“When people go once, they tend to go a lot.” Mark Carlin is talking about the strange phenomenon surrounding Sounds From the Other City, the festival he founded 20 years ago with his brother Maurice.
Over the years, he’s noticed that when you speak to people about the Salfordian music and arts festival – the ‘other city’ of the name – they have either never attended, or do so religiously. You’re in or you’re out. There are few part-time participants in the SFTOC universe.
And universe is the correct word for it. What began as a half-joke of an idea – what if you put on a day of gigs in the four pubs at the crossroads of Chapel Street and Bloom Street on a Bank Holiday? – has become an annual celebration, an immovable date in the diary for those who observe. Sprawling the entire length of Chapel Street, each venue is operated by an independent gig or club promoter from either Salford or Manchester.
Islington Mill is its hub and the result is a joyous, absurd day of music, art and dancing, which has seemed to develop its own visual language over the years. You might struggle to describe what Sounds From The Other City is like, but you’ll know it when you see it.
Over the years, this has included a collaboration between the BBC Philharmonic collaborating with experimental collective Ex-Easter Island Head, or Andrew WK phoning in a ‘gig for one’ to Chapel Street’s last remaining phone box.
One year, Carlin recalls, they swapped locations for the day with Sacred Trinity Church, putting on a gig in the 17th century building. The vicars, in turn, conducted their Sunday service from the Islington Mill gallery.
Was there ever a 20 year game plan? “I didn’t even envisage it reaching year one,” Carlin says. Back in 2005, Chapel Street didn’t look like it does today – all new flats and trendy restaurants, a de facto extension of neighbouring Deansgate and Spinningfields. They liked the location because you were ‘so close to the centre of things, but felt so far away’.
This psychological distance was ideal. There ‘was a lot of opportunity, but not a lot of attention’. In other words, you could get away with doing things you might not be able to in Manchester.
Carlin doesn’t really remember what the reasoning was for having this de-centralised approach, where different promoters curate their own line-ups, with minimal intervention from SFTOC HQ, but it was probably just because it seemed more fun.
It wasn’t ever about being prescriptive in deciding what people ought to go and see, but bringing in different voices from different corners of the music scene. Some promoters, like Now Wave and Fat Out, are regular hosts, part of the furniture of the festival itself.
As well as these stalwarts, the festival allows more ad hoc collaborations between promoters and performers, often in ‘venues that aren’t venues’, which have generated many half-remembered moments of madness over the years. Was the Chatroulette disco afterparty of 2013 a fever dream? SWAYS Records doing a concert in the round under a railway arch, anyone?
These are the type of profoundly odd one-off moments the festival seems to generate, and are the reason it’s become a sort of ‘Salford Christmas’. What was originally coined as an off the cuff remark by long-time festival collaborator Matthew Durrant, has become something they constantly refer to when discussing and planning the festival, says Carlin.
This year’s programming gems include Stockport’s much-loved indie bookstore Rare Mags hosting a stage in the Working Class Movement Library, while CROP Radio will take over a hidden bar in the back of Porta, the tapas restaurant.
Maxwell Hall, part of Salford Uni, will see performances from Du Blonde as well as the Fat Out and Heavenly Recordings psych-to-dancehall soundclash, while The Orielles will be playing at the mothership, Islington Mill. Infamous Salford club The White Hotel – who have hosted stages in the past – will stage the 2025 afterparty venue, hosted by Morsel x Self.
“It’s only as good as what people want to put into it”, says Carlin. Luckily, people continue to put in quite a lot.
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