Tag: The Orielles

Liverpool Venues 33 to 35

I shall return this week to my ongoing review of the 2025 Liverpool Sound City event, with our next port of call being Liverpool Kazimier Stockroom. As I have discovered when writing these scouse based blogs their background stories of the venues never seem to be simple. So, this particular tale commences with the much touted original arty Kazimier venue in Wolstenholme Square.

The venue opened in 2007 in an old mirror-lined club owned by local boxer John Conteh and came complete with an octagonal dancefloor, outdoor space and a top-deck bar and it was the size of the Titanic. It finally bowed out in some particular style on New Years Eve 2015 after a self-created sci-fi themed Escape to Planet Kronos party with one hundred and eighty performers. A mere four months later alongside Nation, the original home of Cream, the whole area was razed to the ground under the banner of gentrification plans.

Kazimier Stockroom. Image Credit liverpooltheatres.com

A regular performer there was the in-house carnival techno act The Krunk Band. They chose not to perform on stage, instead they mingled into the crowd whilst booting out their tunes and included a mishmash of trumpets, percussions, barrel organ and accordions in their sound. Other bands to play there include Sleaford Mods, Blossoms, Buzzcocks, Miles Kane, Michael Head and The Harlequin Dynamite Matching Band.  

Then in 2016 the newly formed Kazimier Collective opened up a new venue on Regent Street near to the Stanley Dock Tobacco Warehouse. The three storey building comprises of two events spaces, the basement one called Substation, and some artist studios. It was named The Invisible Wind Factory and has a 1500 capacity. Fat White Family, Ride and the Orielles have played there, and it has also been used for daytime rollerdisco events, thereby invoking unwelcome memories of Cliff Richard and Frank Spencer!  

The Collective then opened up the Kazimier Stockroom which is a multipurpose small site with a 100 capacity and alongside being an intimate showcase for fledgling local and national bands they also host film screenings and theatre shows. It has an open courtyard area, and its name derives from its location adjacent to Kazimier Gardens.  

Upon our arrival it took us a moment to find the venue which was located just off from the outside area behind an unmarked wooden door, it was a busy enclosed space and was absolutely sweltering. On stage was a young R&B singer called Immi Dash who was born in Scotland to British and Trinidadian parents, raised between California and Slough and now resides in Liverpool, sounds like an eventful journey!  

Arts Club. Image Credit tagvenue.com

We then moved onto the nearby Liverpool Arts Club on Seel Street, a venue that has existed since 1928 and was before that date The Liverpool Royal Institution. Its original remit under the new banner was as a social club before morphing into a live music venue. Prior to its current moniker it was known also as The Barfly, The Masque and East Village Arts Club.

In the early part of 2023, like many other similar establishments it faced closure, but was subsequently thankfully saved from that ignominious fate by the Manchester based Tokyo Industries. That particular company also own Gorilla, The Deaf Institute and Factory 251 and brought that previous expertise and a major regeneration to this venture. Early gigs by The Wombats and Two Door Cinema Club served to cement its reputation back on the live circuit.

The venue has three individual rooms, the first is the lobby which is utilised as a club space with a capacity of 200 punters. The second is Liverpool Arts Club Loft which has a live maximum of 550 people. When we attended there, we saw a Manchester act called Cooper T who are a duo comprising of two producers Kong and TMNMS. They sported brown shell suits and matching balaclavas and were verging on the grime genre, not dissimilar to Sleaford Mods, a band who has always left me cold, though the crowd around me appeared to be lapping it up!

The Florentenes. Image Credit youtube.com

Along a linking corridor brought you to Liverpool Arts Club Theatre, which was my preferred venue of the two and has a capacity of 550 and the space reminded me of the old Preston Polytechnic venue. First up we saw a local singer called Neil Noa and then later in the day Florentenes. The latter three piece were from Manchester and astoundingly young with the two guitarists aged eighteen and the drummer only fifteen. They reminded me in parts of The View, early Strokes and The Vines and they created a very pleasing racket!  

Manchester Venues 136 to 137

As you traverse down Oldham Street in the Northern Quarter from Piccadilly Gardens you pass the iconic Night and Day and Piccadilly Records and just after the junction with Hilton Street you reach Manchester Freemount. It commenced its tenure as a traditional Tetley Brewery public house before morphing into the Northern and then into its current moniker. There are two entrances with one on Tib Street alongside the Oldham Street access.

Manchester Freemount. Image Credit tripadvisor.com

It is an old-fashioned homely establishment with impressive glazed emerald green filed frontage with exterior seating for those rare sunny evenings. It has regular live music and often to quite a late hour as they remain open until 2am every night. Those timelines are handy for catching some cheeky bonus gigs before pottering off for the late train. I first encountered some live tuneage there in October 2018 prior to an Orielles gig at the aforementioned Night and Day when I saw a local artist called Adie playing. My second most recent attendance was earlier this year with my pal Riggers after a gig at the Band on the Wall venue and we witnessed an artist called Monty.

The pub is owned by the Urban Village Bars company who also have Another Heart to Feed bar/restaurant on their roster. They now have a recently added third string to their bow with the Wayfarer pub on Swan Street which has the same frontage as the Freemount. They also apparently have live bands there so I shall have to put it on my list of places to visit.

If you then head up Newton Street towards Piccadilly Station, you arrive at Manchester Hold Fast. located down some steps in the basement of Hatters Hostel. The hostel is named to commemorate the Joseph Wood & Sons Hat Factory that resided in the Victorian building where it is located. The factory was built in 1907 and the three-storey glazed ‘arcades’ were designed with the concept of adding additional light into the building.

Manchester Hold Fast. Image Credit themanc.com

The hostel retains some of the original features of the porcelain sinks and a spooky old lift (probably like the one featured in the ‘The Long Good Friday’ movie). They have received some high level customer service scores, possibly because of the fact they have a games room including a pool table and free tea and toast all day, I mean what is not to like about that!   

The bar also has its own small cinema space, designed for lazy ‘hangover Sundays’, where you can watch old black and white movies whilst nursing your self-imposed headache. There is also a further vintage games room with old Sego video games which included Sonic the Hedgehog and early versions of Football Manager.

Being of a certain age myself I recall the astonishingly basic Pong games in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s where the Tennis and Football used to blip and blop across the screen and were virtually identical! I also remember playing the early Grand Prix driving machines, there used to be one in the New Britannia pub on Heatley Street in Preston, and also Track and Field. My all time personal favourite though was Galaxians, which you would sometimes see as a tabletop version.

Hi-tech Pong video game. Image Credit Timetoast.

Hold Fast is an intriguing nautical themed bar, apparently inspired by Jules Verne’s novels, specifically ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea’, and is a dimly lit space with numerous ships lanterns and candles dotted about. They have a suite of craft beers available to imbibe. They also have open mic nights and live music events and one such evening in 2018 Gill and I saw a local chap called Edwin play there. The venue closed in 2019 and was touted to reopen in November 2023, but it is unclear on their website whether that actually happened.