- Manchester's Islington Mill is more like a strange collection of shapes than a nightclub, with a sloping corridor that bends 90 degrees through the centre. After you hand over your ticket, you turn the hard right and let gravity pull you gradually into the main room, which is like a four or five-car garage that has been converted into a modest hippie hangout. By midnight on the evening of Mike Huckaby's latest Manchester appearance, it was already occupied with a crowd unlike any other in the city.
There was a fervent energy in the room by the time I had cleared the queue at the bar and found a place in front of the DJ booth, where a threatening stack of speakers stared down at me and local jock Rick Nicholls was beginning his set. Theo Parrish's "Falling Up" and its evil crackling bassline crawled off the turntables and blossomed into its infamous hair-tingling riff as a flurry of cheers and screams electrified the room. Nicholls went on to play strands of techno and house that elegantly defied your average warm-up set, every now and then dropping a track that would play out into silence and the next mood-drenched selection would slowly creep out of from the dark corners of the room and up your spine.
As the last record of Nicholls's set sank into the distance, Mike Huckaby let Lil Louis's "I Called You" burst out of the system, turning the atmosphere into a frightening and uncontrollable monster as the endless horn section drove arms and elbows into the air. Huckaby then proceeded to spend Sunday morning spinning what I would label as "real house music." He would layer acapellas, beats and saxophone samples over a record until it was close to finishing, and then mix out into the next track, the set gaining momentum with each transition.
For three hours this continued, and then shortly after "I Can't Kick This Feeling When it Hits" from Moodymann came to its epic nine-minute conclusion, a rumour swept across the floor that Huckaby was going on until 6 AM. He coolly levelled out the rhythms and pieced together a selection for the next unplanned hour, serving up easy rolling deep house for those that dared to stay. The remaining dancing fans wore a set of grins I haven't seen in a long while in Manchester.