Tag: Half Man Half Biscuit

Lancaster Venues 20 to 22

This week, I am continuing the tale of my inaugural visit to the annual Lancaster Music Festival on a bruisingly cold day in October 2023. The next haunt on our list was Lancaster Cornerhouse located on the junction of New Street and Church Street; a stone’s throw away from the Sun Hotel. The Cornerhouse, formerly Paulo Gianni’s and Sphere Bar, went through a major transformation in 2018.

The driving force of the reformation was Gemma Rowlands from nearby Cockerham, who had previously worked at the site in Paulo Gianni’s days. She then converted it into a gin style palace with a restaurant with accompanying comprehensive menu, a plethora of craft beers and live music offerings from Thursday through to Sunday.  

Lancaster Cornerhouse. Image Credit lancastercornerhouse.co.uk

When we arrived, the place was extremely busy, and we navigated the queues to obtain an aperitif from the bar. We grabbed a seat before being politely moved on as we were inadvertently squatting in the restaurant area! On a small stage in the corner of the main room we encountered a local three-piece band called the Beets. They had ensured they would have maximum exposure across the day by volunteering to play a remarkable seven venues across the city in an overall time span of eleven hours!       

A five-minute walk away brought us to our next port of call which was the Lancaster Royal Kings Arms Hotel.  The place has considerable history in that the Grade II listed building was originally constructed in 1625 and revamped in 1879 after a habitual great fire (arsonists abounded everywhere in that era!). Many royals stayed there and in its early days it was owned by King Louis XIV.

The local archives contain a letter that was sent from Carlisle to the hotel on 11th September 1857 requesting that a room be booked there for a certain Mr Charles Dickens who would be accompanied by his friend Wilkie Collins. They also requested a comfortable dinner (tea in the North!) for two persons at half past 5.    

Lancaster Royal Kings Arms Hotel. Image Credit blog.conferences-uk.org.uk

They were in a midst of a walking tour of Cumberland at that stage which was chronicled the following month in Dickens ‘Household Words’ under the title of ‘The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices’. The hotel is also cited as the location that Dickens scribed ‘The Tale of the Bridal Chamber’ and there remains to this day a ‘Dickens Suite’.

We had been in splinter groups for a couple of hours, but we all reconvened here. There was an excellent band on stage called Native Cult who were also playing several shows on the day. The duo hailed from Barrow and had a pot pourri of influences in their sound. Following there we grabbed some much needed tea and a sit down at the Golden Dragon Chinese restaurant next door.   

Our next destination was Lancaster Atticus on King Street which initially came into being in 1974 as a bookshop coffee bar above Probe Records in Liverpool. Probe Records is an interesting tale with its initial commencement as an independent underground/hippy establishment and it then morphed into a punk site when it moved to a new location, as a result of their new address being in close proximity to the legendary Eric’s venue.

Many future musicians were employed there including Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Paul Rutherford, Pete Wylie from the Mighty Wah! and Pete Burns from Dead or Alive. The final named was renowned as faithfully adopting the house ethos of issuing ‘constructive criticism’ when parlaying with customers and thus influencing their selections! Julian Cope references the shop in his ‘Head On’ autobiography and the band meetings that took place there with Ian McCulloch when they were in The Crucial Three together.

They set up a record label Probe Plus whose most famous signing was undoubtedly Birkenhead’s Half Man Half Biscuit, a band who refreshingly took a break from the music business between 1987 and 1990 as they didn’t want to become ‘too successful’! They also famously turned down a slot on The Tube Channel 4 TV show as it clashed with a Friday night Tranmere Rovers match.

Half Man Half Biscuit. Image Credit pinterest.co.uk

The shop struggled for a spell through the initial downloading era, but the vinyl renaissance has boosted their turnover, and the record store remains to this day in its current location in the Bluecoat Arts Centre.

The Atticus name was chosen as it has literary connotations but is also useful alphabetically, from a commercial viewpoint, on any book shop listings. They opened a second shop in Lancaster in the 1990’s which subsequently closed in 2001.

The original owner Tom Flemons then returned to the area in 2014 to reopen the store as a not for profit enterprise supporting the Tasikoki Animal Rescue Centre in Indonesia where he had previously volunteered. At this stage it also expanded to incorporate a coffee bar. When we wandered past there was a band called Bay Big playing who are a large host of musicians who play a repertoire of Swing, Jazz and Latin.    

Manchester Venues 140 to 141

If you head out the back exit of Piccadilly station you drop initially to the metro level and then the escalator gravitates down again to Fairfield Street at ground level and the accompanying taxi rank. Just beyond the cabs is a lift that takes you up to Platform 12 and then onto the next level and into the waiting area outside Platform 13 and 14. For more unscrupulous punters it could be used as a ticket barrier avoidance route!

Piccadilly Station with the lift in the right of picture. Image Credit showmethejourney.com

There are a plethora of breweries near the station ensconced in back streets and railway sidings. If you walk down Baring Street, you reach the hidden oasis of Mayfield Park, the 6.5 acre environmental green space encompassing the River Medlock which is the city’s first green space for over 100 years. To illustrate the industrial heritage of the area, thirteen Victorian wells were discovered in the construction and three were identified as still functional thus were then utilised to provide 20 cubic metres of water each to maintain the vegetation.  

Heading back from the park you would find yourself at Mayfield Depot which contains Escape to Freight Island with all their food and drink stalls and is also the location for conferences and fashion shows alongside the immensely popular Warehouse Project dance events. When waiting for later trains home on the overhead vantage point of Platform 14 I have regularly borne witness to the most extraordinary queues of customers awaiting access.  

Mayfield Park. Image Credit placenorthwest.co.uk

There was previously a venue alongside the Depot called the Fairfield Social Club on the wonderfully named Temperance Street where I once had tickets for a gig but unfortunately, they upgraded the show to another venue, and I never managed to attend there prior to its subsequent closure. It does now appear they have reopened Fairfield but in a different location over in Ancoats, near the Blackjack brewery, and they hold regular comedy nights there.   

Back on Fairfield St, you find one of Manchester’s most distinctive institutions, namely Manchester Star and Garter, the name of the establishment derives from the insignia pertaining to the Order of the Garter. It was originally built in 1803 outside the train station which had several monikers, including London Road prior to the current Piccadilly name. The build of the rail link to Oxford Road station in 1849 necessitated a brick by brick 100-yard movement of the venue, with its subsequent reopening in 1877.

Its initial incarnation was as a hotel containing an in house brewery. In 1986, the closure of the adjacent Mayfield station caused a chain reaction of the hotel also ceasing trading, and the area morphed into a brief ‘Dirty Old Town’ period. The building gained Grade II listed status in 1988 and reopened in 1991 as a live music site with its current pub and upstairs club lay out and has thrived despite its unusual location. It currently has a large Ian Curtis mural on one of its side walls.

It was threatened with closure again in the last couple of decades with the potential Northern hub expansion of the railway station. Their future however was solidified in 2020 with a ten year lease being purchased under the auspices of Mayfield Partnership.

It has been used as a location for many TV series including Band of Gold, Cracker, Prime Suspect and most extensively the recent Russell T Davies scripted landmark drama ‘It’s A Sin’. The venue is renowned for indie nights, Smile running for 20 years from 1993 to 2013 and the famous Smiths night which has been running for an even longer period than that.

The Star and Garter. Image Credit NME

It has hosted many diverse groups including Anti-Nazi league meetings, the 30-strong WBA supporters club of Manchester, Vampire Society and a comic night called Anti-Hoot which included the semi-legendary Bolton poet Hovis Presley!  It has mainly a rock/metal roster and was once coined as the ‘Temple of Doom’. Bands that have played there including Half Man Half Biscuit, Discharge, Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes, Low and remarkably Status Quo in 1999.

For many years I intended to visit but without success, until finally a gig was located, and a sabbatical trip was arranged in March 2015. It does look a little like a haunted house from the outside, evoking comparisons to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer ‘Fear Itself’ episode, but that was instantly dispelled by the warm welcome in the downstairs bar!  We then sallied up to the 200 capacity venue room and the first act on stage was You Want Fox, a noisy female two-piece from Nottingham.

The headline act was the East Town Pirates who travelled in from Ipswich to air their stompy sea shanties and have been referenced as sounding like ‘Motorhead meets the Pogues’. I returned once more in 2022 to see a band called the Reverbs.

In December 2021, local legend Tim Burgess put on a record fair themed event which had a novel set taking place on a Sunday lunchtime at the Manchester Piccadilly Station Mezzanine. The first challenge was actually finding this location and it transpired to be in the aforementioned metro entry level. By the time we found the spot, we only caught the last three tracks of an acoustic set from Starsailor’s James Walsh, who had an appropriate fine busker’s voice which matched the setting!