Tag: Manchester Roadhouse

Manchester Venue 82 – The Castle Hotel

The Manchester Castle Hotel located at the top end of Oldham Street was built in the late 18th century and began trading as a public house in 1816 and it is estimated the grand olde world interior complete with Victorian tiles and mosaic floor dates as far back as 1897. It has had many previous monikers including The Crown and Sceptre, The Crown and Anchor and The Clock Face.

Manchester Castle Hotel. Image Credit Flickr.

There has always been a musical ethos within the pub incorporating the involvement of John McBeith who went on to launch the Roadhouse venue, fondly remembered by me as being the first venue I ever saw Mogwai. The Castle was also the site of a famous John Peel interview with Ian Curtis in 1979 and Fall’s Mark E Smith also chose the pub as a meeting point for some of his abrasive monologue interviews.

The pub fell on tough times and closed in 2008, before subsequently being refurbished and reopened with a linkage to its sister pub Gulliver’s across the road and has gone from strength to strength since that date.

Despite being a fairly small hostelry, they have incorporated an eighty-capacity venue off the corridor to the rear of the pub. Facing the small door entrance is the mixing desk and the stage is to the right, and I must say it is one of the most cramped areas I have encountered when a gig is sold out!

I have attended eleven gigs in total with only the first one being where I have paid a singular ticket to see the band, the others being part of other multi wrist band events such as Carefully Planned and Dot to Dot Festivals.

Thus, on 23/10/11 I saw Veronica Falls who were a four-piece formed in London in 2009. They formed from previous bands The Royal We and Sexy Kids and are still active though sadly their drummer Patrick Doyle died in 2018. They first came to my attention via their excellent debut single ‘Love in a Graveyard’ which was a combination of C86 meets the Raveonettes, and they were good fun in a live setting.   

Veronica Falls. Image Credit Clash

Three years later, Space Blood were in town, a two piece slightly jokey instrumental combo from Chicago and I would place them in the math rock vein, and they have a couple of albums on the books. The following year I witnessed bands called Face, Georgio Tuna  and The Stay Aways, an all-female four piece based in Brighton and London. 

In 2017 I saw a young rapper called Tobi Sunmola from Nigeria, who moved from the country of his birth at the age of 17 and is now living in Manchester. The following year I saw Grand Prix and Thyla, the latter being a four-piece dream pop band who all met while attending university in Brighton. When one of their original guitarists departed in 2021, they decided to call it quits and their final ever gig was at the Hope and Ruin in Brighton on 25/05/22.

In May 2019 I saw another four-piece band called SUN SILVA who initially got together whilst at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Six months later I witnessed Winnie and the Rockettes, a funk and soul band who have supported Chaka Khan and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and have also headlined the famous Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club. My latest and only post-Covid visit thus far was in April 22 to see a Manchester band called Another Country $$$$.

London Eighth and Ninth Trip

As you may have gleaned from my previous blogs, my favourite ever live band is Mogwai. I was fortunate to catch them at a very early stage in their career though I did miss them play at Preston Adelphi in 1997 as I had only just become aware of them. Around that time, I heard Ithica 27/9 off their debut album Ten Rapid and I knew I was smitten for life as I had been searching for that band who would not baulk at the edge of the sonic cliff but were deliriously happy to spring off into the noisy abyss!

My first viewing was at Manchester Roadhouse in 1998 and bar a promo event at Sankeys Soup the following year that I didn’t hear about I have seen every one of their subsequent Manchester dates, which sits currently on 11 in the fair city alone with two more scheduled this year. This will bring my overall attendances up to 36.   

Mogwai live on stage. Image Credit BBC.

They have had a very gradual rise in profile, which in some ways I have been eternally glad about as it has resulted in them never or very rarely progressing to play soulless arenas. Their soundtracks for Zidane and the Returned TV series in the 2010’s eventually led through to their remarkable achievement of a No 1 album in 2021.  

Prior to such infamy, the 15th time I saw them in September 2006 was their biggest gig thus far as they were playing the iconic London Royal Albert Hall. Thus, on that Friday I left work at lunchtime and walked over to Preston train station. En route I bought a student rag mag from a chap who I struck up conversation with when he commented on my band T-shirt.

On arrival in the smoke, we headed over to Holborn and had a leisurely afternoon in a boozer watching the Ryder Cup, we then caught the tube to High Street Kensington tube station. In a pub near the station, we saw the Mogwai boys themselves but left them to their own devices.

PNE were live on TV that night and I did a quick scouting mission to a nearby pub where I identified they weren’t showing the footy, but I did see comedian Helen Lederer enjoying a teatime drink. We subsequently walked down Kensington Road alongside Hyde Park to the venue.  I have always viewed the highly distinctive Royal Albert Hall as the musical Wembley, so I was very excited to attend.

The initial germination of the idea to build the hall was devised at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and it was officially opened in 1871. It is held in trust by the nation and managed by a registered charity which receives no government funding. It has staged the proms since 1941 and there are events held there all year round and it has a capacity of 5272.

Royal Albert Hall. Image Credit Classic FM.

I respected and thoroughly enjoyed the old-fashioned values of tannoy announcements providing a countdown to the performance. We were sat to the right of the stage on the front row of the balcony which provided an excellent vantage point, though it was a tad alarming nipping to the loo mid performance in the dark as it was only a low barrier preventing a significant fall.

It was self-evident that this was a huge event for the band as they had their families in attendance and at two hours remains the longest ever show I have seen them play. They finished their main set with ‘2 Rights Make 1 Wrong’ and ‘Glasgow Mega Snake’ and then on their second encore played their 20-minute opus ‘My Father, My King’. Subsequently they didn’t play this outro track for many years, but they have rebooted it on recent tours.

Three years later, Gill and I were in the same Kensington area and I became aware of a mini festival taking place. So, in the grounds of the nearby London Imperial College we sat in the sunshine and witnessed a set by the Fabulous Boogie Boys.  They were a seven-piece band led by Sarah Warren and the other six members donned in red zoot suits, they played an entertaining set of lively covers of relatively obscure tracks from the 1940s/1950’s.