Strange quarter, here we come

Taken from the new print issue of THE FACE. Get your copy here.

First, they brought out the coffin. On the street, mourners wiped tears behind netted veils as paparazzi lenses shuttered. The late summer sun shone on early evening Salford, as lads wore full black-tie garb; girls, velvet dresses. This was the funeral of Princess Diana. Except: it wasn’t.

This was The Funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales 2.0, a re-enactment hosted by The White Hotel in September 2018. And once the cortège reached the club, things got weirder.

Inside, there was a crashed VW Polo car. The room’s dirty white walls and rusted metal shutters, betraying its status as a barely renovated MOT garage, echoed with the sound of a Mexican mariachi band covering Elton John’s Candle in the Wind. An actor playing Jill Dando was fake-shot in an echo of the Diana-lookalike TV broadcaster’s unsolved 1999 murder.

“This is not a work of art,” declared the venue’s artistic director Austin Collings in a statement, ​“but an exorcism.” The Daily Star had other ideas: ​“Fury as ​‘sickos’ prepare to ​‘EXORCISE’ Princess Diana in ​‘funeral 2.0’ TONIGHT”.

A macabre sense of humour, then. An event that blurred the lines between performance, party and provocation. An anti-community thriving on a dark premise. The reenactment spoke to the powerful strangeness of The White Hotel, a club and venue that has totally galvanised the North West’s experimental music scene while setting a new gold standard for hedonism in Greater Manchester. If a DJ says The White Hotel is their favourite club, you can probably trust them.

Thirty-six years earlier, on Friday 21^st May 1982, Factory Records boss and broadcaster Tony Wilson opened the doors of The Haçienda.

“It’s necessary for every period to build its cathedrals,” he told Granada TV, proudly gesturing at his new venture: a massive city-centre rave venue in a former yacht warehouse which, over the ensuing years, he’d attempt to run with a business method inspired by the countercultural Situationist philosophy of anticapitalism meets spectacle. ​“It’s necessary for any youth culture to have a place, a sense of place,” he said.

While The Haçienda was a sleek Bauhaus-via-NYC space, built to midwife Manchester music out of Thatcher-era depression and into a supposedly Day-Glo future, the city’s 21^st-century cathedral would be as gritty, unsparing, savage and surreal as the modern North West itself – appropriately sited away from the glitz of the centre, in the darkness on the edge of town.

Today, The White Hotel – named after D.M. Thomas’s unfilmable 1981 novel (David Lynch tried) – remains largely the same as it did when clubbers first pushed through its doors a decade ago: a slightly grubby garage space with a completely unhelpful sloping step slap bang in the middle of the dancefloor.

At least its aesthetic is in keeping with its immediate environment, surrounded as it is by the largely uninhabited world of Salford industrial estates. ​“The crap in the air will fuck up your face,” Mark E. Smith sneered on The Fall’s 1979 track Industrial Estate, a hymn to these un-glamorous sites of shutters, barbed wire fences and weedy overgrowth that hum with lorries in the day and are largely deserted at night.

From the 2000s to the mid-2010s, the mischief mainly took place at the raucous DIY space Islington Mill in Salford, a haven for ravers, artists and bands turned off by the increasingly gentrified nightlife in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. Alongside hosting anarchist book fairs and space-rock jam sessions, the former cotton mill put on artists such as Björk, Peaches and Lydia Lunch, before noise complaints forced the 2017 closure of its club capacity (the Mill continues today as a more traditional arts space).

But the spirit never really died. The Islington Mill scene had been fertile ground for the likes of Sways Records, the kind of post-punk label to put out records by a band called Naked (on Drugs) and house a 7‑inch by the band Money in a sleeve featuring full-frontal male nudity and guns. So, along with some like-minded conspirators, Sways co-founder Benjamin Ward began operating an illicit venue in a former MOT garage in Salford, naming it after Hitler’s end-of-days hideout, The Führerbunker. ​“It was gritty, absolutely no frills,” remembers DJ Annabel Fraser of a space that was basically splintery wooden walls, with abstract video projections distracting from the lack of structural soundness. ​“You’ve got shit up your leg, everyone going absolutely nuts and no social media.”

Later, with the club renamed The Bunker, Space Afrika – whose dizzying collages of sub-bass and elegiac atmospheres evoke Greater Manchester’s strange new urban landscapes – played their first gigs there. ​“The energy was unmatched in Manchester,” says Joshua Inyang, recalling a scene that was already drawing ​“people from different groups or disciplines: house, tech- no, jungle, D&B, people doing more guitar stuff”. As the scene intensified, Ward, working with a collective of other Bunker faces, including Austin Collings and floor manager (and now director) Lucy Blackledge, moved the action into a bigger automotive unit at Dickinson Street. It was another grungy former automotive unit, mind, but at least this one didn’t feel like it was about to fall down.

The White Hotel, as it became known, opened for the first time on New Year’s Eve 2015. As the clock struck 2016 – the shock year of Brexit at home, Trump abroad – it chimed the dawning of a club that would meet and match the horrific, berserk and bleak new era.

aya, one of the most fearlessly experimental and confrontational musicians in contemporary club music, remembers first going to a venue that, even weeks after opening its clanking doors, hadn’t finished building the toilets. ​“It was just plywood,” she says. ​“There was nothing there.” DJs had to clamber up boxes to hoist themselves into the tiny, makeshift DJ booth. The bar was literally an underground trench, the MOT garage’s former repair pit: you had to kneel down to pick up your lagers.

Rainy Miller – the Northern Gothic rapper, producer and Fixed Abode label head – recalls arriving at The White Hotel for the first time to the sound of music that sounded like bins being smashed together. ​“Fuck me,” he thought. ​“It’s half four in the morning and someone’s playing this mad music [in a place] where all the freaks come together.”

Word soon got out. In July 2017, Vice’s music platform Noisey published an article entitled ​“Salford is the Most Exciting Place to Party in the UK Right Now”, and explicitly repped The White Hotel as its engine. ​“Londoners started to ask me: ​‘Ooh, have you ever been?’” recalls DJ Finn McCorry, who regularly puts on parties at the venue. ​“For a club that was as weird and esoteric as The White Hotel,” he argues, ​“that’s healthy.”

Iceboy Violet, the West Yorkshire rapper and producer who’s become part of the furniture at the club, remembers a rude awakening that was a mark of The White Hotel becoming a destination. The weekend after the Noisey piece dropped, they were in a (now finally completed) toilet cubicle at the club (“doing what you do in cubicles at clubs”). A studenty type began banging on the door, suspecting that – shock, horror – hedonism might be going on. They threatened to call security. ​“I was like: ​‘You could try, but I’ve been [coming] here since you were 15…’”

The White Hotel got busier and buzzier, and the once decidedly experimental music policy got a little looser. It upgraded its original make-shift sound system to its current d&b audiotechnik rig, rendering DIY sounds like underground baile funk or harsh noise music with a precision and total bone-shaking low-end that, today, you’re unlikely to encounter anywhere else. The venue opened its arms to less confrontational music, too. In recent years, it’s been as much about the unpretentious, feel-good vibes brought by renowned local DJs like McCorry, Tom Boogizm and Anz.

Reassuringly, though, at its core, The White Hotel’s visual aesthetic remains stubbornly dark and intimidating. “[There’s] this sense of looming apocalypse,” Iceboy Violet says. ​“That was a vibe The White Hotel curated [from the beginning].” The club’s Instagram flyers are gothic, ritualistic and minimal. The feel is closer to a funeral programme than shiny EDM boosterism, as evidenced by its love of a crucifix (see: the sort-of logo), an in-house poet named Christ and, more recently, literally sticking a huge white cross up on the dancefloor. This quasi-religious theme can also be found at The White Hotel’s city centre offshoot bar, bookshop, venue and record store (the name of which changes annually – everyone just calls it Peste). It has a luxury Catholic feel, all gold tassels, velvet and hymn- book drinks menus. Imagine a dive bar in, say, The Vatican.

All of which explains why The White Hotel draws a unique crowd. ​“Anyone who doesn’t fit in anywhere always ends up at The White Hotel,” says Annabel Fraser, now a resident DJ. ​“And once they come once, they keep coming.”

“It’s literally the most random people you can imagine,” enthuses White Hotel face Ewan Ferguson. ​“All the degenerates who wanted to stay up until whenever.” Nights like Wet Play, High Hoops and Tough Act have made the club an alternative hotspot for the North’s wilder queer fringes, and Ferguson admires the relaxed door policy and an unspoken rule of tolerance among the staff and regulars. “[It’s] a refuge for people to experiment, to keep going and explore [their] queerness.”

Like all good phenoms, it wasn’t long before The White Hotel began to radiate its weird vibes all around the area. The nearby Derby Brewery Arms transformed from your grandad’s boozer to a full-whack queer techno venue nicknamed The DBA, where pre and post-White Hotel raving – the latter of which has been encouraged by pub parties kicking off at 8am – has flourished amid the bitter, tankards and 1970s carpets. The district was christened The Strange Quarter for more than just its proximity to the Strangeways prison.

And the venue is more than a totem of its location. In the future, when people talk about The White Hotel, it will be impossible to separate it from the conditions of the period in which it rose like a pigeon from the ashes. The late 2010s were years when Greater Manchester became at once more harsh – as the brutal effects of Conservative austerity played out at street-level in soaring homelessness and the city’s spice drug epidemic – and more materially flash. Manchester’s city-centre population rose from 11,000 to 100,000 in a property boom that has seen the city’s skyline soar, with rents rising for ordinary Mancunians by as much as 20 per cent in 2022 alone – at the time, the steepest rises in the UK.

Similarly, Manchester’s night-life became part of that citywide, revenue-raising machine. In 2017, Warehouse Project and Parklife festival owner Sacha Lord was appointed Manchester’s first ​“night time economy adviser” by Mayor Andy Burnham (immortalised in The White Hotel toilet graffiti tribute ​“ANDY BURNHAM IS A POWER BOTTOM”). During his reign, Lord became notorious in the local dance music scene for Parklife and Warehouse Project’s exclusivity contracts – clauses that stopped DJs performing in Manchester within months of playing his events (Lord resigned in January this year after being told to pay back a disputed £400,000 Covid grant). But the city’s big-money clubbing forced the underground, McCorry argues, to double down. ​“It created a utopian space where, you know, we’re not competing with Four Tet.”

So how long can the madness continue? In Britain right now, clubs are still closing – roughly one-third of their number have shut up shop in the last five years. Meanwhile, Manchester’s remorseless regeneration is spreading towards The White Hotel, with Greater Manchester Police’s Operation Vulcan – targeting the historically informal economy in knock-off clothes and trainers in the nearby Cheetham Hill – widely reckoned to be paving the way for the next wave of gentrification. ​“People are afraid now,” says Alice Woods, who has thrown her Meat Free club nights at The White Hotel and The DBA. ​“There are plenty of planning applications going around. People don’t want to think about it, but there probably is an expiry date.”

Not that The White Hotel is resting on its late-night laurels. Next June it’s putting its reputation to the test with a 48-hour pop-up in – all over, in fact – Blackpool. The Black Lights is a weekend takeover of the whole North West seaside town. Across the town’s Winter Gardens, Opera House, North Pier and Pleasure Beach, there will be performances by the likes of Mica Levi, Jawnino and The Caretaker, as well as many of the aforementioned North West artists. Blackpool’s cheeky, faded glamour certainly chimes with The White Hotel’s defiant sensibility and specific brand of regionalism.

For aya, that geo-locked identity is key to why The White Hotel matters. ​“Having Rainy play as much as he does, it creates this nice little incubator for a specific type of performance, a type of sound, a certain kind of intensity,” she says. ​“There’s not a definable White Hotel sound, but there’s an energy that comes through. It fosters a sense of community, but also an artistic attitude.”

“It’s that level of: fuck you, we’re going to do what we want to do.” That’s how Preston-raised rapper, dancer and Playboi Carti affiliate Blackhaine characterises The White Hotel’s guiding ethos. ​“Good, honest people who care about music.” With a sound which merges poetry, power electronics and East Lancs-accented drill, when Blackhaine thinks of people like himself, or close collaborator Rainy Miller, or next-gen talent like Ship Sket – the Dorset-via-Salford producer whose screwed-out take on IDM feels shaped by the club – he thinks of regulars with ​“ideals forged by The White Hotel”.

When venues prioritise sub-culture over profit, they don’t tend to stick around forever. But their legacy lingers. So even if – worst case scenario – The White Hotel’s days serving Becks to punters stumbling down a lip on the dancefloor are numbered, and this former MOT garage is transformed into slick new-build flats, the seeds have already been sown. And somewhere, someday, more strange flowers will sprout from the concrete.