The Walkmen vs Manchester: How Now Wave and a fire-breathing vicar helped New York’s underdogs over the hump
manchestereveningnews.co.ukIn the mid-2000s, on Friday nights in the sweaty basement of Retro Bar, the DJs would play The Walkmen song The Rat. As the music came to a clattering halt, and the dancefloor would attempt to compose itself, instead of picking a new track they’d just play the same one again. “[The song] was such a massive part of us,” says Jon Wickstead, one half of Manchester promoters Now Wave and one part of the duo on the decks those nights in the Sackville Street club. Try MEN Premium for FREE by clicking here for no ads, fun puzzles and brilliant new features “When me and Wes [Jones] met, before we started Now Wave, we were going out in Manchester there was nowhere playing the music we wanted to listen to - like The Strokes and The Walkmen - so we started our own club night.
The Walkmen was a massive part of that night. "It used to always culminate with us playing The Rat at Retro Bar, a really dingy small basement, an amazing crowd every time we did it.
You’d play it and everyone was going crazy.” While it might be reductive to introduce The Walkmen with a reference to easily their biggest hit, the presence of the single at the turn of the century is difficult to ignore.
Amid the early-2000s white-hot invasion of US acts - documented in Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 oral history Meet Me In the Bathroom - the song was a behemoth.
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