I Am The Fly at The Refuge

Most of the posters currently on display in The Refuge were never meant to survive beyond the week they were made for.

In 1982, Matthew Rich was a working screen-printer in Manchester, at the start of Factory Records’ rise through the city’s club scene. He’d begun at Community Expression, a print shop on Oxford Road producing posters and stickers for gigs, the Communist Party and radical theatre, which later moved to Moss Side. There he joined Vinni Faal, the city’s main flyposter, and the shop was renamed Lola Publicity, after Vinni’s daughter. Rich’s job extended beyond printing to pasting posters up across the city, then photographing the sites as proof for the record companies who’d commissioned the work. Somewhere along the way, a stack of leftover prints ended up in a studio drawer instead of on a wall.

Some four decades later, they’ve made the wall after all. Walk through The Refuge’s bar and the show runs right along the back wall. You’ll find dozens of framed pieces, with context provided alongside the key works. What’s notable is how much of it steers clear of the Hacienda iconography most people have already seen a hundred times. It’s great to see posters for Blue Orchids, The Future Primitives and Dislocation Dance given equal weight as those with larger legacies, for example.

But the more famous names have their own surprises, too – like a vibrant red and yellow Fall poster, made from a magazine cutting that Karl Burns, the band’s original drummer, brought back from a tour in Germany. And then there’s the fragment of an early Factory Records poster that – according to the story printed alongside it – Tony Wilson designed himself after the intended artwork missed its deadline.

The show has already travelled from Glasgow to London. In Manchester, though, it naturally carries a different weight. The Refuge stands close to the original Oxford Road print shop where this all began – and the hotel’s own Suite 51 already carries a quiet nod to FAC51 and the Hacienda era. These posters, then, are returning to their original patch, decades after they were supposed to have been pasted over and forgotten.