Get down for one last time on
MUHAMMAD Ali is said to have gone there. Tony Wilson supposedly had his stag party there. Even Bob Marley is rumoured to have visited.
Moss Side cellar club The Reno was legendary in its day – ‘a civilisation with its own black market, social structure, king and queen, all frustrated artists,’ as former regular Linda Brogan describes it.
Yet its name seems to have been lost somewhere in Manchester’s illustrious clubbing history.
Opened on the corner of Moss Lane East and Princess Road in 1962, its heyday was from 1971 to 1981 when it became a haven for the mixed-race community, who often weren’t welcome elsewhere.
Linda remembers being struck by how many great looking mixed-race guys there were on the first night she went there, aged 17, in 1976.
“It was like ‘Oh my god, I didn’t know that many of us existed,’” she recalls. “The closest description I can give it is Goodfellas, when they walk in and you’re either in or you’re out. And it was an absolute badge of honour to be our colour – you were definitely in.”
Spinning rare funk and soul records imported from America, it attracted a crowd of characters.
“The Reno was our theatre. You’d come in and different people would cut different styles,” Linda says.
“Some people would sew leather Rizla signs on their jeans and there were two white girls who’d come down with their cowboy boots painted silver. There were just amazing characters, all dead rum and all dead anti-society, talking about Malcolm X and Buddha and Krishna.”
Jamaican-born DJ Persian, who played at the club from 1968 to 1983, said: “Living in that area, people were suffering.
“Work was hard to find. It was difficult for the youngsters, and mental health came to the front.
“A lot of mixed-race kids were drawn to the club because it was a place where they felt like they were at home. They’d go to town and the white folks didn’t like them, or they’d come to Moss Side and the black folks didn’t like them. They were accepted at the Reno.”
The music was a major part of the magic: “That was what drove everybody to the club. It was carefully selected and it had healing power.
“It was what I now call underground soul and it wasn’t in any other venue in the city at the time.”
Linda recalls how ‘unruliness and anarchy’ reigned, and kicking-out time was “whenever Persian felt like closing.
“If he was on a good night, on a roll, you’d come out to blazing sunshine.”
“Sometimes the police would come and shut it down but that wouldn’t stop us – we’d just go to someone’s house and carry on.”
Linda met her ex-husband, Tom, at the Reno – one of many relationships to blossom there.
The lights came up on the party for good around 1986 and the build-