3000 bathtubs of beer and a (fraudulent) Gallagher lookalike contest: it’s Oasis week

Dear readers — welcome to The Mill’s Monday briefing, which always seeks to answer the biggest, and most pressing questions about our beloved city. This week, that question happens to be: how many bucket hats full of lager are expected to sell at Oasis’ Heaton Park gig this weekend? A spoiler: it looks set to be a fruitful weekend for any beer-proof bucket hat salespeople among you.

On Wednesday last week, paying Mill members were treated to a humdinger of a graph. That might not sound like much, but James Gilmour’s analysis of Manchester’s economic growth was described by one reader as the single most “concise, accessible and understandable” article on the topic he’d ever read, which is very kind! 

Then, Friday’s Mill was a rare double bill. We revealed exclusive details of the agreement signed between Manchester City Council Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United Group (showing the favourable treatment Mansour has enjoyed — with first right of refusal on any land the council has sold from Ancoats to the edge of Beswick). That addition also featured an interview with Mark Garner about the sudden demise of his well-known food website Confidentials. As ever, if you aren’t a full paid-up Miller, these are the sort of goods you’ll be missing out on. Something to think about…

Local festival returns 

From today’s sponsor: Fancy a summer weekend of DJs, bands and festival fun? Newton Music Festival is offering just that from Friday 1st to Sunday 3rd August. The lineup includes (former Mill contributor) Dave Haslam on Friday, The K’s on Saturday and Flash (a Queen tribute band) on Sunday, and is set to repeat the incredible success of last year’s festival. Hosted in the beautiful Mesnes Park, just a 20 minute train from Piccadilly, Newton Music Festival has something for everyone. Day tickets start at £15 and Mill readers can get an exclusive 10% discount using the code ‘1qjpad’ – click here to book.

We’ve just hired a new member of staff, Grace Moriarty, to oversee our sponsorships! If you’d like to sponsor some editions of The Mill and reach over 58,000 Millers, you can get in touch at grace@millmediaco.uk. 

☀️ This week’s weather

Tuesday 🌤️ Dry and breezy with sunny spells. 20°C.

Wednesday ⛅️ Cloudy to start then brightening up during the afternoon. 22°C.

Thursday 🌤️ Much warmer with long sunny spells and light winds. 26°C.

Friday ☀️ Hot, dry and mostly sunny. 30°C.

Weekend ☀️ Remaining hot and dry with lots of sunshine. Temperatures will peak between the high twenties and low thirties.

We get our weekly forecast from Manchester Weather.

Your briefing

🧱 Oasis are playing Heaton Park this weekend, as we imagine you already know. As a result, our editor’s inbox has been filling up with all the most crucial and illuminating facts pertaining to the Manchester gig — including one particularly interesting table put together by Alliance Online…

Yes, as you can see, 567,993 litres of beer are expected to be consumed during the band’s reunion in Heaton Park alone — enough to fill 126,221 goldfish bowls, or 3,156 baths. Or, perhaps most crucially, 157,776 bucket hats.

But what about the rest of Manchester? It seems like half the bars, pubs, and venues in the city are gearing up for the gig, with the majority of the city centre transformed into some sort of inescapable Oasis fringe-fest. Diecast are putting on a Champagne Supernova Bottomless Brunch, The Alan have put out a series of limited-edition cocktails named after the band’s biggest hits, and even Hunan in Chinatown have released an inexplicable Oasis-themed set menu, that claims to be a round up of the band’s favourite dishes at the restaurant, which we suppose they must regularly frequent.

But most intriguing of all are the posters being spotted around the Northern Quarter, advertising an ‘Oasis Lookalike Contest’ at Freight Island, with a £100 cash prize. The posters spell ‘Frieght Island” incorrectly, and there’s no evidence of such an event on the venue’s social media, but still we’re tempted to go along and check. Friday at 4pm, for the optimists among us.

🎤 Catherine Jackson Smith, one of the founders of Radar Festival, has revealed she received a threatening phone call from an unknown number in the days leading up to Bob Vylan’s cancelled performance at Victoria Warehouse. Vylan, a punk rap duo who are currently being investigated by Avon and Somerset Police after a member of the duo led calls of “Death, death to the IDF” and “Free Palestine” during their Glastonbury set, were due to perform at Radar Festival last weekend but were dropped by the festival last minute, in what Jackson Smith said was “categorically one of the most horrendous professional conversations that I’ve ever had”. Jackson Smith said she faced pressure from AMG and Live Nation, co-owners of Victoria Warehouse, and local authority figures to drop Vylan or face losing the festival’s entire Saturday programme. “I cannot express clearly enough that I wanted Bob Vylan to perform at our festival,” she said on the Two Promoters One Pod podcast, implying the decision was taken out of her hands. Three bands dropped out of the festival in solidarity with Bob Vylan, including metalcore band Hero In Error, Irish metal band The Scratch and post-punk band GENN.

🎓 Senior staff from the University of Manchester were invited to an event at the University of Oxford where the universities minister Jacqui Smith said that “universities have got to go further” in improving outcomes for disadvantaged students. Smith warned that the Labour government is going to be looking for “better transparency over university admissions, starting with publishing data on medical schools’ admission of those from lower socio-economic backgrounds.”

🎨 If you’re walking down Deansgate this week, make sure you stop outside the large glass windows opposite the Hilton Hotel and Beetham Tower to watch a painting unfold in real time. Michael Browne, 62, an artist from Moss Side who we profiled earlier this year, is creating a new piece of political artwork that features Donald Trump, Elon Musk and JD Vance surrounded by scary biblical figures wielding scythes.

Quick hits

✏️ Open newsroom: we’re currently working on a piece on the race to get into Trafford’s Grammar schools. If you’re a teacher, a tutor, or a parent trying to train your kids up for the 11+ (or know anyone who is) please get in touch with Ophira here!

🎭 Buxton International Festival starts this weekend and its highlights include the French opera Hamlet, performed by the Orchestra of Opera North, the Sacconi Quartet playing 150-year-old Ravel and a jazz programme that ranges from Latin, Brazilian, soul and folk. If you’re under 35 and would like to attend, fill out this form for £5 tickets to any event you’d like.

💰 The Sunday Times reveals where the billions of pounds invested in the much-delayed HS2 project went, with the highest earner in the recruitment sector from the project being Morson International, the Manchester-based technological recruitment firm, which earned £12.1 million between 2012 and 2018. 

🏡 The MEN claims that a gender reveal party at a holiday let in Rochdale attended by over 200 people caused so much havoc that the police were called out. The rowdy guests were charged £2,000 to fix damages to the property.

Home of the week

We’re somewhat infatuated with this three-bed (detached!) redbrick in Levenshulme, going for £475,000. If one of you buys it, please invite us round.

Our favourite reads

Wild visions of nature and carnage fuelled by hallucinogens – Santiago Yahuarcani review — The Guardian 

Santiago Yahuarcani, artist and leader of the White Heron clan of the Indigenous Uitoto Nation in the Amazon basin in Peru and Colombia, has a new visual art exhibition at the Whitworth. In his large, chaotic paintings, rocks have eyes and teeth, birds transform into lizards, fish brandish weapons, and hybrid creatures, part dolphin, part man, move through rivers. But amongst these psychedelic, fantastical creatures, “one presence looms darkly over all of this: colonial violence.” It’s showing until 4 January.

The brothers from Bolton who’ve made £120m dressing pop stars — The Times

Mike and George Heaton are currently No 14 on the 40 Under 40 Rich List, with a combined net worth of £350 million, having made their fortune from the Californian-inspired streetwear brand Represent, which started in their parents’ garden shed in Bolton. “We just didn’t fit in around here,” George says. “We started out simply creating clothes that we wanted to wear.” Their fans include Dua Lipa and Justin Bieber, though they insist their clothing is accessible: “An attainable price point. Not cheap, but not too expensive for the everyday lad.” 

‘Playing a festival is like teaching a supply lesson’ — The Observer

Antony Szmierek, a spoken word poet and former teacher who recently performed at Glastonbury, reflects on his upbringing in a working-class Catholic family in Hyde and the horror of encountering his former students at Parklife. “It was a happy childhood,” he reflects, admitting that spoken word poetry wasn’t an obvious calling given his background. “Just, at school, no one gave a shit, no one cared. Everyone was just going to go and work in Morrisons. You were going to be a paramedic or a police officer or a teacher, they were the jobs that existed. There was no aspiration that you could be a writer or an actor.”

Our to do list

Tuesday

📷 Artist Scott Brown is exhibiting the work he produced during his 14 day residency at 1853 Studios in Oldham. His practice merges photography with physical materials, and centres around his childhood in the town.

🪿 Fantasy author T. Kingfisher will be at Waterstones celebrating the release of her award-winning novel A Sorceress Comes to Call: A retelling of the Brothers Grimm story Goose Girl.

Wednesday

🫏 Oddsocks theatre company are putting on a production of Shakespeare’s daftest masterpiece, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, at Kagyu Ling Buddhist Centre. Get your tickets here.

🎤 And South Korean pansori-pop group Leelanchi are joining the Manchester-based Catbandcat, for what should be a great gig at Band on the Wall.

Thursday

🎻 Head to Aviva Studios for the world premiere of Ruhaniyat (روحانیت) — a new composition of Sufi devotional music in partnership with Manchester Camerata.

💥 And Manchester Lit and Phil will be giving a talk on our city’s connection to the invention of the atomic bomb, at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation.

Got a To-Do that you’d like us to list? Tell us about it here.

Thanks again to Newton Music Festival for sponsoring this edition. Click here for tickets.