Headline by Stan Cullimore (The Housemartins) October 2014.
http://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/Housemartin-Stan-Cullimore-New-Adelphi-reunion/story-23053999-detail/story.html

On Thursday 30th we celebrate 31 years since Paul Jackson opened the doors of The New Adelphi Club for the first time. Come and join us as we celebrate with the fantastic Rozi Plain Band, The Sarah Johns Music Party and local maestro Neil Thomas. Doors 8.00pm

The Adelphi offers a visionary and diverse music policy under the direction of Paul Jackson. The club offers a first exposure to local, national and international performers. Famously the venue has offered the first opportunity to perform aside of their home town audience for Pulp, Radiohead, The La’s and countless other bands. It was always said that nobody famous has ever played at The Adelphi. Of course most bands were not famous when they played the venue but some progressed to headline Glastonbury and successfully tour the world.

“I’ve played the Adelphi about 15 times, lots of times with both The La’s and Cast.  The Adelphi was the first gig that I ever did, that The La’s ever did, outside of Liverpool.  Paul Jackson and the Adelphi came in with a gig for us.  We didn’t have a drummer and the three of us drove over there with a hotchpotch selection of guitars.  I borrowed one, a Mustang bass.  I remember the gig well, like no drummer, but we seemed to have a good laugh.  We drove home full of good ambitions and it was the beginning of something, the beginning of all our dreams coming into some kind of order”
(Jon Power, La’s/Cast)

Excerpt from the The Guardian. Saturday 5th September 2015 by Jamie Doward talking about the Sheffield Boardwalk…

“But the club is no more. It has joined many other famous venues, including Leicester’s Princess Charlotte, Leeds’ Duchess of York and Dudley’s JB’s, in shutting its doors. In central London, large-scale redevelopment projects have seen the closure of Madame Jo Jo’s and the Astoria and the relocation of the 12 Bar Club; Camden has witnessed the closure of the Purple Turtle and the Stillery. Several other Camden venues and Oxford Street’s 100 Club are said to be threatened. So, too, are a number of venues outside the capital, notably Southampton’s the Joiners, the Tunbridge Wells Forum, Exeter’s Cavern, Hull’s Adelphi and Manchester’s Band on the Wall.

Reasons for the closures are manifold, but a common concern is the increasingly hostile environment for many venues. The pressure to build more housing has seen blocks of flats built next to clubs, causing a rise in noise-abatement notices that can cost thousands of pounds to contest.

The alarming pace at which the venues are closing is now the subject of a report to be presented to the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, this week by the Music Venue Trust, a body set up to defend the UK’s live music scene, which estimates that the number of live music venues in the capital has fallen from 430 to 245 since 2007. Mark Davyd, the trust’s founder and chief executive, said there had been a similar fall across the UK, threatening the diverse nature of Britain’s cultural landscape.

They are so inspirational,” he said. “They are places where people can get involved in culture as a first step. The whole point of a grassroots venue is that you’ve got a maverick running it who, for no apparent reason, is prepared to put on a guy dressed as a plant making white noise through a trumpet that everyone thinks is awful. These are incubators for other industries. They are places where the guy who becomes the lighting engineer at the Royal Opera House in 40 years’ time started out.

The decline in live music threatens an industry worth an estimated £1.6bn a year to the UK, something that concerns one of the trust’s patrons, Frank Turner.

The thing about rock music is that there needs to be a place for people to experiment, people to get up on a stage and try things out.

The large successful acts of this world, Coldplay or Ed Sheeran or whoever, they didn’t pop fully formed into this world. These are skills and talents that have to be honed somewhere. If we’re careless about the places where this sort of culture can evolve, then it won’t exist. The only thing you will be left with at the top of the food chain is Simon Cowell.”

Now there’s a sobering thought.

Three cheers for The Adelphi!