Over the last five years there has been an overriding feeling that The Warehouse Project was meant to be. Had we not done it, then it may have been called something else and it may have looked slightly different but it was always going to happen.
It was not an idea that was thought up, chewed over, tweaked, refined and deliberated... its conception was a single eureka moment. While literally thousands of hours have since been spent contemplating production and licensing solutions, what each season would feel like and pouring over who would perform each year and every other minute detail, the idea was conceived almost exactly as it exists now.
In 2006 Manchester felt in limbo... A place with such a rich musical heritage, and unique place in the world of dance music, seemed to feel a little dry. It was going to take something of a certain scale and impact to really capture the imagination of a city where pride in what had gone before had almost polluted the desire to seize the moment. From the second The Warehouse Project was conceived we never really doubted what was happening... When other local promoters heard we planned 25 shows each for 3500 people over only twelve weeks, pretty much every one of them told us ‘its just not going to work’ and that ‘Manchester simply won’t sustain something that big week in week out’. Some of these same promoters were also a little miffed at the strap-line we launched with which is really a call to arms: ‘For twelve weeks this city is ours...’. Of course the ‘ours’ in that sentence is inclusive and means something like ‘the people of Manchester’, but promoters (being the way they are!) assumed we were talking about ourselves which was never the case!
The synergy with the city is a major reason why The Warehouse Project hasn’t followed the well trodden path and ventured out into new territories embarking on a grand, national or global strategy, doing similar seasons of events in London or Ibiza or Berlin or New York. it is the unique relationship that the event has with the city which is what makes it work. There are many reasons why, some technical and some poetic, but The Warehouse Project could only have happened, and was always going to happen, in Manchester.
Over the last five years there have been some very close calls. Occasions when dramatic, almost freak circumstances have conspired against us and cast the future of the warehouse project into uncertainty. At these times it felt like the whole thing has dangled by a thread - the four of us staring into the abyss of cancellation, bankruptcy and the realisation that this could be where the warehouse project ends... When we think back to how bizarre some of those situations were, and what was required to pull things back on track it reinforces that sense that fate plays a hand in keeping the whole thing going.
While the WHP really found a first natural home at Store Street in 2007, the iconic Boddingtons Brewery was definitely the right place for things to start. Despite huge problems with acoustics, temperature and complaints from the Warden of Strangeways (that he had hundreds of prisoners raving their socks off next door), Boddingtons was a baptism of fire. After those twelve weeks at Boddies it really felt like The Warehouse Project had arrived. The following year Store Street of course bought new challenges... Many involving turning an underground car park into a fully functioning, fully licensed, state of the art venue every Friday night and then returning it so nobody would even know we’d been there by 7am Monday morning. But where there’s a will there’s a way.
The WHP is very grateful to all the artists who have performed and for the relationships we have developed with the dance music community. Likewise, the goodwill and belief that all the Manchester authorities have shown is quite remarkable (one of the reasons why this could only have happened here!)
Hopefully it will continue for a bit longer... Wherever that might be.
