Between 1982 and 1984, Matthew Rich screen printed and fly posted music campaigns across Manchester. The photographs made to prove the work had been completed document Manchester’s fly-posting scene and the city in the early 1980s.
By the early 1980s, Matthew Rich was designing and screen printing music posters in Manchester, then heading out with a small crew to paste them across the city.
Once a site had been covered, it was photographed as proof that job had been done. The films were processed, a selection of prints was sent through the post and Lola Publicity was paid only after they had been received. In many of the images, someone stands beside the finished wall, confirming where the posters had gone and how much space had been used.
The photos had to be taken quickly. Another firm might cover the campaign, or the council could remove it. Some were taken by Rich; others were taken by another crew member when he appeared in the frame.
These were not conceived as documentary photographs. They were part of the job and were kept after their original purpose had passed.
What survives is an account of Oxford Road, Moss Side, Hulme and the city centre between 1982 and 1984. The posters are the immediate subject, but the city around them has become equally significant: clubs, shops and buildings that have since been demolished or put to different use.
Photo © Matthew Rich, all rights reserved.
Rich arrived in Manchester as a student in the late 1970s and learned screen printing at Community Expression, a community print shop near Manchester University on Oxford Road.
From there, he became involved with Lola Publicity, a printing and poster display business ran by Vini Faal. A surviving business card gives the firm’s address as 97 Claremont Road in Moss Side.
Rich’s own account of his Manchester years records Lola operating first from Blind Lane in Ardwick, then from Claremont Road, where it printed and fly posted campaigns for the newly opened Haçienda.
Photo © Paul Wright, all rights reserved.
The wording on the business card covers both sides of the operation. Posters were printed, then taken out across the city. Record company campaigns also arrived from elsewhere and were allocated to established sites around Manchester.
A good wall carried commercial value, especially near a venue, station or busy road. The best sites were known and regularly contested by rival firms.
Photo © Matthew Rich, all rights reserved.
Vini Faal had already been involved in Manchester music before Lola. He managed Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds, worked around the city’s punk scene and promoted concerts during the late 1970s before becoming closely associated with fly-posting.
Another central figure was Anthony “Tosh” Ryan. A founder of Music Force and co-founder of Rabid Records with Martin Hannett and Lawrence Beedle, Ryan helped establish Manchester’s first commercial fly-posting business. Income from the business helped finance Rabid Records, illustrating how closely poster campaigns, independent record labels and live music promotion were connected in the city during the late 1970s.
According to later accounts, Vini and Mike Faal initially learned within Ryan’s operation before developing their own position in Manchester. The relationship did not last, and control of established sites became part of the dispute. Fly-posting was a competitive trade in which valuable locations were closely guarded and newly pasted campaigns could disappear beneath another company’s work within hours.
Ryan’s crews used recognised sites across Manchester, including the derelict Grosvenor Picture Palace on Oxford Road, whose boarded frontage offered a large, highly visible advertising surface close to the university.
Photographing completed poster campaigns was already standard practice. The pictures provided proof that the work had been carried out before posters were removed or covered by a rival firm.
Photo © Matthew Rich, all rights reserved.
The Haçienda opened on Whitworth Street West in 1982 and carried the Factory catalogue number FAC 51. Rich was printing and fly posting for the club by the following year.
His surviving archive includes posters for The Smiths, The Fall, SPK, Icicle Works and other early Haçienda bookings. Some were printed from supplied artwork templates, including many of the early Haçienda designs, while others involved Rich directly in the artwork. He has since returned to several of the original artworks and produced new screen prints in Glasgow.
One photograph shows a long stretch of temporary hoarding covered with posters for Curtis Mayfield at The Haçienda on 22nd June 1983. The design is repeated until the separate sheets become a continuous band beside the road.
Another shows the former Shaw’s furniture building on Oxford Road covered with posters marking The Haçienda’s first birthday. The building later became the Cornerhouse, one of Manchester’s best known venues for film and photography.
These pictures show how Factory’s visual identity travelled beyond its records and premises. It was printed and posted around Manchester by people whose names rarely appear in the standard narratives.
Whatever was happening inside The Haçienda, somebody still had to go out with a brush and tell the rest of the city about it.
Photo © Matthew Rich, all rights reserved.
Factory is an important part of the archive, but it is not the whole of it.
Rich and the Lola group worked on campaigns covering reggae, soul, punk and pop. The archive includes posters for Bob Marley and the Wailers, Harlem Spirit, The Smiths, Icicle Works, Alan Vega and Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
Several surviving posters relate to the PSV Club on Royce Road in Hulme, formerly the Russell Club. They include designs for Culture and Prince Far I. The Russell Club had hosted the Factory nights that gave Factory Records its name, while its later incarnation as the PSV became an important Manchester venue for reggae, dub, soul and jazz-funk.
The photographs give a broader account of Manchester music in the early 1980s than the usual emphasis on Factory and The Haçienda. Major record labels, local promoters and club nights all relied on the same printing, promotion and fly posting-networks.
Photo © Matthew Rich, all rights reserved.
Photo © Matthew Rich, all rights reserved.
One photograph from 1984 shows repeated posters promoting the reissue of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ “Waiting in Vain”. Further along the wall, the orange and red New Reno sign locates the scene beside the club in Moss Side.
Above the posters is a large billboard for Billy Graham’s Mission England campaign. The official advertising space sits above rows of Bob Marley posters pasted at street level, bringing two very different forms of public promotion into the same frame.
The Reno opened in 1962 at the corner of Princess Road and Moss Lane East. By the 1970s and early 1980s, it had become one of Manchester’s best known late night soul and funk clubs, drawing Black and mixed race communities from Moss Side, Hulme and across the city. It was demolished in 1987.
British Culture Archive documented the club through photographs and testimony connected with Linda Brogan’s Excavating the Reno project.
Photo © Matthew Rich, all rights reserved.
Fly-posting made use of the temporary surfaces created by a changing city: empty shops, derelict buildings and construction hoardings alongside busy roads. In Rich’s photographs, older poster campaigns remain beneath new ones and shop signs hang above boarded up windows covered in posters. The pictures were made as proof of completed work, but they also record the closures, clearance and redevelopment shaping Manchester in the early 1980s.
Photo © Matthew Rich, all rights reserved.
British Culture Archive explored the city around the formation of Factory Records in Use Hearing Protection: The Early Years of Factory Records at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester.
The exhibition covered Factory’s first 50 catalogue entries, from 1978 to 1982. A photographic section that placed those early years within Manchester’s wider social history, including work by Thomas Blower, Red Saunders and Luis Bustamante.
Thomas Blower photographed Moss Side, Ancoats, Hattersley and central Manchester during the 1970s and early 1980s. Luis Bustamante’s 1979 Manchester series documented Oxford Road and Hulme, showing gig posters appearing across the city.
Use Hearing Protection stopped at FAC 50, immediately before The Haçienda entered the Factory catalogue as FAC 51. Rich’s archive picks up almost exactly there.
His photographs carry the story into the first years of The Haçienda, while showing that Factory was one client within a wider city business involving printers, promoters and record companies.
Manchester’s music history was built through records, bands and clubs, but it also depended on the promotional networks and people who printed the posters and covered the walls.
Photo © Matthew Rich, all rights reserved.
Rich’s early work in Manchester became the foundation of a long career in screen printing. After leaving the city, he worked for Autotype, researching printing methods and training printers internationally.
During the 1990s, he moved into fine art screen printing at London Contemporary Art and Coriander Studios, producing editions for artists including Peter Blake, Bruce McLean and Rachel Whiteread. He later spent several years in Malawi, working as a teacher and training others in print and theatre production.
In 2008, Rich helped establish the print studio at Jealous Gallery, where he worked as Master Printer until 2017. He then founded M.A.R.S. Print Studio in London before moving the studio to Glasgow in 2021.
The Manchester material had remained with him almost by accident. Drawers in the studio held posters from his earliest printing years, pieces of Letraset artwork and photographs of completed fly posting jobs across the city.
While printing record sleeves for Night School Records, Rich showed part of the material to the label’s Michael Kasparis, who also worked from Monorail Music in Glasgow. Kasparis suggested an exhibition in the shop’s café bar.
With support from Kasparis, Stephen Pastel and Claire Forsyth of Glasgow Print Studio, Rich brought the material together as I Am The Fly. The exhibition opened at Monorail Music in July 2025 before travelling to The Social in London.
British Culture Archive was introduced to Matthew Rich and his Manchester archive by John Poland.
I Am The Fly comes home to Manchester at The Refuge, opening on Thursday 23rd July, 2026.
