Bradford’s rock venue Nightrain is one of the latest venues to join the Ticketmaster portfolio on our TicketWeb ticketing platform.

We caught up with Nightrain’s Director Keith Tempest to find out more about the venue and their plans to return to live….

Nightrain is relatively new to the Bradford scene. How did it come about? 

We are huge music fans and life long residents of Bradford, after seeing the demise of Rios back in the late 90’s, 00’s we thought we’d try put live music back into the heart of Bradford as we still feel music is a massive part of people’s lives and especially live music at that. Being regular gig goers in the UK and abroad we’ve seen personally there is still a huge and passionate following for live music be it watching new or older established bands.

Unfortunately COVID hit at the time where we were approaching our first sell out shows, new band nights, and just becoming established as a premier venue in the UK. We’ve had from new local bands to hosting worldwide touring bands all with the highest compliments of the venue. 

Could you share one of your favourite memories at the venue?

Tough one but I’d say simply taking a derelict, run down building of 5 years with squatters, drug issues and one of the most anti social streets in the city centre to within 5 months later transforming the building ourselves into a fantastic Reputable venue hosting the likes of The Quireboys, Graham Bonnet, Uli John Roth, John Corabi playing packed out shows and more importantly have nothing but praise for Nightrain.

This along with showcasing upcoming bands such as Revival Black, Anchor Lane amongst many many others and also meeting different fans from across the uk who have visited just leaves us thinking we’ve made a difference and hopefully we’ll have many more memories to share! 

Have you started to make any plans on how you can reopen your venue when restrictions lift? 

Yes we are looking to be open sometime in October just operating as a bar with all the safety guidelines being followed. Although we won’t have live music until restrictions are fully eased, simply because like many venues it’s just not viable to make it work for ourselves or the bands.

Hopefully whenever possible we can start with local bands and build up consumer confidence to get back venturing out into venues, only then can we aim to be back hosting bigger acts selling plenty of tickets and hopefully get back to some normality soon as possible. 

How can people support Nightrain right now?

We did set up a Crowdfunder a long time ago at the start of covid but being a brand new venue to make any kind of dent was going to prove difficult, although we got a little which all helps 🙂 The link is here .

We are involved with MVT all the way and hopefully reopening slowly and with limitations we can survive but it’s going to be very tough to say the least, one things for sure we will always stay positive and do our very best to make our venue survive through this.