From Salford’s Shadows To Blackpool’s Grand Stage: The White Hotel Goes Orchestral

After a decade building The White Hotel into a byword for risk, intensity and leftfield cultural energy, its founders are stepping onto a bigger stage. The Black Lights, a new three-day festival in Blackpool, brings that same radical instinct into conversation with orchestral music, civic spectacle and some of the most adventurous artists working in the UK right now.

There are few collectives or venues in the North that have shaped contemporary underground culture quite like The White Hotel. (I'm obviously thinking here about Industrial Coast - on our 'East side'.)

Tucked away in the 'proper' part of Salford, the club and arts space has built its reputation not through polish or prestige, but through risk: risk in programming, in atmosphere, in trusting that audiences will follow artists into darker, odder, more emotionally charged territory. Over the last decade, it has become a lodestar for experimental music in Greater Manchester and beyond - the kind of place where scenes don’t just gather, but mutate. MagNorth was there when Rakhi Singh gave us a haunting Braham's Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77 ahead of a Manchester Collective show. And we've been slack-jawed while the creative genius that is Lonelady took charge of the DJ booth. This space - and the people that gravitate towards it - are special.

Now that restless DIY energy is scaling up.

This June, the same team behind The White Hotel and are bringing The Black Lights, a three-day festival taking over more than 20 venues across Blackpool from 26 to 28 June.

Among the most striking moments in its inaugural programme is an orchestral collaboration with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra at Blackpool Winter Gardens’ Opera House on 28 June, centred on the world premiere of a new BBC commission by Mica Levi. The concert also features Terry Riley’s In C, Oliver Leith’s Pearly, goldy, woody, bloody, or Abundance for orchestra, and John Adams’ Harmonielehre.  

On paper, it sounds like a leap: from one of the UK’s most mythologised independent club spaces to a grand 1930s opera house, with one of the country’s most celebrated orchestras in tow. In practice, it makes perfect sense.

The White Hotel has long thrived by collapsing false boundaries - between club culture and sound art, between noise and beauty, between high seriousness and total abandon. That same instinct runs through this programme. Mica Levi’s work has always occupied a fertile space between the visceral and the uncanny; Oliver Leith writes music full of emotional slippage, where sweetness and disintegration seem to happen at once; Terry Riley and John Adams are both composers who found transcendence by worrying away at repetition until it became something ecstatic, hallucinatory, even unstable. The press release describes the programme as revolving around pleasure, moving “back and forth from bliss to pain” - which is also, in its way, a very White Hotel proposition.

That is really what makes this collaboration feel significant. It is not The White Hotel “going respectable”, nor classical music borrowing underground credibility for the night. It is a meeting point between institutions and independents, between broadcast culture and grassroots culture, between Blackpool’s historic spectacle and Salford’s cultivated weirdness. The BBC Philharmonic has leaned increasingly into adventurous collaborations and new work in recent seasons, including projects at Aviva Studios and premieres by contemporary composers. The White Hotel, meanwhile, has become synonymous with the kind of programming that gives artists room to be difficult, visionary and ahead of the curve.  

And that “ahead of the curve” quality is the key here. The White Hotel is frequently described as being at the cutting edge of Manchester and Salford’s experimental scene, a place whose influence far exceeds its physical footprint. Public coverage has framed it as a former garage turned vital cultural node - a home for boundary-pushing club music, live work and cross-disciplinary experimentation, and a nurturing force behind artists connected to the North’s newer avant-garde. Its own public-facing identity leans into that same dream-logic: part venue, part myth, part visual world-building exercise. Even its Instagram feels less promotion - more curation.

The wider Black Lights bill reinforces that sense of scale and ambition. Alongside the orchestral event, the festival spans live music, DJs, theatre, film and visual art across Blackpool landmarks including the Tower Ballroom, North Pier and Pleasure Beach, with artists such as Blackhaine, Space Afrika, Iceboy Violet, Shell Company, Evian Christ, Afrodeutsche, Moin, Kali Malone and A Guy Called Gerald in the programme.

Official festival material describes it as “the start of a new dream” from the hearts and minds of The White Hotel - and for once that kind of language doesn’t feel overblown. It feels accurate.  

There is also something pointed about this happening in Blackpool. For a venue born out of the industrial fringes of Salford, Blackpool offers a different but related northern backdrop: faded grandeur, theatrical excess, civic memory, glamour held together with grit. The move suits The White Hotel because its best work has always understood that the North’s abandoned, overlooked or outmoded spaces are not cultural dead ends - they are stages waiting to be reactivated. The White Hotel helped prove that in Salford. The Black Lights looks like an exercise to prove it again on a much bigger canvas.

Ten years of building an audience for the strange, the ecstatic and the uncompromising has led here: not away from The White Hotel’s core identity, but outward from it. A club that made its name in darkness is now producing one of the North’s most intriguing new festivals, and doing so with an orchestra, a world premiere by Mica Levi, and the full faded majesty of Blackpool behind it.

Last month a Monet. Mica Levi in June. That's not a departure. It's a coronation.

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Header Image: Prom Pier. Image: Timon Benson