P.S.

There was a piece that I wrote for the Metro paper which covered the impending Sankeys birthday but I also saw it as an opportunity to get thoughts on Spektrum now that the new venture has had time to get going. It was meant to follow up a small piece that ran in the paper for the latter's launch event.

The final version that was published today was quite a bit different to the original draft so I thought I'd post that here as it contains a few thoughts from the owner of both nighteries on matters that he'd been keen to avoid previously. So:

When Sankeys supremo David Vincent was refused a licence for, proposed warehouse-style venue, Labyrinth early this year, he refused to comment. Not usually short of words, the club owner simply wouldn’t discuss that outcome. He maintained this uncharacteristic silence. Until now.

‘I was just too gutted to speak to anyone about it,’ he tells us. ‘I reckoned that it would have been amazing for the city. Now I realise that it just wasn’t meant to be. And I have this belief that everything happens for a reason.’

That reason – plus what’s behind that sanguine disposition of his – is now evident up at Ancoats. Spektrum – his second venue - opened just three weeks ago. But, in the lead-up, Vincent had gone quiet once again. Initially he said that he didn’t want us to see the club ahead of its opening. In fact, he expressed a desire to avoid any press interest in Spektrum ‘for a while’. We were concerned.

‘I just didn’t want to launch with any kind of media frenzy,’ he states. ‘We’ve been fairly low key in our promotion of Spektrum. Still, I had people going on about how much hype surrounded the club. None of that hype was coming from me. I just knew that this club would have to find its feet. I knew that that it was going to take time to become the club I wanted it to be.’

That process was hardly helped when the central-to-its-activities custom-designed LED lighting had its delivery delayed and arrived on site - requiring two days for installation – the day before Spektrum’s Friday debut. On the Saturday the computer that controls the system crashed. But these were the kind of teething troubles that Vincent envisaged [while he insists that there were also additional elements that only he would have known weren’t completed].

Now partnering the adjacent Sankeys for the latter’s impending 2^nd birthday extravaganza, the venue is running smoothly. The mastering of the lighting’s 16.9million colours is an ongoing task [‘the programming of all the possible combinations will keep us going for years’]. But the Spektrum sound system has already been worked on extensively and this weekend will see it being put through its paces by Style of Eye and Robert Babicz while, big names, Danny Tenaglia and Fedde Le Grand hold court downstairs.

‘You know that my building – Beehive Mill – was at the centre of the industrial revolution, don’t you?’ asks Vincent. ‘Well, the way I see it, the place is right at the heart of this whole new revolution.’

[ends]