Next public tour: Saturday 18 May 2024, 11.30am.
Meet: Outside Mercure Hotel, Portland St/Piccadilly Gdns.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
Private Tours: Please e-mail info@newmanchesterwalks.com.

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Private tours
We have been inundated with requests. It’s been so enjoyable taking good folk from San Francisco, London and all places in between on a custom-made tour, and there’s nothing like playing the right track at the right spot. For instance “Blue Monday” at the site of the Beach Club...

Calling all Ian Curtis/Joy Division fans. We meet hundreds of you every year aimlessly wandering around Manchester city centre looking for relevant locations: the Hacienda, Rafter’s, the Britons Protection .... If only you booked a tour with us, you’d find out so much more, and we could relate all these places and their music stories with the history of the city while playing the appropriate track at the relevant site/sight!

Rant over, here’s what we’ve got to say.

Ian Curtis; he was a tortured soul; a visceral, troubled mind with a voice that echoed Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop and Matt Monro.

Curtis briefly led Joy Division, the finest flower of the early days at Manchester's Factory Records, shaking sensibilities and sending shivers down the spine on an all too brief catalogue of classic works, epitomised by the Gogol-influenced “Dead Souls” and the harrowing “Shadowplay” in which he prefigured his own sad suicide.

This is one of the more tragic tours in the NMW roster – but also one of the most powerful, heading into the very “centre of the city where all roads meet waiting for you”.