Lochlan undertaking a gig on that very stage.

Nearer to the main train station on Lime Street is located the Liverpool McHales Irish American Bar. The establishment is a single room bar and when I visited, I saw a singer called Michael perform there. Its history runs back to 1830 and at that point in time it was positioned on the other side of the street. It was initially closely linked to the nearby Empire Theatre and then became a very popular haven for US naval men during the First World War and was known as the American Bar or more colloquially as the ‘Yankee Bar’.

One urban legend is that there was a local prostitute called Maggie May (or Maggie Mae) who used to frequent the bar, and she later featured in a skiffle folk song telling the tale of her robbing a ‘homeward bounder’. The latter term relating to a sailor coming home from a round trip. The song is potentially crafted from a similar 1856 American slave song called ‘Darling Nellie Gray’.

Maggie May songs EP with a picture of the old thriving Liverpool Docks. Image Credit ebay.co.uk

The 1950’s version referenced featured a direct reference to Liverpool in the lines ‘Oh, dirty Maggie Mae, they have taken her away, and she’ll never walk down Lime Street anymore’. The composer Lionel Bart used the tune and back story to devise a musical called Maggie May set in Liverpool Docks, which ran in a London theatre for two years.

The most well-known recorded version was by the Vipers Skiffle Group in 1957, but the BBC decided to ban it because of the lyrics ‘sexual content’. There were also covers by the Searchers, the Spinners and a 40 second edition by the Beatles which serves to curtail Side 1 of their final album ‘Let it Be’. Rod Stewart also stated this song was an inspiration for his No 1 hit of the same name.  

Manchester Venues 136 to 137

As you traverse down Oldham Street in the Northern Quarter from Piccadilly Gardens you pass the iconic Night and Day and Piccadilly Records and just after the junction with Hilton Street you reach Manchester Freemount. It commenced its tenure as a traditional Tetley Brewery public house before morphing into the Northern and then into its current moniker. There are two entrances with one on Tib Street alongside the Oldham Street access.

Manchester Freemount. Image Credit tripadvisor.com

It is an old-fashioned homely establishment with impressive glazed emerald green filed frontage with exterior seating for those rare sunny evenings. It has regular live music and often to quite a late hour as they remain open until 2am every night. Those timelines are handy for catching some cheeky bonus gigs before pottering off for the late train. I first encountered some live tuneage there in October 2018 prior to an Orielles gig at the aforementioned Night and Day when I saw a local artist called Adie playing. My second most recent attendance was earlier this year with my pal Riggers after a gig at the Band on the Wall venue and we witnessed an artist called Monty.

The pub is owned by the Urban Village Bars company who also have Another Heart to Feed bar/restaurant on their roster. They now have a recently added third string to their bow with the Wayfarer pub on Swan Street which has the same frontage as the Freemount. They also apparently have live bands there so I shall have to put it on my list of places to visit.

If you then head up Newton Street towards Piccadilly Station, you arrive at Manchester Hold Fast. located down some steps in the basement of Hatters Hostel. The hostel is named to commemorate the Joseph Wood & Sons Hat Factory that resided in the Victorian building where it is located. The factory was built in 1907 and the three-storey glazed ‘arcades’ were designed with the concept of adding additional light into the building.

Manchester Hold Fast. Image Credit themanc.com

The hostel retains some of the original features of the porcelain sinks and a spooky old lift (probably like the one featured in the ‘The Long Good Friday’ movie). They have received some high level customer service scores, possibly because of the fact they have a games room including a pool table and free tea and toast all day, I mean what is not to like about that!   

The bar also has its own small cinema space, designed for lazy ‘hangover Sundays’, where you can watch old black and white movies whilst nursing your self-imposed headache. There is also a further vintage games room with old Sego video games which included Sonic the Hedgehog and early versions of Football Manager.

Being of a certain age myself I recall the astonishingly basic Pong games in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s where the Tennis and Football used to blip and blop across the screen and were virtually identical! I also remember playing the early Grand Prix driving machines, there used to be one in the New Britannia pub on Heatley Street in Preston, and also Track and Field. My all time personal favourite though was Galaxians, which you would sometimes see as a tabletop version.

Hi-tech Pong video game. Image Credit Timetoast.

Hold Fast is an intriguing nautical themed bar, apparently inspired by Jules Verne’s novels, specifically ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea’, and is a dimly lit space with numerous ships lanterns and candles dotted about. They have a suite of craft beers available to imbibe. They also have open mic nights and live music events and one such evening in 2018 Gill and I saw a local chap called Edwin play there. The venue closed in 2019 and was touted to reopen in November 2023, but it is unclear on their website whether that actually happened.