Now, I have endeavoured where possible to review all the venues in a chronological order, but I must say I had to check back in the Jimmy archives to ascertain which was my 50th venue in Manchester. It transpires that it is Joshua Brooks which is a pub on Princess St opposite the Garratt pub and on the adjacent corner to the FAC251 venue, located in the old Factory Records, a place I have not yet managed to visit.
When I checked back at the nomenclature for the venue, I unearthed that Joshua Brookes (JB) was an Anglican chaplain born in Cheadle Hulme in 1754 and seemed an unremarkable chap apart from the fact that his father was nicknamed Pontius Pilate by the virtue of his violent temper.
JB is portrayed in a Mrs Linnaeus Banks novel The Manchester Man that follows the life of a Manchester resident, Jabez Clegg who also had a public house on Oxford Road named after him. There is also a quotation from that novel that forms the epitaph on the tombstone of Factory Records founder Tony Wilson.
The pub opened in 1993 and has a ground floor craft ale bar with a small music space downstairs which lays claim to being the Chemical Brothers first ever residency when they were at the University in the city.
My first visit was on 24/05/13 as the night’s last venue at the Dot-to-Dot festival prior to catching the late train at Piccadilly Station. The band in question was Story Books but to be fair, they weren’t particularly memorable though I did remember them saying they had undertaken a hellish journey traffic wise from somewhere down South and just arrived in time for their 11.30 pm slot.
My second and final musical encounter was prior to an Arab Strap gig at the Ritz when we heard a local synth band called DENOVA playing, and we managed to catch a portion of their performance.
My personal choice of site for buying gigs tickets is ENTS24 as I have always found them very reliable and infinitely less corporate than Ticketmaster. Alongside their ticket distribution they regularly list unusual venues that you tend not to find on other sites. Thus, every time I attend a gig, I always have a gander to see if there is a sister event the same evening.
So, on 30/10/11 prior to a F%**$d Up gig at Sound Control we headed to an innocuous looking unit near the Oxford Road end of Charles St, opposite the new Circle Square development. It looked like a generic office space but when you headed down the stairs to the Base Bar you entered an Aladdin’s cave of an all-day punk event. It seemed to be a very short-lived venue as I never saw any other events listed there, but it was a privilege to attend something that resembled a hidden guerrilla gig.
Annoyingly the last band had just finished their set, so we camped at the bar and the next band up were a local four-piece called Dangerous Aces who were a very high-octane punk band, and they were fabulous fun. The other band we witnessed was a long-standing group from Macclesfield called Kirkz. We bade our farewell but what an interesting noisy interlude it had provided!
