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Wednesday 2 May 2012

Exhibitions - Haçienda 30 XXX - Manchester Photographic Gallery


Star rating – 8/10

How did it get to be 30 years since the legendary Hacienda opened in Manchester? Well it is – and there is a great new exhibition at the Manchester Photographic Gallery to celebrate the fact.
As well as superb photos of fantastic nights in the capital of cool, there are some artefacts from the club to take you down memory lane, including a fabulous model of the club itself (pictured), accurate in detail both inside and out. That’s so everyone who was surely far too young to have ever sampled its delights for themselves who were there at the VIP opening of the exhibition tonight can see what it looked like.

To be fair through there were a fair few oldies like me too, reminiscing about great nights over the evocative photographs, bits of wall, floor and original prints from the venue. For myself I like to remember some of the great gigs I went to there – best of the bunch being the Smiths, and Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five in the mid 1980’s. 

Whatever your memories of the Hacienda, be they Madchester, Flesh, gigs, or whatever, or even if you never even went, this great little exhibition gives you an idea of what an iconic club it was – yes we know about the gangsters and the money flooding out of New Order’s pockets that it also involved – but this is an exhibition for wonderful memories. And well worth a visit to reawaken them until it ends on 29th May.

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