*

Linda’s spade dug into squishy soil.

Old friends had reunited around a mound of grass and poppies to dig alongside her, with blue hard hats on their heads, yellow high-vis on their chests, and spliffs hanging from their mouths. They shared old stories as they worked. Remember Fonzo, his long locks, and how he would dance with his shoulders and arms writhing? He was like DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street. ‘He always got his top off because he’s got a great body,’ Linda told me, speaking with a child’s delight. ‘He’ll whistle, bang glasses on the table, do backflips.’

Now back to the task at hand: dig, dig, dig. To this group, something more valuable than gold was beneath the soil.

***

Hit the button!

It’s several decades before the dig. The police are rounding a corner, running to raid a three-storey soul club when the doormen, seeing the cops coming, swiftly pressed the panic button, alerting the revellers inside. Douse your joints, hide your weed, evacuate the building. The fuzz were coming.

Thud, thud, thud came the boots on the rickety wooden stairs, the cops descending into a world they rarely saw. Yet rather than coming across a room of rum-drunk revellers, the police saw something unexpected: an empty space.

‘Sometimes the police would come and shut it down but that wouldn’t stop us, we’d just go to some fucker’s house and carry on,’ Linda said.

Welcome to The Reno. Located in Manchester’s Moss Side, this was a haven for Black people, Asian people, and others from mixed-race backgrounds in the 1970s and 80s. Race relations were in the pits owing to an emboldened National Front, and The Reno was a place to escape from that misery. It was the place to be. And until 6 a.m., no less.

When a pub had denied Phil Magbotiwan a drink years earlier, he decided to make a change by founding The Reno, ‘Manchester’s first racially inclusive nightclub,’ in 1962. His club was named after its American counterpart, initially created to provide sailors a place to stay. Later, it blossomed into a funk and soul paradise where everyone was welcome to party. This was crucial, as it could be difficult for people of colour to get into mainstream clubs during the period. ‘In other places, mixed-race couples were ridiculed and made to feel uncomfortable,’ the BBC reported. The Reno was an antidote to this, and the club became so famous that Chaka Khan, Muhammad Ali and Bob Marley reportedly paid it a visit. As did . . . the cast and crew of Coronation Street, of course.

***

Before the mid- to late 1970s, there was little legislation to prevent nightclubs from banning people of colour. In fact, until the mid-60s, ‘it was legal to turn away Black people from pubs or clubs’.

The Reno existed within this grim climate. ‘Half-caste was said to us as a slur when we were young,’ Linda told me, her voice sizzling like hot sauce. ‘And then it became the best thing you could be in The Reno.’

One of The Reno’s best-known DJs, Persian, had this to say: ‘[Mixed-race people] were rejected by white clubs and Black clubs and were left in the middle. The Reno became their place where they could forget about their problems and kill the night.’

***

The Reno was underground, its name spread through word-of-mouth. After all, nobody was on the street handing out flyers boasting ‘free shots of Apple Sourz on entry’ – this wasn’t Oceana Watford. No, if you knew, you knew. And those that did know, loved The Reno.

Linda saw it as a style capital. Some came in a uniform comprising a pair of Levi 5Os below a white shirt, others wore purple double-breasted suits, or cowboy boots painted silver.

Before arriving in beautiful clothes, Linda and friends would knock back a bottle of Martini, or as many Special Brews as their hands could carry. Upon arrival, a problem would greet them: the steep mirrored staircase down into The Reno was daunting and dimly lit. Linda remembers women in high heels collapsing and rolling down the wooden steps, while one former club-goer said this of the club’s white-and-yellow-bricked interior: ‘To me the Reno stunk, it was a structural deathtrap. The toilet was like a bathtub full of piss.’

Yet when Linda made her first descent into its belly, hand-in-hand with her best friend Suzie, who was also mixed-race, she made it down safely, and a powerful wave of weed smoke crashed into their nostrils. ‘It just smelled like weed of every variation. It also smelled a bit damp because it’s a cellar. The building felt ancient,’ Linda remembered.

Once inside, best of all were the characters.

Frank was their ‘King’, Linda said, a 6 foot 4 inch man who smuggled weed between Africa and Amsterdam, who ‘outright owned a Rolls Royce [and] was warm and he loved dancing, even though he couldn’t dance,’ she said. ‘For some reason, this huge man thinks he’s a ballerina.’

Linda ‘tells tales of a “super cool” Sikh man who used to play the bongos’, and the club even had its own football team, called Afroville. A photo exists of the squad and, yes, they did all have afros, as well as stylish long-sleeved yellow football shirts.

Meanwhile, Assassin wore ‘women’s white tennis shorts and beads around the neck, and spouted poetry.’ He was ‘completely gay’, Linda added, at a time when that was tough to be in public. ‘He would spout lyrics off the cuff. At the time, his friends would just say “fuck off Assassin”.’ Yet with the gift of hindsight, Linda now realises how amazing he was, how amazing they all were, all those friends she used to have. This was a place where people earned ‘their street PhDs’, and had the best nights out of their lives. These young people should have been photographed and made into clay and put in a museum.

‘The other thing many of us had in common was tragedy,’ Linda said. ‘Many had an alcoholic mum, or there was something wrong in the background.’

***

Before Linda was born, her white, Irish mum was married to a rich man. They had four children together.

Meanwhile, a Black Jamaican man was renting a room from Linda’s grandmother. Linda’s mother soon met him at a pub nearby, called The Bowling Green, when love ripped into their lives. They were falling for one another, but both of them were already in other relationships. A life-altering decision would be made.

Linda’s mother chose to leave her family behind, and her now ex-husband took the children to Limerick, Ireland, to be raised by his sister in a huge home. Linda’s father, who had arrived in England only two years earlier, left his partner to be with Linda’s mother.

In 1959, the couple had Linda, and the family grew up ‘poor, poor, poor’, in Moss Side, Manchester. Life was challenging. As a child, it wasn’t uncommon for Linda to walk past signs on the streets saying, ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs’. For Linda’s Irish mother and her Black father, it was devastating, and her father ‘internalised what they [said] about him.’

In spite of the cruelty outside, Linda wanted to stress one crucial fact about their home lives: how utterly in love her parents were with one another, and continued to be for the rest of their lives.

But the effect of starting a new family still provoked a profound change in Linda’s mother. ‘When Mum left the family behind, her four kids were aged between two and twelve. After leaving, they barely spoke to her. Even today it’s not good if a woman leaves her kids, but can you imagine back then?’ Linda said. ‘So, she had a lot of shame about that. And then she began to drink when I was about eight or nine. She wasn’t well, really, for what happened. And just recently I realised – actually, she left her kids. You can’t really get away with that emotionally. I don’t think any woman could in any era.’

It’s not something Linda’s mum would speak about. ‘She was really secretive and then she’d just shout things when she was drunk, ridiculous things, and come in and smash the house up.’ Linda’s dad was the complete opposite, remaining ‘completely calm all the time.’

‘But having said that, since I was at least about seven or eight, they were absolutely in love,’ living together in a home shared by her mother’s roasts and her father’s yams.

Years later, Angela, the eldest half-sister, came and found Linda’s mother. The families merged, and Angela lived with them for several years. It was a balm for their souls.

***

Over the late-1950s and into the 60s, the Home Office used Britain’s chief constables to investigate immigrant communities across the country. At first they looked at new arrivals’ ‘living conditions, level of crime, illegitimacy rates, and involvement in brothels’, before specifically turning their attention to ‘intermixing, miscegenation and illegitimacy’. The police in Manchester were specifically targeting mixed-race people at the time. The National Archives released documents, passed to me by its staff, noting how The Home Office believed ‘that almost half of the mixed-race families were “illegitimate”.’

As the Reno was famous for its diverse patrons, and was open until daylight hit the pavements, it attracted further police attention. ‘In those days the police were very discriminative and harassed people,’ a BBC report said.

As Moss Side phased into the 80s, relationships between the police and people of colour had deteriorated. Riots broke out in Manchester as The Reno came under pressure from the authorities. It’s worth noting, in one colourful moment, when the Queen’s motorcade rolled through Moss Side for her silver jubilee, and banners saying ‘Fuck the Queen’ were displayed from The Reno.

By 1986, ‘the Manchester City Council declared the building unsafe’ and The Reno shut down, its building demolished in 1987. Phil Magbotiwan’s dream was over and the site where The Reno used to be, where all that life used to occur, became a wasteland. ‘Thirty-one years later, nothing [was] built in its place.’

***

There’s a line in the play Death of a Salesman, where it’s said that, ‘Life is a casting off.’

For years, this applied to Linda’s life and her formative years in The Reno. But then something changed her mind, forcing her to lasso rafts back into her orbit.

The plan? A dig.

In 2017, Linda and her former friends, now in their fifties and sixties, reunited for a nineteen-day archaeological dig in Manchester. ‘Most people are friends to this day,’ she said. ‘When I went to excavate The Reno, I didn’t have to hunt them down. And it’s really mad that the minute that we met we talked as if time had not passed. Friends, proper friends, [for] all time.’

Linda says it ‘resurrected the community [and they] hugged like it was decades and talked like it was yesterday.’ As their spades dug down, they uncovered a series of artefacts – not the kind TV’s Time Team find, sure, but artefacts none the less – and they placed them inside Manchester’s museums. As a reporter from gal-dem wrote:

Among the artefact haul was a bag of red Lebanese hash from the 70s, a pair of green flares, rubber from the momentous turntable, as well as a nostalgic record bag from the Spin Inn, a historic record shop that stood above the club, where the club’s influential DJ Persian used to source all of his American imports [...] that you couldn’t hear anywhere else in the earlier days of the Northern Soul club movement.

Best of all, Linda and her friends uncovered these artefacts while they were stoned.

‘Everyone was smoking weed,’ Lind said. ‘Authorities turned a blind eye to it . . . as long as it was within health and safety. It caused a really fabulous atmosphere. And then they got really friendly with the amateur archaeologists who were all white and middle class. They started sharing food and having a quick sly drink and a laugh. It didn’t feel like fucking work. The sun was shining . . . It was just really cool.’

Later on, Linda and her old friends held a fundraising party, with four former Reno DJs playing as rum punch was guzzled down. The party took place on the dig site of the Reno, now lit up in blues and greens, as old friends soared across the dancefloor together again.