The Walkmen vs Manchester: How Now Wave and a fire-breathing vicar helped New York’s underdogs over the hump
In the mid-2000s, on Friday nights in the sweaty basement of Retro Bar, the DJs would play The Walkmen song The Rat.
While it might be reductive to introduce The Walkmen with a reference to easily their biggest hit, the presence of the single at the turn of the century is difficult to ignore. Amid the early-2000s white-hot invasion of US acts - documented in Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 oral history Meet Me In the Bathroom - the song was a behemoth.
Both those venues are run by Now Wave - the aforementioned Retro Bar DJs. The second will be the biggest they've ever played in the city. “We’re from New York and we’re a New York band so, [Manchester has] a similar type of folk, with a similar type of music. But for years we played at the, I think, Academy Three. Whatever the little bathroom at the back of the Academy was.”
He laughs: "Just asking how you’re supposed to get to a place – that was someone telling you to go to the third roundabout and come back. English directions are just incredible... There were a lot of weird nights, you know, all stuffed into a hotel room or in some guy’s house in the suburbs somewhere. Times where you’d beg from the stage to sleep on someone’s floor.
“Manchester, we thought, is like those regional cities in America, like a Philadelphia or a Baltimore, places I really do love, or sort of like Chicago because it’s the second city," says Bauer. "They’re all places The Walkmen felt were sort of our home bases, in a way, and we always wondering why Manchester never really felt like that.
The rotten piano eventually fell off the back of a truck in Birmingham and evaporated into a ‘cloud of dust’. According to guitarist Paul Maroon it took a "labour of love" to get The Walkmen over the hump in Manchester. He adds: “They were one of the first bigger American bands that we got to work with. Now Wave had been putting on gigs for two or three years… it was sort of a different challenge. If we choose where they play, we can give it a fresh feel and give it something new. They were in a bit of a cycle of playing the Academy venues.
A fire-breathing priest Their first stop on the hunt for Manchester’s more unusual venues was St Phillip's church in Salford – run by a fire-breathing vicar who was more than happy to oblige. Wesley says: “The first one was at St Phillips in Salford - it is pretty amazing. The vicar, Andy, who ran the place at the time, was fantastic.. really receptive, he encouraged us.
It was the venue Now Wave had always wanted to see The Walkmen play - to the size of crowd they should always have been attracting in the city.
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