Manchester is popping the cork on a Champagne Supernova 2025. Chart-topping Manchester-born band Oasis has done what seemed impossible, reuniting for a five-month international tour.
Battling-brother frontmen Liam and Noel Gallagher called it quits 16 years ago. But sonic magic has a way of happening in this northwest England post-industrial city.
Finding Oasis, the Sex Pistols, a Tarot Card Reader, and a Pub Located in a Converted Toilet
The city’s symbol is the Manchester worker bee. Tough times motivate Mancs, as the locals call themselves. When the cotton industry collapsed in the 1960s through the ’80s, Manchester’s economic woes inspired young musicians to express their existential turmoil. Punk, post-punk, melancholic Britpop, jingle-jangle guitars and thumping dance scenes followed in creative waves.
Manchester’s Streets Filled with Music History
You’ll find Manchester’s music stories in the city’s stock of Industrial Revolution red-brick buildings, the canals and former warehouses of Castlefield, and along the Deansgate thoroughfare.
It’s in the pubs, clubs, and used record stores in the Northern Quarter. It’s even in the wet weather, which forced songwriters and musicians to work indoors on dark-tinged love songs.
Can it be a coincidence Oasis started out named Rain?
Walking, Talking Manchester Music
Professional Blue Badge Guide Emma Fox is an expert in the 1980s and ’90s Manchester music scene because she was there.
I spent close to three hours with Fox on a private walking tour. She specializes in cemetery, architecture and pub history tours in Manchester, Liverpool, and Wales, but her true love comes from her years as a former club kid. Fox was a regular at the Haçienda, a venue run by indie record label Factory Records owner Tony Wilson and financed by band New Order. She was a participant in Manchester’s musical rebirth as frenetic Madchester.
© Linda Barnard
“I think I’m probably a tour guide because of music,” Fox said as we walked under railway overpasses and along streets lined with heritage buildings.
“When the Stone Roses album came out, I was 17,” she said of the band’s 1989 debut disc, often included in greatest albums of all time lists. “I was going to the Haçienda. I was mad about Happy Mondays and Inspiral Carpets. It felt like Manchester was the center of the universe, and it just stems from there.”
The Gig That Changed the World
“The Sex Pistols showed kids uprooted from their communities in Manchester’s ’70s slum clearances that all they needed was a guitar to make sounds that fought back,” Fox said.
Fox took me to the site of the Pistols’ most powerful lesson, delivered June 4, 1976, at “the gig that changed the world.” Two sparsely attended Sex Pistols shows, six weeks apart, in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall building, made history for the number of bands they inspired.
You could say fighting for change was in the Italianate Free Trade Hall’s bricks. It was built in 1853 on the site of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, the bloody pushback of a peaceful parliamentary reform protest. It was rebuilt as a concert hall from rubble after the 1940 Manchester Blitz.
Fox said fewer than 100 people in total showed up to the small, upper-level Lesser Free Trade Hall for the shows by then relatively unknown Pistols. Among them were musicians, the punk progenitors influenced that night, including pre-The Smiths’ Steven Patrick Morrissey, future members of Joy Division and Buzzcocks, Mark E. Smith of the Fall, and Mick Hucknall of Simply Red, along with Tony Wilson, who later founded the indie label Factory Records.
From Free Trade Hall to Luxury Hotel
The Free Trade Hall building has been reborn as the luxury five-star Radisson Collection Edwardian Manchester spa hotel. What would the Sex Pistols’ rebellious Johnny Rotten have made of that?
The second-floor Lesser Free Trade Hall, site of the famous Pistols’ performance, is now a posh art deco-style meetings and events venue. The room divider has portraits of the musicians who played there, from Johnny Cash to early Led Zeppelin.
And then there’s Bob Dylan. The main-level Free Trade Hall stage was where Dylan was famously called “Judas” by a furious audience member in 1966 for daring to go electric.
Oasis Played Here First
Fox took me along narrow Little Peter Street to a former Victorian-era Sunday school building. A small, round plaque with a happy face icon tells the music story: from 1986 to 1999, it was The Boardwalk, a club and rehearsal space that served as a keystone in the evolution of Madchester. It’s where Oasis rehearsed and played their first gig in 1991.
Not far away, at 35 Little Peter Street, Fox shows me The Ropeworks. It looks like thousands of other urban mid-rises. But back when it was still a converted mill, it was a recording studio and T.J. Davidson’s Rehearsal Room, owned by Tony Davidson of indie label TMJ Records. Joy Division rehearsed here, and the video for “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was shot in the cavernous interior.
As we walk, Fox shares stories about the bands and their histories. Names and dates flow easily as she speaks. Her love of the music is evident, especially when she shows me Factory Records Christmas cards and 30-year-old tickets for shows at the Haçienda.
Science and Industry Museum
Manchester takes its contributions to local musical identity seriously. The Manchester Science and Industry Museum has a copy of Joy Division’s 1979 Factory Records debut album Unknown Pleasures on display.
The Manchester Central Library is an impressive domed building on St. Peter’s Square. Fox wanted to show me the shelves of books written about Manchester music, including David Nolan’s chronicle of the Sex Pistols’ Manchester concert, I Swear I Was There: The Gig That Changed the World, and musician and author C.P. Lee’s history of 40 years of Manchester music, Shake Rattle and Rain.
© Linda Barnard
Artist Stanley Chow’s Rock Portraits
The library gift shop also has a good selection of illustrations of music luminaries by Manchester artist Stanley Chow.
© Linda Barnard
Chow is famous for his rock-world portraits, including Oasis. Fox is proud to say he designed her business cards.
Victorian Toilet Turned Pub
It was feeling like time for a pint. There’s a meridian in the middle of Great Bridgewater Street, where Fox led me down a steep set of stairs. The former Victorian public toilet is now the Temple of Convenience, known as the Temple by locals, an eight-table pub featuring a bathtub-sized service bar and a well-stocked jukebox.
Guy Garvey, co-founder of legendary Manchester band, Elbow, wrote the hit song “Grounds for Divorce” about the popular pub, singing: “There’s a hole in my neighborhood down which of late I cannot help but fall.”
Peak Oasis
Still in a pub mood, we walked a couple of blocks to what became my favorite Manchester public house, The Peveril of the Peak. Landlady Nancy Swanick, now well into her 90s, has had her name over the door for more than 50 years.
The yellowish-green-tiled pub was built in 1820 on a triangular lot. The Gallagher brothers had been known to drop in for a pint in the barroom or snug inside, or in the yard out front. That’s where most people were drinking to catch a breeze on the warm late afternoon when I visited.
Fox showed me an image of Oasis taken outside the Pev, as locals call it, shot by celebrated Manchester rock photographer Kevin Cummins. I stand against the same wall for a photo, failing miserably to achieve the same detached cool of the Gallaghers.
On Your Own: Head for the Northern Quarter
The Northern Quarter neighborhood is the place to be if you want to feel Manchester’s ongoing living music history within a funky, vibrant few blocks of clubs, pubs, and indie retailers.
Joy Division, The Fall and Buzzcocks played some of their early gigs at Band on the Wall on Swan Street. It’s on the site of a circa–1803 pub, the George and Dragon. Run by charity Inner City Music Ltd., there’s live music most nights, from jazz to funk and rock to world music.
Afflecks Palace: An Emporium of Eclecticism
Since it’s mid-morning and Band on the Wall isn’t open yet, I headed to Afflecks Palace a few doors down.
The former department store is a four-floor funky delight known as an “emporium of eclecticism” and a must-stop within these boho streets. There are more than 60 indie retailers, including Vinyl Resting Place records and Mars Tapes, the last remaining cassette shop in the UK.
The adjacent Definitely Maybe Bar Afflecks is an Oasis-themed joint that has live music and plenty of band memorabilia.
Music is in the Cards
Afflecks also has a resident tarot card reader, Maxine Gilbert. She turned my cards and suggested I needed to grab awaiting opportunities. She also told me I could find a great Manchester music story at Night and Day Café around the corner.
“They love to talk about music,” Gilbert said, sending me off with a reminder to be bold in my choices.
Night and Day Café
In 1991, Jan Oldenburg turned a former chip shop into what became one of Manchester’s most legendary music venues, Night and Day Café. Since his death, his daughter Jennifer Smithson has run it with her husband, Ben. There’s a Stanley Chow portrait of Oldenburg on the wall.
© Linda Barnard
Elbow was one of the first bands to play there. Johnny Marr, guitarist and co-songwriter of The Smiths, also performed. Club booker Dave Beech said the “underdog spirit” of the Northern Quarter continues in Night and Day’s lineups.
Down on Ducie Street
I headed back to my hotel in the hulking red-brick Ducie Street Warehouse. Built to store cotton bales for shipment to London mills, it’s now a cool loft-inspired apartment-hotel called Native Manchester.
The main floor is a combination of social space, bar, and restaurant. There are records lined up behind the check-in desk. A DJ is spinning discs. People are dancing. I don’t know the song, but I like it. It has a Manchester sound.
If you go
Book a music tour: Manchester has a variety of music-themed walking, minibus, and taxi tours. Go to VisitManchester to learn more. Blue Badge guide Emma Fox leads group and private music tours. Find her here.
Where to stay: Manchester
- Aparthotel Native Manchester, located in the Ducie Street Warehouse, features large, loft-like rooms with an industrial vibe, situated a block from central Manchester Piccadilly railway station. Bonus: In-room laundry and a mini-cinema located off the lobby.
- The Alan Hotel is in a 19th-century former cotton warehouse in central Manchester, next to St. Peter’s Square tram interchange. The four steep steps up from Princess Street can be a challenge if you have bulky luggage.
Where to eat in Manchester
- Dishoom pays homage to the old Irani cafes of Bombay in a dining room that feels like a slice of history. Excellent South Asian cuisine turns to tradition for a new spin on Indian dishes.
- Contemporary Japanese meets modern Mexican at the award-winning Peter Street Kitchen restaurant in the Edwardian Manchester Hotel. Start with a glass of British bubbles in the hotel’s Library Champagne Bar. I tried a glass of Kentish vineyard Gusborne’s award-winning 2019 Blanc des Blancs.
More on Manchester
Go to VisitManchester and VisitBritain.
The author was hosted by Marketing Manchester and VisitBritain.
Read more by Linda Barnard here.
