Band on the Wall

Meet Simon Webbon, Head of Marketing & Communications at Band on the Wall. Listen to the rich history of one Manchester’s most famous music venues in the city and his perspective on the Manchester's music scene. 

We are one of, if not the, oldest music venues in Manchester. One of the oldest in the world. We were founded in 1803 as a pub – it was called the George & Dragon at that time. And the whole area of what is now the Northern Quarter was at the time a big market area. So, there was the Smithfield Markets which the remnants of it are now the Craft & Design Centre and then there’s the original façade that’s still there. Flats behind there now, next to where the Richard Goodall Gallery was and that sort of area. But the whole region of the Northern Quarter, behind Band on the Wall all the way down to Piccadilly Gardens was a big market trading area.

Yes, we’ve had a licence for song and dance since 1803. The original building dates back earlier than that so we know that in 1803, the George & Dragon, as it was, was granted a licence and the building was a converted dwelling. Now how far that goes back pre-1803 we don’t know. The building has been here in one form or another from probably the late 1700s, but we’ve been operating as a pub with music since 1803.

Throughout the 1800's it operated pretty consistently as a watering hole with entertainment, which at the time was probably to provide a bit of entertainment to punters and to mark itself out as somewhere a little bit different from all the other pubs. But its transition into something which was primarily a music venue and then food and drink secondary goes into the early 20th Century. 

There was a landlord in the 1930s to the early 1950s called Ernie Tyson and he had a bit of a reputation as being, he didn’t take any nonsense from people, let’s put it that way and at the time it was a little bit more of a kind of rough and tumble area than it is now. He had this idea of putting a stage half-way up the wall at the back of the pub, so he could still bring in the entertainment for the drinkers but also he didn’t have to have a stage that was taking up any room in the pub, so he could fit more drinkers in. He erected this stage half-way up the wall. The nickname Band on The Wall came from that. 

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s we were primarily a jazz club, so a lot of famous jazz musicians have come through there. We became world famous in the 1970s and the early 1980s through the Manchester punk scene. Everyone knows that Joy Division and The Fall and Buzzcocks played some of their earliest shows at Band on the Wall. And there’s a bit folklore that says that it was in our bar where Joy Division signed that famous contract in blood with Tony Wilson. Now how true that is no one knows, but as Tony said himself “always print the legend.”

Image of Joy Division playing in the venue from the Band on the Wall archive. 

More recent names people might recognise are Gregory Porter who has played. He did two nights and now of course he’s picking up Grammys and playing in arenas. Snarky Puppy played their first European date at Band on the Wall and did a whole week artistic residency, rehearsing and developing their craft before going onto massive things. Femi Kuti, Sharon Jones, Robet Glasper, Mica Paris, Tinariwen, GoGo Penguin played some of their shows at Band on the Wall. Tony Allen, of course, that massive Afro Beat legend, the names go on really of people that have played here over the years. 

To be fair, all the venues in the city centre do something pretty special, certainly at the moment when we’re all kind of sticking together. We’re set up as a charity so our artistic programme doesn’t really make us any money and that frees us up a little bit to bring music of excellence to all corners of the world to Manchester – that's what our USP is. We have a lot of African musicians come through, a lot of musicians from the Caribbean come through. Musicians from all over Europe and America. What we do is, we bring music of excellence from all around the world to Manchester and present it in a way that is accessible to the people of Manchester. 

Our programme’s really diverse, so we can have a 16-piece afro beat band on one night and then a local indie band on the next night. And then a jazz band on. And then a drum and bass night. And that's very much by design. We’re not a venue that just indie music or just jazz. We believe that genres don’t exist in an ideal world. 

We can have 10-year-old kids coming in with their parents to watch their first gig. One of our regulars must be in his nineties, who comes to every jazz gig we have on. It’s a really big spread, right from people coming with their parents, through to students and elderly couples. 

It’s massively changed over probably the last 20 years. The whole Northern Quarter regeneration scheme that was pushed. It was great what the council did in the nineties, along with Michael Traynor, those local business leaders like that. Let’s go back to the seventies and the eighties when it was not the kind of tourist, hospitality destination that it is now. There were a few shops and local businesses. There was a big influx of the cotton trade, so a lot of South Indian companies came in and textile businesses. The remnant of that, of course, is the famous Rice & Three curry house café that’s still in the Northern Quarter that people might know. And then in the nineties a massive regeneration and gentrification.

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