Tag: The Beets

Lancaster Venues 23 to 25

This week I return to the Lancaster Live festival I attended in 2023 to review the final venue visited that year which was Lancaster Tite & Locke. This establishment opened on the northbound platform 3 on Lancaster train station on 8th April 2022. It was named after the original architect and engineer of the station, when that was first built back in 1846.

It is a very cosy welcoming bar with the wooden surrounds and exposed brickwork providing a vintage feel. It has four rooms, the initial containing the bar and the others named as first, second and third class lounges!

Tite and Locke. Image Credit flickr.com

There are 24 beers on tap including the five different variations of the very fine Lancaster Brewery ales, and they also offer a takeaway service in advance of your upcoming journey. There is also a large covered outdoor area where you can watch the trains departing to Glasgow, Edinburgh and the Lake District.   

We had a cheeky head wetter there when we first landed around lunchtime and had a relaxed hour at the end of the day prior to the members of our group jumping onto Manchester and Carlisle trains respectively. We managed to commandeer a large table in front of the small acoustic stage in the bar area.

The first act we saw was local band Diverted Traffic who undertook some cover versions including Johnny Cash’s ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ including the amended line of the day which became ‘Shot a man in Tesco, just to watch him die’!

The other performer was Chris Barlow, who is the Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Cumbria and has been instrumental in driving forward the Eden Project inspired Morecambe Bay curriculum.

The commendable initiative links to place based learning including staging Glastonbury Festivals at the local Sandylands school featuring live music, songwriting workshop, face painting and weaving workshops. That sounds like a whole lotta fun to me and top trumps the double physics classes in my day!

When he needs what I am sure is a welcome break from academia he transforms by night into acoustic guitar man! He has released two albums, one called ‘Hiroshima Twinkie Sunset over Morecambe Bay’ which has tunes featuring lyrics devised by the afore mentioned Sandylands school pupils.

The other is titled ‘Lunar Landscape’ under his stage name Chris Twinkle containing songs with Half Man Half Biscuit sounding titles such as ‘Hey Jules Verne’ and my personal favourite name of ‘Iggy Pop’s Trousers’!

Iggy Pop. Image Credit madelinex.com

So, then I will move forward two years to Gill and I’s return to attend the 2025 festival. The event itself was initially under a modicum of doubt as the original organisers decided to take a well-deserved year off, but thankfully a separate local co-operative took up the mantle. They did a fine job with the usual 50+ venues in operation over the four days of the weekend.

We decided to avoid the risk of relying on train transport home and bagged a room at the Sun Inn in the centre of the city. This allowed us to have a full day’s gigging on Saturday and a half day on the Sunday resulting in a Jimmy personal best of 37 gigs and 23 new venues!

There obviously had to be the traditional false start to proceedings with our local trains having a meltdown, but this was swiftly resolved by an uber to pick up our connection at Manchester Piccadilly, landing in Stockport about 1pm. Our first port of call was the Lancaster Storey Café, where we attended a gig in the gardens last time, but this was the first event inside the building.

Thus, against the backdrop of cappuccino makers and tempting looking cakes there was a local singer called Grace Dawson performing. Prior to our departure we managed to purloin a programme with valuable schedules contained in the pages within.

Our next destination was the Lancaster Toll House Inn, situated near to the canal. There are records of a public house being in this location since 1820. There then followed many derivations before the Thwaites brewery owners undertook a £2m refurbishment in 2007. It was renamed the Penny Street Bridge Hotel complete with bar, brasserie, courtyard and 28 bedrooms.

Toll House Inn. Image Credit Visit Lancashire

In 2015, it obtained its current name reflecting the fact of its location at the original toll house, At the turn of the 19th century local football teams, even ones like Scotforth and Galgate which are only a couple of miles away, were quantified as southerners and thus charged a toll to enter into Lancaster!

It is a grand old Victorian building, and we saw a three piece self-styled jukebox band called the Beets who were actually playing as a duo on the day. They were exactly as they stated on the tin, by playing any song on request from the audience.  

A postscript this week is I do not think the pictures will display, which could be a pesky AI problem, so I shall endeavour to resolve for next week!

Lancaster Venues 20 to 22

This week, I am continuing the tale of my inaugural visit to the annual Lancaster Music Festival on a bruisingly cold day in October 2023. The next haunt on our list was Lancaster Cornerhouse located on the junction of New Street and Church Street; a stone’s throw away from the Sun Hotel. The Cornerhouse, formerly Paulo Gianni’s and Sphere Bar, went through a major transformation in 2018.

The driving force of the reformation was Gemma Rowlands from nearby Cockerham, who had previously worked at the site in Paulo Gianni’s days. She then converted it into a gin style palace with a restaurant with accompanying comprehensive menu, a plethora of craft beers and live music offerings from Thursday through to Sunday.  

Lancaster Cornerhouse. Image Credit lancastercornerhouse.co.uk

When we arrived, the place was extremely busy, and we navigated the queues to obtain an aperitif from the bar. We grabbed a seat before being politely moved on as we were inadvertently squatting in the restaurant area! On a small stage in the corner of the main room we encountered a local three-piece band called the Beets. They had ensured they would have maximum exposure across the day by volunteering to play a remarkable seven venues across the city in an overall time span of eleven hours!       

A five-minute walk away brought us to our next port of call which was the Lancaster Royal Kings Arms Hotel.  The place has considerable history in that the Grade II listed building was originally constructed in 1625 and revamped in 1879 after a habitual great fire (arsonists abounded everywhere in that era!). Many royals stayed there and in its early days it was owned by King Louis XIV.

The local archives contain a letter that was sent from Carlisle to the hotel on 11th September 1857 requesting that a room be booked there for a certain Mr Charles Dickens who would be accompanied by his friend Wilkie Collins. They also requested a comfortable dinner (tea in the North!) for two persons at half past 5.    

Lancaster Royal Kings Arms Hotel. Image Credit blog.conferences-uk.org.uk

They were in a midst of a walking tour of Cumberland at that stage which was chronicled the following month in Dickens ‘Household Words’ under the title of ‘The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices’. The hotel is also cited as the location that Dickens scribed ‘The Tale of the Bridal Chamber’ and there remains to this day a ‘Dickens Suite’.

We had been in splinter groups for a couple of hours, but we all reconvened here. There was an excellent band on stage called Native Cult who were also playing several shows on the day. The duo hailed from Barrow and had a pot pourri of influences in their sound. Following there we grabbed some much needed tea and a sit down at the Golden Dragon Chinese restaurant next door.   

Our next destination was Lancaster Atticus on King Street which initially came into being in 1974 as a bookshop coffee bar above Probe Records in Liverpool. Probe Records is an interesting tale with its initial commencement as an independent underground/hippy establishment and it then morphed into a punk site when it moved to a new location, as a result of their new address being in close proximity to the legendary Eric’s venue.

Many future musicians were employed there including Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Paul Rutherford, Pete Wylie from the Mighty Wah! and Pete Burns from Dead or Alive. The final named was renowned as faithfully adopting the house ethos of issuing ‘constructive criticism’ when parlaying with customers and thus influencing their selections! Julian Cope references the shop in his ‘Head On’ autobiography and the band meetings that took place there with Ian McCulloch when they were in The Crucial Three together.

They set up a record label Probe Plus whose most famous signing was undoubtedly Birkenhead’s Half Man Half Biscuit, a band who refreshingly took a break from the music business between 1987 and 1990 as they didn’t want to become ‘too successful’! They also famously turned down a slot on The Tube Channel 4 TV show as it clashed with a Friday night Tranmere Rovers match.

Half Man Half Biscuit. Image Credit pinterest.co.uk

The shop struggled for a spell through the initial downloading era, but the vinyl renaissance has boosted their turnover, and the record store remains to this day in its current location in the Bluecoat Arts Centre.

The Atticus name was chosen as it has literary connotations but is also useful alphabetically, from a commercial viewpoint, on any book shop listings. They opened a second shop in Lancaster in the 1990’s which subsequently closed in 2001.

The original owner Tom Flemons then returned to the area in 2014 to reopen the store as a not for profit enterprise supporting the Tasikoki Animal Rescue Centre in Indonesia where he had previously volunteered. At this stage it also expanded to incorporate a coffee bar. When we wandered past there was a band called Bay Big playing who are a large host of musicians who play a repertoire of Swing, Jazz and Latin.