{"id":807,"date":"2004-05-04T00:42:00","date_gmt":"2004-05-04T00:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.urban75.org\/u75blog\/?p=807"},"modified":"2010-04-13T12:59:41","modified_gmt":"2010-04-13T11:59:41","slug":"807","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/807\/","title":{"rendered":"A Trip Down Tin Pan Alley, London"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><\/strong>Tonight, I visited the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.12barclub.com\" target=\"_blank\">12 Bar Club<\/a> in  London&#8217;s West End for the first time and was mightily impressed.<\/p>\n<p>Conveniently situated in Denmark Street &#8211; a street long renowned for its connections to live music &#8211; the bar has got just the right mix of friendliness and scruffiness &#8211; and the beer&#8217;s reasonably priced too.<\/p>\n<p>The street facing part of the bar serves as a caf\u00e9, with two other bars leading on to the stage at the back.<\/p>\n<p>The dark, low-roofed and intimate  crowd area really is bonkers as it offers two viewing positions: upstairs (where you can only see the heads of the band) or downstairs (where you can only see up to their neck).<\/p>\n<p>So here&#8217;s the<em> actual view <\/em> we had for rather excellent Kevin-Rowland-esque meets &#8216; neo-orchestral soundscapes&#8217; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theirrepressibles.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Irrepressibles<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/images\/12bar1.jpg\" alt=\"stage view from 12 Bar Club, London\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Impressive, huh?!<\/p>\n<p>Naturally, you&#8217;ll do fine if you&#8217;ve managed to grab one of the seats in front of the stage, but we learnt that by leaning waaay back against the back wall we could catch the occasional above-neck glimpse of the musicians.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/images\/12bar.jpg\" alt=\"Helen McCookeryBook at the 12 Bar Club, London\" \/><\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;d gone along to the bar to see an old chum, Helen McCookeryBook (formerly of <a href=\"http:\/\/punkmodpop.free.fr\/Chefs_pic.htm\" target=\"_blank\">The Chefs<\/a>) play her third-ever solo gig.<\/p>\n<p>Helen and I go back ages &#8211; I was in her band Helen and The Horns for a while and we always seemed to end up working on various musical projects, often with another old pal,  Lester Square from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bid.clara.net\/mset\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Monochrome Set<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway &#8211; I&#8217;m waffling now &#8216;cos it&#8217;s late &#8211; but I can report that I had a chuffin&#8217; top night out and I can thoroughly recommend the 12 bar Club as an excellent old-school live music venue.<\/p>\n<p>And they certainly pack the bands in onto their tiny stage: their site claims that they have an average of four acts a night, seven nights a week!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tonight, I visited the 12 Bar Club in London&#8217;s West End for the first time and was mightily impressed. Conveniently situated in Denmark Street &#8211; a street long renowned for &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5922,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[194,193],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-london-features","category-places"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/12bar1.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/sQI7P-807","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=807"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1376,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions\/1376"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}