Firmly ensconced in my Top 5 Manchester venues is the Night and Day Café situated halfway down Oldham Street, next to the Dry Bar and opposite the legendary Piccadilly Records in the Northern Quarter (NQ). The venue opened originally as a chip shop in 1991 in what at the point of time was a disreputable area of town, before gradually evolving into a music venue.
The Night and Day capacity is 250 and like many small venues has served to be a launch pad for bands on the ladder up to much larger venues. Local band Elbow were a mainstay in their early days and to support the venue in the current pandemic are scheduled to play a Back to the Roots gig there later this year.
It is recognised as the first real seminal gig venue in NQ and a forerunner on which the whole area was rebuilt upon. This has resulted in the present-day position where there is a tsunami of small independent venues and bars located in the streets and byways adjacent to the venue.
Despite the venue being a mainstay in the area for 30 years, some punter in 2013 moved into the flats above the venue and then inexplicably had the temerity to complain about the decibel levels. A petition with 74,000 signatures was raised in support of the venue and thankfully the council saw sense and only applied some conditions to have a complaints log and set up ongoing quarterly meetings with nearby residents.
It has a fine geographical location with a 15-minute jaunt to either Piccadilly or Victoria stations to catch the last train home.
The Night and Day lives up to its name and operates as a café during the day with continental tables outside to watch the comings and goings. It then has an hour crossover period early evening and morphs into a paid gig venue at night.
The set-up is a long thin room with a long bar on the left, DJ stand to the right and the stage down at the bottom. It is a very intimate setting where you can stand right up front though you must carefully navigate the wooden pillars. Alternatively, you can even have the unusual vantage of being up close and personal at the left-hand side of the stage which then leads onwards to the downstairs loos.
There are certain places where I have developed traditions on the drink fronts, any pub up in Kirkcudbright in Scotland (base for Wickerman Festivals) generally incites a Guinness and Raiders nightclub in Preston for many years had Murphy’s Stout as the drink of choice. For Night and Day however, it has always been a cold bottle of Budvar!
I have attended 17 gigs there in totality, placing it at No 7 on my most visited venue list. Ten of those gigs were attended either by blagging our way in following other gigs prior to the last train or part of multi event festivals such as Carefully Planned, Dot to Dot or Off the Record. Quite often it was deliberately the last venue of the night as it is always a cracking place to finish in!
