Manchester Pride Festival has just revealed its 2023 line-up, promising the most diverse and representative bill of performers to date across the city’s world-famous Gay Village.
The beloved LGBTQ+ celebration will be back in the city over the August bank holiday weekend, shining a spotlight on local and international queer talent.
The Gay Village Party will have a line-up that’s 96% queer, with 54% of performers women, 51% people of colour, and more than 42% from trans and non-binary communities.
Headlining will be Brazilian drag sensation Pabllo Vittar, international pop star (and former Scissor Sisters vocalist) Jake Shears, and RuPaul’s Drag Race UK winner Danny Beard.
They’ll be joined by pop performances from Natasha Bedingfield, and Lisa Scott-Lee from STEPS.
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The line-up has been co-created with Manchester’s queer communities, and will span four days and multiple venues and stages.
Manchester Pride Festival will once again host takeovers, including the Queer Asian Takeover, Trans Filth & Joy, Black Pride MCR and the Queer Women’s Takeover.
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The main performances will take place on three stages; the Village stage, the Mancunity stage, and the Alan Turing stage.
Takeovers this year include the Queer Asian Takeover, Trans Filth & Joy, Black Pride MCR and the Queer Women’s Takeover.
Back to that line-up then, and Pabllo Vittar is the most-followed drag queen in the world, with a social following of 34.8m and 4m monthly listeners on Spotify.
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Meanwhile Jake Shears has dominated the charts while part of the Scissor Sisters with hits including Filthy/Gorgeous and I Don’t Feel Like Dancing. He’s now pursuing a solo career with a new album due to be released later this year.
Local drag star Danny Beard is also back on the line-up hosting Danny Beard and Friends for the fifth consecutive year.
Also returning to Manchester Pride Festival is multidimensional cultural icon Cheddar Gorgeous, who placed as runner-up in last year’s RuPaul’s Drag Race UK (beaten only by Danny Beard).
They’ll be joined by season four Drag Race UK stars Black Peppa and Dakota Schiffer.
The festival’s first Queer Asian Takeover will celebrate queer brown joy, headlined by international DJ Gok Wan, who will be joined on stage by local talent including The Bitten Peach, a gender-diverse, pan-Asian collective showcasing joy and excellence, Gracie T, who runs a South Asian creative collective and platform for unrepresented artists, and House of Spice, an LGBTQ+ South Asian and Middle Eastern performance house.
Trans led and curated event Trans Filth & Joy, hosted by Milk Presents and Trans Creative, returns for 2023 where party-goers can expect to be entertained by a night packed with DJs, drag, burlesque, cabaret, activism and music. Headlining Trans Filth & Joy is British drag queen BIMINI, who is best known for competing on the second series of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, and has since been awarded ‘Drag Hero’ by Gay Times magazine.
Black Pride MCR will take festival goers on a musical journey, celebrating the black roots of house music, disco, funky house, vocal and tribal, all brought together by exceptional DJs and iconic dancers.
Fat Pride also returns, celebrating big bodies with an evening of dancing, partying, showing off and feeling good.
The Cabaret Stage will again host The Enby Show, described as an ‘electric, unique and vibrant’ gender-bending variety show that ‘bins the binary and crashes the cis-tem’.
This stage will also host Pecs Drag Kings, a female/non-binary theatre and cabaret company who’ve been creating critically acclaimed shows for the LGBTQ+ community since 2013.
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Manchester Pride Parade. Credit: Supplied
Festival goers can also expect exciting and diverse performances from Queeriosity Cabaret, Cutie-POC Cabaret, and Disabled Queer Joy Cabaret.
Other events announced as part of the Pride celebrations include Youth Pride MCR and Family Pride MCR, where young people and families will be able to join in the celebrations with a series of performances and events, such as Ginny Lemon’s Dog Show, an unmissable doggy extravaganza, and Disney Classics performed by The Untold Orchestra.
Other performers include Kelly Llorenna from N-Trance (Set You Free), Jodie Harsh, Misty Chance and Friends, Lucky Roy Singh, Queen Bayard, La Discothèque Orchestra, Manchester Residents Blasha and Allatt (Meat Free/Frixxxion), Kim Lana, Mix-Stress and Friends, SWAGGA, Monopoly Phonic, Kele Le Roc, and Tom Aspaul.
Mark Fletcher, CEO of Manchester Pride, said: “We have worked closely with our communities to offer a line-up that is for the community, by the community. As a world leading city and an organisation that is spearheading the global Pride movement, our aim is to provide a platform which elevates and showcases local queer performers alongside renowned international LGBTQ+ talent, with a little support from our allies. This is Manchester and this is how our communities want us to celebrate our Pride.
“We are so proud to announce that our line-up consists of 96% queer performers, 54% female performers, 51% people of colour, and over 42% trans and non-binary performers.”
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Manchester Pride Festival, in partnership with Booking.com, takes place over four days in Manchester city centre on August bank holiday weekend (25 – 28 August) and is made up of several fringe events.
The events of Manchester Pride Festival 2023 are free to attend with the exception of the Gay Village Party, tickets for which can be purchased through Ticketmaster now. £2.50 from every ticket will be donated to the Manchester Pride Community Fund, with the money going directly to LGBTQ+ causes and projects in Greater Manchester through the distribution of grants.
The Manchester Pride Festival 2023 Gay Village Party line-up in full
Pabllo Vittar | Jake Shears
Natasha Bedingfield | Danny Beard | Jodie Harsh | Gok Wan | BIMINI |
Lisa Scott-Lee | Cheddar Gorgeous | Black Peppa | Jonbers Blonde | Monki | Gracie T | Angie Brown | La Discotheque Orchestra | Kelly Llorenna (N-Trance) | Dakota Schiffer | Ginny Lemon’s Dog Show | Blasha and Allatt (Meat Free/Frixxxion)
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Kim Lana | Mix-Stress and Friends | The Bitten Peach | House of Spice | The Enby Show | Queeriosity Cabaret | The Noirtones | Queer Women’s Takeover | SWAGGA | Black Pride MCR | Danny Beard and Friends | Fat Pride | Cutie-POC Cabaret | Queer Asian Takeover | Disabled Queer Joy Cabaret | Trans Filth and Joy | Misty Chance and Friends | Your Manchester | Monopoly Phonic | Kele Le Roc performing Basement Jaxx ‘Romeo’ | Val The Brown Queen and Blaq Ivory presents | The Runway by Banksie | DJ Stacy Bee | Tom Aspaul | Violet Blonde | Lucky Roy Singh | Jsky | Reeta Loi | Queen Bayard | Barb | Lady Bushra | Misty Chance | The BollyWitch | Lill | Banskie | Joanna Cuddle | Sam Buttery | Ivy Profemme | Leila Rafoui | Joe Spencer | The Niallist | Minara ‘El Waters | Club Clam | What She Said | Vanilla Girls | FATCAMP | Pecs Drag Kings | The Fat Britney | | Ghetto Fabulous | Donna Trump | DJ Nkay | DJ KL | Carrot | Flick | Queens in Kicks | Frequency 3 | DJ Klitbait | Cyro | Club Zindagi | Belinda Scandal | Disney Classics with The Untold Orchestra | DJ Billy Andrew | DJ Callum Parr | Duniya Dhoom | Shanika Sunrise | Immy Terial | Jason Patel | Rikki Beadle-Blair |
Speaking with Maggie Rogers before her spellbinding stripped-back set at Gorilla
Danny Jones
Every now and again we’re fortunate enough to get the opportunity not only to see a big name but to experience them in a smaller, more intimate setting for those special one-offs that people go on to talk about for years to come — that’s how we got to see Maggie Rogers at Gorillaon Monday.
Better still, we were incredibly lucky to be offered time to speak with the American singer-songwriter just a couple of hours prior to her all-acoustic set at Gorilla and just before she and her band set off to tour her new album, Don’t Forget Me, which drops next month.
Manchester being the first of these up close and personal pre-album launch shows here in the UK, of which she listed just four, it’s always an honour to be picked for the start or the end of an album cycle but it was immediately clear she had a lot of love for our city.
Arriving in 0161 on Sunday just in time for the Paddy’s Day chaos and to watch the FA Cup final between Man United and Liverpool in a local pub, our conversation started with simply: “That game!”
We’re loving these intimate gigs at Gorilla — give us more.There are some very passionate Maggie Rogers here.Credit: Piran Aston (via Gorilla)/The Manc
The interview
After meeting and greeting the line of people already queuing up for the 500-cap Gorilla show, we walked backstage for what ended up being a laid-back chat about live music, relaxing into herself as an artist and an album process that was recorded in a whirlwind five days.
Touching on the upcoming third album and that beautiful title track, Maggie said, “It feels like coming home. In a lot of ways, it’s like a return to a lot of the style of songwriting and production and arrangement that really got me into music in this place when I was like 16/17.
“It just feels really relaxed and my friends keep saying that it sounds like the version of me that they know. I think, after doing this for quite a while, I’m finally relaxing into it.
“I think it’s always been authentic but I think music sort of takes some of the most sensitive and intense people and puts them in really high-intensity situations… It’s not even that I wasn’t being authentic before, I think it’s just that my guard was a little bit up yeah. I was a little scared — I still am, you know, but I think that’s normal.”
Describing how it felt her last LP Surrender had the punchiest and most contemporary rock approach of her music to date, we then moved on to where her style is at currently and the difference between the studio listening experience and live performance.
“I mean, my undergrad was in production engineering but that record was really designed to be played live, especially in a time like the pandemic, where all I was thinking about was coming back to touring and really missing it.
“I got really into British rock and, at least during the Surrender era, I was like fully like in Oasis mode, but you guys are responsible for some of the best music and pop culture.”
Chuffed that she dropped in the Burnage boys so early in the conversation, she went on to say that although she was “discovered in a moment of experimentation” — that old Pharrell meme (yes, that is her if you’ve never put two and two together), her “songwriting has always been the same at the centre.”
“What I love about making albums is the world-building part of it, and I’ve just gotten to build different worlds. I always think about where the albums are designed to be listened to and Heard It in a Past Life was really designed for headphones, Surrender was really designed for stage and this is really designed for a car — like a Sunday afternoon drive”.
As she puts it, the debut was lots of synths, the sophomore was “drums and distortion” and the star of Don’t Forget Me is the acoustic guitar. “There’s definitely different forms of energy”, she said, adding: “but this is more on the stripped side and the whole record was kind of designed as a live album. Almost everything was a first take and this record was made in five days”. Some achievement in its own right.
Credit: Maggie Rogers
Having the most fun on stage
After touching on that internet moment from back in 2016, we then talked about how seeing her for the first time at Victoria Warehouse back in November 2022 (which she described as “so sick” and one of her favourite venues here in Manchester) was the real ‘wow’ moment for us and realising just important it is to see her live. Maggie puts a lot of it down to the band.
“I think that on stage what I love is that it’s different every night. I’ve worked really hard to be excellent at something that I really love and I get to play with some of the best musicians around and my band is just so f***ing talented.”
“It’s sort of like I hope the audience is having a good time too but also if they’re not I’m just having a really good time anyway.” She definitely was too; jumping ahead a little bit, one of our favourite moments from the gig was when she stopped between songs to laugh and say, “I just love playing music”.
She said similar about the creative process this time around too. Although there’s a lengthy newsletter post describing how the album came to be on her Instagram, she summed up it by saying, “Creativity, often comes from some of the most essential and sometimes childish or playful senses.
“Like, it’s called playing music and I think keeping that like sense of playfulness alive is so inherent to keeping my creativity alive, and in the studio making this record I was just having so much fun and was just feeling really playful, so we sort of made a record by not trying to make a record.”
Again, you could see that “contagious joy” she talked about written on her face and everyone else’s.
She was having the most fun and, believe us, so was everyone who managed to get a ticket for Maggie Rogers’ sell-out Gorilla show.
The show
Moving on to the show itself, Maggie said she was most looking forward to playing the likes of ‘Drunk’ which they’ve been doing live for a while now, as well as a track she called “devastating” with just the keys and a guitar entitled, ‘The Kill’ — and she wasn’t lying.
She set up the song by promising “It’s such a jam” with a full band but the stripped-back version fittingly killed us off in the crowd and the same could be said for a lot of the versions we heard on the night. From ‘Begging for Rain’ to an almost ethereal take on ‘Alaska’, you really get to appreciate just how incredible her voice is in this kind of scenario.
Bigging up British and Manchester crowds in particular because we “know culture and [we] care”, insisting, “It’s crazy how important those two things are”, her audience certainly lived up to the billing. She said there’s no “half-assing” it with us and she was right. We were emotional and so was she.
The set naturally closed with ‘Don’t Forget Me and a few teary faces (we didn’t dare film that moment as we wanted to be present) but nothing summed up the night better than when the Manc Maggie fans pretty much turned Gorilla into a congregation for ‘That’s Where I Am’, perfectly harmonising and clapping like a gospel choir.
We’re already looking back on the show and thinking of it as going down as one of those ‘I was there’ moments and we think we speak for everyone when they say they won’t forget the time they saw Maggie Rogers at Gorilla with nothing more than a guitar and her piano player — also incredible, by the way.
Don’t Forget Me releases on Friday, 12 April and we already can’t wait to hear not only how the rest of it sounds but how the tracks we heard sound fully-fledged.
‘That’s Where I Am’ – Maggie Rogers, live at Gorilla (Credit: The Manc Audio)
Featured Images — The Manc Group/Press Image (supplied)
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Night & Day Cafe issues statement after battle to save iconic venue comes to an end
Daisy Jackson
One of Manchester’s most iconic music venues has issued a statement after their lengthy court battle came to an end today.
After three years, the court has ruled that Night & Day Cafe in the Northern Quarter will be allowed to continue operating as a gig venue and nightclub.
The iconic venue was served a Noise Abatement Notice (NAN) by Manchester City Council way back in 2021 after a new resident in the area filed multiple noise complaints.
The initial incident sparked a huge outcry from famous faces in the music industry as well as locals who love the venue – though Manchester City Council has maintained that at no point did it seek to close the venue.
The council also said that the NAN was issued ‘as a last resort’ after months of negotiating and compromising with Night & Day.
Night & Day Cafe have now issued a lengthy statement after Manchester Magistrates Court ruled in their favour, meaning the venue will be allowed to remain open under new conditions, including a maximum volume level at weekends.
While saying they were ‘delighted’ that the Noise Abatement Notice has been amended in the venue’s favour, Night & Day Cafe added that they were ‘disappointed’ that they would have to adjust their club nights.
They said that they would have to tweak their late-night offering ‘to suit an occupier of what is a defective apartment’, adding that the apartment (which was built after the venue) was approved planning despite the proximity to an established music venue.
Night & Day also thanked all those who have shown their support over the last three years.
Their full statement reads: “We are delighted that the Noise Abatement Notice has been amended in favour of N&D with the judge agreeing to noise levels that we offered to Manchester City Council (MCC) in June 2023 as part of the joint testing and negotiations.
“This means we can continue with the club nights that N&D and other live music venues are so dependent on. DJ club nights contribute to developing the raw, amazing talent and emerging live music scene that grace our stage, Manchester and beyond.
“Although N&D has won, we’re disappointed with today’s judgement as the venue will have to adjust our club nights to suit an occupier of what is a defective apartment.
“MCC Planning approved the apartment back in 2000 in full knowledge that there would be serious potential for noise problems in this flat and before any resident moved in.
“Today’s decision has huge implications for other Manchester night time industries and operators.
“We want to really thank all of our supporters in Manchester and beyond and every single person that has stood up and shouted for us. Without your incredible support we couldn’t have done this.”
A spokesperson for Manchester City Council said: “We are glad that this case has reached a conclusion, although it is regrettable that despite many attempts it could not have been amicably resolved prior to Night & Day bringing this court case.
“The Council has never sought to close Night & Day and very much want it to remain open and continue to play an active role in Manchester’s music scene.
“Over many months numerous meetings have taken place where we have sought to reach an amicable resolution with the venue, through negotiation and offering compromise, to agree acceptable sound levels which would allow us to uphold our legal duties and the venue to continue to thrive.
“It is as a last resort and extremely rare for us to issue a noise abatement notice. Manchester’s music venues overwhelmingly live in harmony with their neighbours and while complaints and issues are not uncommon, they are almost always resolved through dialogue.
“We welcome the judge’s ruling that Night & Day should use a noise limiter. The use of a limiter was a solution we proposed – and the judgement makes clear that our officers acted correctly in investigating the noise complaints in line with the Council’s legal responsibilities.
“We hope that we can all move forward from this unfortunate episode and we wish to work constructively with the venue.
“Music is a key ingredient of what makes Manchester special. The Council not only recognises this but has for many decades supported and encouraged grassroots venues and emerging musical talent. We continue to do so.
“In response to the pressures facing grassroots music venues across the country and here in the city, the Council commissioned a major independent review into the support Manchester’s grassroots music venues need, and how the council and partners can support venues. Its findings will be launched in May and will set out a way to champion Manchester’s independent music scene for the years ahead.
“The Council regularly support music ventures across the city, from grassroots to major venues, and emerging musicians through initiatives like Manchester Music City, Brighter Sounds and the Manchester Music Education Hub. The Council also funds and supports Beyond The Music, a new annual conference and festival which brings music industry leaders together to address challenges within the sector.
“We are committed to helping Manchester’s music scene to continue to flourish for many years to come.”