Another great gig from the Future Noise boys. All of the bands were new to me (or had new members amongst them at least).
Before the show started, before the venue had even opened up for business, me and Patchie showed up in Manchester, mainly because there was not much for us to do in Liverpool to kill time (apart from maybe walk about the city centre in the sunshine) and we have a bit of a ritual now before gigs of parking the car up and wandering around by the venue and checking the area out. It's just as well that we did so on this occasion - we started walking our way down the roadside by the Star & Garter - an old (and derelict looking) detached pub which is situated all on its own, smack-dab in the middle of Manchester's red-light district - and we happened upon 3 guys dressed in black who were sat on some grassland by the edge of a busy street. They were just sat with nothing to do, 3 of them on their own, along with some traveling gear comprising of assorted guitar cases and backpacks.
Turns out that these guys were GLOOMY SUNDAY, the last band playing this night's gig, they had flown in from Sweden only to get to the venue and find no one there to let them in. They'd been in town since 9am that day (we met them at about half 4 in the afternoon) and in the meantime they had pretty much been waiting outside the venue in the baking sun, sitting around and getting burned. No one there to meet them, no one there to greet them.
And then Thee Claw turns the corner to find a Scandinavian rock band sitting about looking desolate and bored. So what do we do? We do what any decent person would do - no, *Should* do - we put their bags and guitars in the back of our car and took the guys down to the local pub and got them some beer until we could arrange for someone to come to open the venue so the guys could get in their and soundcheck.
See, this is pretty much what Thee Claw does best. We turn up early and buy stranded band members beer. Lucky stroke. Actually, they saved us an unmemorable journey to the usual places along the lane, all we had plans of doing was walking to a rock club and sitting about listening to Venom on the jukebox. The Gloomy Sunday guys (3 out of 4 of them) were cool, in spite of the sunburn, we spent an hour or so with them in an Irish pub talking about traveling and future plans. The usual stuff when you first meet someone and go to the nearest bar I guess!
I'll leave it to Patchie to serve up a fantastical drunken gig review. After all, he somehow does that kind of thing much better than I tend to.
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