The New Adelphi - It’s come a long way, baby

The Crow’s Nest, a music column by Russ Litten

The New Adelphi Club is now the proud recipient of the Music Week Annual Award for Grassroots Venue of the Year. It’s a worthy accolade and one perhaps long overdue. The welcome news of this recognition prompted me to recall several of the notable nights I have spent down De Grey Street over the years.

The Gargoyles

The first ever gig I attended at The Adelphi. I’d heard all about the Gargoyles through their Housemartins connection and was already familiar with their legendary songs featured on the Mrs Two Dinners album. Seeing them live was a totally different deal.

The Gargoyles were like a psychobilly version of Half Man Half Biscuit, but with an added sense of surreal theatrics courtesy of their much-missed genius frontman Eddie Smith. There was always a slight sense of performance art about The Gargoyles. One of their early gigs featured an anarchist puppet show. Eddie would frequently hold seances on stage, or strip naked and curl up inside a drum case.

Gargoyles gigs were usually chaotic, sometimes edgy, always hilarious.

Happy Mondays

The Mondays played a few times between the releases of their first and second albums in the late eighties. The first occasion I saw them, I had actually gone to see the support band, The Company, but stuck around for this strange looking bunch of Mancs.

Legend has it that Jacko came downstairs one afternoon to find the band all sat around waiting to soundcheck, and mistook them for a bunch of vagrants who had wandered in off the street. It was only when he had ushered them out, returned upstairs and glanced out of the window and saw them all huddled in a vehicle marked ‘SALFORD VAN HIRE’ that he realised they were actually that night’s band.

The first time they played there was about 15 people there. I wandered into the gents to find the bass player getting his head flushed under a tap by the tour manager to wake him up. When they actually got on stage, they sounded like The Fatback Band playing Fall covers.

Bez hammered away on a wooden block, like a human metronome in flares. Shaun Ryder bashed a floor tom with a maraca whilst struggling to take his anorak off. I’d never seen anything like them. They played again a few months later when they released Bummed and the place was packed. By this point, they had evolved into a rawer version of the grubby scallywag groove machine they eventually became.

The Music Week Annual Awards

The La’s

Quite simply one of the most magical nights I’ve ever spent in any venue anywhere. I had no idea who The La’s where when I wandered into The Adelphi one Bank Holiday Monday. I’d only popped in to help my pal spend his winnings on a horse that had romped in at generous odds that afternoon.

The back room was crammed with excitable Scousers, all proclaiming the brilliance of this new band they followed over the Pennines. We went through to have a look. The La’s came on and basically did that classic first album from start to finish. I thought they were playing covers from the sixties. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a band so focussed, so intense, so absolutely on it as The La’s were that night.

I’d only dropped in for a quick pint. I left with my heart and head ringing, convinced I’d seen the new Beatles.

Hamill on Trial

The stage name for Ed Hamill, a one man blur of furious alt-folk/punk rantings, personal anecdotes and confessional stand up comedy. Very political, a scabrous sense of humour, and armed with an acoustic guitar that sounds like a chainsaw. By turns tender, vicious, hilarious and thought-provoking, Hamill On Trial is a night out you really should experience.

He’s a regular Adelphi visitor, so keep an eye out. 

The New Adelphi Club

Benefits

The last gig I saw at The Adelphi was Teeside architects of furious noise, Benefits. Prior to this, I thought they were just one fella and a backing track.

The four-piece band assembled on a damp Wednesday night in front of 50 or more curious heads proceeded to put in a exhilarating sonic shift. The frontman is an intense performer, roaring into a hurricane of static and electronic feedback, eyeball to eyeball with the audience, feeding off the tension and nerves. Henry Rollins meets The Aphex Twin round the back of a flat-roof pub for a straightener.

Benefits are a great example of a bold and brave new band coming up through the grassroots circuit. The singer came straight off stage at the end of the set and stood at the bar. He told me they’d all took the week off work to come on tour, zig-zagging the country, spreading the word. I bought a T-shirt to try and help them get to Brighton.

Kaiser Chiefs at The Adelphi. Picture by Ian Rook

There have been many more legendary Adelphi gigs, some of which I attended, some I still regret missing - famous names like Radiohead, My Bloody Valentine, The Fall, Oasis, Pulp, Pavement, Primal Scream, Kaiser Chiefs, Idles and more obscure artists such as SE Rogie, Thomas Truax and The Lovely Eggs. And, of course, the artists who are the very reason for The Adelphi’s existence - local heroes such as Salako, Fonda 500, 3-Action, the Red Guitars, Kingmaker, Pink Noise, Cheidu Oraka, Bunkerpop, Life, Low Hummer, Bedroom. The list goes on and on.

Right now, The Adelphi has never been in safer hands. The indefatigable Paul Sarel is constantly putting on interesting original music and encouraging raw talent within the community at every turn. As long as those beer-stained bricks are still standing, there will always be home in Hull for wide-eyed dreamers and the eager makers of righteous noise.

The New Adelphi Club. It’s come a long way, baby. And longer may it run.