Hedonism is back: Manchester Sunkeys club reopens in Mecca | Clubs

Long lines stretched on the street outside, drops of condensation dripped onto the walls inside, and memories were made – and lost – and it all happened without a smartphone in sight. For those who remember Manchester nightclub Sunkeys in its heyday 30 years ago, the venue was a clubbing Mecca.

“The sweat was dripping off the walls,” said Lee Spence, the club’s resident promoter and DJ from 2002 to 2012, who remembers once double-booking Chase & Status and Carl Cox on the same night. “It was an atmosphere unlike anything else I’d really seen.”

It closed in 2017 but now, amid a wave of venue closures, Sankey’s is back. As when it first opened more than three decades ago, there will be no phones on the dance floor.

Nightclub co-founder David Vincent, who is behind its revival, said venues needed to return to a more “intimate” club experience rather than the selfie craze that saturates social media.

“The phones are the problem,” he said. “People are more upset about having a phone and filming a DJ than dancing.”

In particular, the goal is to address continuous shooting on the dance floor. “We’ll probably put a sticker on their camera so they can’t film. People need to stop taking pictures and start dancing to the beat,” Vincent said.

Sankeys will reopen in late January in a 500-capacity venue in Manchester city centre. By reputation alone, it should have a busy start although clubgoers may still be nursing their festive hangovers.

But the challenge facing the venue is stark: nearly 800 late-night venues have closed in the UK over the past five years, according to the latest data from the Night-time Industries Association (NTIA). It recorded a 26.4% decline in night-time venues since March 2020.

Michael Kell, chief executive of the NTIA, said the reopening of Sankey’s was “more than just a place to return”. “She points [Manchester’s] “A commitment to curating spaces that are central to the cultural heartbeat of nightlife,” he said, adding that it showed there was still “strong demand for the shared, immersive experiences that only physical spaces can provide.”

The no-phone policy follows similar steps taken by other venues across Britain including Amber’s in Manchester and FOLD in east London. Kell said he’s seen more and more clubs ban cameras from the dance floor in an attempt to “reflect the essence of the live experience.”

“By encouraging guests to attend and engage fully with the music and community, these policies aim to restore some of the spontaneity and sociability that can be mitigated in a digital-first world,” he said.

Spence said it would be impossible to replicate “the exact version we had before,” but he embraced the opportunity to provide a new venue for tomorrow’s pleasuremakers. “The world has changed. It’s a different place but I believe something new can be created.”

Sankeys first opened in 1994 as Sankeys Soap in the basement of Beehive Mill, a former soap factory on the industrial estate of Ancoats. It is widely believed to be the successor to the Haçienda Club. In 2010, DJ Mag named it the best club in the world, and it has debuted artists such as Daft Punk, The Chemical Brothers and David Guetta. The place was sold to real estate developers.

With the reopening, Vincent hopes that highlighting new DJs will attract a new, younger audience. One consequence of the decline of the UK nightclub industry is the lack of platforms for emerging and undiscovered artists.

“What we’re going to do is book a lot of new, young talent,” he said. “Back when the Chemical Brothers or Daft Punk played, they became stars. We hope to do that again with some new stars of the future.”

“It wasn’t just about the music for me,” said Davina Vernezzo, who sang regularly at Sankey’s when she was a college student in the early 2000s. “It felt like I was finding a group of like-minded people where we all belonged, and we were all united and meeting there in the same place every week.”