Partying under pressure at Warehouse Project
Article published: Sunday, February 8th 2009
Bully-boy security and inflated prices make a mockery of the Warehouse Project’s ‘free party’ image says Andy Bowman
Sometimes good music can compensate for the worst of venues. On the other hand, sometimes a bad venue can destroy pleasure in the finest music. The latter is the case with Manchester’s Warehouse Project (WP), as myself and a team of Mule correspondents discovered one night last December.
The WP has built a reputation on its unconventional venues. In the past few years these have included the former Boddington’s brewery and, more recently, a car park beneath Piccadilly station.
WP’s empire has come to dominate the Manchester clubbing scene, pulling in all the biggest acts. Half the Mule team were drawn to one particularly enticing line up, featuring Squarepusher, Luke Vibert and LFO legends of the legendary Warp Records.
This trio could, you might have thought, made the very worst of venues enjoyable. Not so on this occasion. For starters, few of us have come across security quite like this in all the hundreds of hours whiled away on Manchester’s dance floors. Within a couple of hours, at least five of the people I arrived with had been thrown out for one ridiculous reason or another.
Standing outside in the cigarette smoking area, penned in by Harris fencing with police standing eagerly on the other side, felt more like being on a confrontational political demonstration than an evening out. Every few minutes I saw another unfortunate sod being dragged out with a goon on each arm, £20 ticket fee gone forever. Scowling guards circled the huddled smokers, pouncing without warning to smash £4 cans of pissy Budweiser beer from the hands of those (myself included) who hadn’t realized drinking in the smoking area was on the long, long list of forbidden activities.
In a licensed venue there are some things the owners can’t turn a blind eye if they want to retain their license. But security seemed to be hunting people down, roaming though the crowds with flashlights are they on commission for how many people’s nights they can ruin?
Anyway, bouncers acting like fuckwits, what’s new? Why complain? What makes this particularly offensive in the case of the WP is how much it trades upon the free party image to sell its extortionately priced tickets, appropriating the creativity, excitement and edginess of the original warehouse parties which put this city on the musical map to market something that is altogether different.
Free parties at their best (take the Lost n Found squats in the Northern Quarter and Hulme in recent years) are open spaces in an increasingly closed city, where people from all walks of life mix and have a good time together, where underground, oppositional art, music and culture can flourish.
The WP is the polar opposite. It’s the most tightly-policed space you’re ever likely to see in any experience associated with ‘having fun’. Adidas, Bench and Budweiser logos beamed onto the walls, alongside stalls selling branded merchandise. And, with the ticket and drink prices as they are, the crowd is pretty much all students.
Mule reviewed WP a few years back when it first came out. The conclusion? A New Labour rave. So it remains today, encapsulating all the worst of commercialism and petty social control in the UK today, all glossed over with savvy marketing and spin.
More: Manchester
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