I went down to the delightful Shoegaze Cafe to talk to some of the staff about the coffee shop that has taken Manchester by surprise… and won’t be here for long.
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00:00It's like once you've missed it, you've missed it and it's fun to be part of.
00:04Hi, I'm Lily Cook and I work at the Shoegaze Cafe.
00:07It's just taken off, like it's, I don't think we expected anything this big to happen because
00:13it was just for us really, like we like coffee, we like music, people come in, people come in,
00:19but then it just popped off on like a reel and it's ever since then it's been boom, boom, boom, yeah.
00:25This is the Shoegaze Cafe, one of Manchester's more surprisingly viral businesses at the minute
00:30that can be found on Tibb Street. Basically it was opened by the landlord as a bit of a
00:33passion project and a go-between until he can find a new tenant for the space.
00:37But the first question we need to ask is what is Shoegaze?
00:41It's just loads of sounds, I don't think you can pin it down to what Shoegaze is because it's
00:46like streams into like Dream Park, like Garage Rock and whatever, so I think it's just a wall
00:52of sound I've heard that's been described. Now while music is the thing that it advertises
00:57itself on, it also does great film nights such as a Jarmusch night this week and a David Lynch
01:01night last week. While those things are great options for creative mancs, the thing that every
01:06ordinary manc needs is a good cup of coffee. £2 filter coffee and like you get what you're
01:11given, you know where you stand with filter coffee and it's free refills, easy, quick,
01:17it's just what you've been looking for. We have cream and everything so it's proper American style.
01:23Now while this is undoubtedly a bit of a passion project for landlord Henry, he's very keen that
01:27all credit go to his staff including Lily who he says have managed to maintain the business and
01:31bring it forward to what it needs to be. So he just loves his Shoegaze and he has loads of records
01:37so he wanted a place where he could sit, drink coffee and play records all the time and he like
01:42completely trusts us so it's like, it's really fun, it's kind of mad that I can just come in and
01:48play a record and like he's all right with that and it's that's my job. And what a job it is. Now it
01:52was a delight to go down to the Shoegaze, I really can't recommend it enough even just to go down for
01:57half hour and have a chat to the brilliant staff.