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Sunday, July 28th, 2013
Peace love and good vibes open mic night with Chris Ingram. £1 Tequila!!
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Sunday, July 21st, 2013
Born with angelic good looks and a voice from heaven Alx Green is fast becoming Telford’s most regular host ever. If you haven’t seen this god of a man yet join us tonight for Open Mic shenanigans and £1 tequila madness. If you are lucky enough he might just dedicate a song to you. Live music starts about 9pm. Get there early for a slot.
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Sunday, June 30th, 2013
For those of you unfortunate enough to miss out on this years Glastonbury and bands like The Rolling Stones, Arctic Monkeys, Nick Cave, Elvis Costello amongst numerous others, then here is the next best thing. Open Mic featuring artists such as Mark Henderson, Thor, and Chris. You can even join in and play songs from your favourite festival appearances. Free Entry and £1 tequila. Much cheaper than a warm can of larger in some muddy tent!!
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Sunday, June 23rd, 2013
Hosting open mic this week is the peace, love and good vibes ambassador Chris Ingram. Help him fight the good fight by coming along and singing your song. Open mic starts around 8pm. Free Entry and £1 Tequila… that’s good vibes!!
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Sunday, June 16th, 2013
Sunday 16th June marks the end of the Chester Rocks pop festival on the racecourse. As our city bids to become the 2017 ‘City of Culture’ we are truly blessed to have a festival of this magnitude and insight on our doorstep.
Jessie J-Cloth is due off stage about ten, and we would like to invite you all to come on down and listen to some rock. With a band that PLAY guitar, bass and drums.
We’re going to have an open mic night first. Open mic at Telfords means that you play and sing, we don’t allow backing tapes, we don’t have auto tune, and if you wish to mime, that’s fine, but no noise will come out of the speakers.
First we must own up to something. We’ve booked Rusty Mahone to host the night. Rusty is an outspoken, short arsed fat man who has dared to say that ‘Chester Rocks’ actually doesn’t. (read his comments here) and hence, we deeply regret booking him, but his contract is a tough one to get out of, and we’re frankly a bit stuck.
(Rusty is an accordionist who once lent his box to Rolf Harris for the night. He was 35 at the time)
Actually, Rusty has played with bands that you might have heard of if you’re older than twelve, and does a good job assembling the diverse talent that blesses our open mic night into a coherent show.
Rusty’s ‘Meatloaf’ tribute with his accordion led power trio ‘The Bay City Cheese Rollers’ has become the stuff of legend. It just goes to show, you don’t need guitars
It happened here on an open mic sunday, and was only recorded as it happened, not beforehand
To end the night we have Warrington’s best kept secret- ‘The Andy Bennett Band’. They smoke fags and stuff, drink beer and snort at boybands. Their amps go up to TWELVE, and they’re not ashamed to sweat as they play.They won’t woo you with choreography and production, they will seduce you with raw guitar, animal drums and throbbing bass. They play ‘The Who’, and you understand why Townsend smashed his guitar. Their takes on Hendrix are both authentic and evocative of what could have been at the same time.
Every note you hear is played by them, created fresh just for tonight, just for you.
Before that, we have open mic with about ten slots available. Our nights are always busy, and given Rusty’s gravitational field, this one will be busier than usual, so if you do want to perform, we ask that you arrive by 8 o’clock (7.30 if you have gear to go on stage). The list will ‘close’ at 8.30. Open mic acts get three songs or 15 minutes (whichever is shorter) to get on stage, perform and clear the stage
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Sunday, June 9th, 2013
Rock and or Roll with this weeks open mic hosted by 60′s throwback Banjo. Slots available from 8pm. £1 Tequila just to make Monday even more fun!
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Sunday, June 2nd, 2013
The wonderful Sarah Deboe hosts this weeks open mic. To take part turn up around 8pm and find her wondering the bar area pen in hand, ready to slot you in.
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Sunday, May 26th, 2013
Open mic antics with Telford’s legend Mark bringing his unique folk/jazz/blues stylings to the show. Bring your instruments and best singing voice and join in the fun.
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Sunday, May 19th, 2013
Aaaaaahhhhhh Alx my hero!! Open Mic starts from 9pm. Be there early for a slot.
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Sunday, May 12th, 2013
Chester’s longest running open mic is hosted by Rob Vincent, who’s making a special trip across the Mersy to be joined by all on the Telford’s stage. Live music starts at 9pm.
If there’s a lot of half-finished, semi-fulfilled, vaguely unsatisfying music around these days – songs that say nothing to you about your life – then maybe it’s because the people who make it haven’t lived much of a life themselves.
Not so in the case of Robert Vincent, the searingly honest Liverpool singer-songwriter whose mix of folk, rock and country is like a Mersey Van Morrison or a Scouse Springsteen.
Born into a house that rang to the sounds of Johnny Cash, The Beatles and Pink Floyd, Robert knew before he was five years old that he wanted to be a musician. When he became a father at 17 he had to balance the hard graft of life in a working band with the responsibility of providing for a family. He’s seen setbacks and false dawns, he’s come near to success only to have it snatched away, but he’s never lost his faith in his music. And now that faith is coming good.
“I’ve done the whole thing of trying to be what people want me to be,” Rob explains in his warm and good-humoured Scouse drawl, “And in the end I just thought I’ve had enough of this. The songs I’ve written now, some of them sound like Johnny Cash and some of them like 50s rock’n’roll – but they’re what *I* wanted to write. And the funny thing is, the more honest I am the better people like it.”
The result is Rob’s debut album ‘Life In Easy Steps’: a set of songs that are alternately as open and empathic as ‘Second Chance’, and as raw and righteous as ‘Riots Cry’ – all held together by a singular lyrical vision and a voice that can soothe, comfort or tear down a wall. In a sea of plastic pop, this is real rock and roll.
“There’s no smoke and mirrors about it,” Rob says with a smile. “It’s like a good old fashioned country record. Sing what you mean – and sing it like you mean it.”
It all goes back to that house in Crosby, north Liverpool where, alongside country and The Beatles, his older brothers initiated him into the mysteries of Pink Floyd. ‘Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’ taught young Rob that a song could be cosmic and mystical – but it had to be a proper song too. He became fascinated with lyrics. “It wasn’t just what Roger Waters wrote but why he wrote it,” he says. “That really interested me as a kid. And then I started meddling with the guitar…”
Rob left school at 16 to dabble in local bands, growing mildly frustrated that his mates only wanted to play standards and not write their own songs. A job as a roadie for a covers band earned him a few quid and a chance to get up and sing a couple of numbers – ‘All Right Now’ and the inevitable ‘Wish You Were Here’. “You’ll give anything to get up and have a go at that age,” Rob recalls.
Then his girlfriend became pregnant. “It was a massive, massive thing to happen when you’re so young,” he admits.
For a while music had to take second fiddle to providing for the baby. He worked in catering jobs and even as an Estate Agent – but there was always a band too.
One of them, a group called Boa, won Rob the chance to represent Liverpool at a festival marking 50 Years of Rock’n’Roll in Memphis in 2004 and to record at Sun Studios, Sam Phillips’s fabled Birthplace of Rock’n’Roll. But just as Boa seemed about to happen the band fell apart. “After that,” Rob says, “I thought, I’m doing my own thing from now on.”
By 2007 he promised himself he’d never be left high and dry again. His band ‘Night Parade’ recorded a debut album but management wrangles kept it from being released. More setbacks, more refusal to give in. But Rob was now in the rhythm of writing his own songs and more convinced than ever that he knew what he was doing – and why he was doing it. He’d also started working with one Pete Smith, Grammy award winning co-producer of Sting’s ‘Dream Of The Blue Turtles’. Together they recorded ’Life In Easy Steps in Brighton.
The years of hard work put grit and insight in these songs by an artist who’s still barely in his thirties. When you’ve worked in a band for four or five years and the rug gets pulled, it can feel like you’re left with nothing, he thinks. But that’s not really the case. You’ve got all that experience, that practice. It toughens you up and focuses you. You find you can write about people as they are – the good and the bad.
So Rob Vincent’s songs are compassionate and perceptive. There’s a wild evocation of the fact that every life is lived in the eye of a storm on the blues-blazing ‘Riots Cry’, and forgiveness for former friends who’ve let you down in ‘How Do You Sleep’. There’s an elegy for the wasted opportunities of a dead relationship, where your partner can’t change, in the plangent, Lennonesque ‘Second Chance’.
And he’s not frightened of getting a little cosmic either. The intimate, gently strummed ‘Stars’ takes that familiar spine-chilling moment when you look up into the vastness of the night sky and realise your insignificance, and then flips it. We might be tiny, the song says, but what matters is what we are to one another. “I’ll be here in the light of the stars,” sings Rob, and in the end that’s all that matters.
“Having a kid so young gave me a way of looking at how people act towards each other, especially with children,” he explains. “There’s a song on the album called ‘Heaven Knows’ that wonders if maybe we were happier when we had more social boundaries, not fewer. I’m not religious but you wonder if some things – not everything, but some things – might have been a bit better in the days when we all went to church on a Sunday, dealt with all the grief and misery of the week, and came out feeling better. I think people are missing those boundaries.”
“The record is about trying to be the best person you can possibly be,” he continues, “And I think that’s what most people want from themselves. You want to be a better human being. I write from the point of view of being a dad, and worrying about the world my kid is growing up in. The world focuses so much on the individual – iPhone, iPad, I, I, me, me all the time – and there’s something unhealthy about it. We feel cut off from other people. But if music is good at anything, it’s reconnecting us.”
Rob’s mum likes to remind him of a tale from when he was perhaps four years old. They’d got off a train in comfortable Freshfield near Southport, where footballers and businessmen reside in spacious houses near the woods and the beach. Little Rob pointed to one of the big houses. See that, mum? he said. When I’m a rich rock star I’ll buy you one of those.
“Daft, isn’t it?” he says, laughing. “I was only four. But the thing is, I didn’t really want to be rich. I just never, ever wanted to do anything else but this. It’s been hard work getting here but I’ve never, ever wanted to pack it in. I know what I’m here for – to do this. It’s always been music for me. One hundred per cent.”
Written by editor of Q magazine, Andrew Harrison…
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Sunday, May 5th, 2013
This Super Sunday’s Open Mic is hosted by Country & Bluegrass loving Tom Durkin. Get down early for a slot and lets have a hoe down!! Live music starts at 9pm.
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Sunday, April 28th, 2013
A very special host for you this Sunday… All the way from Toronto, Canada it’s Darren Eedens…
Darren Eedens is a full time banjo/ guitar picker… in the bluegrass folk, roots, rockabilly styles … both on the road and in the studio
Currently playing solo as well as for MIKEY CHUCK RIVERS, THE OLD SALTS, MIDWAY AFTER DARK, LILY FROST and more.
An old soul with the imagination of a child, darren eedens tells stories, bends truths, and creates upbeat rhythmic tracks with hauntingly morbid lyrics. With his many influences ranging from the folk and bluegrass pickers of the past, he uses his unique and powerful voice to captivate anyone within earshot. With an unmatched live energy, he shares his views on life and more often death, shedding a beautiful light on the tragic tale. Standing on tables belting out words beyond his years, audiences are silent, only adding the necessary stomp clamps to many of the entirely acoustic pieces. You can catch darren eedens playing hard and fast, with his banjo, guitar and mandolin as his weapons of choice, sometimes using his voice as his only instrument. It is not uncommon to find darren belting lyrics out at the top of his lungs, standing on top of bars, tables and chairs. He breaks any barriers that one would expect to find when attending a show to see a solo act. His energy is unmatched and from the first note picked literally has the entire audience silent and yet ready for a party.
Read more… »
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Sunday, April 14th, 2013
Chester’s finest and longest running open mic sessions, this week hosted by Jon Parry.
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Sunday, April 7th, 2013
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Sunday, March 31st, 2013
This year, Easter Sunday happens to coincide with Rusty Mahone hosting our open mic night.
Wow! Anyone would think we plan these things! Rusty has a lot of plans for this night, including the debut of his new project ‘The Green Smoke Hokum Band’ and a blistering set from Motion Empire to let you dance yourselves into Bank Holiday Monday.
Open mic slots are available too with registration closing early at 8.30- although Rusty is good at fitting in late comers. Feel free to contact Rusty via https://www.facebook.com/mahonesofchester if you want to book a spot in advance. There will, unusually be a drum kit available along with limited back-line, and sets will be three songs or 15 minutes- whichever is shorter.
Live music from 8.30 until 11.30 with real ale. tequila and banter! Why on earth would you stay in?
Not very long ago a man was sat up the dusty end of Chester Library when, suddenly a book fell on his head. It vanished into his pocket and the man left the library. The book was old and told stories of Chester. Specifically it was about Bryn Mullhanon, rouge, chancer, brewer and allegedly, smuggler.
These stories have not been aired for many years, but they tell of love, danger and battles with the excise men. It tells the story of the Beeston Dragon, and Bryn’s last stand when ‘The Bootle Boys’ as the Excise’s thugs were known, attempted to destroy the brewery under the castle. Bryn died, but the Brewery was saved.
It tells of a racy inter-county wedding that only happened after a dangerous elopment- the girls dress was found afterwards and people thought that the Dragon had eaten her. The Dragon really existed- it was a preserved elephants head on a cart, and it looked fearsome as it spouted flame from the top of the hill. It stank too, but it did keep people’s noses out of the castle.
Such Epic Mythology must be heard, so in a mysterious crypt under one of Chester’s finest drinking dens The Green Smoke Hokum Band was formed. Four musicians assembled. Four muso’s of Pedigree. Chums for a month and destined now, before your eyes, to bring the real History of Cheshire to life.
The Incredible String Band, Whitesnake, Mansun, Barclay James Harvest, Tower Struck Down, Peter Kaye, Rolf Harris, The Family Mahone. Thea Gilmore.
Not a bad festival line up, but that’s just a quick list of people who have worked with members of this self dubbed ‘stupor group’
Fluff on fiddle, Pip on bass, Andy on percussion and Rusty on accordion and guitar provide the heartache and fireworks pre-requisite for such a grandiose project.
Expect gypsy-jazz, punk attitude and anthems, madchester dance rhythms, stirring marches and heart rending ballads that will leave you singing along and believing every bit of the story.
It is just possible that a 1/12 scale balsa wood model of Beeston Castle may descend into the audience.
Motion Empire a 3 piece band from the Chester area, combine Rock and indie elements perfectly, with the upbeat catchy melodies of indie music and the big riffs of the rock world. The blend of alternative rock and indie rock sound comes from Ben Lee on guitar and vocals, John Hall on bass and Mark French on drums and vocals, all combining to make one awesome wall of energy and sound.
The band has gradually expanded their sound to include a variety of genres, and are continuously expanding their song repertoire with a mixture of amazing originals and creative covers.
“An indie / alternative 3 piece from Chester, with strong musicality and rhythmic drive”
-Wirral Festival of firsts
“A fresh face on the alternative rock scene, motion empire present us with a blend of indie rock and post 90′s alt rock. FFO: PLACEBO, SMASHING PUMPKINS”
-Exes & Crosses
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Sunday, March 24th, 2013
Heidi has been writing and gigging for ten years has and has amassed over 40 songs, written on guitar and piano. Heidi plays the violin and flute parts heard on her tracks. Though a fan of the 1950’s aesthetic, her attitudes embody those of the modern, free-thinking, outspoken woman. Fiercely individual, her personality can be felt through her witty lyrics and unusual guitar-playing style which has brought her highly deserved recognition as a BBC Introducing pick for 2013.
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Sunday, March 17th, 2013
Another acoustic session from lady’s man Alx Green. Young, handsome and with a great voice to back it all up. Come and show us what your made of… kicks off around 9pm.
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Sunday, March 10th, 2013
Beardy Weirdy guitarist Depo from Shy & The fight fame hosts this weeks open mic night. Kicks off around 9 pm… Be there early for a slot.
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Sunday, March 3rd, 2013
50% of Me & Deboe, Mercy Elise hosts this weeks open mic session. Come down and join this ecelecticly diverse singer songwriter whose beautiful vocals will insipre anyone to get up and have a go. Free entry – free stage.
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Sunday, February 24th, 2013
Local Hip Hop & Folk star Chris Ingram hosts this weeks open mic. Be prepared for tequila fueled foolary.
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Sunday, February 17th, 2013
Chester’s longest running open mic is this week hosted by Neal Thompson. Bring your weapon of choice and join in the fun.
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Sunday, February 10th, 2013
The wonderful Ms Deboe brings her considerable talents to our Sunday night free stage. This week we feature a special performance from JP Cooper
Playing a blend of folk, blues, soul and gospel; JP Cooper is an intriguing prospect amongst aspiring British singer-songwriters. Listening to him perform, either alone or with his band, bears witness to an honesty, intensity and power evoked via the simplest of orchestration. His soulfully expressive, unique vocal style, the kind that cuts through a room to hush a chattering crowd in seconds, is utterly bewitching. His unexpected vocal flights hardly prepare you for the intimacy and empathy to follow, and coupled with a clutch of sensational songs, you will find it almost impossible to believe that he has only been writing seriously for two years and performing solo for barely one. Comparisons are yet to be made (although they inevitably will be..), but there is nothing derivative about his voice or his songwriting.
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Sunday, February 3rd, 2013
Acoustic country ‘n’ blues man Tom Durkin will be hosting this weeks open mic. Bring your weapon of choice and join in the fun.
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Sunday, January 27th, 2013
Telford’s Open Mic night, the best and longest running in Chester. This week hosted by Dave Burton.
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Sunday, January 20th, 2013
2012 was a great year for Alx Green. Lets see if he can be the host with the most this year. Open mic starts 8:30pm. Be there early to secure a slot.
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Sunday, January 13th, 2013
Chester’s longest running open mic is this week hosted by Danny Gruff. Bring your weapon of choice and join in the fun.
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Sunday, January 6th, 2013
Chester’s longest running and best Open Mic night returns for 2013. Hosted this week by Shy & The Fights Chris Done.
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Sunday, December 30th, 2012
Come down for the last Open Mic Session of 2012 and warm up you liver ready for the New Years Eve mayhem! Hosted by Chester’s favourite accordianist Rusty Mahone.
© Telford’s Warehouse - Canal Basin, Tower Wharf, Chester, CH1 4EZ
Telephone (01244) 39 00 90 | Fax (01244) 37 00 71 | Contact Us by Email?
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