This month we’ve invited Seymour Quigley from the band Horse Party to take us on a tour of a lesser known hotbed of rock n’ roll…
Bury St Edmunds is located right in the centre of East Anglia, about 30 minutes each way from Ipswich and Cambridge. If you imagine East Anglia as England’s breast, you’re weird and I don’t want to talk to you, but let’s just say that if you were to imagine such a thing, Bury St Edmunds would the nipple in the centre of that breast. It’s a splendid little place: the Magna Carta was drawn up here, there are loads of nice parks, celebrities such as Nick Cave, Russell Brand and Davina McCall have all come here to stop taking heroin (Nick Cave even wrote a song about the Abbey Gardens called ‘Gates to the Garden’). John Peel once called Bury St Edmunds “The New Seattle” on account of its ridiculously fecund music scene, and Rolling Stone magazine voted us #2 Culture Capital of the World in 2002, behind Liverpool. We’re nowhere near as inbred as you think we are, although our accents are almost impenetrable – but more on that later. Seriously, stop thinking about breasts, weirdo.
GIGS
The throbbing heart and greasy soul of Bury’s music scene is The Hunter Club, where we run our Washing Machine club nights – it’s basically a stronghold against twats where freaks of all denominations can mingle as one, with a sweet cocktail bar and two separate gig rooms. A few miles down the road is the John Peel Centre in Stowmarket, which is a gorgeous venue – we had Shonen Knife and The Nightingales come and play for us not so long ago. There are quality open mic and acoustic-type nights at Oakes Barn, The Hunter Club and The Farmers’ Club (that’s the actual Farmer’s Club, not some hipster venue – they like music enough to let townies in for gigs). There’s also The Apex, which is a really nice new mega-venue in Bury town centre, comparable to Cambridge Junction and Norwich Waterfront, although it’s a bit under-used thanks to their predilection for blue-rinse horror.
SHOPS
Most of the best shops are in St John’s Street and Risbygate Street – there’s Hardcore Hobbies, which is considered by many to be the UK’s best skate and BMX shop, and they’ve been instrumental in making Bury’s skatepark an absolute must-visit destination for gnarly, radical types. Sounds Plus and Balaam’s Music are really supportive of the local scene, and unlike most music shops, they’re not rude to people. Bury’s blessed with more than its fair share of brilliant charity shops (and brilliant fish n’ chip shops, come to think of it). I buy all my rainbow crockery from Sunrise, which is a hippy-type clothes and trinkets shop. We also have a massive, twice-weekly market, where you can buy fleeces with pictures of wolves on. The one thing we’re massively lacking is an independent record shop – the last one closed ages ago and no-one’s been heroic/vainglorious enough to open another one as yet. That said, HMV’s manager is lovely: he’s in an awesome band called These Are End Times and he’s been lobbying for the store to stock more vinyl.
NIGHTLIFE
Washing Machine is our night, mostly indie/alternative bands at The Hunter Club every other Saturday. Upraw put on secret DIY punk/hardcore gigs in odd places: you have to join their Facebook page for clues and info. A lot of the nights are more infrequent – Subtotal Promotions put on indie/punk gigs at The Hunter Club, Cemetery Bench Records do goth/industrial nights, Toonteen Industries specialise in Rock Sound-type stuff and acoustic music, Peacefrog Promotions run open mic nights. Plus, every single night of the week, all year long, you can go to Flex, which is a hellish, yet brilliant, Jager bar with underfloor lighting and dance to dreadful chart music until 2am – I think they open every night on principle alone; it can’t make economic sense. There are other nightclubs, but I wouldn’t recommend them.
LINGO
Suffolk has pretty much its own language, which is almost incomprehensible to normal people. Instead of “hello”, we say, “ROIGHT BUH”, which means “Are you alright boy?”. Or we just shout, “HEP!” at passers-by, which is a friendly greeting that terrifies the uninitiated. We pronounce all the vowels wrong and put in extra consonants where none are needed. Everything we say is pretty much comedy gibberish.
DID YOU KNOW…
Bob Hoskins was born in Bury St Edmunds, and he was properly famous. John Peel used to live down the road and we used to bump into him all the time outside Pizza Hut – his wife Sheila now runs the John Peel Centre. Stephen Fry’s grandfather helped to build the British Sugar factory. Greene King IPA is brewed here, although that’s not a person, more a terrible brewing mistake. According to Wikipedia our most famous bands to date are Jacob’s Mouse, The Dawn Parade and Miss Black America, although Kate Jackson from The Long Blondes was born and raised here, and she’s been on Never Mind the Buzzcocks. We’re currently breeding a mass army of future superstars, to infiltrate your homes and make you talk funny.
Seymour Quigley
@seymourquigley @HorsePartyParty
Horse Party’s debut album, Cover Your Eyes is available now and they play The Hunter Club on 6 December. Look out for their new single in 2015.
Paul Sng
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