Muhammad Ali is said to have gone there. Tony Wilson supposedly had his stag party there. Even Bob Marley is rumoured to have visited.
Moss Side cellar club The Reno was legendary in its day, ‘a civilisation with its own black market, social structure, king and queen, all frustrated artists’, as former regular Linda Brogan describes it.
Yet its name seems to have been lost somewhere in Manchester’s illustrious clubbing history.
Opened on the corner of Moss Lane East and Princess Road in 1962, its heyday was from 1971 to 1981 when it became a haven for Manchester's mixed-race community who often weren't welcome elsewhere.
Linda remembers being struck by how many great looking mixed race guys there were on the first night she went there, aged 17, in 1976.
“It was like ‘oh my God I didn’t know that many of us existed’," she recalls.
“The closest description I can give it is Goodfellas, when they walk in and you’re either in or you’re out. And it was an absolute badge of honour to be our colour, you were definitely in.”
Spinning rare funk and soul records imported from America, it attracted a crowd of artists - although Linda says they wouldn’t have dared to think of themselves in that way at the time.
“The Reno was our theatre. You’d come in and different people would cut different styles,” she says.
“Some people would sew leather Rizla signs on their jeans and there were two white girls who’d come down with their cowboy boots painted silver.
“There were just amazing characters, all dead rum and all dead anti-society, talking about Malcolm X and Buddha and Krishna.
“The other thing many of us had in common was tragedy. Many had an alcoholic mum or there was something wrong in the background.
“We vibed with each other. Certain sorts of tragedies give you a certain sense of humour.”
Jamaican-born DJ Persian played at the club from 1968 to 1983 and remembers it as a place where people came to heal.
"Living in that area, people were suffering," he says.
"Work was hard to find. It was difficult for the youngsters and mental health came to the front.
"A lot of mixed race kids were drawn to the club because it was a place where they felt like they were at home. They'd go to town and the white folks didn't like them or they'd come to Moss Side and the black folks didn't like them. They got blamed for all sorts.
"They were accepted at the Reno. For them, when they came in, they saw other kids like themselves and they felt comfortable and enjoyed their lives. It started a healing process.
"Not everyone, but for most of them it changed their lives. It was a special place."
The music played a major part in that.
"That was what drove everybody to the club. It was carefully selected and it had healing power," says Persian.
"It was what I now call underground soul and it wasn't in any other venue in the city at the time.
"I always listened to proper R&B from the 50s and I learned about the music style. In the content of the music and the lyrics there was a message that I would find in the tracks that I played. Unconsciously that was going into their psyche.
"If they had a bad day they came to the Reno to listen to the music, it soothed them."
Linda agrees.
“When Persian had you up he was great at keeping the vibe. And you’d stay up,” she recalls.
‘Unruliness and anarchy’ reigned and kicking out time was 'whenever Persian felt like closing'.
“If he was on a good night, on a roll, you’d come out to blazing sunshine like ‘oh God I’m going blind’," Linda laughs.
“Sometimes the police would come and shut it down but that wouldn’t stop us, we’d just go to some f*****'s house and carry on.”
Linda met her ex-husband, Tom, at the Reno - one of many relationships and friendships to blossom there.
“The whole club was friends,” says Linda. “Every facet of life really happened there. I was there until the night before I gave birth. And if I’d have given birth [in there] they’d have just put Rachel on the side and I’d have carried on partying.”
The lights came up on the party for good around 1986 and the building was demolished. To much of Manchester, it faded from memory.
Now Linda, today an award-winning playwright who has previously been on attachment at Manchester’s Contact Theatre, has made it her mission to unearth the club’s forgotten stories, literally - by digging it up.
After securing £65,000 of Arts Council funding, she and a team of volunteers from the old Reno crowd are currently excavating the site, overseen by Salford University’s Applied Archaeology department.
Next weekend they will throw a party on the site - now a patch of grass opposite the Heineken brewery - to revive the spirit of the club for one more night.
Former Reno clubbers and their families will be able to walk over the dancefloor one last time before dancing to tracks selected by the club’s original DJs including Persian, Hewan, Dennis and Tomlyn under marquees overlooking it.
“It’s about us who went, our kids and our grandkids being there and let’s all party,” says Linda.
“As much as it’s an art thing it’s a heritage thing, for us to learn about our heritage and feel like we’re worthy. For our kids to come and stand on it and witness that we should have been artists and this is our moment, and here we are now being artists.”
Linda has also been collecting memoirs from fellow clubbers, which have been filmed and archived online and will go on display at The Whitworth, in a special Thursday Lates event on November 23.
The archive will colonise the gallery, with video memoirs projected on to its paintings, artefacts displayed on plinths made out of bricks from the dig, and music blasted from a pop-up Reno bar.
Having previously felt like an outsider and experienced racism in the arts world, Linda felt compelled to tell the stories of the club and the people who went there in their own words.
“I knew there was a story in the Reno for a million years. There’s a hundred stories in there, but my soul couldn’t sell it out,” says Linda.
“This was the only way to do it right. To give me a voice I had to give them a voice as well. All our stories combined is one big story.”
Footage of the excavation and party will be buried in a time capsule on the site for future generations to find. It is set to be backfilled and built on once the excavation is complete, and Linda hopes to get a blue plaque put up as a permanent reminder of The Reno.
- The Excavating the Reno project has been shortlisted for a National Lottery Award and is up against six other finalists for a chance to win £5,000. You can cast your vote online at lotterygoodcauses.org.uk/project/excavating-reno, tweet your vote with the hashtag #NLATheReno or call 0844 836 9699. Voting closes on July 27.
