Band on the Wall, the venue owned and operated by Inner City Music, has been at the very heart of Manchester culture for many years. A showcase venue for some of the best music in the world, we present an internationally-acclaimed programme of live music events, both in-house and externally at venues across the UK.

We emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic with a brand new venue. After six years of fundraising and planning and finally re-building, Band on the Wall has been truly reborn after a £3.5m physical transformation which will truly make it the best showcase music venue of its scale in the UK. Along with the transformation of the building, we have transformed the organisation, refocussing our mission on celebrating the music of all the diverse communities of the UK. Looking beyond our borders we want to be a truly inclusive and international facing music venue, and through that prism we believe we are best placed to celebrate Manchester’s rich heritage by confidently celebrating the whole worlds creative diversity.

As well as promoting great live music and producing national tours with international ‘cultural’ artists, we are committed to providing opportunities for our local communities to get involved in music making and producing accessible digital content to inform and educate people who a keen to engage with us online.

Our unusual name harks back to the building’s days as The George and Dragon pub in the early 20th Century. Regulars would affectionately refer to the ‘Band on the Wall’ as the place where house musicians quite literally played on a stage halfway up the back wall to make room in the busy pub.

While gaining a reputation for bringing the finest jazz, folk, blues and international music to Manchester, Band on the Wall also found itself at the centre of Manchester’s famed post-punk scene in the late 1970s when Buzzcocks, the Fall and Joy Division played some of their earliest gigs at the venue.