Tag: Fontaines DC

Preston Venue 42 – The Venue

Situated near to the Bus Station on Lords Walk there is a Preston pub with a long history and many owners. In the 1960’s and 1970’s it was named Moonraker’s and was a firmly established music venue, details on the musical content in this era are a tad sketchy but local legends Dennis Delight and various punk bands are referenced as having played there.

For the 1980’s kids out there you may recognise it when its moniker was the Amsterdam Bar before then changing its name to the Blue Moon. As you entered the pub from the entrance there was a reasonable size tap room and a door to the right transported you into the large main room. It was the first pub Gill and I ever had a drink in on our first date back in January 1988.  

The pub in its current Blitz phase. Image Credit Ents24.

I was a decent pool player in my youth briefly playing for the Joplins pub team, and for many years in the Blue Moon tap room there were a couple of pool tables and I recall one Friday night in there going a personal best ‘winner stay on’ ten games undefeated.  

The name changed again to the Town End bar creating an affinity and linkage to the local Preston North End football team. It then became Pachas which was designed as a ‘fun pub’ under the tutelage of Colin Durnan, who previously ran the infamous Hollywood Bar on Deepdale Road.

In 2004, John Bates, the owner of 12 Bar on Church St took over and reinstated it as a live music hub  again and it then passed over by the owner of the Mill who renamed it the Venue. It then morphed into a club called Beats of Rage. At that current point in time there was a huge game changing Tithebarn development planned across that area of Preston, threatening impending closure so it was cleverly renamed Coda, representing the final bars of a song and they became a successful dance club with a renowned club title Mixmag. Somewhat unsurprisingly the Tithebarn scheme never reached fruition.

A complete change in direction ensued in 2010 when the renowned Frog and Bucket comedy club became ensconced there and the likes of John Bishop and Terry Christian graced the stage. Sarah Millican used to utilise the club to test run her brand-new material.

It then finally became its latest incarnation by reverting back its musical roots under the name of Blitz. Now, somewhat confusingly I did cover in an earlier blog my attendance at the other venue in Preston which for a short period was also called Blitz which in 2013 was in the old Gatsby nightclub building on Great Shaw Street.  

This particular blog though is concerned with the Lords Walk Blitz site where they have been closely linked to Action Records and have had pre tour or promo performances from the likes of Fontaines DC and Snow Patrol.

My one attendance there was on 14/07/06 when it was called Preston The Venue. It was a Battle of the Bands event and the first act we witnessed was Jelly’s Last Jam, who formed in 2005 from the ashes of a previous band called Frencheryk. The bassist Martin Clarke was co-managing the Mitre Tavern pub down on North Road, and two of the band members were also residing there so many of their early rehearsals took place in that boozer. The pub itself has long since closed and is now a business called Vets and Pets.  

The Mitre Tavern. Image Credit Lancashire Evening Post.

The other band we saw were called Green Room who are a three-piece from Preston who also formed in 2005. Their first ever gig was held at the Adelphi venue in Preston, and they were a female fronted act who sat in the trip-hop genre, not dissimilar to Portishead and Massive Attack.       

Manchester Venues 63 and 64

Located deep in the Northern Quarter there used to reside the Cord Bar. It was situated on Dorsey Street off Tib Street, almost directly behind the Gullivers public house. Apparently at the start of the millennium, it was one of the ‘go to’ places in NQ as it was cited as a favoured DJ venue and like many in this area of town was a visiting spot for an embryonic Elbow.

It suffered declining numbers over the years and a reboot attempt under the name of NYQ in 2018 was unsuccessful, however I visited its latest incarnation a couple of weeks ago prior to watching the Courettes at Night and Day. It is now called Alvarium with a restaurant called Lazy Tony’s Lasagneria where we had a table by the old stage!   

I visited there three times under the auspices of the Dot to Dot and Carefully Planned multi venue festivals and quite liked the establishment as it always reminded of an archetypal New York diner style bar you would see on the American cop shows. The bands played in the downstairs bar, and this could be accessed via a choice of stairs at the front or rear of the venue.

Cord Bar. Image Credit tripadvisor.co.uk

My first attendance on 19/10/14 was accessed from the latter steps and the acts played in an alcove where rather quaintly and somewhat niffily the space for the small number of punters was located outside the lavatories! The artist was a young local acoustic artist called John Ainsworth who released his debut album the following year.

When I landed there a year later, I discovered the stage was in the same place but was now thankfully facing the opposite way into a larger less pungent room. We saw Howie Reeve, who is a self-titled acoustic bass troubadour from the South of Glasgow. In May 2016, on my final visit I witnessed another local musician called Sam Frost. 

Nearby in the famous Afflecks Palace block there is a fine basement bar and live music venue. The club has had a couple of entrances, either from Oldham Street or Tib Street. It has also had a few name changes over the years, originally a singular 500 capacity music venue called Moho, then a hybrid site called Manchester Dive NQ. It is now called Dive Bar and Grill and is more focussed on being a food/sports bar and it appears that live music is now longer on the roster, and it is a late-night DJ location only.   

My first visit in April 2012 was in the Moho moniker era and we accessed the gig from the Tib Street entrance, and I thought the place had a decent layout.

Manchester Dive NQ. Image Credit venuescanner.com

Now, from the starting point of being a humongous Mogwai fan I have always searched out other like-minded bands positioned in the post-rock genre. However, a few of these have turned out to be in the Mogwai lite category, God is an Astronaut and I so I Watch from Afar spring to mind.

An exception to this was the band that night with the vaguely threatening but musically promising name of This Will Destroy You from Texas. They were an excellent live band, and it looks like the band are still operational and under their revised name of TWDY they are scheduled to play the ArcTangent festival later in 2022. It was also jointly my 150th different venue and my 150th gig in Manchester.  

After the change to Dive NQ where they moved the stage to the front of the venue, I attended four other times between 2016 and 2019. The first was to see a local blues-rock band called Turrentine Jones. The second was to see a young Sheffield band called Exhort, who were perhaps unsurprisingly heavily influenced by Arctic Monkeys. This was prior to attending a Julia Jacklin gig.  

On the penultimate visit whilst at the Dot-to-Dot festival we saw local act China Lane led by Reuben Hester who apparently after the band disbanded appeared on the reality TV programme Little Mix the Search. This was just before walking across the road to Night and Day to catch a young astounding Fontaines DC for the first time. My final attendance there was to see Saytr Play.