CityLife

The Chapel

IT'S hard to know what’s made this weekend so great at Fallowfield’s finest new venue The Chapel.

Maybe when you stand back it’s the weird, oddball eclecticism of it all in a setting that refuses to stand still.

From an ubercool club on Friday, to a house party atmosphere on Saturday, and finally a jazz café on Sunday the venue is as chameleon-like as the acts that fly there, and the crowds that stalk through this old church’s hallowed doors.

If one things for sure it’s that the owners are managing to make the venue a community centre for all around not just your typical student trap.

The Chapel provides a much-needed meeting ground for academics and Mancunians in an area plagued by student-only pubs, and forever typified by its ghetto status.

Both nights, Belly of the Beast residents Metalink's dubstep mash up comes off without a hitch, and without a fight in sight…even when the lights come up at x ‘o’ clock in the morning. 

Both club nights entertain an amazing lighting display… looking up at the strips of white paper dangling from the ceiling it would have been easy to dismiss this as a nursery school attempt at home-decoration, but when the main lights go down and the darkness rises they transform into tiny glow worms, neon globules slowly trickling down them like radioactive droplets of water… the result of high-tech computer chicanery I believe.

Saturday night's Format is a real blur, an explosion in urbanism kick started by Samrai VS Platt then Faultline with dirty beats and lights streaking across the graffitied walls, it’s over as soon as it’s begun leading credence to the line, “time flies when you’re enjoying yourself”.

Fundamentals

Sunday, My Black Cat’s Blues, is (luckily for everyone’s stretched sanity) a more gentrified affair. The fundamentals of British society, tables, chairs, tea and cake, with beer only a much-needed sideline, lubricate a night of silent cinema and live music.

Early on, the music is used to tickle the cartoons to life, making three-dimensional the antics of dancing skeletons, phantoms, a take on little red riding hood that spoke to me of Wile E Coyote, and an early Mickey Mouse outing.

Itchy and Scratchy

There are times when I can’t help but feel that all this would play second fiddle to a sequence of Itchy and Scratchy cartoons, but that speaks more for my own taste in depraved cartoon violence rather than anything else.

Later that night the music becomes music for its own sake as we’re treated to a host exponentially brilliant acts. Zacc Rogers, all alone up there, tears through genres like Shakespeare tore through the English language, and then S R Gents, cooler than cool livens things up with a combination of Parisian melancholia, and slightly more straight forward indie-blues rock.
 
The final 10 minutes of Sunday night are really the perfect full-stop on the weekend as a whole. Despite the tired, pale faces around, tables and chair are kicked and dragged to the sides and we take to the dancefloor one last time throwing profoundly random shapes to Ernies (profoundly random) Rhythm Section.

I’m pretty certain that the old stalwarts of silent cinema would have vomited into their top hats at such disgustingly loose behaviour. I loved it. 

These are the fragments of a broken memory cobbled together from a sleep-deprived mind, but the overwhelming feeling? This was good… really good.

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