The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The only sober guy at the party
In a score-settling book, Manchester’s ‘night-time tsar’ recalls raving with gangsters and Gallaghers
320pp, HarperNorth, T £18.99 (0808 196 6794), RRP£22, ebook £9.99
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Anyone who has partied in Manchester over the past 20 years – from students to MPs – can thank Sacha Lord. After dancing on stage at Lord’s Parklife festival with the surferturned-DJ Fisher in 2023, Angela Rayner asked Lord to take a picture she could send to Jacinda Ardern, another big Fisher fan.
Lord’s memoir, Tales from the Dancefloor, runs from the dirty and criminal 1990s, when the bouncers were also the city’s gangsters, to the contemporary superclubs exemplified by Lord’s 10,000-capacity the Warehouse Project. Lord is the one sober guy at the rave. He is both a promoter and a political figure, the mayor Andy Burnham’s “night-time tsar”, always smartly dressed and with hair so severely parted, it looks as though he opted for a comb-over without the inconvenience of first going bald.
The story begins with Lord bundled into a car by a couple of Salford characters. When they demand he comes to DJ at their party, he is forced to admit he is Sacha Lord, and not the more famous DJ, Sasha – a misapprehension I also shared for many years. His mother named him after the French singer Sacha Distel. Years later, he sacked her from the backroom staff at Parklife; she had shared a picture of her feet on a strongbox with the caption, “Using Sacha’s money to keep my feet warm.”
Lord’s parents split up when he was a teenager, shortly before he failed his GCSEs at Manchester Grammar. His father, a bankrupt textile merchant, drinker and womaniser, died at the age of 52. Lord was working on the markets when he saw the future lay in dance music (despite preferring guitardriven songs – he is still a devoted Morrissey fan). This is the paradox. Lord sees himself as an innovator, in keeping with the city’s unofficial motto: “What Manchester does today, the rest of the world does tomorrow.” But he might add, “While we talk endlessly about Factory Records and the Haçienda.”
Lord promotes gigs by Manchester superstars, from New Order to Liam Gallagher, who wanted to rename Parklife “Parkalife” as a tribute to the iconic Manchester overcoat, as well as to avoid any association with the Blur hit. When Lord promoted New Order at the Jodrell Bank observatory in 2013, he was surprised that three members of the band insisted on arriving by helicopter, even though they lived beside the venue and had to
drive to Salford to pick up their ride. Lord realised it was because the now-ex fourth member, the bassist Peter Hook, also lived by Jodrell Bank, and the other three wanted “Hooky” to hear them arrive without him.
Lord stages a Haçienda reunion night each year at the Warehouse Project, but he has learnt that there are dangers in nostalgia. A 2015 event became dangerously overcrowded because no one had calculated that middle-aged ravers are considerably more bulky than skinny students. The problem was exacerbated because, despite the rising temperature, everyone kept their parkas on.
Lord’s success has always rested on other people’s ideas. Parklife began life as a student-run festival in Platt Fields; and his first venue, Sankeys, in Ancoats, was a revival of an older club. Even the Warehouse Project, his one achievement with no obvious precursor, grew out of a film shoot for 24 Hour Party People. After the director Michael Winterbottom recreated the recently demolished Haçienda inside another Ancoats mill, Lord and his then-partner Dave Vincent decided the venue was perfect for a one-off old-school warehouse rave.
Ancoats was still a dismal area of derelict mills and street prostitution, and as Sankeys depended upon Manchester’s 120,000 student population, Vincent operated a free bus service from the halls of residence. Sankeys’ young promoter, Sam Kandel, was the first to realise their annual profits were made during the autumn term, before student grants were spent. The idea for the Warehouse Project was born: a seasonal superclub, running from September to New Year’s Eve. Lord packaged the season as a series of one-off events, like a rolling Glastonbury for clubbers.
However, the launch of the Warehouse Project saw an acrimonious split with Vincent, who walked away with Sankeys. There is still bad blood: one of the attractions of this memoir is the score-settling, as Lord brands Vincent “the naughty kid that co-owned the sweetshop”, calls his poor dress sense “a London thing”, and describes him riding around a festival in a golf buggy, firing fireworks at the former Marines he had hired to provide security, while dressed as his drugfuelled alter ego, “Ketaman”.
Lord may not be an innovator, but he has put Manchester’s clubland on the map for a new generation. With his “night-time tsar” role, and old friends such as Burnham and Rayner now in high places, his memoir may prove a launch pad for a political career. As his namesake Sacha Distel sang, “the good life, full of fun, seems to be the ideal”. He’s the man to make the fun pay.
Lord’s business partner rode around in a buggy, shooting fireworks at security