SANKEY'S, formerly Sankey's Soap in Ancoats, has somehow yanked itself to a twentieth anniversary this year.
To mark the occasion and another return to their Ancoats base, the club are hosting the Tribal Sessions 'all-nighter', with acclaimed Brooklyn-based DJ, Danny Tenaglia, playing a mammoth six-hour set with his only UK date of the summer - tickets here.
Sankey's totters dangerously on the brink of tedium. The stop-starts have become predictable, like a deceptive closing down sale by Sports Direct, you know full well they're going nowhere.
But it hasn't been an easy path for the club, more a winding mountainous trail blocked by boulders of bankruptcy, legal mudslides and faux-closures.
Here's a potted history (mainly lifted from Wikipedia because I'm hungry):
Sankeys Soap first opened in a former soap factory in 1994, when that club beginning with H (anyone that speaks the same shall eat their own tongue... yes we know you DJ'd there once) was still ticking-over.
Due to problems with pennies the club closed in 1998, only to be reopened in 2000 by current owner David Vincent in league with Sacha Lord-Marchionne, later founder of the Warehouse Project.
In 2006 the club closed again, but with Vincent declaring: "this isn't the end of the matter, not entirely anyway. You'll just have to wait and see."
David Vincent
Sure enough, later that year the club reopened, dropping the soap (o'er) to become just Sankeys, in 2009 they had a major fit-out and became DJ Mag's 'Best Club In The World' in 2010, leading to a Sankeys Ibiza opening in the summer of 2011.
Still, come April 2013 and they announce another Manchester closure (fiver says they reopen), and bugger off for some sun in Ibiza, before announcing a grand return to Ancoats (who'd have thunk it, gimme a fiver) for January 2014.
Come June 2014 and they're off to the Balearics again. Does Manchester stop clubbing in July? Nobody told me.
Now they're back, again, and somehow they've made it to two decades.
We almost like this chaos, however transparent the marketing. Clubs should be anarchic, rambunctious, capricious places, hovering somewhere between greatness and self-destruction. It's just more fun that way.
Still, Sankey's totters dangerously on the brink of tedium. The stop-starts have become predictable, like a deceptive closing down sale by Sports Direct, you know full well they're going nowhere.
And shutting up shop and buggering off every summer to party in Ibiza is just rude, what's wrong with us in summer eh? We're still good fun... aren't we?
Sankeys
The thing that keeps events such as Warehouse Project (although Victoria Warehouse became a hiccup), and to some extent the new breed of food events such as B.Eat Street's Friday Food Fights and Up In Your Grill, is their nomadic nature. The willingness to up sticks and move on, dip a toe somewhere else.
Yes they open and close like a harlot's undercrackers too, but you're never entirely sure where they'll pop-up next.
Just hopping between Manchester and Ibiza (there's also a Sankeys in New York) isn't nomadic, it's voracious.
Sankeys is twenty years old, and fair play to it. My pals and I have enjoyed some blaring and fantastically loaded times in there, and the club has swung and scrapped its way through a whole dancefloor of obstacles to maintain a position at the apex of Manchester's clubbing scene.
But is it time for something new? Somewhere new in the city?
Sankeys, Jersey Street, M4 6JG.
Sankeys is hosting twenty of its world renowned Tribal Sessions parties across the world throughout the summer.
More here: https://www.facebook.com/officialsankeys
Sankeys
