Keys Money Lipstick, a no-arsehole policy and queues round the block: Remembering Andy Martin’s Star and Garter

By Fergal Kinney

Now that Dan Phillips had turned sixteen, it was time to join the family firm. He was put to work in the cloakroom at his uncle’s club The Star and Garter in 2014. Phillips remembers people-watching at the venue’s long-running Smiths Disco or indie night Smile. Only later did he realise how unique this experience was. 

“All these people know each other, they all know the staff, everyone was having a crack and a laugh. You start going out to 42s and nobody speaks to each other, nobody’s mates and nobody’s known each other for years. It was a really hard feeling to achieve elsewhere.” A pause. “I’d been in the Premier League of atmospheres in pubs.”

On the afternoon of Friday 29th March, Andy Martin passed away. The longstanding venue operator and licensee of Piccadilly’s The Star and Garter venue had died unexpectedly following a short illness. The 52 year old’s death was announced on the venue’s Facebook page by his wife Helen Kitchen, with whom he had two young daughters.

The Star and Garter — which was taken over by Martin in 1997 — sits glowering on the edge of the city, an imposing and sullen landmark of high Victoriana buffeted by industrial dereliction. It has watched but not participated in Manchester’s regeneration.

First opening in the early 1800s, the building was reportedly moved brick by brick to its current site on Fairfield Street in 1877, where it operated as a pub for over a century. Under Martin’s tenure, it metamorphosed into a live music venue and club instead.

Since the 1990s, The Star and Garter has at different points defined the city’s booming indie nightlife, and latterly symbolised something left behind in its fast-paced rush to regeneration. Today, the pub serves multiple niche audiences: namely, those of the city’s indie, punk, metal and experimental scenes. “The things they cater for,” says Jay Taylor of the Music Venue Trust, “they tend not to happen elsewhere.” 

Half pub, half venue

Andrew Martin was born on 24th January 1972. Raised in the North Manchester suburbs of Blackley and Moston, he was a nerdy teen in hock to three passions: indie music, alternative comedy and computers. The first time Martin ever visited The Star and Garter was in his (enduring) capacity as a Half Man Half Biscuit enthusiast. Considering his favourite band feels appropriate if you want to understand the man: a sardonic and iconoclastic institution ploughing on for decades in the face of mainstream indifference.

Like a lot of modern Manchester, the roots of Martin-era Star and Garter begin in the shocks of the Thatcher years. The Mayfield sorting depot behind Piccadilly Station was closed by Royal Mail in 1986. A large and thirsty workforce left the area, which fell into dereliction, and the brewery pulled out of the large Star and Garter pub. The streets around the pub became a red light district. 

Charlie Darlington bought the pub in 1991, influenced by warm noises from Manchester City Council about regenerating the area. Martin turned up at the pub on a whim to enquire about promoting a Half Man Half Biscuit show. He never really left: working with Darlington to promote shows and eventually becoming the licensee in 1997. Darlington owned the freehold, but Martin — as venue operator — was responsible for everything from beer to bookings, able to shape the space in his own image and likeness. 

The Smile club night began in 1993 as an eclectic and obscurantist 60s night, featuring DJs like Neil Barker. CityLife dubbed it “clubbing for the dressed up and the disenfranchised.” DJ Andy Woods had spent the 1990s working his way up from spinning records in social clubs to shaping club nights in emerging Northern Quarter establishments like Roadhouse and Night and Day, and in 1997 was poached to join the Smile team. 

Woods tells me there was no real music policy at Smile, other than not playing what everyone in Manchester played. That meant no Stone Roses, no Happy Mondays and, very quickly, no Oasis.  “We veered away from the mainstream indie and we veered away from lad culture,” argues Woods of Smile’s eclectic music policy, “what we embraced was more the arts, as wanky as that sounds. And cult things.”

By the late 1990s, a combination of hard graft and illicit flyposting had birthed a word-of-mouth success story. “We were the darlings of the NME,” says Woods, “and had kids queuing around the block.”

In the lads-and-lager 1990s, going out in Manchester could be an experience for many synonymous with violence and harassment. “We attracted all the people who, if they went into town all twee and wearing their cravat, would get battered,” says Woods, “all the weirdos and the freaks gravitated to Smile.”

By the infant years of the new millennium, The Star and Garter was suddenly booming. “It had the three busiest, most talked about nights in the city,” remembers former promoter Ian Jones — referring to Smile, the Smiths Disco and his own electro-indie night Keys Money Lipstick. “If you are young, creative and hip then it’s pretty much the place to get yourself down to,” gushed fashion magazine Dazed’s report on the venue in 2006, describing its “vintage clad girls, Cansei de Ser Sexy pounding out of the speakers, cheap pints and well-attired boys.”

Clubs during boom periods can become susceptible to egos and narcotics. Not on Andy’s watch. “Andy despised people on coke,” says Woods, “people probably did drugs but it wasn’t based on that. It was based on friendship and good music. Nobody wanted to become celebrities.”

It helped that the operation was all a little Phoenix Nights. Unusually for a venue operator, Martin worked the door of the venue. This was often alongside Ian ‘Strawboss’ Garner, the deeply lovely and deeply no-nonsense elderly odd-job man at the venue.

“The Star and Garter was built in Andy’s image,” says Jones, “Strawboss was like your granddad and Andy was your uncle. It kept you in line. If you were an arsehole, you would get banned. He was absolutely ruthless, but that’s why it was a safe place.”

This was crucial for Martin. “We attract intelligent people here,” he explained in a 2014 blog interview, “people who are now GPs, archaeologists, psychologists and who work for the CPS. I’ve helped every single one of them into a taxi. Thick people stick out here like a sore thumb.”

His public pronouncements were the exact opposite of gurning Manchester boosterism: “There’ll be nowt flash, no surprises,” said Martin to The Guardian in 2008 when asked to promote a Smile New Year’s Eve party, promising ticket-holders “the same songs, just in a different order.”Writer and DJ Natalie Bradbury remembers finding The Star and Garter after some dismal city-centre experiences. “I went to 5th Avenue and absolutely hated it,” she says, “someone pinched my bum, someone stole my hat and ran off with it.” She began going to Smile alone. “I started talking to people in the queue, or in the bar, and it felt like that was a completely safe and accommodating thing to do there.”

Initially, Bradbury was wary of this imposing doorman — based on first impressions, he seemed cantankerous, curmudegeonly and sarcastic, but he quickly became a supportive presence for her. “It didn’t seem to matter that I wasn’t very polished or professional, he was more about encouraging people who just wanted to do something for the love of it.”

Mill editor Sophie Atkinson remembers the special care that Martin took to look out for The Star and Garter’s female clientele. “Smile and Keys Money Lipstick are still some of the best club nights I’ve ever been to,” says Atkinson, “Andy felt like one of the few men in mid 00s Manchester nightlife who genuinely cared about women. This felt like an anomaly in a pretty macho era.” After a series of spikings at the venue in 2004, Atkinson remembers Martin doing the rounds of the venue every hour or so to warn women to keep their drinks attended. “I remember a thirty-something guy following teen me into the loo ostensibly to hold my hair back when I threw up,” she says, “and Andy very wisely throwing him out.”

This created a safer place for like-minded souls to meet. The secret weapon? The pub’s traditional layout — pub downstairs, function room upstairs — affording The Star and Garter a choose your own adventure quality to this day. “You can go upstairs in a darkened room and dance around and come downstairs with whoever you've pulled,” expanded Martin, “and realise you've made a massive mistake and go upstairs again.”

Please, please can we go to the Smiths Disco

The longest running continuous club night at The Star and Garter — indeed, maybe one of the longest continuous club nights in the UK — is the Smiths Disco. The Morrissey Smiths Disco began in 1994 when its DJ and promoter visited Smile and saw the reaction when Panic by The Smiths was played. Since then, the club night playing exclusively Morrissey and The Smiths has been held on the first Friday of the month, with admission rising from £2 to its current £5. 

“I was a typical Morrissey fan feeling on the outskirts of everything,” says Hannah Saunders, who began making the pilgrimage from her native Kent to the Smiths Disco in the 2010s. “I’d never been to a venue like The Star and Garter. You found a tribe. I felt like, wow, I could actually make friends there, which was the first time I’d ever felt like that.” The Star and Garter provided space for a dedicated niche to express something messier than straightforward fan worship. Other clubs tried to imitate it: all failed.

Saunders befriended Martin. “If you felt a bit too drunk you could go outside,” she remembers, “Andy would be playing Wordscapes on his phone. You could help him find some words, he would offer you a chewing gum, and then you could sober up a bit, go inside and have another five vodka and Red Bulls.”

For Middleton’s Liam Fray, early visits to the Smiths Disco in the 2000s are remembered as potentially intimidating experiences. “I thought I loved the Smiths,” he says, “but people in there really love the Smiths.” The Star and Garter had a disconnection from the city that Fray admired.

“Andy and the others kind of made it feel like a club that only we knew about,” he says today, “It feels like a proper old school boozer down stairs, and then you climb the stairs into the unknown until the small hours. We’d be playing pool and then some lad with leather gloves on and a beret on would put a quid down for the next game. I adored it in there.” When Fray’s band The Courteeners entered the top 20 with ‘Not Nineteen Forever’ in 2008, its B-side was a song about the night: ‘Smiths Disco’. Martin remained deeply proud of the association.

“Even now, we’re getting 180 through the door for Smiths Disco,” says Danny Marsh. The proudly anti-fascist, anti-racist space — which hosted the longstanding queer night Bollox in the 2000s and early 2010s — was put in an undoubtedly strange position by Morrissey’s shift to the far-right. “We have all the Smiths Disco things on the wall and I sometimes think, hang on, these are possibly quite offensive now,” laughs Marsh.

As Manchester changed, audiences noted that The Star and Garter felt representative of something that was being erased in an increasingly blingy and slick city. This was reflected in the entry wristbands that Martin printed, carrying offbeat slogans like ‘CHORLTON = TWAT FACTORY’, ‘THE FORTRESS OF MUNICIPAL VENGEANCE’ and innumerable Alan Partridge quotes. Some of Martin’s wristbands became defiant folk art protests against the ongoing regeneration of the city: ‘THE NORTHERN QUARTER: SOHO LIGHT.’

Network Rail = Charognarde en costards bas de gamme

The first that Andy Martin heard of Network Rail’s plans for The Star and Garter was a tip off from a regular. It began a dispute that would define the 2010s for the venue.

Network Rail began the 2010s with a promise to develop Manchester Piccadilly station by adding two new platforms as part of the Northern Hub project. The wider Mayfield area too was slated for a huge programme of regeneration. Unable to simply demolish the Grade II listed pub, Network Rail argued for an option where The Star and Garter would close trading for three years. No business could survive this, and Martin was incensed.

“They’ll get this place through a compulsory purchase [order], or whatever,” said Martin to The Guardian in 2015, referring to a legal mechanism by which land can be purchased without the owner’s consent. “They’ll get it on the cheap, skirt round the listed building shite, say it’s unsafe and knock it down,” he continued. “If it stays afloat, they sell it on to a coffee chain. Either way, they’re quids in.”

Network Rail reportedly offered £100,000 for the venue. Barely more than Darlington had paid for it in 1991, it was a desultory offer for a five floor, three bedroom Victorian city-centre building and Martin told them exactly where to shove their offer.

“That period of time was mental,” says Phillips, “you couldn’t have a conversation with someone about The Star without someone asking if it was shutting.” Promoters started pulling shows. “It got dark,” says staff member Danny Marsh, “we had nothing coming in.”

During those years, I promoted and DJ-d at the Let’s Make This Precious club night at the venue with my friend Daniel Cooke, a fairly typical Star and Garter combination of jangling guitars, northern soul, post-punk and other obsessions of my 21-year-old self.

Smile had fallen away, its audience had stopped going out for all the reasons that people traditionally stop going out, and other nightclubs had replaced it with more social media savvy but far less eclectic landfill nights. Working with Martin was an education. 

Whilst I was fussing about the quiet nights and exalted by the busy ones, Martin treated successes and failures much the same. You got on with the job. We held a particularly dismal event the night after the 2015 General Election. Nobody turned up, he quietly didn’t charge me a fee and put a few more nights in the diary.

For me, the first hour was always special. I would play music for myself over the PA system in near darkness, the only movement the arthouse films we projected onto the huge dark walls as the incoming trains shook the large, arcane pub. Cashing up at the end, you just might get a free can of Oranjeboon and be allowed to smoke inside. Heaven.

Time passed, and Martin held his nerve. Whilst others eulogised the venue, he got to work diversifying. Punk and metal became more important to the venue, not least through promoter Stu Taylor.

“Andy was always very, very forthcoming,” says Fair Play Festival promoter Jacob Brailsford, “and generally keen to give new promoters a stepping stone to earn their stripes.”

In the daytime, The Star and Garter became a favourite with film crews from It’s A Sin to Brassic. “I remember him saying, oh we’ve got Netflix in next week as though it was nothing,” says Hannah Saunders.

“The pub reinvented itself,” says Jay Taylor, “it isn’t talked about enough how he’d managed to interact with Mayfield and the cultural changes around there. It became a fixed point in a changing neighbourhood.”

When Warehouse Project began to operate from the Mayfield site — stirrings of that long-awaited redevelopment — they were able to integrate The Star and Garter into their bookings. It was funny and surreal to see Boiler Room begin hosting events upstairs.

By the late 2010s, there was still no sign of the Piccadilly station expansion. What happened? Network Rail and Manchester City Council could have easily enforced the closure. One reason is that Martin gritted his teeth through inspections and surveys, and gave evidence with typical intelligence and wit at a public enquiry. He became proficient at standing outside the pub looking moody in local press, making the dispute a bigger problem than his opposition seemed to have expected. It was later confirmed by Lucy Powell MP that, in the background, the government had quietly dropped the plans altogether.

A few days before Christmas 2019, the Mayfield Partnership — a joint venture between developer U+I, Manchester City Council, Transport for Greater Manchester and London and Continental Railways — released an unexpected statement in partnership with The Star and Garter. The freehold of the venue had been acquired for an undisclosed sum, signing a new 10-year lease with Martin and committing to keep The Star and Garter as a music venue. Martin described himself as “relieved and more than satisfied” at the long overdue settlement. In the background to this, the Piccadilly expansion had been quietly dropped. Andy Martin deserved better, but he had won his David and Goliath battle and had every reason to believe that the new decade might finally be something to look forward to for his venue. 

The Holy Trinity

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, venues like The Star and Garter found themselves having to navigate funding systems that were anathema to their informal, spit and sawdust practices. 

Jay Taylor remembers supporting Martin with his Cultural Recovery Fund application. “He had his idea of what a perfect venue was and how it should be run,” explains Taylor, “you went into The Star and Garter and every ounce of pretension had been sucked out of the room.”

The pandemic had coincided with enormous personal changes for Martin and Helen Kitchen: Jasmine was born in 2019, followed by Georgina in 2020.

Danny Marsh remembers cleaning the main room with Martin who began confiding in him his worries about imminent fatherhood. “As soon as they were born,” says Marsh, “I’ve never seen a man change overnight. He doted over them, loved them. Any time he could spend with them he spent.”

As Martin enjoyed time with his family, Ian ‘Strawboss’ Garner became more central to the operation than ever, working the door until 3AM or scaling the rickety heights of the Victorian building in high-vis. “Late into his seventies and fit as a fiddle,” says Marsh, “he was in all the time oiling things, with his Aladdin’s cave of tools.” Garner suffered a stroke in late 2022, and died in hospital on 22nd May 2023. “Andy never really got over that,” says Marsh. A few months later, longstanding punk promoter Stu Taylor died on 15th November. Martin’s mother also passed away around the same time.“There will never be as awful a year for The Star and Garter and all of its extended family,” wrote Martin on the venue’s Facebook page. “It was a really challenging six months for Andy,” says Jay Taylor. Danny Marsh says he is unsure Martin ever really got over the loss. 

And yet, in late 2023 Martin married the love of his life Helen Kitchen. The pair had met at the venue in 2010, with Kitchen latterly joining the bar staff. “That was the last time I saw him,” says Ian Jones, “which I can’t really talk about because it breaks my heart. He kept saying: get married and have kids, it’s the best thing you can do.”

Across March 2024, Martin had been suffering from an ear infection. After a family holiday in North Wales, Martin complained of feeling increasingly unwell. On Monday 25th March, he was admitted to Salford Royal Hospital suffering from a suspected stroke. The next day he suffered a cardiac arrest. It is understood that Martin had developed sepsis, which caused encephalitis and meningitis, resulting in unrecoverable swelling on the brain. Andy Martin died on Good Friday.

“Like taking down the Angel of the North”

“It’s not an original thing to say that our pub offers community,” says Dan Phillips, “but it does and it’s hyper focused.” He explains that the crowd who come along to the punk nights are radically different from those who attend the metal nights, both of which are completely different to the Smile and Smiths Disco audience. “If you don’t like The Star and Garter, you don’t really understand it.” Phillips refers to Martin, Garner and Taylor’s loss as “the Holy Trinity.”

In the days after Martin’s death, all of those groups came together to raise money for Martin’s funeral. By Easter Sunday, the JustGiving page had already leapfrogged its £7000 target.

Today, small venues matter because the best ones carve out and insulate a space outside of the mainstream for community to flourish. This, at a time when capitalism has largely eroded community spaces — with the attendant crisis of epidemic loneliness — is a towering achievement. It takes graft, it isn’t glamorous: it takes someone like Andy Martin. 

This, for me, is personal. When I think about my first memories with many close friends, it was meeting them at The Star and Garter. My brother met his partner there, and they have two beautiful children only slightly older than Martin’s daughters. The human tragedy of Martin’s passing is devastating, but what he built endures.

 “As a lover of Manchester music you want to know some things are still there,” says Jay Taylor, “I might not be at The Star and Garter every week, but I liked knowing it was there. It’s like taking down the Angel of the North, or Blackpool Tower. Those gigantic figures who you thought would be there forever.” Andy Martin was one of those giants. In keeping The Star and Garter the same, he changed Manchester forever.

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