Night and Day, Manchester

The Night & Day is my favourite live venue in Manchester. It's small, it's friendly, and even though the sound is often quite poor, it feels very intimate and I can usually find somewhere from which I can actually see the stage. They get loads of up and coming national and international acts, but also put on a lot of local shows too. Over the years we've seen Editors (before they released a single), Bloc Party, The Decemberists, Neko Case, Death Cab For Cutie, Spoon, Forward Russia, Battle and more in this bar. We've also been to see fantastic local acts such as Nephew.

The crowd tends to be made up of indie music afficionados and hipsters and very often is either young kids who've found a band via MySpace or some such way or older, more cynical types who've heard the hot new American act and want to see if the hype is true. So you get a combination of wildly mad gigs and more subdued ones.

The place is small and bottlenecks often form between the entrance, through the bar and block access to the "dance floor" in front of the stage. Once you get through the bottleneck it's fine. The walls are always lined with gig posters (many professionally commissioned and some will be available down the road at The Richard Goodall Gallery!) and original art, prints or photos of gigs or musicians which will be for sale. The beer is pretty much all bottled, it's not cheap to buy a round, and most of it is typical Northern Quarter fare of European imported beers like Budvar.

During the day you can pop in and have a meal or a cup of coffee, and when there aren't gigs on there's club nights. Often the gigs will finish for 11pm or 12am and there will be a DJ til 2am. We've never stayed on for a club night, but I suspect it would be a good enough atmosphere.

Really, with the exception of the usual gig annoyances of people talking or being generally rude, the place is a great asset to the Manchester bar & club scene and I'd recommend checking out some bands there.