Night Bus to Nowhere: Manchester's After-Hours Revival

Piccadilly Gardens, 22:40, raining in the specific Manchester way that arrives horizontally and from below. Dee Whitcombe hands me a bus ticket instead of a guest list and says the first useful thing anyone has said to me about this scene: "If you can't do it on two quid and a night bus, it isn't a scene, it's a holiday."

We get the 192 towards Stockport. On the top deck, empty except for us and a man asleep against the window, she gives me the rules, which are not printed anywhere and which everyone I meet tonight recites in some form. You get on the bus you are told to get on. No address goes out before eleven, and never in writing. Nobody films anything, including the ceiling. And if you are the loudest person on the bus, you are the problem the whole system is designed to filter out.

By six in the morning we will have taken four buses and spent eight pounds on travel and fourteen on doors. We will have heard a sound system built in 1994 in a room above a car wash, sat in a community centre with better fire exits than most licensed venues in this city, and arrived at the last room of the night at half four, at exactly the moment it filled up with people finishing work.