On 4 June 1976 the Sex Pistols played the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester. Somewhere between forty and a hundred people were there.
In the room, by reliable accounts, were Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner, who formed Joy Division within weeks; Morrissey, who wrote to the music press about it; Mark E. Smith, who formed the Fall; Tony Wilson, a Granada TV presenter who founded Factory Records; and Martin Hannett, who would produce most of it.
It is the most consequential small gig in British history, it has been the subject of a book and a film, and roughly ten thousand people now claim to have been present.
Factory
Tony Wilson, Alan Erasmus, Rob Gretton and Martin Hannett founded Factory Records in 1978. It was run on principles that were part situationist art project and part commercial negligence.
Contracts were minimal — the famous one, signed in Wilson’s blood, said the musicians owned everything and the company owned nothing. Catalogue numbers were assigned to non-records, including the Haçienda itself (FAC 51), a lawsuit, and Wilson’s coffin.
Joy Division made Unknown Pleasures and Closer. Ian Curtis killed himself in May 1980, aged twenty-three, in Macclesfield, the night before the band’s first American tour. The survivors became New Order and made Blue Monday, which was the best-selling twelve-inch single ever released and — because of Peter Saville’s die-cut sleeve — reportedly lost money on every copy sold.
That story is disputed and Factory people have both confirmed and denied it over the years. It is repeated because it is a perfect description of how the label operated.
The Haçienda
FAC 51, the Haçienda, opened on Whitworth Street West in May 1982, funded largely by New Order’s record sales. It was designed by Ben Kelly as an industrial space — bollards, hazard stripes, a cathedral of a room with terrible sightlines and worse acoustics.
For its first four years it was almost empty and it haemorrhaged money.
Then acid house arrived, and from about 1988 the Haçienda was the most important club in Britain. Madchester — the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets, 808 State — came out of it, and the city acquired a global identity for the first time since cotton.
It also acquired gangs, guns and a drug economy that the club could not control. It closed in 1997. Factory had already gone bankrupt in 1992.
The site is now flats called The Haçienda Apartments, which is either the perfect ending or the worst one depending on how you feel about the whole thing. There is a plaque.
Everything else
The Smiths, formed 1982, Morrissey and Johnny Marr, and a body of work that Manchester is proud of while being increasingly uncomfortable about one of the people who made it.
Oasis, from Burnage, whose two Maine Road shows in 1996 were the high-water mark of Britpop and who reunited to enormous attention and enormous ticket prices.
The Chemical Brothers, formed at the university. Elbow, from Bury. Doves. Take That. Everything Everything. The 1975.
The Charlatans, James, Buzzcocks, Magazine, A Certain Ratio, Durutti Column.
And, going back, the Hallé — founded 1858, the oldest professional symphony orchestra in Britain, still playing at the Bridgewater Hall, which is a longer continuous musical tradition than any of the above.
Where to go now
Band on the Wall, Swan Street — reopened in 2022 after a major refurbishment. Jazz, world, electronic, and a room that has been a music venue in one form or another since the 1930s.
The Deaf Institute, Grosvenor Street — a small upstairs room with a domed ceiling, and the best place in Manchester to see a band before they get big.
Night & Day Café, Northern Quarter — which fought and won a long noise-abatement battle with a neighbouring flat, an argument about what happens when residential development arrives next to a venue that was there first.
Matt & Phreds for jazz. The Castle and Gullivers on Oldham Street for small gigs. Yes on Charles Street for four floors of it.
Co-op Live, opened in 2024 in east Manchester, is the largest indoor arena in the UK at 23,500 capacity. Its opening was a shambles — cancelled shows, a falling air-conditioning unit, a resigned general manager — and it has settled down since.
The AO Arena at Victoria remains the other big room.
Doing the history
There is no Manchester music museum, which is a persistent local complaint.
What there is: the plaque at what is now the Radisson on Peter Street, where the Free Trade Hall gig happened; the Haçienda plaque; Salford Lads Club, which is a working youth club and asks visitors to come at advertised times rather than turning up for the photograph; and a number of walking tours run by people who were genuinely there.
Piccadilly Records and Eastern Bloc in the Northern Quarter are the better pilgrimage. Both are working shops, both have the history in them, and both would rather sell you a record than a memory.