I had an accidental archive in a few of the drawers in the studio. A pile of posters that I’d kept from my earliest days of screen printing in Manchester, bits of original Letraset artwork and a ton of photographs of fly-posting on the streets of the city.
I’d been screen printing record sleeves for Glasgow’s Night School Records run by Michael Kasparis from my favourite record store, Monorail Music . Michael saw some of the poster collection on a visit to my studio and put forward the idea of an exhibition in the Mono cafe bar, attached to the record store.
It took a while to get it all together but after great support and encouragement from Michael, Stephen Pastel and Claire Forsyth of Glasgow Print Studio, the show opened on a lovely summer evening in July 2025.
Here is Monorail Music’s introduction to the show:
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.
Just days after the the Monorail show opened a parcel arrived. A box of Cafe Royal Books with my photographs of flyposting sites on the streets of Manchester. Cafe Royal’s Craig Atkinson had produced these far quicker than I’d expected - perfect timing!
The Glasgow summer faded and the show moved on to London in winter. The new venue was Heavenly Recordings ‘The Social’. A welcoming and stylish cocktail bar in the city centre, minutes from Oxford Circus.
