Lost pub · Fisher Street
The Front Page Club
- Built
- Opened as the Front Page in August 1984, in premises that had been a jazz club
- Gone
- Closed in 2004, a month short of its twentieth birthday
- There now
- Empty. After the club came the Melting Pot, then the LGBThq building with the Regency in the basement, then Abstrakt
The venue the Brickyard replaced, more or less, and the only Carlisle club with its own Wikipedia article. Before 1984 it was Mick's, a traditional jazz club named for Mick Potts, who led the Gateway Jazz Band and was a well-known pianist and trumpeter in the city; Mick's was also where the punk bands played, and a bill from 1 June 1979 has the Ironing Boards, Blitz, the Chevettes and the Renwick Bats.
Bob Mungall and Martin Lawson took it on in August 1984 and opened it as the Front Page, widening it out to modern jazz, then blues, rock, reggae and country. It held 132 people and still pulled acts from all over Britain and audiences from both sides of the border. Mungall left in 1986 and died in Florida in 2010. It was sold, briefly shut, and reopened as Jackson's under David Jackson, who brought the old name back.
It closed for good in 2004, a month short of twenty years. Between 1984 and 1988 somewhere between three and four hundred bands and solo artists played the room. The Bhundu Boys made their English debut here in May 1986. The last band before the first closure, on New Year's Eve 1988, was You Slosh, led by Troy Donockley, who later joined Nightwish. Acts too big for 132 people were put on elsewhere in the city under the club's name: Keith Tippett at the Tithebarn in October 1984, Jack Bruce there in May 1985, the Hank Wangford Band at the Sands Centre. The premises did not stay quiet: a club called TC's took them on afterwards, and by the late 2000s was drawing DJs away from the Wheel.