Tag: Manchester Night and Day

Manchester Venue 74 Soup Kitchen – Part 1

The Soup Kitchen which has recently been rebranded simply as Soup resides deep in the Northern Quarter on Spear St, within stumbling distance of the Night and Day venue. During the Covid apocalypse an eminently sensible decision was made to pedestrianise the nearby Stevenson Square area to create a European style outdoor seating vibe and thankfully this ethos has been retained post-pandemic.

Manchester Soup Kitchen. Image Credit Pinterest.

The upstairs room is laid out in a canteen style with long wooden benches to create a communal atmosphere. It has decent but slightly overpriced tucker available and has a plethora of craft ales to imbibe. Downstairs resides the venue with a small bar to the right and stage to the left with a 150 capacity. When approaching the room limit, it can get very busy down in the slightly damp cellar setting.  The unisex toilets would be best quantified in the ‘basic’ category, but it all adds to the grungy allure of the place. They have a lot of upcoming bands and DJ’s who frequent their busy live roster.

I have attended Soup fourteen times in total and first heard of the venue when the much-hyped Milk Music from Washington DC played there on 17/05/12. They had only released a couple of early singles by this stage, and they had an engaging slacker vibe about them, despite the venue only being half full. There was little audience participation until they somewhat oddly woke from the slumber on the last song to create an impromptu mosh pit!

I must say since this gig the band completely dropped off my radar until I began researching this article and was surprised to find they are still in existence. I am just now listening to their debut album ‘Cruise Your Illusion’ which has shades of Neil Young, Dinosaur Jr and Meat Puppets therein which sounds like a tidy combination to me. They were supported on the night by an appearance from Eagulls who I cited in last week’s Beacons Festival review. They were my only two viewings of the Leeds based band, coincidentally within a couple of months of each other.

Milk Music. Image Credit VICE.

Many of my attendances have been part of multi event wristband events such as Dot to Dot or Off the Record festivals and one such appearance was a couple of years later to see Remember Remember. The Glasgow band was initially the brainchild of Graeme Rowland who released a 2008 album with participation from other collaborators. By the time I witnessed them in 2014 they had morphed into a seven-piece band and had just released their third album ‘Forgetting the Present’, before they subsequently split the following year.

They were on Rock Action roster run by Mogwai, with whom they had supported. They were also in the fully instrumental post-rock genre, but they were of a gentler variation than their label counterparts and I enjoyed their show.

A year later I saw Worriedaboutsatan from Bradford, their name deriving from a track by Belgium band Deus. They were formed by Gavin Millar around 2006, before being joined by Leeds College of Music pal Tom Ragsdale. They have a crossover post-rock/electronic template and have supported luminaries such as 65daysofstatic and Maybeshewill. They garnered considerable radio airplay, and their music has also somewhat bizarrely been featured on Coronation Street!  

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.