Tag: Manchester Deaf Institute

Manchester Venues 18 to 22

Following on from the Festival blog last week I am going to concentrate on some Dot to Dot festival venues on and around Oldham Street in the Northern Quarter that I visited at the event which took place on 28/05/16.  

COW is a two-floor vintage clothes shop on the same block of Piccadilly Records and is an archetypal shop for this area of town. From a very unusual vantage point of standing behind a clothes rack we witnessed a young Manchester acoustic artist called Miranda Amess who had a decent voice with a smidgeon of a KT Tunstall vibe about her.  It was also my 250th different venue.

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Cow clothes shop. Image Credit WordPress.com

The Black Dog Ballroom is a downstairs New York style bar situated underneath Affleck’s Palace on the corner of Tib and Church Street. I had only previously been in for a drink and a burger once before prior to another gig. The venue was behind a further door off the main room and had a little bar and stage within. We saw Love for Zero, an electro synth band from Manchester who were in the Editors mould.  

Traversing from the basement to the top floor of Affleck’s you find the Black Milk Dessert Café. The local band on stage were Bright Young People and they had a nice scuzzy Stooges crunch about them. Their debut single was produced by Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen.  

Their performance exemplified the uniqueness of the chosen venue as the American style diner on the third floor with windows overlooking Oldham Street was in great contrast to the sturdy guitar led sound on stage.

The unassuming orange signed Koffee Pot is located at the Swan Street end of Oldham Street. It is very near the Crown and Kettle pub which unfortunately ever appeared only on a festival roster for one day when I couldn’t attend as I was ensconced at Uncle George’s 60th hootenanny, and as a result my friends Jez Catlow and Moggy have beaten me to the punch there.

We saw a three-piece garage rock band called the Slovaks and they were good value.

The Koffee Pot. Image Credit northernnoise.co.uk

I recently read that the Koffee Pot was collaborating with the reborn Deaf Institute by providing the food for the ground floor restaurant space.    

Just off Oldham St lies the 57 Thomas Street Beer House. It is one of several pubs linked to the local Marble Brewery who also have their original flagship Marble Arch pub nearby. They had some devilishly strong ales on display in the ground floor bar and the venue was situated upstairs.

The band Psyblings were a terrific five-piece psych rock combo from Warrington who had met at Manchester University. Unfortunately, we only had time for a couple of tracks, but I made a mental note of their capability and as a result ensured we caught their full set at another event the following year.  

I caught another local band called Easter at the venue later that year.  

The bar has very recently been taken over by Fierce Beer, an award-winning craft beer brewery based in Aberdeen, enabling them to open their first bar North of the border.

Preston Venue 12 – Polytechnic Part 1

The University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) was founded in 1992 but derived from humbler beginnings. In 1828 the nattily titled Institution for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was established. Further iterations of Preston Polytechnic and Lancashire Polytechnic were in place prior to it becoming a fully-fledged university.

UCLAN has through a suite of unusual courses created a niche for itself and is now the 19th largest in the UK in in terms of numbers, many of them foreign students. In my lifetime the University has spread its tentacles far and wide across town in relation to outbuildings and student accommodation.

In the Preston/Lancashire Polytechnic era, a music venue was introduced. It was a decent venue with a capacity of perhaps about 600. Beyond the dancefloor were large wooden blocks for group seating in a similar style to the block layout at the rear of the Deaf Institute. Above that, there was a viewing balcony.

I attended one non-music event there when a friend who was employed by the Poly obtained complimentary tickets for a group of us for a hospitality comedy event. The main act on that night was a pre-famous Peter Kay.

My first gig was Teenage Fanclub on 14/01/92. This was the year after ‘Bandwagonesque’ was released and a couple of years before my fave album of theirs ‘Grand Prix’ saw the light of day.  There was a big group of us in attendance on a cold Tuesday night and after visiting the Lamb and Packet and the Variety we headed into the venue for a sold-out gig.

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Preston Poly looking somewhat dreary back in the day. Image Credit lep.co.uk

Dependant on which tome you perused at the time they had been touted as either the new Nirvana or the new Byrds. I would personally place them nearer the later categorisation with their West Coast sound and pleasing harmonies.

I watched the opening couple of tracks in the balcony before diving (not literally!) into the pit. The band did not seem fully engaged with them muttering after the first track ‘played a crap gig in Newcastle last night, hope we don’t do the same here’ which only served to dampen down expectations for the rest of the set!    

I have seen them several times since and enjoyed them but due to a couple of deliberate false starts and lukewarm set they were disappointing that first time.

In May 2000 I went to see Asian Dub Foundation who were a melting pot of crossover influences including rap, dub, ragga and rock. It was one of the most unenthusiastic crowds I have ever witnessed and despite the bands best efforts the gig failed to ignite.  

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Asian Dub Foundation. Image Credit Louder Than War.

In 1995, an upcoming band called Radiohead booked the venue. I think the tour was supporting the imminent release of their second album ‘The Bends’. They were supported by Marian.  

I didn’t know a lot of their stuff apart from the overplayed ‘Creep’ off their first album ‘Pablo Honey’. We watched the gig from the panoramic vantage of the balcony, and they were enjoyable, and Thom Yorke had a presence about him.

That said, I would not have predicted their stellar rise in the following couple of years and the fact that ‘The Bends’ and ‘OK Computer’ are periodically placed in pundits lists of Top 10 all-time albums!