Lost Venues: The Irish, Northampton

There was a moment in time that a dingy Irish Centre in Northampton played host to almost every big name in indie. Radiohead, Kirsty MacColl, Ian McNabb, Levitation.

"We're booked in for the Hacienda, Barrowlands and Hammersmith Palais," someone connected to Primal Scream might have said, "but do you think we could get a night at the mighty Irish in the town famed for shoes and a medieval cobbled market square?" Clear evidence, if any were needed, that drugs were being consumed in the Screamadelica camp.

The town had been steadily deteriorating since Henry III banned it from having a university in 1265, a university which then rivalled Oxford and Cambridge, being one of just three universities in England.

Northampton adopted a bunch of lads for a brief period in the 80s to stall its decent into drab nothingness. Studying art at the college, Bauhaus created goth for the world. Some say the now crushed brutalist Greyfriars Bus Station imbued Pete Murphy with the requisite level of horror, gloom and intensity.

The large Derngate theatre managed to book The Fall and The Damned in the mid-80s, a venue more used to mainstream variety acts. And back to the mainstream it went after a few hundred Damned fans rearrange the fixed seating.

Despite having another venue, Northampton continually failed to attract big acts to town. That is until a fraud specialist at Barclaycard and a local reporter set up The Noise Factory, a promotion company no one had heard of and ceased to exist just four years later Apart from a rabid interest in Husker Du, neither of them had experience of the music scene and yet, suddenly, they were attracting major names to this miserable location on an almost weekly basis.

The Irish resembled a youth club in a derelict village hall with free pouring pints of misery at the dank bar, famed locally for a lax approach to teen sales and 11pm closing. It made a bottle of cider at a bus shelter seem appealing. But now the Irish had Bobby Gillespie, Thom Yorke, and...is that? Why it is. It's Radio DJ Annie Nightingale. Radio DJ Annie Nightingale talking absolute gibberish and falling on the floor. Some think she might have over-indulged in some of Primal Scream's rider. Me? I think she was simply trying to fit in with the locals.

And as quick as it began, it was over. The Noise Factory moved on to fill the rooms at the Roadmender with the likes of Sugar, Ian McCulloch, the then much more popular Radiohead and the Boo Radleys - and the Irish stood silently pouring after-hours drinks until a local pub chain thought it would be better used as a "gentlemen's club". From screening top indie chart hits to exposing t...the shallowness of people.

There will be those who tell you Northampton isn't that bad, but the cobbles were ripped up in the marketplace, you can no longer see a gig for a fiver, and Andy Winter doesn't produce local fanzine Splinter anymore.