Pub Closures-The Gransmoor, Openshaw, Manchester

I was thinking about pub closures today and remembered the Gransmoor on Ashton Old Road in Manchester. Last time I passed it was a secondhand fridge and washing machine shop. Sad as it was a great old Victorian place.

Then I started thinking of some of the bands we used to see there when we were in our teens. Manchester pubs and clubs were the launch pad for many great bands, I suppose they just use the internet these days which is a shame as so many small atmospheric venues and pubs are no more.

One band that I remember from the late seventies, and I was introduced to them by my cousin Vinny in the Gransmoor, was Gammer. The last incarnation of Gammer's original band I saw was Gammer and His Familiars at the old Band on the Wall in Manchester in the early eighties. Happy daze!

So this post has really just become a plug for Norman Gammer. I've posted this before but eh, if something's good..





  

Focus-Hocus Pocus

The sixties was the bizarre decade in my view, where too many musicians thought they were changing the world and contributing to 'the revolution'. In the same way that every Scouser claims to have been to school with one of the Beatles, every social commentator seems to think that the whole of the UK lived through a haze of pot smoke in Afghan coats listening to Jimi Hendrix in the sixties. In reality the best sellers in the charts in the '60s were Rolf Harris and Englebert Humperdinck.

So I think the '70s were quite refreshing. Yes, you had prog-rock which was pretty self-indulgent at times, but you had the pyre entrtainment too of glam-rock and bands like Sweet, T Rex, Sparks and many others. The '70s also saw the emergence of the greats like Roxy Music and, thankfully, punk rock.

But the joy of the 1970s was that it  was a decade that didn't take itself anywhere near as seriously as the 1960s had. A fine example of that being Dutch band Focus:
                                                                                                              


Then, for the lads who remember watching Gammer at The Gransmoor on Ashton Old Road, Openshaw here is Gammer with his very own version from about ten years ago:

Gammer and His Familiars

There used to be a great old Victorian pub in Openshaw, Manchester called the Gransmoor. It is now no more, another victim of exorbitant taxes, the smoking ban and cheap supermarket booze. But in the late 70s, like so many pubs in Manchester and elsewhere, the place was a venue for local bands. It was here, around 1977, slightly underage, I discovered Gammer, later incarnated as Gammer and His Familiars. I last saw him at the Band on the Wall in about 1980.

Here he is in 1982: