Cool Manchester

The Village bakers are an LGBT social group with the aim to Bake it! Bring it! Share it! Within Manchester’s Gay Village. Inspired by the Great British Bake Off, the Village Bakers was formed in November 2012 by a group of friends meeting and sharing homemade cake and lots of glasses of wine. Since then, the group has grown in popularity with over 500 followers on face book & twitter... The Village Bakers are taking the Manchester’s Gay Village by storm!!

As the youngest LGBT social group in Manchester they have already achieved great things without using botox!!  Village Bakers has supported many charities and organisations and already contributed to The George House Trust Mobile Bake Sale raising in excess of £500, supported the launch of UK’s first LGBT retail Network - Checkout producing rainbow inspired cakes. They have also supported Sparkle, A UK Transgender festival with a sparkle cake pop giveaway and running a baking masterclass. Regular foodie evenings are also organised including a fabulous tapas nights to bring people together and inspire foodie interests.

One of the highlights of the Manchester Fringe calendar is the first annual ‘great village bake off’. A camptastic baking event bringing Manchester’s Gay Village together to help raise money for Manchester Pride. Individuals and organisations can enter their tartiest tarts, firmest buns, best rainbow cake or campest cupcakes to be judged by our panel. Everyone is encouraged to enter regardless of your baking ability, don’t worry if you are used to a soggy bottom or your dough not rising you’ll still be welcome at The Great Village Bake Off! There will be a variety of wonderful baking inspired prizes for you to win across the different categories. In true Village Bakers tradition of sharing, all entries will be available to sample once judging has taken place.

So grab your rolling pin, prove that bread, and squeeze your buns the village bakers are looking forward to judging your entry!  Enter online at the address below and come along with your tasty entry at the Molly House, Richmond Street, Manchester on 18^th August 1pm. Full details including tickets: www.greatvillagebakeoff.eventbrite.co.uk

Price: £5 individual entry (+ 95p booking fee), £10 organisation entry (+ £1.25 booking fee)

No charge for spectators

Check out Village Bakers on facebook:  www.facebook.com/villagebakers

Twitter: @villagebakers

E-mail: villagebakersmanchester@gmail.com

Venue address: The Molly House, Richmond Street, Manchester, M1 3NB

Event Date: 18^th August, Time: 1pm

Petition. Manchester City Council: End the 'twinned city' link between Manchester and St. Petersburg

http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/petition-manchester-city-council-end-the-twinned-city-link-between-manchester-and-st-petersburg#share

Petition by
James Swinburne
Manchester, United Kingdom

Twenty years after homosexuality was decriminalised in Russia, anti-gay legislation is making a rapid comeback, with St Petersburg becoming the latest city to ban "homosexual propaganda".

29th June 2013, over 60 members of the public were arrested simply for taking part in St. Petersburg's gay pride parade.

It is now no longer appropriate that Manchester be twinned with St. Petersburg.

In the UK, with our far more tolerant culture, there is still, sadly, a higher than average rate of suicide and drug use, which is convincingly linked to the often negative experience of being gay in our society.

Now we must think about how the LGBT community in St. Petersburg must feel if this is how the local government is treating them. Think about young gay people, coming to terms with their sexuality and seeing in the news that who they are is apparently so awful that they deserve to be arrested for it.

Manchester's large gay community is something that Manchester should be proud of. Out of respect to the gay community here, we need to symbolically end this connection with St. Petersburg.

Instead of twinning the two cities, links should be established between the gay community in Manchester and the gay community in St. Petersburg as a sign of solidarity and that, perhaps, Manchester City Council could help to facilitate th

'BLACK AND GOLD' SINGER SAM SPARRO

AND SUPERSTAR DJS MOTO BLANCO 

COMPLETE MANCHESTER PRIDE

BIG WEEKEND SATURDAY LINE-UP

This week's nice weather has made me want to look back at the warmest summer I can remember - 1995!

These were the movies released at the cinema in June 1995:

The Bridges of Madison County

Fluke

Congo

Smoke

Batman Forever

Pocahontas

Apollo 13

Judge Dredd

Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: The Movie

Not much to say really! Hardly classics - a RUBBISH version of Judge Dredd, but I enjoyed it more that Batman Forever - the start of the end of the Batman Movie franchise. It was also the end of Disney's long run of great animated films with Pocahontas, a film rarely mentioned and better best forgotten...

During this time, I was at Uni and really enjoying all the music around. To me the summer of 1995 was a great period in pop music history. So when I looked back at the chart of the time I was a little disappointed to see a major atrocity at the top...

1 Robson Green & Jerome Flynn Unchained Melody / White Cliffs Of Dover

2 Pulp Common People

3 Perez 'Prez' Prado & His Orchestra Guaglione

4 Scatman John Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop)

5 Baby D I Need Your Loving (Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime)

6 Ali Campbell That Look In Your Eye

7 The Nightcrawlers featuring John Reid Surrender Your Love

8 McAlmont & Butler Yes

9 Billie Ray Martin Your Loving Arms

10 Michael Jackson & Janet Jackson Scream

11 Livin' Joy Dreamer

12 Reef Naked

13 Ladysmith Black Mambazo featuring China Black Swing Low Sweet Chariot

14 Celine Dion Only One Road

15 Montell Jordan This Is How We Do It

16 Bon Jovi This Ain't A Love Song

17 Jimmy Somerville Hurt So Good

18 Michelle Gayle Freedom

19 Joshua Kadison Jessie

20 Therapy? Stories

21 Tina Arena Chains

22 Black Grape Reverend Black Grape

23 Take That Back For Good

24 Radiohead Fake Plastic Trees

25 Whigfield Think Of You

26 Happy Clappers I Believe

27 Bryan Adams Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?

28 Oasis Some Might Say

29 The Outhere Brothers Don't Stop (Wiggle Wiggle)

30 Elton John Made In England

31 Jam & Spoon featuring Plavka Right In The Night (Fall In Love With Music)

32 Blessid Union Of Souls I Believe

33 Love City Groove Love City Groove

34 Curtis Stigers This Time

35 Annie Lennox A Whiter Shade Of Pale

36 Manchester United 1995 Football Squad featuring Stryker We're Gonna Do It Again

37 Bobby Brown Two Can Play That Game

38 Dodgy Staying Out For The Summer '95

39 Boyzone Key To My Life

40 Gompie Alice (Who The X Is Alice?)

To be fair, if we pretended that the Number One never happened and moved all the other songs up a place the chart isn't that bad at all.
Pulp had released Common People which was one of the best tracks from "A Different Class" which was one of the best albums of the 1990s. Dodgy, Radiohead, Reef and Oasis were also setting up the beginnings of the Britpop phase which was going to dominate the charts over the next 12 months.
Dance music was also entering a great phase with Baby D, Living Joy, Billie Ray Martin and Jam and Spoon releasing the best Dance Anthems of the year, not to mention a cracking David Morales remix of Michael and Janet's "Scream"
Here were my favourite tracks:

I should also mention Love City Groove, this first time the in the 1990s the BBC took the Eurovision Song Contest seriously and used the viewers of Top Of The Pops to select the song.

Review By Mick Aneworderfan

It has been often apparent Sumner and Hook can't carry on together in the last, say, 25 years.

I remember reading a 1987 biography which already put their future in doubt. It was bollocks of course, they came back with Technique two years later and as we all know it was a masterpiece. But there was something true behind the surface. They basically recorded Republic (1993) through separate sessions and couldn't stand each other during the tour. Only Rob Gretton was able to bring them together for a while and by Get Ready (2001) we all had the illusion they were best friends again, but when they toured the following (and last) album it was obvious something was broken again and it would have been hard to fix it.

While the previous split had never been announced, this time Peter Hook declared the band finished.

He thought they couldn't carry on without him. They of course have in fact, recruiting the mighty Tom Chapman to replace Hook and touring the world to huge acclaim, and honestly it's better to see them carry on in that form with a renovated spirit (and Gillian Gilbert back) than in the sick and tired version of the last gigs with Hook where you saw a band which had nothing left to say (and for us fans, better than no New Order at all). Obviously Hooky disagrees, but while he waits for the court he has carried on another interesting project, which is to tour each album of Joy Division and New Order in its entirety.

He has assembled a fantastic band called The Light, featuring his son Jack, on bass of course, the excellent Nat Wason from Haven at the guitar, weirdly enough Andy Poole, a prog keyboardist, does his best to play these post punk classics, and we also get back Paul Kehoe, the wonderful Monaco drummer.

This new release, which can be purchased at http://music.playconcert.com/ for £9 only, sees The Light performing the tracks of not one but two albums, including all the single and B sides from that crucial era (1981-1983) for a total of 26 tracks!

We can hear tracks New Order have never performed again in the last 30 years. The marvellous Procession, for example, Bernard Sumner hates it, New Order won't ever play it again. Hooky does, and it's great to hear it live again. Movement was the attempt of New Order at finishing what Joy Division were trying to do after Closer, which is a pretty dark album already. Adding that the mood in the band wasn't exactly happy after Ian Curtis' suicide, you have the album of a band trying to carry on after such a loss, and bordering on goth.

Having been followed by Power, Corruption And Lies, the album where not only New Order found their own style, but basically invented a new one with some of their best songs ever, not to mention non-album singles like Temptation and Blue Monday which will always remain as two of their most essential tracks, meant that Movement has been forgotten quickly both by the band and their fans, though it always had its hardcore fans in those Joy Division die-hard fans who were too narrow minded to embrace their evolution. But Movement had its great tracks too.

It's absolutely delightful to hear Truth live again, and The Light's performance of Senses seriously threatens New Order's as the best ever version. Actually, Hooky's voice sounds even more appropriate for tracks like these than Sumner's, having a deeper tone more similar to Curtis' than Sumner's thin voice. Chosen Times has always been one of my favourites, and I can hear the origins of Blue Monday in it.

Now, Mesh. Mesh!!! Mesh is the most criminally underrated song in the whole music history.

A truly emotional masterpiece, it appeared only on the Everything's Gone Green 12" EP.

When Factory released the 2CD version of Substance with all the B sides, it forgot this song and included Cries And Whispers mis-titled as Mesh. But the true Mesh didn't resurface until the 2008 reissue of Movement!

Power Corruption And Lies is my absolute favourite album ever, hearing the luminous restart of Age Of Consent after the dark Movement tracks makes us appreciate its revolutionary charge, though The Light here perform it with an endearingly punk attitude, and you could almost mistake it for a Warsaw track rather than the song heralding New Order's turn to pop.

We All Stand has always sounded the comedown after that, with its fascinating melancholy it sounds like a Movement reprise. But with the electro feast of The Village and the Blue Monday beta of 586 the switch sounds clear and glorious. I'm happy how New Order rediscovered 586 and I also really like how The Light play it. I've always been a huge fan of Revenge (my favourite side project actually, even over Electronic) and Ultraviolence played by The Light just sounds like a great track off their underrated debut masterpiece, One True Passion.

Ecstasy has never been played live, so it's great to finally hear it. The Light even play The Beach, which was an instrumental dub of Blue Monday appearing as its B side. Not many bands play remixes live!

So there's a lot of reason to enjoy this live album.

Long live Peter Hook And The Light!

You can download the album exclusively NOW from http://www.playconcert.com/