Your AfterDark bars and clubs bulletin
A few years ago Oldham Street had a venue called Bar Code, on the site where we now have Joe's Bar. The name's now moved across town to the unrelated Barcode Bar & Clubroom at Albion Mill, Albion Street. It launched on Friday 24th for the VIPs (and our invite somehow got lost, WTF?) and if the location doesn't strike a chord, it's in the previously dormant premises that was Aqua Bar. All we need now is for the former House 9 to get appropriated by an entrepreneur and we'll have the Locks bookended by two new venues. Barcode's musical remit is firing volleys at the students and includes indie, dance, R'n'B, etc. Personally, if we were aiming our bar at students, we would have launched in September. June's not your ideal time when most of them have gone home already.
Something altogether more exclusive now, with the opening earlier in the month of Australasia, the latest cocktail bar/restaurant from Living Ventures. This basement venue is a little more salubrious that most of its kind. Well it is underneath Spinningfields. Once you spot the triangular glass entrance it's down and effectively underneath the new Armani store to then negotiate your way past security and into an environment that is dominated by dining tables and earthy, natural tones. The wine list is on an iPad, the menu features Pacific Rim and Australian cooking and a 3am licence on Friday and Saturday is supported by a DJ. Is it a DJ type of venue though? It feels too much like a restaurant, to be blunt. Customer reviews were glowing in the opening week, but a month later and the executive chef has left and the staff are said to be in need of more training. All of that can be addressed though. It remains a rather gorgeous venue, which the city has needed after Ithaca's demise.
We mentioned in the last news that Jackson's Warehouse had closed down. It has now reopened as Jackson's Retro Bar, a gay friendly venue channeling 60's and 70's influences. We've mentioned before that gay friendly venues have a hard time outside of the Village (such as The Edge and The No.1 Club), but you have to admire the new owners for trying to break away from Canal Street's well-trodden ground.
It's not all about the shiny and new. We've also had a lumbering dinosaur finally admit defeat, keel over and start it's journey to become a fossil. It was perhaps inevitable after the closure of Opus that Pure would follow, and it has. These venues that hold a four figure sum of people are just unsustainable in the economic climate, but when you're a huge venue that just plays generic, populist music to a crowd without strongly define tastes, you always run the risk that your crowd might mature, change or just get bored and move on. The owners are hoping to scale down the concept and reopen a smaller venue in the future, while The Printworks are expected to break up Pure into two or three more manageable units.
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