26 former Bristol music venues

With the Fleece still under threat, it seems like an opportune moment to look back at the live music venues Bristol has lost over the years. It’s not all doom and gloom.

We’ve made a few gains too, notably the Exchange and, most recently, the Marble Factory. And let’s not forget that the O2 Academy was originally designed as a ‘superclub’ back in the days when it was asserted that rock was dead and henceforth da kidz would entertain themselves by shovelling down huge quantities of MDMA and waving their arms in the air to repetitive beats all night.

We’re not foolish enough to claim that this is an exhaustive list. Let us know what we’ve missed.

1. The Granary

The roll of honour above the entrance to the Granary club at 32 Welsh Back read like a who’s who of prog, metal, classic rock and punk: Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, Robert Plant, Judas Priest, Thin Lizzy, Ian Dury, Iron Maiden, Dire Straits, Motorhead, John Cougar, Status Quo, Billy Idol, Def Leppard, The Stranglers . . . More than 1500 bands squeezed on to its tiny stage between 1968 and 1988. Originally run as a jazz club by the late Acker Bilk, the Grade II listed Bristol Byzantine building announced its reincarnation as a rock venue on November 15, 1968, with a gig by the great bluesman Muddy Waters. Its director was legendary local capsizer Tony Bullimore. A grungy, sticky-floored dive, with local bikers serving as ‘security’, The Granary couldn’t have been further removed from today’s corporate, elf’n’safety-constrained venues. That’s probably why it remains so widely loved, spawning a book (The Granary Club: The Rock Years, Broadcast Books), website and regular old rocker reunions at the Golden Lion on Gloucester Road. Today, the building has been converted into expensive apartments with a fish restaurant on the ground floor.

2. The Western Star Domino Club

As the name implies, this was a club where West Indian gents would gather to play dominoes. But it also put on live music in the 1980s, with much-loved local acts such as The Losenges being regular visitors. Notably, Erasure played their very first gig here in November 1985, away from the media spotlight. The club was subsequently demolished. In its place is the Staples car park. But, hey, that’s progress.

3. The Locarno/Studio

This venue in Frogmore Street went through many different names. In the late sixties it was home to the Electric Village prog night, which brought Jimi Hendrix to town in 1967. In 1972, you could have seen David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars supported by Thin Lizzy. The Studio/Locarno subsequently played host to the likes of The Clash, Spirit (supported by The Police!), Elvis Costello, Joy Division, Iggy Pop, U2, Kraftwerk, Iron Maiden, Faith No More, Living Color and Ozzy Osbourne. Today, it’s been converted into student flats.

4. Victoria Rooms

The historic Victoria Rooms has had a number of functions over the years. In the 1920s, it was briefly run as a cinema. In the 1960s, several groovy pop happenings took place. The Vic Rooms even formed the backdrop to a promo by bubblegum popsters Edison Lighthouse (see above). Pink Floyd played here three times. 1974 brought Supertramp and Chris De Burgh. Then things went very quiet until the early 1990s, when a brief burst of gigging activity included Suede, INXS, The Wedding Present, The Cocteau Twins, Marillion and Lenny Kravitz. Since then, bugger all.

5. The Corn Exchange

Promoter Freddy Bannister, who went on to organise the massive 1970s Knebworth festivals, brought the top bands of the mid-sixties to the Corn Exchange between 1964 and 1967.  Their ranks included The Yardbirds, Cream, The Who, The Small Faces, The Pretty Things, The Zombies, Them (with Van Morrison), Pink Floyd and Gene Vincent. The Byrds played one of their handful of British dates here in 1965.

6. Yesterdays

A folky club on King Street with strong connection to the Troubadour Club (see below), programmed by Ian (not that one) Anderson. Jonathan Richman played a packed Ashton Court Festival benefit show here.

7. Troubadour Club

Situated in Waterloo Street, Clifton, this was the hub of the late ’60s folk boom in Bristol. Among the acts who played here were John Renbourn, Bert Jansch, The Incredible String Band, Roy Harper and Bristol’s very own Fred Wedlock. Al Stewart, later of Year of the Cat fame, had a residency at the club and immortalised it in song in Clifton in the Rain on his debut album Bedsitter Images. The Troubadour closed in 1971.

8. Top Rank

Positioned handily opposite the old Bridewell Police Station, this place is – you guessed it – yet another bloody student nightclub. It’s gone through a variety of names and is currently called The Syndicate. But back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was the Top Rank. Here you could have seen everyone from prog titans Genesis, King Crimson and Gentle Giant to The Sweet, Cream, Peter Frampton and even the Beach Boys.

9. The Croft

Now yet another Stokes Croft hipster hostelry, The Croft was basically a windowless sweatbox at the back of a pub whose glory years were from 2006 to 2013.  Before that, it was the Bristol Brewhouse and Bristol Comedy Pub. As the Comedy Pub, it played host to local DIY music nights such as Choke and Pull the Strings, whose popularity led to the eventual music takeover. Memorable nights at the Croft included Circulus all dressed up in medieval garb to support Witchcraft, Julian Cope turning up in full biker regalia to DJ at a low-key gig by Krautrock titans Michael Rother and Dieter Moebius, and lady duo Harptallica playing Metallica songs on harps in 2009. Other acts who played here included The Melvins, Viv Albertine, Robin Williamson, Imelda May and Bring Me the Horizon.

10. The Dugout

Best known these days as the club that gave birth to the ‘Bristol Sound’, the Dugout was often used as a live music venue in the late 1960s. Those freaky longhairs of Bristol alternative collective Plastic Dog put on a weekly residency by local prog rock one-hit-wonders (Jig-A-Jig, 1971) East of Eden. But booming audience numbers meant that they soon had to decamp down the hill to the much bigger club that was the Granary.

11. Tiffanys

Formerly known as The Glen, this dance hall at the top of Whiteladies Road was a frugging mecca for generations of Bristolians, renowned for its classy plastic palm trees. In the early ’70s, it was also a live music venue under the decidedly non-PC moniker Boobs (hey – in the 1970s, they could probably have got away with calling it Titties or Jugs). Thin Lizzy, Motorhead and Hawkwind are among the bands known to have played here. Perhaps most extraordinarily, Bob Marley and the Wailers played their first Bristol gig at Boobs in May 1973. Later in the ’70s, Tiffanys had a punk night with live music from the likes of The Clash. Its was later demolished. The Spire private hospital now occupies the site.

12. Berkeley Centre

The Berkeley Centre is now the Berkeley Wetherspoons at the top of Park Street. Upstairs was Carwardines which was very much part of the Bristol live music scene in the 70s and early 80s. Gill Loats, author of Bristol Boys Make More Noise: The Bristol Music Scene 1974-81 (Tangent Books), recalls “Carwardines was a great gig, upstairs from Bristol’s original High Street coffee house the Berkeley Café. The ballroom upstairs with its high ceilings and stained glass dome was a perfect venue for our Bristol boys and some out-of-towners including Paul Young’s Q Tips and a little band called U2.” Ah, that U2 story… you’ll find it all over the interweb and maybe Bono and chums did play the Berkeley Centre/Carwardines, but they definitely played the Trinity Hall. It was an Ashton Court Festival benefit gig in 1979, promoted by Mark Simpson. There were about 75 people in the audience with tickets priced at £1.50 in advance or £1.80 on the door.

13. The Stonehouse

The Stonehouse was the venue at the back of the Bunch of Grapes pub on Newfoundland Road near The Western Star Domino Club. It was mainly a folk music venue, but in its later years also staged gigs by Bristol’s practitioners of punk and new wave. This is where you might go to see The Untouchables, Essential Bop, The X-Certs or The Stingrays. There is an urban myth that the Bunch of Grapes/Stonehouse was a listed building and was demolished ‘by mistake’ in the development of the bottom of the M32 in the early 80s. Hey, these things happen, and look what we got instead of a characterful pub and quirky live music venue – The Spectrum Building.

14. The Bristol Bridge Inn

Generations of pub rock bands paid their dues at the Bristol Bridge Inn on St Nicholas Street at the top of the steps leading from Baldwin Street to St Nick’s Market. It also staged occasional gigs by indie bands including a bunch of schoolboys called The Coltranes who a few years later had evolved into one of Bristol’s finest acts – Strangelove. Various cafes and shops have inherited the site, most recently Obento Japanese restaurant.

15. The Dockland Settlement

Mostly reggae and sound systems here, but Ted Milton’s Blurt were among the live music acts.

16. Hope Chapel

This was mainly a forum for local acts, including avant-gardists the Startled Insects, who played a sold-out Ashton Court Festival benefit show on the same night as Live Aid. Pere Ubu’s David Thomas and Blurt’s Ted Milton once did a double act here.

17. Bristol Exhibition Centre 

Something of a punk haven. The Clash played here in their White Riot pomp. The weirdest night was when the Stranglers failed to turn up (because one of them had been injured in a gig/fight the previous night) and local bands stepped into the breach. The disgruntled crowd responded by… fighting each other. On a more sedate note, the Exhibition Centre also played host to a number of pre-WOMAD world music and food festivals.

18. The Albert Inn

This Bedminster watering hole was the most unlikely of Bristol pubs to acquire a national and international reputation as a jazz venue, despite being small, shabby and run by the pathologically grumpy Ian Storrer (still promoting great gigs at Hen & Chicken).

19. The Cooler

A live music venue on Park Street between 2006 and 2012, The Cooler staged memorable shows by the likes of The xx, Wolf People, Marina and the Diamonds, Vintage Trouble, Jim Jones Revue, Earth and Acid Mothers Temple. It’s now the Forty Eight – yet another student nightclub.

20. The Junction

Back in the mid-noughties, The Junction on Stokes Croft was a haven of punk, metal, noise and experimental rock. Run by a big-hearted Lancastrian skinhead nurse with a psychedelic twinkle in his eye, it was a vital incubator of local bands, proudly flying the freak flag in an area that was rapidly getting more commercial. When the (frankly inevitable) financial meltdown came, a series of benefit gigs and compilation albums showed what The Junction meant to people but it was too late to stop it from closing in 2007. Now a conventional decks ‘n’ pizzas joint, it smells better but its soul is somewhere else.

21. Metropolis

This Grade II listed mock-renaissance building certainly has some history. It was a cinema (The Plaza, later The Academy) between 1914 and 1955, then became a church and, subsequently, a pub. In 1995, it reopened as the Jesters Comedy Club, mutating into the Metropolis in 2008. The Wurzels, The Fall, The Zombies, Brand New Heavies, Efterklang and Arrested Development were among the bands to play here before it closed in 2012. There were plans to turn it into a mosque a couple of years ago, but today the building remains abandoned and empty.

22. The Mauretania

Another Grade II listed venue, The Mauretania at the bottom of Park Street used to stage live music shows for a while. Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist Zakk Wylde played a low-key gig here with his band Pride and Glory in the early 90s. Live music was curtailed in 1994.

23. The Bamboo Club 

Opened in 1966 by that Tony Bullimore fella, The Bamboo in St Paul Street was the first club to cater for Bristol’s West Indian immigrant community. It also nurtured local reggae outfits Talisman and Black Roots. Bullimore attracted plenty of top acts, including Desmond Dekker and, most famously, Bob Marley and the Wailers, who played the Bamboo not long after their Boobs show. Later, punks rubbed shoulders with the dreads. The club burned down in 1977, shortly before a combo named the Sex Pistols were booked to play on December 21.

24. The Tropic Club 

A Grade II listed little dive in Hepburn Road off Stokes Croft, the Tropic was run by the Burgess family, who are now best known for the Lakota Club. Its heyday was the mid-80s, when you could have seen the likes of Pulp, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Napalm Death, Half Man Half Biscuit and, erm, Dumpy’s Rusty Nuts at close quarters. Local bands such as indie poppers The Flatmates and thrashy herberts The Herb Garden also played here.

25. The Demolition Diner 

Way back before Stokes Croft filled up with hipsters and trustafarians, it was dark, threatening and really rather good fun. At the junction of Ashley Road and Cheltenham Road sat the Full Marks radical bookshop. When this closed in the early 1980s, the building was squatted and reopened as the Demolition Diner, which had film nights, political events and live music – a little like The Cube, only much, much scuzzier. The riotous gigs featured such local crusty punk titans as Disorder and Lunatic Fringe. You always had to be alert to the danger of being slam-danced onto some junkie’s discarded needle. Ah, happy days. Today the Demolition Diner has been, er, demolished. A Salvation Army charity shop sits in its place.

26. Seymour’s Family Club

Probably Bristol’s weirdest live music venue, Seymour’s in St. Philips was indeed a family-run club. It was eventually razed to the ground and replaced by flats. Our man Tony Benjamin remembers it as “the only place I’ve ever been to with widescreen video coverage of the skittles alley and little kids running round till closing time. The music room was like something abandoned at a Butlins in the ’60s, with one wall devoted to the Cliff Richard Fan Club (Mrs S was the convenor of the Bristol chapter, I believe) and covered in badly drawn pencil sketches of the great man. One great night was when Jo Swann’s outfit Ilya did a full production album launch on the velvet-lined stage; another was a random Qujunktions thing involving Bucky, SJ Esau and that guy who used to do John The Revelator while running around the room.”

List compiled by Robin Askew, Laura Williams, Tony Benjamin, Adam Burrows, Dave Higgitt and Richard Jones