COMPETITION: Fear of Men @ The Castle Hotel

Brighton trio Fear of Men make the trip up to Manchester's Oldham Street on Sunday 28 September on a wave of melodic indie pop.

With debut album Loom still hot off the press earlier this year, this show finds them in the intimate climes of the Castle Hotel's back room. Following a spate of 7" singles and EPs, the band now has a body of recorded repertoire fitting with their headlining billing and subsequent European tour.

We’ve teamed up with Northern Noise to give away a pair of tickets to their show at The Castle Hotel on Sunday 28 September. All you need to do to enter is like and share the image at the other end of this link (making sure it’s set to ‘public’ so we can see that you’ve entered).

We'll announce the winner on Friday 26 September.

Good luck!

Not A Summer Festival @ Gullivers and The Castle Hotel, 08.02.14

It sounds like one. It appears like one, so surely it must be one. Well, it is a festival but, as the headline states, it's not a summer festival which is technically true as we are being deluged with water in February. That does compare well with Glastonbury in June or July though.

The positive part is that the music, spread over the Castle Hotel and Gullivers, will go ahead regardless of how wet it is outside. With a diversely engrossing line-up of styles and attitude available, it’s good to see that the Castle is three quarters full at 3.30, with more people queuing to purchase wristbands.

Crywank. It's one thing to have a name that will stand out, court controversy and attention, but is the talent there to support it? On this performance, James Clayton, subtlety supported by Dan Watson, who has the packed crowd entranced, does have the magnetism to draw people around him. He might just be able to reach the escape velocity beyond merely being potential.

Meanwhile, a snippet of the closing number from The Ferals’ set is inviting enough to try to catch them from the start next time. A more precise, considered musical range is displayed by MyLyricalMind.

The simplicity in structure provides a useful counterpoint to the more upfront urgings of Waltz.

A lot to encounter for the first event but hopefully the promoters will be around again, passing out the cakes along the way.

Words & photos: Ged Camera.

Daniel Bachman @ The Castle Hotel, 19.06.13

A good example of the appeal of this all-seater affair at The Castle Hotel is when, during headliner Daniel Bachman’s set, attendees without chairs were filling in all the nooks and crannies by crouching, kneeling, reclining and resting behind and betwixt the furniture and in the aisle.

It was a busy, yet attentive, one from the start, as a pair of Manchester’s most active musicians, Tom Settle and Dan Bridgewood-Hill – aka dbh – set the scene in the Oldham Street alehouse’s back room. The former, a soft spoken finger picking guitarist whose strings collection extends tonight to a mandolin, compiles a collection comprising his own work and Jefferson Airplane’s ‘My Best Friend’, evoking the spirit of that 60s psyche band’s ballad by inviting the latter to join him to perform a rendition of Shirley Collins and Davy Graham’s ‘Hares on the Mountain’. Underneath the spotlights of a web of fairy lights that dangles overhead, dbh carries the appearance of an Eisenberg-Cera hybrid, with the pair’s gently strummed songs resembling Juno’s final scene.

When he takes centre stage, dbh can be seen in better light, showing the Eisenberg-Cera fusion to be no more than whimsical myopia on my part. His set is more forceful, with each note immaculately considered despite being short-lived amidst the fluid arpeggios of flamenco and Americanised acid-folk. While often searching and introspective, his closing tune, ‘Fix’, hits the major notes to offer a happy ending.

The main attraction – the touring American Daniel Bachman – sits just as the other two before him: quietly and politely in voice, but the most intensively of the three in sonic terms. This time launching in with his lapsteel guitar and a bottleneck slide before reverting to type with an acoustic guitar, whose open low-E string shudders in discord with other elegantly selected notes, the whole set is turned up a notch on the speedometer.

Between songs, he re-tunes, red-faced in concentration.

Then liftoff, again, with a style that isn’t quite strumming, and is far from finger picking; notes that often seem to be merged, yet are audibly separate. The catch, if there is one, is in the divergence from the core technique; beyond the opening bottleneck slider, there’s little to differentiate his songs, and a set continuing any longer would merit another direction the break up his favoured style. His chord shapes are no more inventive than anyone else’s, but with a playing technique so vigorous there’s enough to mesmerise the gathered audience.

Words & photos: Ian Pennington.
Poster design: Fliss Horrocks.

The next Crowfoot Records gig is scheduled for tomorrow, 24th July, at Kro Bar on Oxford Road, and will feature L’Etrangleuse, McWatt, Irma Vep and David M Birchall.

Arts, Music & Events Preview, January 2011 (Part One)

If you’ve been consulting your Gregorian calendar lately then you’ll no doubt have spotted a couple of things. Namely, we’re slowly rolling into another year and this preview feature is a few days overdue. The former significantly more obvious than the latter, perhaps, but both indicative of the sleepy nature of Januarys in general.

That’s not to say there isn’t anything to sink your creative teeth into this month. Oldham Street’s refurbished Castle Hotel hosts Welsh linguists Colorama following their session on the airwaves for Marc Riley’s 6music show – all this evening, Wednesday 5th. And later on, Now Wave’s DJs pick up where they left off in 2010, spinning their tips for 2011's buzz bands to fill the Deaf Institute floor.


Saturday 8th brings another Carefully Planned All-Dayer, albeit a rescheduled one due to pre-Xmas snow. That’ll also take place at the in-demand Castle Hotel with eight more hand-picked musicians from the world of indie-folk. For a more chilled affair that evening, the electronic types at This City Is Ours continue their monthly slot at An Outlet, with tunes selected by Anytime, Blood Boy, LSN and Borland DJs.

The Art Corner launches a new exhibition with a preview night on Monday 10th, capturing the zeitgeist with an artistic interpretation of everybody’s favourite fad, ‘austerity Britain’. They’ve called it Cuts & Grazes, roped in a palette of artists and set an end date at 30th of this month.


Onto the world of film, the curtain comes down on the New British Cinema Quarterly’s run at the Cornerhouse on Tuesday 11th with a screening of brilliantlove, which stars local Manc actor Liam Browne in the role of a besotted character named Manchester. Produced by North Eastern champions of outsider cinema Pinball Films, the film has already been met by independent cinema kudos and an impressive-looking soundtrack includes Sol Seppy, Wild Beasts, David Holmes and James Yorkston.

There’s a seminar worthy of your time on Wednesday 12th (you might want to double-check the date - I've read conflicting info) if you’re prone to a whinge about the frequency of buses. The GMITA (Greater Manchester Integrated Transport Authority) will discuss their forthcoming budget at the Town Hall, but to attend you have to book yourself in by Friday 7th.

Islington Mill bursts into life on Thursday 13th with a trio of alt-rockers in the form of Charles Hayward, Barberos and Gnod.

Over the weekend of 15th and 16th, an alternative political group currently known as ‘Network X’ will hold discussions with the aim of homogenising the activities of similar-minded groups, both local and national. Expect to be involved with planning strategies, defining the shared points of a political ideology and structuring methods of achieving aims. If you’d like to make your voice heard then that’s the time to do it. Contact them for details.


Finally, Chorlton Arts Festival may seem a fair way off in the distant future as yet (19th-30th May), but they’re planning events as I type and will continue to accept submissions for ideas until Monday 17th. Forms can be downloaded here and for more info the contact is Philip.

Words: Ian Pennington