Believe it or not, bands like The Beatles and The Sex
Pistols used to play in Wakefield - bands that shaped twentieth century society
as much as Presidents and Prime Ministers. Of course this was in an era before
multi-national promotion agencies monopolised the gig circuit with generic,
over-priced, square rooms, but still, if The Beatles announced that they were
playing the ABC Cinema, which would obviously require multiple and variable resurrections,
I'd chop off my own arm if it meant I would be guaranteed ticket.
When I decided to go to university I picked Manchester, not for any
particular academic reasons, moreover because I had grown up as a fan of Oasis
and then matured through The Stone Roses, before arriving at The Smiths. Manchester however, in the
early noughties, turned into a parody of itself. Most bands were fully equipped
with a simian-looking vocalist, a complete set of Parkas and a nasal twang, yet
lacked any discernable talent. One example were The Young Offenders Institute,
who both looked and sounded like the cast of Shameless aping Oasis. Meanwhile
on the other side of the Pennines everything
seemed alive.
In 2004 Leeds was vibrant for the first time in years and
Wakefield
actually had a few bands that were receiving national acclaim – namely The
Cribs and The Blueskins. Despite this there were very few venues in Wakefield for our own band
to play, or clubs that represented our music tastes; there was nowhere that did
both. Basic DIY; if no-one else is going to do it then do it yourself, which we
did on July 23rd 2004 at the now defunct Escobar.
The bar was hired out by Chris Morse, who played bass in
the same band as me, as it was his birthday and we needed a gig. In truth our
gig, if memory serves me right, was pretty shoddy (although in our defence it
was our very first gig), but the owners were suitably impressed with our
intrepid organisational skills and asked us, along with a couple of others, to
promote a night at the bar on a weekly basis. We called it Louder Than Bombs
for no other reason than it sounded like a good name.
Usually we supplied the entertainment by playing records
(Chris had already run a clubnight in Plymouth
while at university and he supplied the majority of the vinyl) but in order to
get more punters through the door we began putting bands on. Usually it was
free in, or occasionally we would charge a couple of quid in, but money was
never an aspiration - we just wanted to put together a night that we’d be happy
to go to ourselves. We had someone designing flyers, someone else taking
pictures and at any time you could find one of half-a-dozen different people
working on the door. It was ramshackle, laissez-faire and fun.
Some time during the Christmas of 2005 Dan Barber, who
took photos for Louder Than Bombs, played us a band from Sheffield
that a friend had recommended to him. I'd seen them pop up on a few internet
forums and disregarded them due to their terrible name (Arctic Monkeys), but it
was blatantly obvious that they were going to be huge from the first moment we
listened to them. With bands like The Libertines on the wane there was a gap
for a new group to garner teenager fervour and adolescent adoration. We were
desperate to book them, especially when we realised they lived just 27 miles
down the M1 motorway in Sheffield. This was a
while before anyone had built up any contacts in the music industry so getting
hold of a contact number required a fair bit of detective work, and then a fair
bit of persuasion was required to book a band that were beginning to gain a
fanatic following.
In the end their manager, Geoff Barradale, gave in to my
persistence and a few weeks before the band began receiving national acclaim we
booked them to play the tiny Escobar venue. Some of my main recollections from
the evening of April 4th 2005 included meeting the young couple who
had travelled all the way from Aberdeen for the gig and the footprints marked
on the ceiling due to the excessive crowd surfing (the image of footprints on
the ceiling is regularly recalled by attendees and even by the Arctic Monkeys
themselves in interviews and biographies).
In the following couple of years we promoted gigs in
Leeds and London
as well as gruelling weekend long festivals at Escobar with promoters Rich
Short and Chris Phelan (who also joined us on a “full time” basis). I could
probably write an entire book on all the stories and scrapes that followed us
around in those days. When myself, Morse and Phelan moved to Leeds
our house was dubbed “Louder Than Bombs Towers” and our housewarming party
ended up in the Evening Post.
Before we began promoting it seemed to me that the Wakefield music scene was
fragmented. A few years earlier there had been McDermott’s on Cheapside
that had created a similar camaraderie amongst the bands in the city, but many
people, including myself, had missed out on this. Now we had somewhere to go
that seemed like Cheers, where
everyone knew your name! Looking at old photographs of the crowd at many gigs
it is incredible to see how many people were all part of the same group of
friends. Bands like Last Gang, The Pigeon Detectives, The Labels, The Old
House, The Research, Middleman, The Spills and many more all became regulars
both on and off the stage.
A couple of years later a handful of releases came out on
Louder Than Bombs Records, with Rob Dee working as part of this (Rob Dee would
later rename his vinyl output Philophobia Records). It was also in the
following years that Rob Dee and Benjamin Trout started the Rhubarb Bomb
fanzine.
A lot of the current crop from the Wakefield music scene spent time at Escobar
and Louder Than Bombs. It always had to come to an end at some point but it’s
just a shame that a new venue hasn’t come along a captured the crowd in the
same way. The scene is still healthy, but it misses a focal point.
Stephen Vigors
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