monorail music present…

We are so excited to host our friend Matthew Rich and his collection of original screen prints from his time as a printer and flyposter in early 80s Manchester. We will be hosting an opening for the exhibition on July 17th, with Dj sets by Monorail’s Stephen Pastel and Michael Kasparis.

Matthew Rich is a screen-printer and artist based in Glasgow. In 2025 he is a facilitator at the heart of the Glasgow art and music scene but in 1982 he was a working screen-printer at the beginning of Factory Records’ dominance of the Manchester club scene. I Am The Fly is an exhibition of original posters from the era, saved from the print run by Rich at the time and stored at his studio in The Glue Factory, Glasgow.

The exhibition will feature large format posters that were intended for public use on the streets of Manchester by artists like The Smiths, The Fall, Prince Far-I, Alan Vega, S.P.K., Blue Orchids, Culture and many more. Included in the exhibition are other posters for artists lost to time, club nights where new genres were being formed in real time and club listing posters from legendary Manchester venues like The Hacienda, The Ritz Ballroom and more. Rounding off the exhibition are documentary photographs taken at the time by Matthew and his colleagues that portray Manchester as it was; an industrial city at the heart of Thatcher’s Britain, a city thriving in the underground thanks to a youth movement that were in the process of being dumped on the dole by the Conservative government.

I Am The Fly is not only a time capsule of time and place but a celebration of the art of documentation. These cheap, quickly-designed and printed artifacts played their part in constructing a visual language that informs our world today.

That Manchester is gone but we have a slice of it here.