A tale of two clubs in Manchester

Written by Sean Stapleton & Liam Donoghue

It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times. There’s no denying that Manchester is in a state of flux. Swathes of developments are carving tracts of history out of the city. As the city looks forward and expands its building both upwards and outwards. The nature of creative spaces and clubs in Manchester is changing.

No dichotomy crystallises this issue better than two vastly different clubs in Manchester.

Mantra Warehouse

Mantra Warehouse sits in the shadow of the Etihad Stadium. Nestled on the edges of New Islington. It’s a large disused warehouse space complete with creative rooms for artists, two rooms for events and a large courtyard for daytime parties. It even has a record store. The decor is very DIY as you’d expect from a disused warehouse. The walls are sticky with sweat and covered with graffiti but they’re also seeping with creativity and passion.

Manchester’s biggest and brightest have thrown events within its walls; High Hoops, Meat Free and Micron are just a few of the promoters that have sold out the 500+ capacity space over its 3 year stint.

Lazy Lizard Manchester

On the flip side of this coin is Lazy Lizard Manchester – Ibiza Beach Bar. Opening in late 2017 Lazy Lizard Manchester offers clubbers the ‘VIP Ibiza experience’ in an 800 capacity venue underneath The Printworks. The decor is sleek with underfloor lighting, white isle style curved walls and Grey Goose vodka can be delivered to your table.

Musically Lazy Lizard Manchester muscled into Manchester’s bustling scene with opening parties with Kenny Dope and Norman Jay gracing the decks. A line up that gave other clubs in Manchester a run for their money. Since then, however, the bookings have leaned away from revered names like these. A short stint by Future Disco & Ben Pearce filled the intermediary few months, and we now see its Friday night taken over by commercial house and RnB.

The second half of 2017 saw one close and the other open, the glitz of the city centre steamrolling the gritty heart of New Islington. This wasn’t a hostile takeover or a binding tale of corporate club espionage, but, simply put, an unhappy coincidence.

Still, a change of fortunes that saw Manchester lose yet another interesting club space on its outskirts only to be replaced by the more commercially focused clubs in Manchester.

STOP! Wait one second

Before this article goes any further I feel it’s important us authors acknowledge our own personal biases in this article. Otherwise, I fear we’ll be tarred as screaming hipsters, drowning in a vat of craft beer and moustache wax.

It’s really easy for us to cast assumptions and look down from our metaphorical ivory tower on to Manchester. Venerating what we know as familiar whilst casting aspersions on any club or brand that doesn’t fit our ethos. We wanted to tackle this bias head-on, so felt it only fair to head to Lazy Lizard Manchester to see what all the fuss was about.

The Night Itself

The ‘blank slate’ approach was rendered more difficult as we scanned the Lazy Lizard Manchester events page to find a suitable party to fit our schedule. It appeared that our two options were a night called BITCH (featuring live saxophonists and the BITCH girls). Or a Hed Kandi ‘Ladies Night’, featuring two female headline DJs. We opted for the latter, despite our misgivings that Hed Kandi would always be synonymous with tacky house music. We were to leave these well-established prejudices at the door, cut the ‘I’m enjoying this but only with a sense of irony’ schtick, and experience the reality of what the venue had to offer, unburdened by snobbery.

When we arrived we were greeted by a friendly Lazy Lizard Manchester doorman, adorned with the pre-required mosaic of sculpted facial hair and Indian ink. There was no queue, which felt peculiar for midnight on a Saturday. He showed us in, where we obtained our VIP wristbands. These fabled orange strips would act as gateways to the top-floor balcony, as well as a booth and private server (with a £50 minimum spend per person) should we so desire. A quick log on to the website also revealed that we could indulge in ‘sparkler delivery’ from these very servers – an act described as ‘VIP Instagrammable!’. Our suspicions were already beginning to take shape; people were here to look good and talk about it rather than enjoy themselves. We consulted our paltry bank accounts, shunned the booth and bought ourselves a Becks each.

The most important aspect of any clubbing experience is undoubtedly the clientele. Sure, the music is similarly pivotal, but without a good crowd to let go and enjoy yourself with, even the best soundtracked nights are simply near misses; wasted opportunities. The first customer that I interacted with was seemingly annoyed that I was polite to him. Irked by the jovial, throwaway pleasantry that I offered in passing. This immediate hostility was something that I had come to expect from The Printworks, a two-year stint as bar staff at Tiger-Tiger having been my gateway into this disheartening world of macho bullshit. Thankfully, however, this was a one-off.

The majority of the crowd were not necessarily behaving in a way that I was used to, but they were reasonably friendly whilst being fully committed. I glanced around to see what appeared to be Wolf from Gladiator, commanding his spot and raving with real finesse. Several large groups of lads rocked the Dad vibe, dressed for a wedding and dancing like Chumbawumba. Beach balls floated around to really nail the Balearic theme. Females were at a premium, yet the ones that had made it out were incorporating a game of catch into slut-dropping. Never had I seen the notion of innocence so inventively dismantled.

The meat market issue had been addressed (or created? This feels like a modern-day chicken/egg scenario) with the introduction of hired ‘Baywatch babes’. Pretty, young dancers had been squeezed into something revealing, placed on a podium and charged with entertaining the intoxicated punters. In other words, they had been thrown to the wolves. They patrolled their platform with feigned indifference, as glitter-heavy skin fades pursued them with all the subtlety of Andy Gray with the camera off. It felt dark and avoidable. Although overt sexual objectification is hardly something new in the clubbing sphere, be that at Lazy Lizard Manchester or HomoElectric. Crowds like to see beautiful people dance; it is up to the punters to react to it in the correct way.

We nipped to the Gents, enjoying the relative luxury compared to the cesspits we were used to. The pristine aesthetic is not at all in line with my partying ethos, but when it comes to hygiene, exceptions can be made. Granted, I didn’t need to be offered a spray of cologne by a man in a bow tie. I didn’t need him to wash my hands for me either, or to explain that I needed said cologne to pull, through the medium of foul, worn-out nursery rhymes. I sorted myself out, escaped the sordid ritual and felt guilty for not paying somebody for making me feel uncomfortable.

The best thing about the night was undoubtedly the music. Occupying the more soulful/disco end of the house spectrum, it was easy to get down to, with a few sneaky Shazams (ahem, Debbie Jacobs) enhancing my repertoire. Not only that, but the DJs were enjoying themselves and interacting enthusiastically with the crowd, rendering the vibe contagious. I think a few of the harassment squad even left the dancers alone for five minutes. We rode the uplifting wave for an hour or so before leaving. Our journalistic expedition having turned into something a lot more fun than we had expected.

To summarise, I think it’s important to acknowledge that our night was a good one. The venue did its job. This was not in the script. As previously mentioned, I am more drawn to the grungier parties where I consider the focus to be on sound over decor, atmosphere over glamour. However, I have realised that it is not as simple as drawing a line in the sand and choosing a side. It is telling that we left Lazy Lizard to head over to Soup Kitchen for the final two hours for a loud, sweaty club night courtesy of Kiss Me Again. But with that being said, I’ll be a lot less forthright with my unqualified opinions in the future. The best clubs in Manchester have an ethos of acceptance, especially for people/things you’re not used to – this should apply everywhere and not just where it’s fashionable.

PHEW! Quite the night.

All in all, we had a great time. But a one-off-surprise doth not a great clubbing city make. Despite our revelry, our stance on the direction clubs in Manchester are heading hasn’t changed and an analysis of a night at Mantra would have been a lot more glowing.

Obviously, it’s not as simple as Mantra Warehouse vs Lazy Lizard Manchester. But we do believe the microcosm of study we’ve created for this article does stand up under scrutiny. There are, however, several counter-arguments to our stance and we’ll address each one in turn:

Day parties

Many would refute the notion that Manchester’s dance scene is in decline by pointing to the definite rise in the infamous ‘daytime party’. Many individuals see that as the natural progression of an aging demographic that occupied Manchester’s heyday as well the bleak reality of operating under a totalitarian council and noise averse curtain twitchers.

But in our opinion, no amount of record shop in-stores or bar sessions that end at 11 will replace getting sweaty and tops off at 5 am. The fact of the matter is that this aforementioned aging population now have kids. Kids they very much want to integrate into the culture that they revere. For them, it is a rite of passage. For us, it’s a little tepid.

Creative Spaces

Others may point to the proliferation of ‘creative spaces’. Multi-functioning warehouses that host pop up art galleries one day and life drawing classes with Yorkshire pudding kebabs the next. But as this article details, creative spaces aren’t club spaces. They may throw the occasional party, they may even be good at it, but they simply cannot replicate the anxious glee and bated anticipation of entering Corsica Studios or White Hotel at the dead of night.

You don’t form communities around these events the same way you build a rapport with your fellow nocturnal partygoers. This is simply because these people exist in very different states. Furthermore, Antwerp Mansion has been forced into the category of a creative space purely to survive. In our eyes, it is a nightclub first and foremost. No matter how much local artwork decorates the walls (including our own Ode to Antwerp Mansion), this is secondary to the thrill of hearing those speakers do their thing on a big night.

Many will point to the appointment of the night time tsar as evidence that clubs in Manchester are thriving. Otherwise, why would they be required? Surely anyone appointed to oversee a large section of a cities businesses must be doing so because that sector is booming.

This would all make sense if the Tsar himself didn’t have such a clear vested interest as Sasha Lord. It is like making Ronald McDonald the Head of Food Hygiene Practices. Sasha is the owner of The Warehouse Project, a clubbing behemoth that holds a conflicting place in the hearts of many young (and not-so-young) partygoers in Manchester.

Sasha’s appointment is a relatively recent development. It’s difficult to assess the impact that he has made so far. This is not a witch hunt, more a source of concern. It’s surely in his interest for as many people as possible to be close to the city centre and enhance a potential monopoly.

We also noted that many acts are strongly rumoured to have to sign waivers. These forbid DJ’s from playing other clubs in Manchester for a six month period. The idea of an up and coming DJ playing to an empty 11 o’clock crowd, and then being barred from headlining a pumping Soup Kitchen is a poor trade-off for punters, artists, and promoters alike.

Concluding a tale of two clubs in Manchester

As we mentioned at the beginning of the article Manchester is in a state of rapid change. The centre is being rapidly redeveloped. As the ‘new money’ moves in it’s becoming harder and harder to run venues with ‘underground’ bookings. With a small city centre, space is at a premium. It seems that to survive, clubs in Manchester need to cater to the commercial, Friday night hen party crowd.

But Wait!

We’re going to break the fourth wall again in this article and chat to you directly. This post has been a long time coming, we’ve been working on it for over 6 months. At AMF we always strive to produce thought-provoking and well-written articles that provide real food-for-thought for our readers. The downside of that is that they take ages to write.

We had the idea to write this article in February and over the course of writing it, we’ve seen clubs in Manchester change again. We’ve spoken about a city in decline in the article but with clubs in Manchester like Partisan Collective, Hatch & YES opening it’d be true to say everything moves in cycles.

At the start of the year, we were at a definite low point but the city has shown resilience. Ultimately, no one is going to tell people they can’t party. New spaces are opening, Salford especially is stepping up to the plate. It’s taking the party away from clubs in Manchester and north of the Irwell.

The change in fortunes for clubs in Manchester has been rapid. We felt it was better to write the article as we initially intended. Then add this note at the end. We thought the piece would read better if we laid out our arguments and points as we initially intended. Instead of trying to adapt the article to developments happening as we were writing it. It’s more satisfying to end the process with our views being replaced with a surge of excitement and optimism.

(Note added on the 31st August 2019)

A week after we released this article Lazy Lizard dramatically shut. We like to think this post had something to do with it but its more likely that Lazy Lizard followed the trend that many clubs like it does. It was too big to make money.

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