When Bob Dylan played Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in 1966, an audience member infamously yelled “Judas” at him. When the Sex Pistols played Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976, in a different part of the same building, they kickstarted a local music scene pivotal to the next 50 years of popular music. When I visited Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in 2025, I slept very comfortably in a big, soft bed and enjoyed a walk-in shower with fantastic water pressure. I even found time to check out the spa in the basement.
Built on the site of a 1819 massacre of workers protesting for reform, and opened to commemorate the 1846 repeal of tariffs and other taxes that placed an undue burden on the urban workers that predominated in Manchester (they were called the Corn Laws and holy shit I assume some band has already used that as a name), the Free Trade Hall was a public meeting space for its first century. After World War II it became the most prominent concert venue in the city. In the late ‘90s it was sold to developers who reopened it as a hotel in 2004. Its journey, from political activism to music to tourism, reflects Manchester’s own history. The world’s first industrial city (one-time resident Friedrich Engels and his running buddy Karl Marx studied the plight of Manchester’s workers when cooking up their manifesto) became a crucible for arts and culture at the nadir of its post-industrial decline, making a massive impact on all of popular music from the 1970s on. Its musical legacy became a central part of the city’s identity, and a major driver of tourism as the 20th century danced into the 21st. That’s why I was there in April, staying at The Edwardian Manchester, now owned by Radisson, and the current occupant of the Free Trade Hall.
The list of bands from Manchester is a who’s who of the coolest of the cool: Buzzcocks, Joy Division, New Order, The Smiths, The Fall, Magazine, The Stone Roses, 808 State, The Happy Mondays, The Chemical Brothers, Inspiral Carpets, Crispy Ambulance, The Durutti Column, James, The Verve, freakin’ Van der Graaf Generator… the list literally goes on and on. The Hollies were from there! Manchester can claim The Bee Gees and Genesis P-Orridge. Muslimgauze! Truly, the city’s music knows no boundaries. And yes, apparently some scruffy pub rockers called Oasis are from around there, too.
Beyond any specific artists or groups, Manchester was also central to the birth of rave culture. The Hacienda, the legendary night club owned in the ‘80s and ‘90s by local impresario Tony Wilson and New Order, was an early home for DJ nights, where people came not to watch bands play music but somebody hitting play on turntables and CD players. The city’s name was even adapted for the particular strain of ecstasy-fueled dance music (part indie rock, part acid house) that became popular in the UK (and with too-cool Americans who listened to college radio and stayed up late to watch 120 Minutes on MTV) at the end of the ‘80s: Madchester.
Look, if you need the history, just go watch 24 Hour Party People. I’m sure it’s wrong in a million different ways, but it definitely feels right in the big picture.
Oasis might have marked the commercial peak of the Manchester music scene (and it’s hard for us Americans to comprehend how huge their upcoming reunion tour is over there), but their kind of meat-and-potatoes dinosaur rock isn’t what made the city an international music hub. No, it was the work of all the bands that came in the ‘70s and ‘80s—Buzzcocks showing everybody how to independently release their own music, Tony Wilson and his partners at Factory Records getting Joy Division and then New Order out to the world, New Order following Kraftwerk down the electronic music hole and coming up with a dance rock hybrid that sounds as fresh and vital today as it did 40 years ago, The Smiths (and especially Morrissey) for serving as melodramatic catnip to every sensitive and misunderstood teenager that will ever exist for the rest of eternity—that made Manchester synonymous with music, creating the platform and infrastructure for a band like Oasis to become the biggest damn rock band in the world (or at least one small island off the coast of France).
When I was in Manchester I caught a show by Peter Hook, the bassist of Joy Division and New Order, and his band The Light. They played all of New Order’s album Get Ready in sequence, followed by an extremely generous dream playlist of almost every major Joy Division and New Order song. (They’re touring America right now, and shouldn’t be missed.) When I asked him what made Manchester such a fertile breeding ground for culture-changing music—the kind of dumb question music journalists love pestering artists with—his answer was simple: “I have absolutely no idea.” He’s probably been asked some version of that question in almost every interview he’s ever given for the last 45 years, so he’s had time to work up a stock answer, and yet his inability to do so illustrates how absolutely massive Manchester’s influence has been. You can’t really wrap your head around it, even if you were at the center of it, like Hook was. He gave full credit to Pete Shelley and Howard DeVoto from Buzzcocks for igniting the whole thing by booking those Sex Pistols gigs, though, sharing his own memories of that night and emphasizing again the enormous immediate impact it had on local musicians.
A good way to start your musical tour of Manchester is with an actual musical tour of Manchester. The Manchester Musical Walkabout is a casual walking tour through the city’s center with insight, stories, and sounds from the British Invasion up through today. The guide for my tour, the journalist and author Jonathan Schofield, was a great resource for Mancunian history, spotlighting not just the sites of important clubs and studios (including the apartment building that now sits where the Hacienda used to reside), but sharing fascinating tidbits of Manchester history at large. (You’ll quickly notice that many of the older buildings in the city are a distinctive red color; terracotta was often used in the 19th century, because Manchester was so clogged with smoke from its many textile factories that white or grey buildings would quickly become discolored.) As a longtime resident (and recipient of The University of Manchester’s Medal of Honour) Schofield knows his stuff, often supplementing it with personal anecdotes from his own life, including run-ins with Wilson and other major figures.
Whether you spring for an official tour or not, you’ll encounter Manchester’s music throughout the city. You’ll hear the sounds of Joy Division and New Order in bars and coming out of cars, recognize places from Smiths lyrics and band photos, and find Mark E. Smith of The Fall scowling at you from a wall-sized mural on the side of a chippie. One night I was eating Korean fried chicken at Freight Island, a food hall in an old train station, and a DJ started spinning songs by The Happy Mondays and The Smiths; it was Manchester Rocks night, a regular DJ event focusing on local artists. Over a salad and piri piri chicken at the restaurant inside HOME, a community arts center that includes a cinema and space for concerts and live theater, I realized that the square it was located in was named after Tony Wilson. Manchester’s impact on music is unmistakable, and so is the presence of that music within Manchester still today.
Although my deep abiding love for many of the bands that made Manchester famous was the main reason I headed to the city, I wound up enraptured with the city as a whole. I knew it was a key global city at the height of the Industrial Revolution, but I didn’t know, until visiting the Science and Industry Museum, that the primary industry was textiles. That means Manchester’s fortunes were intimately connected to that of the American South, where I’m from. Slavery wasn’t legal in the United Kingdom, but Manchester profited directly from American slavery, which was used to cultivate the cotton that Mancunian textile factories purchased in vast quantities. It was sobering to see that Manchester, a city an entire ocean away from my home state of Georgia, was far better about acknowledging and trying to atone for its own secondary role in American slavery than the states and country responsible for it.
And even the Science and Industry Museum pays tribute to Manchester’s music scene. Its timeline of the city’s contributions to the world include one of Tony Wilson’s copies of a Joy Division record. An interactive DJ station lets guests make their own remixes, much like the city’s dance artists would. (Weirdly, though, the song available for remix is by the Scottish band The Delgados, with the thin justification that their label, Chemikal Underground, was heavily inspired by Factory. They couldn’t have used a Manchester band? I mean, there’s a lot of ’em.)
You can’t miss Manchester’s music in the city today, but you also can’t see the city the way it was when much of that music was being made. The Manchester of the ‘70s and ‘80s was a city reeling from the collapse of its industry. It could cultivate such a vibrant music community because living downtown was unbelievably cheap, and often free; so much of it was empty and abandoned that practice rooms, recording studio space, and even places to live often didn’t cost anything. You didn’t have to worry about complaints over the noise you were making when there were literally no landlords or paying tenants nearby. There were even parts of the city damaged during the bombings of World War II that hadn’t been repaired into the 1980s. If you read Jon Savage’s oral history of Joy Division—or, really, any book about Manchester in the ‘70s and ‘80s—you’ll immediately understand where Joy Division’s stark, foreboding sound comes from; they were literally living in it.
Today Manchester is a thriving 21st century city, with a number of towering silver spires looming over the city that Ian Curtis knew. Since 2000 it’s seen rampant development, and has become a major center for tech, communications, and various creative industries. The BBC moved much of its operations to the city in 2012. Tourism is a big part of its economy, and music tourism in particular represents a large chunk of that. It’s why the Free Trade Hall, a building erected 170 years ago in tribute to Manchester’s role in the struggle for worker’s rights and against economic disparity, that later became a cultural hub during the city’s own rise as a music power, is now a luxury hotel, with a pricy spa, fancy restaurant, and expensive bar. There’s little sign of the hall’s musical history inside The Edwardian today, but the exterior preserves the building’s classic facade; it looks glorious at night, the arches above its windows dramatically lit from below. It’s the story of Manchester captured in one building—which means it’s also the story of the last 200 years, of everything from the Industrial Revolution through today. Where London is massive, overwhelming, desperate to be everything for everybody, Manchester stands proud but unassuming, the working class city of working class cities—and with a goddamned great soundtrack, to boot.
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.
