North by Northwest festival in Blackpool

The four venues for the festival were Connolly's Bar, West Coast Rock Cafe, Scrooges Wine Bar and The Blue Room


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The flesh-eating hordes roam the seafront of Blackpool. They are the sybaritic living dead that form the bank-holiday crowd. Girls in barely-there skirts and feral gangs of lads crawl from bar to bar drinking until they either find a partner or an opponent to fight. The bacchanalian orgy of alcohol and violence is a perpetually repeating scene straight from Dante’s nine circles of hell and will be familiar to anyone who has ever visited the seaside town on a busy weekend.

Iain Brownbridge attempted to offer an alternative this bank holiday with a three-day music festival featuring more than 100 bands playing in four of the town’s friendlier venues, all within a stones throw of one another. What’s more the festivities were in aid of local charity The Tommy Castles Trust.

Shot Dead

A gang of four lads from Sheffield, singing in broad Yorkshire accents with bags of attitude and no pretensions, immediately, and inevitably, brings to mind the city’s most famous sons; Arctic Monkeys. The comparisons are, slightly, unfair but unavoidable and they may have to move away from singing about lad culture and start marching to their own drum to rise above the hundred other bands doing the same thing. However, the energy with which they rip into their lunchtime-slot at Connolly’s, playing to a sprinkling of people, is admirable. The rhythm section is tight and chugs along nicely, the guitarist, in a home-made Shot Dead T-shirt, is genuinely impressive and lifts the sound into AC-DC territory; and the cocksure lead singer stomps and thrashes as much as the small stage allows. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday dinnertime.