Tag: Preston Adelphi

Preston Venue 42 – The Venue

Situated near to the Bus Station on Lords Walk there is a Preston pub with a long history and many owners. In the 1960’s and 1970’s it was named Moonraker’s and was a firmly established music venue, details on the musical content in this era are a tad sketchy but local legends Dennis Delight and various punk bands are referenced as having played there.

For the 1980’s kids out there you may recognise it when its moniker was the Amsterdam Bar before then changing its name to the Blue Moon. As you entered the pub from the entrance there was a reasonable size tap room and a door to the right transported you into the large main room. It was the first pub Gill and I ever had a drink in on our first date back in January 1988.  

The pub in its current Blitz phase. Image Credit Ents24.

I was a decent pool player in my youth briefly playing for the Joplins pub team, and for many years in the Blue Moon tap room there were a couple of pool tables and I recall one Friday night in there going a personal best ‘winner stay on’ ten games undefeated.  

The name changed again to the Town End bar creating an affinity and linkage to the local Preston North End football team. It then became Pachas which was designed as a ‘fun pub’ under the tutelage of Colin Durnan, who previously ran the infamous Hollywood Bar on Deepdale Road.

In 2004, John Bates, the owner of 12 Bar on Church St took over and reinstated it as a live music hub  again and it then passed over by the owner of the Mill who renamed it the Venue. It then morphed into a club called Beats of Rage. At that current point in time there was a huge game changing Tithebarn development planned across that area of Preston, threatening impending closure so it was cleverly renamed Coda, representing the final bars of a song and they became a successful dance club with a renowned club title Mixmag. Somewhat unsurprisingly the Tithebarn scheme never reached fruition.

A complete change in direction ensued in 2010 when the renowned Frog and Bucket comedy club became ensconced there and the likes of John Bishop and Terry Christian graced the stage. Sarah Millican used to utilise the club to test run her brand-new material.

It then finally became its latest incarnation by reverting back its musical roots under the name of Blitz. Now, somewhat confusingly I did cover in an earlier blog my attendance at the other venue in Preston which for a short period was also called Blitz which in 2013 was in the old Gatsby nightclub building on Great Shaw Street.  

This particular blog though is concerned with the Lords Walk Blitz site where they have been closely linked to Action Records and have had pre tour or promo performances from the likes of Fontaines DC and Snow Patrol.

My one attendance there was on 14/07/06 when it was called Preston The Venue. It was a Battle of the Bands event and the first act we witnessed was Jelly’s Last Jam, who formed in 2005 from the ashes of a previous band called Frencheryk. The bassist Martin Clarke was co-managing the Mitre Tavern pub down on North Road, and two of the band members were also residing there so many of their early rehearsals took place in that boozer. The pub itself has long since closed and is now a business called Vets and Pets.  

The Mitre Tavern. Image Credit Lancashire Evening Post.

The other band we saw were called Green Room who are a three-piece from Preston who also formed in 2005. Their first ever gig was held at the Adelphi venue in Preston, and they were a female fronted act who sat in the trip-hop genre, not dissimilar to Portishead and Massive Attack.       

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.