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Manchester Pride announces Nelly Furtado as surprise headliner

She's joining the Mardi Gras bill.

Daisy Jackson Daisy Jackson - 14th August 2025

Manchester Pride has just dropped another huge headliner for this year’s festival – and it’s only global pop superstar Nelly Furtado.

The huge LGBTQ+ festival, celebration and protest had kept its final headliner under wraps for months, but has today announced the Maneater star will be joining the line-up for 2025.

Nelly Furtado will co-headline Manchester Pride alongside Olly Alexander, with tickets for both the Gay Village Party and Mardi Gras already on sale.

Also announced on the line-up today are DJ Paulette and Moonchild Sanelly.

Manchester Pride 2025 will take place from Friday 22 to Monday 25 August, with four days of live music, celebrations, the parade, parties, and the candlelit vigil.

Already-announced headliners include Olly Alexander, Leigh-Anne, Billy Porter, and Tulisa, alongside loads more queer artists.

Nelly Furtado is known for her anthems like Maneater, Promiscuous and I’m Like A Bird, and will bring Mardi Gras to an uplifting, powerful end on Sunday 24 August.

Homegrown legend DJ Paulette will also join the Sunday Mardi Gras line-up, along with South African trailblazer Moonchild Sanelly on Friday at the Gay Village Party.

Mark Fletcher, CEO of Manchester Pride, said: “Welcoming an Icon like Nelly Furtado alongside DJ Paulette and Moonchild Sanelly further showcases the diversity of musical tastes that we’re catering for. They’re each sure to create some unforgettable moments.

“Manchester Pride 2025 will be bold, brilliant, and bursting with Pride energy, but it’s at a tipping point.

“Pride can only thrive if our community shows up: by attending events, joining the Parade, and buying supporter bands.

“We’ve seen what happens when we don’t rally together, and we cannot let that happen in our City. This is the moment to stand up, come together, party as a protest and ensure Pride continues to shine long into the future.”

For full-day line-ups and more information on Manchester Pride 2025, download the Manchester Pride app.

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Featured image: Supplied

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The Last Dinner Party have announced a huge 35-date tour, including a big Manchester gig

Danny Jones Danny Jones The Last Dinner Party Manchester tickets 2025

Multi-award-winning indie and alternative rock band, The Last Dinner Party, have just announced what is set to be one of their biggest globe-trotting tours ever, with a momentous Manchester gig included on the UK run.

The much-celebrated five-piece have revealed their latest run of shows will span the UK, Ireland, mainland Europe, Australia AND New Zealand, confirming a total of 35 live dates.

After coming somewhat under fire in 2024 following a series of cancelled concerts, the Londoners have responded in the best way possible: by putting their money where their mouth is and coming back with a bang ahead of their highly anticipated sophomore release.

We have every faith they’ll have the stamina to fulfil their live commitments this time around, and you best believe we’ll be going for tickets.

TLDP2

Speaking in the build-up to the release of the second album, From The Pyre – which is set to drop on 17 October – the band said of their latest material: “This record is a collection of stories, and the concept of album-as-mythos binds them.

‘The Pyre‘ itself is an allegorical place in which these tales originate, a place of violence and destruction but also regeneration, passion and light. The songs are character-driven but still deeply personal, a commonplace life event pushed to a pathological extreme.

“Being ghosted becomes a Western dance with a killer, and heartbreak laughs into the face of the apocalypse. Lyrics invoke rifles, scythes, sailors, saints, cowboys, floods, Mother Earth, Joan of Arc, and blazing infernos. We found this kind of evocative imagery to be the most honest and truthful way to discuss the way our experiences felt, giving each the emotional weight it deserves.”

Going on to describe the follow-up to their seminal debut, Prelude to Ecstasy (which saw them sweep up multiple BRIT and NME Awards, as well as a Mercury Prize nomination), as “darker, more raw and more earthy”, you’re definitely in for a heavily intellectualised experience with this one.

Their performances are certainly much more than a group of musicians getting up on stage too; having seen them last October ourselves, the LGBTQ+ icons definitely revel in the artistic expression of a live show, and have been praised for celebrating the female queer gaze too.

The Last Dinner Party aren’t ‘industry plants’, they just got real good real quick – Victoria Warehouse, Manchester

The Last Dinner Party UK tour dates

As you can see in the social post shared by the band, they’re about to have a very busy end to 2025, plus plenty of travelling in the new year, but for now, you can see The Last Dinner Party’s upcoming UK tour dates in full down below:

  • 14 November – 3Arena, Dublin
  • 17 November – Corn Exchange, Edinburgh
  • 20 November – O2 City Hall, Newcastle
  • 23 November – Bridlington Spa, Bridlington
  • 26 November – Aviva Studios, Manchester
  • 29 November – The Civic Hall, Wolverhampton
  • 30 November – The Prospect Building, Bristol
  • 2 December – Utilita Arena, Cardiff
  • 4 December – Plymouth Pavilions, Plymouth
  • 5 December – Brighton Centre, Brighton
  • 7 December – O2 Academy Brixton, London
  • 8 December – O2 Academy Brixton, London

Yes, set to visit Aviva Studios – a.k.a. the home of Greater Manchester’s ever-growing artistic hub – for the very first time, we couldn’t think of a more fitting act to play the stunning dynamic space.

General admission for The Last Dinner Party tour goes live from 10am GMT on Friday, 12 September, but fans who pre-order the album can gain early access.

You can get ready to grab your tickets right HERE.

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For all the latest news, events and goings on in Greater Manchester, subscribe to The Manc newsletter HERE.

Featured Images — Press shots (supplied)/The Manc Group

Audio

The story behind one of Noel Gallagher’s best bits of songwriting and greatest ever performances

Danny Jones Danny Jones The

Noel Gallagher is not only one of the greatest songwriters of a generation, but perhaps one of Britain’s best-ever; he’s certainly in the top five of all time from Greater Manchester, but did you know how the story behind how one of his best (you heard) songs, ‘Dead In The Water’ came to be?

Or rather, do you know how one little radio performance produced one of his best vocal performances to date? Keep reading…

In case you’ve never heard the haunting ‘Dead In The Water’, taken from Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds LP three, Who Built The Moon?, it is very much just that: an almost ghostly and preciously quiet, acoustic song that became a cult favourite on the LP and even more beloved live track.

But this tune was never even supposed to be on the album; the deep cut, which was only ever played live a few times during concerts prior to its being released to the world, was taken from a radio show on Irish station RTÉ 2FM – and Noel didn’t even know it was being recorded.

Played during 2015, and it barely even needed ‘mastering’ before being released in 2017.

As explained by RTÉ’s Damian Chennells, Noel was promoting the previous album, Chasing Yesterday (his sophomore HFB outing and just second solo album up to that point), and during the session in the studio, Damian decided to hit record on an otherwise behind-the-scenes moment.

You can actually hear him going back and forth with the sound engineer at the start of the track – one he’d only just finished writing the night before – before he actually starts playing and the rest, as they say, is history.

We love the notion that the piano player didn’t even know what he was doing until Noel started playing.

Taped and ultimately tracked thanks to a spur-of-the-moment decision made in 2FM Studio 8 at the national free-to-air network’s radio centre in Dublin, Oasis and High Flying Birds fans, as well as lovers of Noel and music in general, got one of the most beautiful stripped-back listening experiences imaginable.

Returning to Ireland some time later, and just four years prior to getting Oasis back together for the Live ’25 world tour show that is now well underway, he performed it once again for The Late Late Show, which goes out on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player.

Some might argue he sounds even better this time around, but just as he says in the interview above, there is something truly special and unfiltered about that first raw and ridiculously good live recording.

From 2015 to 2021, and even present day, the story behind the original ‘Dead in the Water’ recording is fascinating.

Many have even speculated that the chatter recorded at the start and played to crowds on just a handful of occasions may have even foreshadowed the eventual reunion, as it seems to feature discussion surrounding Liam

The radio tech himself said in the recent retrospective interview of his own, he felt in the moment that “this song is an Oasis B-side” and was the only one played on the day that could easily slip onto one of their records.

As for Who Built The Moon?, a.k.a. HFB3, the album never featured ever B-sides of its own; instead, it just had one extra bonus track right at the very end of the 48:46 run-time – ‘Dead in the Water (live at RTÉ 2FM Studios, Dublin)’.

So there you have it: one of Noel’s most emotional, in-the-zone/lost-in-the-moment vocal performances in history, and one that so many still rate right up there with his very bits of music, may never have been if it wasn’t for ‘Damo’. So thanks, mate, I guess…

Are there any other tracks like ‘Dead in the Water’ where you love the back-story almost as much as the song itself? Bonus points if they’re by Greater Manchester artists.

A new online series spotlighting Manc songwriting is set to debut this month
Speaking of songwriting, there’s still plenty of it coming out of Greater Manchester.

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For all the latest news, events and goings on in Greater Manchester, subscribe to The Manc newsletter HERE.

Featured Images — Jose Francisco Del Valle Mojica (via Flickr) RTÉ One/Sour Mash Records

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