Tag: Ride

Manchester Venues 149 to 150 – New Century Hall

Of the four main city centre train stations, Victoria would probably be my least attended as it has always been slightly on the wrong side of the tracks for me! Now if you depart the station down the approach heading alongside the tram tracks towards Shudehill Interchange but deviate marginally to the left down Hanover Street, you reach the Sadler’s Cat public house.

Sadler’s Cat pub. Image Credit secretmanchester.com

The Sadler’s was originally known as the Pilcrow which was purpose built as part of a regeneration programme commitment by the Co-operative Society, following the demolition of the Crown and Cushion pub to make way for a new public road. The current name reflects the commemoration of the very site of the first hot air balloon flight in 1785 and the pilot being one James Sadler who took his feline friend with him on the trip! The pub is contained within the NOMA complex and is now owned by the Cloudwater brewery and is a good basking spot in the summer with a suite of outside tables.

Staying with the Co-op theme, across the square from the hostelry you find the New Century Hall which was built as their 1000 capacity Insurance Society building in 1962 and sits adjacent to New Century House. They had many major acts play there in the 1960’s including Rolling Stones, Tina Turner, Jerry Lee Lewis and the Kinks. There is also an anecdote of the Jimi Hendrix Experience performing there in 1966 and a young John Cooper Clarke being denied entry as he was not wearing the obligatory tie, despite being bedecked in Fred Perry and a striped sports coat, bouncers eh! 

John Cooper Clarke. Image Credit pinterest.com

It is a three-storey building with the basement containing the Access Creative College where you can obtain degrees in music and gaming. The ground floor houses the Manchester New Century Food Hall where I first visited in December 2022 on a Christmas works do where we partook some tucker from one of the many food vendors and watched the England v Wales World Cup match. Where the big screen showing the match was located, there is normally a stage, and I have seen a couple of local singers perform there.

Upstairs from there is the Manchester New Century Hall which on first sight I was instantly impressed by with the wood surrounds and tasteful lighting. Even when busy it remains an accessible venue with ability to scoot down the sides to obtain a spot nearer to the stage. I can see myself in the future checking their listings from a venue viewpoint ahead of many others in the city where they become an almighty scrum when reaching capacity, the Albert Hall being a case in point.

My first attendance was in May 2023 with Gill and our good friends and fellow rabble rousers Jo and Paul. We had a couple of drinks around the Kampus area near Piccadilly and in the Northern Quarter. The band we were going to see was The Beths from Auckland in New Zealand. They were promoting their hugely recommended third album ‘Expert in a Dying Field’ which I have given serious airplay to as I love the upbeat nature of it, and I thoroughly enjoyed their set. Their sound reminds me of a fellow upcoming band called Fortitude Valley.      

Manchester New Century Hall. Image Credit manchestereveningnews.co.uk

My next attendance was with Gill in June 2024 where we only shamefully discovered the Abel Heywood Hydes brewery pub for the first time, but we have rectified that by attending a couple of times since. The band that night was the Lovely Eggs who I didn’t enjoy as much as their previous times I have seen them.  

There then followed two attendances in Sept 2024. The first was remarkably for me to see Ride for the first time, however I had previously seen an individual set by Mark Gardener at Preston Continental back in November 2011 where they also showed a screening of ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’ which provides a story of the Oxford music scene featuring Ride alongside many other bands.    

For the uninitiated, Ride were prime shoegaze pioneers releasing two highly touted albums on Creation records in the early 1990’s. They broke up in 1996 before reforming in 2014 and were touring their latest album ‘Interplay’. The sound quality was poor early on but once they sorted that out, they were excellent.

My latest visit involved a large group of us including my pals Jason Gill and Barry Jury going to see the Go Team for the fourth time and for my first time for 14 years. They played in full their superb debut album ‘Thunder Lighting Strike’ with other tunes interspersed in their set.           

As a postscript I have managed to obtain some degree of numerical symmetry as New Century Hall was the actual 150th Manchester venue that I had visited.                                                                                                                                                         

Preston Venue 41 New Continental – Part 2

Within the New Continental Arts and Events space the owners purchased a new PA and created a small reception area with its own bar and it doubles as the ticket checking area before entry into the gig room which has a capacity of around 250. The driving force behind the booking of the music acts was a local chap called Rico, and they have held a broad spectrum of events including World and Jazz bands and cinema showings.  

My first visit was at an all-day event on a swelteringly hot day on the May Bank Holiday weekend in 2011. Between bands we gravitated outside into the sunshine before returning inside for more tunes. First up was Seamus McCloughlin, a local singer/songwriter who has subsequently become a member of an alternative rock band called The Capital. Next up was Preston band Dirty Swamp led by Mark Whiteside, who is also the driving force behind Evil Blizzard.

They were followed by Australian born Viv Albertine, who was a guitarist in the legendary Slits from 1977 to 1982. She dropped out for a live scene for a long time before reappearing and was promoting her sole studio album ‘The Vermillion Border’ released the following year prior to her penning two autobiographies of her life. She cut a very enigmatic presence.

Viv Albertine. Image Credit flickriver.com

The headliners were the prolific Wave Pictures from London. They have a quirky quintessential English sound complemented by David Tattersall’s wavering vocals and are a staple play on Marc Reilly’s 6 Music show. I recall them referencing the ongoing World Snooker final ongoing at that stage between John Higgins and Judd Trump.  I walked home through the park with a spring in my step after an entertaining afternoon and the realisation of the birth of thankfully another commendable venue in Preston. 

My next appearance was a bonus one as it was on the Sunday where we have just returned from Wickerman Festival 2011 and decided for some inexplicable reason to drag our tired bods out to a gig. We initially caught a Sheffield Steam Punk band in the Dog and Partridge before sallying down to the Conty.

The first act was Best Friends Forever, a wonky bedroom sounding lo-fi band but not without charm and they are coincidentally not unlike the recently mentioned Wave Pictures.

The headliners were Let’s Wrestle, a three-piece band from London. They were promoting their second album ‘Nursing Home’ which was produced by Steve Albini of Big Black fame. They subsequently took a hiatus and disbanded in 2015. They had a plethora of influences in their sound, however for the best descriptor I would have to defer to a BBC’s Collective quote which memorably coined them as ‘the accidental 4am lovechild of eight bottles of £2.99 merlot and a wheelbarrow full of Cutter’s Choice’. This is arguably the best quote I have read since early Idlewild were described as ‘the sound of a flight of stairs falling down a flight of stairs’!    

The band were an engaging presence, but we understandably flagged towards the end of the set as the weekend’s festivities caught up with us and a taxi was called to curtail the evening.

At the tail end of 2012 we went to see the old punk band Eddie and The Hot Rods whose constant member throughout their existence was Barrie Masters prior to his death in 2019. Their famous top ten hit ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’ released in 1977 still stands up to this day, but their set was a tad limp. They were supported on the night by Dirty Swamp.

In November 2011 there was an unusual event which piqued my interest. They showed a screening of the ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’, a Jon Spira documentary narrated by Stewart Lee about the Oxford music scene covering the period from 1978 to 2007. The film name was derived from a Radiohead track, and they were naturally a key reference point alongside Oxford counterparts Supergrass. 

Alongside the successes, it also concentrated on other bands who didn’t quite make it, one such band was the Candyskins, who were about at the inception of Britpop. They had limited success but must have driven over a black cat at some stage because they could not have encountered worse luck, including legal disputes over royalties and record companies going bankrupt at inopportune moments. I am just listening to some of their back catalogue as I type this and I am hearing strong shades of Boo Radleys in their sound, which is never a bad thing in my book!

The Candyskins. Image Credit alchetron.com

Another band referenced was one of the shoegaze forerunners Ride and their guitarist Mark Gardener was in residence and after a Q&A performed a short acoustic set. That was followed by a decent set by another Oxford band Rock of Travolta who sat in the instrumental post-rock genre.