Tag: The Spinners

Liverpool Venues 21 to 24

Liverpool Tess Riley’s is a hostelry that is situated on Great Charlotte Street. The history behind the naming of this boozer runs back to prior to the Second World War, so if you are sitting comfortably, I shall begin…

Back in the 1930’s an entrepreneurial lady called Tess Makin developed her initial business acumen when working on her mother’s market second hand clothes stall. On the occasional non-market days, she took it upon herself to travel over to the Wirral to pick up the stock. She became a dab hand at bartering with the affluent traders to obtain the best price before returning to the market and selling on the goods for a tidy profit. In 1947, she marries a chap called Joe Riley and they had four children together. Bear with me, I will get there eventually!

Tess Riley. Image Credit pubsgalore.co.uk

In 1970, when her kids had grown up, she retrained in the pub industry and undertook her apprenticeship at the Pig and Whistle and the Old Mona. She then took over the ropes as The Jester for five years before she bought the freehold of The Beehive in the Mount Pleasant area of the city in 1978.

Her novel approach of installed a free jukebox that only played songs from the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s captured the zeitgeist of the era and the once quite pub was transformed into one of the busiest places in Liverpool. They also staged live music at quiet periods and on Sundays where Tess herself would step up alongside the resident organist to contribute a couple of ditties. She was reportedly very glamorous, and this provided the launching pad for her retirement on board cruise ships.

Her eldest child Joan also moved in the family trade and ran a couple of successful pubs using the same tried and tested template. In 1996 they purchased a unit in the former Blackler’s building and then decided to name the pub in honour of her mother. It remains a lively place to this day thankfully staying away from karaoke, but they do have live music and on my one visit I saw a local lass called Annie perform there.

Directly above Tess Rileys is the Liverpool Central Sports Bar, which is a very popular wall to wall sports viewing establishment, but they also stage live music, and I once saw a local fella called Edwin play there.     

Celtic Corner. Image tripadvisor.co.uk

Nearby to there on the intersection point of Lime Street and Ranelagh Street you would find the Liverpool Celtic Corner. As I am sure you can glean from its moniker, it is another Irish based hostelry. It initially opened in 2017 taking over from the old retail site of the Army and Navy stores. It is a very large establishment with an enormous room downstairs and a function room for hire situated in the upstairs area.

There is an abundance of seating at the front for the sunshine days. It also had a mechanical rodeo bull that kicked into life every Saturday from 3pm but I believe that has been retired and sent to pasture a couple of years ago. There is a sizeable standalone stage, and I saw a decent local singer Lochlan undertaking a gig on that very stage.

Nearer to the main train station on Lime Street is located the Liverpool McHales Irish American Bar. The establishment is a single room bar and when I visited, I saw a singer called Michael perform there. Its history runs back to 1830 and at that point in time it was positioned on the other side of the street. It was initially closely linked to the nearby Empire Theatre and then became a very popular haven for US naval men during the First World War and was known as the American Bar or more colloquially as the ‘Yankee Bar’.

One urban legend is that there was a local prostitute called Maggie May (or Maggie Mae) who used to frequent the bar, and she later featured in a skiffle folk song telling the tale of her robbing a ‘homeward bounder’. The latter term relating to a sailor coming home from a round trip. The song is potentially crafted from a similar 1856 American slave song called ‘Darling Nellie Gray’.

Maggie May songs EP with a picture of the old thriving Liverpool Docks. Image Credit ebay.co.uk

The 1950’s version referenced featured a direct reference to Liverpool in the lines ‘Oh, dirty Maggie Mae, they have taken her away, and she’ll never walk down Lime Street anymore’. The composer Lionel Bart used the tune and back story to devise a musical called Maggie May set in Liverpool Docks, which ran in a London theatre for two years.

The most well-known recorded version was by the Vipers Skiffle Group in 1957, but the BBC decided to ban it because of the lyrics ‘sexual content’. There were also covers by the Searchers, the Spinners and a 40 second edition by the Beatles which serves to curtail Side 1 of their final album ‘Let it Be’. Rod Stewart also stated this song was an inspiration for his No 1 hit of the same name.  

Manchester Venues 186 to 187

Manchester Central Libraryis situated facing St Peters Square. It was constructed back in the 1930’s and was designed as a columned portico building in the style of the Pantheon in Rome. It was officially opened by King George V in 1934 with the writer of ‘Dirty Old Town’ Ewan MacColl ensconced in the crowd.

Manchester was ahead of the curve in being forward thinking as the first local authority to provide a free public lending facility in 1852 and the opening was attended by an illustrious writer called Charles Dickens. The library then had several homes before landing at the permanent location cited above. It is now classed as a Grade II listed edifice, remarkably alongside a fellow 237 others in Manchester.

Manchester Central Library. Image Credit Time Out.

There was an extensive £40m refurbishment in 2010 which included resolving asbestos issues which appears to be a common issue with structures of that generation.  Prior to the renovation work the Library Theatre Company was in place in the basement, but the area was restructured as part of the library with the Theatre moving into the Home complex on First Street.

The Library Company had an illustrious history with Patrick Stewart (Jean Luc Picard) appearing in Billy Liar there in 1963. Others to tread the boards are Amanda Burton, Julie Walters, Bernard Hill, Liam Neeson and rather bizarrely John Noakes.

Many folk bands played the intimate 312 seat space in the mid-1960’s including the Spinners, The Oldham Tinkers (remarkably still active) and the Moston Brook Clog Dancers. Additionally, one of the city’s music shops ‘Rare Records’ put on lunch time shows for a spell.

It is now the second largest library in Britain and there are collections dedicated to the author Elizabeth Gaskell and the composer George Handel. There are also large spaces called the Shakespeare Hall and the Great Hall.

The Oldham Tinkers record cover. Image Credit oldhamtinkers.com

Beneath the latter, at one stage there were four floors full of shelfing totalling 35 miles length and contained an astonishing one million books. The humungous library brings to mind the remarkable ‘The Book That Wouldn’t Burn’ tome penned by Mark Lawrence. Methinks, that would take a little while to read your way through that lot!

During his school years the Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess was a regular visitor. Very periodically gigs have been staged including Slow Readers Club and Every Everything in 2014 and in 2016 Thurston Moore had a book tour date there and naturally Noasis performed earlier this year.

Another area is the Manchester Henry Watson Music Library named after the local composer who donated his works to the library. It contains one of the largest assemblages of sheet music and was opened in 1947 by Sir John Barbirolli, who was the conductor of the Manchester Halle Orchestra.

I have only crossed the threshold into the impressive building a couple of times, the first being for a photography exhibition and the latter to attend a show in the afore mentioned Music Library where I saw a combo called Jam Crew playing, whilst I listened and mulched around the bookshelves.  

The aforementioned Manchester St Peters Square was in the late 17th century located on the fringes of the town of Manchester with three open sides, one wending its way down to the River Medlock. St Peters Church was then constructed, and the square was named in 1801.

On Monday 16th In 1819 the area gained national attention for all the wrong reasons when a large crowd of approximately 60k protesters gathered to demand parliamentary reform. Astoundingly at that juncture only 11% of adult males had the right to vote, let alone women!

They were met with a staggeringly disproportionate show of force when the 15th Hussars on horseback were ordered to disperse the crowd which they did with sabres drawn. In the resultant carnage, 17 people were killed and around 700 people injured.

The shameful events were subsequently coined the ‘Peterloo Massacre’, the name being a nod to the Battle of Waterloo which took place four years earlier.  I recall in 2019 a memorial statue was designed and installed commemorating the 200 year anniversary.   

Nowadays, it is a busy transport hub with a large metro station with four platforms located there which was initially opened in 1992.

St Peters Square. Image Credit greenblue.com

When I was traversing the square a couple of years ago, I noticed there was a random event taking place on a temporary stage in one corner. I discovered the lass performing a short promo set was a K Pop artist called Mirai, who has appeared in bands called ael and The Hoopers.