Tag: Manchester Night and Day

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.  

2022 Gigs – Part 2

I am continuing the tale this week of the 2022 gigs I attended at venues already covered in previous blogs.

Every year, there will always be gigs that I go to in one of the Academy sites and I am rapidly closing in on 100 gigs in total across their four venues, all since I attended my first ever, namely Wedding Present at Academy 2 in February 1988. Thirty-four years later In February 2022 I attended Manchester Academy 2 again to see Dry Cleaning with Graham Jones in tow.

They are a post-punk band with a distinctive lead vocal from Florence Shaw interspersed with spoken word lyrics and they later in the year released their second album ‘Stumpwork’ containing the catchy single ‘Gary Ashby’. That night I also finally managed to make a visit to the Old Abbey Taphouse, a community pub located in Hulme near to Manchester science park where they undertake sporadic gigs and I hope to return at some point to attend an event.    

Old Abbey Taphouse. Image Credit Manchester Evening News.

A month later I returned to Academy 2 to see Warmduscher, a post punk band from London for whom Mark Reilly from 6 Music is a keen advocate. I personally didn’t warm to their sound, but their twitchy energetic lead singer Craig Louis Higgins Jr (Clams Baker) was an interesting presence. It was also a landmark gig numerically as it transpired to be my 500th gig in Manchester.  My final visit there was in June to see Dave Wakeling’s Beat, one of the two splinter groups out there touring who emanated from the original Beat.

In September I headed to Manchester Academy 1 to finally witness Godspeed You! Black Emperor who formed in Montreal, Canada in 1994. They are a Canadian instrumental post-rock combo who provide sweeping soaring soundscapes and apart from the slightly dizzying visual screens behind them they were a terrific live proposition.

I was in tow with Uncle George and John Dewhurst, the latter previously saw Godspeed in Planet K in 2000 on the same night that George and I saw Trail of the Dead at the Roadhouse a couple of streets away, that was one noisy night in Manchester!

Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Image Credit Chicago Tribune.

On my birthday weekend in June, Gill and I went for a meal at a local restaurant on the Thursday before the following night heading to Manchester Ritz to watch Lovely Eggs. It was their biggest ever gig and they were as vibrant as ever. Holly was in a particularly combative mood, exemplified by her justifiably and scathingly condemning the security staff when they aborted her plans to undertake the final of a stage diving contest. Her wrath was only increased by the fact that prior approval had been sought and obtained but then ignored. They were supported by Thick Richard on the night.  

On the Saturday we stayed over in Preston after attending a family barbecue before travelling back over to Manchester on the Sunday prior to another gig at Manchester Apollo. We were off to see Yeah Yeah Yeahs but at one point in the early evening Gill bandied about the phrase that our attendance looked more like a ‘No No No’, however our gig stamina kicked in and we shuffled off to the venue.  

I had never previously seen them and was anticipating a good one and my preconceptions were met fully as they were superb and lead singer Karen O had a hypnotic presence on stage, English Teacher were the support band.  

I attended there again in November to see Sigur Ros and visited the Aspley Cottage pub next door for the first time in 14 years and the hostelry was refreshingly unchanged. I met up with Barry Jury and a couple of his pals and Sigur provided an epic 2-hour set.   

The final venue to reference is the ever-reliable Manchester Night and Day. In June we attended to see The Courettes with our friends Jo and Paul. The band are jointly from Denmark and Brazil and perhaps best fit under the Spector Wall of Sound genre. They were good fun and had a very keen tendency to keep shouting out the phrase ‘Come on Manchester’! They also bravely asked the audience to crouch on the knees for a sustained period during one song, which was a challenge for the majority of the audience, including me!   

My final appearance to Night and Day was somewhat accidental in that I was scheduled to attend the White Hotel in Salford for the first time, but the gig was cancelled. Not wanting to totally kibosh the evening I found an alternate gig involving an artist I would not normally pay to watch but I was so glad we did.

The night started with meeting Uncle George in Piccadilly Central bar (previously Monroes) near Piccadilly train station and some tea in Ning on Oldham Street. When we arrived at the venue, it was all seated at the front and we managed to grab a pew at the side of the stage.

The support was Peter Bruntwell and the main act was a sprightly 74 year old called Bill Kirchen who has been quantified as the ‘Titan of the Telecaster’ for his terrific guitar work and has collaborated over the years with Nick Lowe, Gene Vincent, Link Wray and Elvis Costello. With the latter he penned a remarkable tune called ‘There is a Man at the Bottom of the Well’ with Elvis’s laconic delivery and the line ‘is he looking down from heaven or staring up at hell’ which he played on the night.

Bill Kirchen on stage. Image Credit gigharbourmarina.com

His outro was remarkable as he played a medley of around thirty high quality, seamless short segments of artists including Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Nirvana and AC/DC. It resembled the best ‘Stars on 45’ you could ever wish to hear and something I have never seen in 38 years of watching gigs!