blakejonesmusic
local music, local arts, The Underground Garden

Wednesday, May 25 Bolton-Manchester

[note: I know there were some nice photos taken of this night's gig in Manchester. I'll post them when I track them down.]
Woke up to the great hospitality of Olly’s house. Lots of good stuff there for us for breakfast..and then Olly gets up and makes us (the non-vegetarians in the group that is) Bacon Butties (bacon sandwhiches on white bread with butter—mmmmm so delicious and heart-friendly too!). [They were awesome.]
Then Olly got us packed up and off on the motorway to his school in Manchester.
It’s a small music industry oriented college that’s built around a former commercial recording studio. They have fascillities for folks to study performance, recording, artist management, DJ’ing—anything that’s in that field. Olly said it’s a bit of an experiment at this stage. Very cool though.

We set the instruments up in a large classroom, then went into another to be ‘interviewed’. We were trying to discuss the things that might be relevant to them: how we funded the tour, how we set up a tour so far from home, etc. Of course the ever-present theme of ‘community’ was discussed, as well as how the International Pop Overthrow festival really set the framework for this particular tour—and served as a real mechanism for ‘community’ once again—even meeting Olly was through this festival’s network.
So we spoke, and then went next door for a couple of songs: “Sun Up” and then to the theremin for “Miserlou” (the theremin’s always a big hit). Nice kids (I keep resisting using the term ‘kids’…but relative to us ahem…’veterans’ (laughs), yeah.)
One young lady, when hearing of my worries for my voice, produced a packet of cough drops (often called ‘sweets’ in this country) that she said Tom Jones swore by. (They were pretty potent!)
After this presentation, we loaded up a nice pile of gear borrowed from the college for tonight’s gig. When piled onto the parking lot it was hard to believe it was going to fit into Olly’s little Ford Fiesta….but applying great ingenuity….he made it work.
(As the picture above shows…)
Next, we all went downtown on the tram (around here we might call it a “light rail”. In Germany, I was familiar with these rides as the “Strassenbahn”. We went for a bit of a walk through Manchester’s “North Quarter” neighborhood—lots of record stores, independent clothes shops for hipsters, etc. Fun stuff. We got a little bit of gift shopping done for the folks back home.

Olly took the tram back to fetch his car and the gear. The rest of us roamed over to look at Manchester Town Hall–a wonderful and massive Victorian beauty of a building. It was just after 5 o’clock, so we suspected it was closed for viewing, but we went through the door anyway.

The older man at the desk said,” I’m sorry, it’s closed.” A moment later, he adds,” But if you’d like to look around in the lobby…go right ahead” The place was a wonderland of long, arched stone hallways. In another moment, the man says, ” If you’d like to go upstairs, I’ve called ahead.” So we walk upstairs, and there’s another older gentleman…at first he looks unsure, but then, here we go again, we get the full-on private tour! (Now some of this might be put down to the friendliness of the people [certainly a factor], but the serendipitous timing of all these ‘lucky tours’ we’re getting really did feel like we were having some cool gifties dropped into our laps by Someone Upstairs.)


After our tour of all the grand meeting rooms, council chambers, etc. [one of them had recently posed as the "House of Lords" in the most recent Sherlock Holmes movie], we wandered back over to the Tiger Lounge (our venue for tonight’s show) and saw that Olly had beaten us there. We loaded the gear, set some things up and generally got ready.

The Tiger Lounge was a cool and kitchy basement club. Various decades of ‘retro’ were spread around the rooms. Apparently , on DJ nights, they only spin vinyl. Very Swinging Bachelor Pad. I was drinking copious amounts of tea and hot water–and sucking on the Mighty Tom Jones Cough Drops.

When the entertainment began, the host for the night, a guy called Stuart, played a couple of sort of Nick Drake-type style songs. Very very good.
Then Olly did a set of his soulful numbers—excellent as usual.
Then came a sort of performance-poet guy called Martin (can’t remember his stage name). He set up various synth loops with some hand-held gizmos, and sang/spoke his poetry. Very engaging and quite good. This was definitely shaping into a night of extreme variety–but good stuff.
We were on next and we were all hyped up to play.
Apparently all the hydration and magic cough drops did their job, because singing was a joy. The band were white hot and rockin’. We were able to play a slightly longer set since we weren’t part of tightly scheduled festival, and we had a ball.
The theremin went over big again. “Dear Prudence” felt great—Neptune really played well–a most fortuitous choice for the position since Martin Hansen couldn’t travel with us this time. “Here Comes the Bus” was as “Who-ish” as could be, and John and Leland slammed it home. A very very fulfilling gig. We made some new friends and had a ball—AND the bar served us pizza afterwards. Nice.