The Co-op Live catastrophe: how the opening of Manchester’s ‘ultimate arena’ became a joke

The Co-op Live Arena cost £365 million to build – Andy Mallins/Bav Media

“Fuming” was the word most commonly used by Rick Astley fans on Saturday. Just an hour before the doors opened for the inaugural test concert at Manchester’s gleaming new Co-op Live concert arena, thousands of fans received an email telling them that their tickets had been cancelled. The Never Gonna Give You Up singer performed to 3,500 people rather than the planned 9,500, according to someone who was there.

It was an inauspicious start for the biggest indoor music arena in Europe. The £365 million Co-op Live, which sits next to Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium, bills itself as a “game-changer for the UK music scene”. With a capacity of 23,500 people, it dwarves London’s flagship O2 arena. Harry Styles helped design it, while The Killers, Olivia Rodrigo, Take That and The Eagles all play there soon. Teething problems around the Astley gig were perhaps forgivable. It was a test event, after all. But then Monday happened.

Bolton-born comedian Peter Kay was due to perform Co-op Live’s official “grand opening” with a pair of shows on April 23 and 24. The shows would mark what organisers called “a monumental moment in the city’s cultural history”. But on Monday afternoon, Co-op Live postponed the concerts by a week as the venue wasn’t ready.

“Truly gutted,” was how Kay responded, adding – however – that “it’s important that everything is finished and safe” at the arena. His dismay was felt by fans too. One ticketholder I spoke to, who would only identify himself as Duncan, spent £185 on a hotel and train tickets but can’t make the rescheduled show. “Disgusting” was how he summed it up.

But that’s not all. A war of words has broken out between Co-op Live’s boss and the man who represents the UK’s grassroots concert venues over a proposed £1 levy on tickets at mega-concerts. The idea behind the mooted so-called “Taylor Swift tax”, which has received sympathy from the Government, is that a £1 surcharge on tickets for big concerts goes into a pot to help struggling small venues. But Co-op Live’s executive director and general manager Gary Roden told the BBC over the weekend that the levy idea was “too simplistic”. He added that some small venues are poorly run and said the campaign for the £1 surcharge has been “quite aggressive”.

This drew the ire of Mark Davyd, who runs the Music Venue Trust (MVT) and spearheaded the campaign. He accused Roden of “taking b______”, on X. Speaking to the Telegraph, Davyd claims that it was actually Co-op Live’s owner who has been “extraordinarily aggressive” and had refused to meet with MVT (something people close to Co-op Live deny, saying that Roden and Davyd did eventually meet). In a sign of backstage tension in the live music sector, Davyd says he received two phone calls on Monday from music industry colleagues asking him to stop “having a go” at Co-op Live. There appears to be a distinct lack of harmony between the Davids and Goliaths of Britain’s concert venues.

All of which is rather takes the shine off the big opening week. And things don’t get much bigger than this venue. While “Hello Co-op Live!” may not quite have the same ring as “Hello Wembley!” or “Hello Glastonbury!”, the venue’s ambitions are absolutely vast. Co-op Live is positioning itself as “the ultimate arena” (according to its website).

Manchester’s Co-op Live Arena – Getty

It boasts the largest floor-space of any UK venue with a standing capacity of 9,200, and has an “innovative sound bowl design” to give all punters the “best show possible”. There’s a backstage gym for performers, while outside the main arena stands a 22-metre long bar for thirsty music-lovers (£8.95 a pint) and a food market. Styles had a hand in certain design elements, such as having no distracting advertising hoardings in the arena.

And Styles, who also invested money into the venue, is just one of the big names involved. The behemoth is a 50:50 joint venture between US venue operator Oak View Group, co-founded by music mogul and long-time Eagles manager Irving Azoff, and City Football Group, the Manchester City owner controlled by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family and frustrated suitor of Telegraph Media Group. (The Co-op, whose name adorns the venue, is a sponsor.)

Trouble started at around 4.30pm on Saturday when thousands of the VIPs, arena workers, Co-op staff and journalists invited to the Astley event received an email telling them that their tickets had been cancelled so that organisers could “test the spaces effectively”. One 19-year-old attendee, who declined to be named but had a standing ticket on the lower floor, says there were only 3,500 people there when there should have been 9,500 (a Co-op Live spokesman declined to confirm the figures).

The ticketholder says numbers were cut due to an issue with the power supply on the floor above, meaning that one of the entrances was shut. “This meant that it wasn’t safe for just under 10,000 people to [be rerouted] through one entrance,” he says. While the show and the acoustics were “great” – “the bass was amazing, you could feel it vibrate against you” – he adds that parts of the inside, such as restaurants, were “not completely finished”.

When it came to the Kay postponement, Co-op Live yielded a little more information. “It is critical to ensure we have a consistent total power supply to our fully electric sustainable venue, the completion of which is a few days behind,” it said. Refunds were offered to ticketholders (while people affected on Astley’s night were offered tickets to US rockers The Black Keys this Saturday). But “shambles” and “embarrassing” were typical reactions by Kay ticketholders on social media. Punter Duncan says he’ll try to move his hotel booking to another night if he can’t get a refund on it.

More concerning to the wider live music ecosystem, however, is the spat between Co-op Live’s Roden and small venue evangelist Davyd. The latter is particularly riled by Roden’s claim that some small venues are poorly run. “Gary has no experience of running a small venue, has never run one in fact no one at Oak View has ever run one. It [requires] a particular set of skills,” Davyd says.

Co-op Live has said it plans to offer training to people who work in grassroots venues. Davyd dismisses this as patronising. “I’m sorry, grow up. I would never say that Nathan [Clark] at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds, one of the best venues in the world, should offer training to Oak View Group on how to run an arena. They should be a lot more respectful and a bit more professional about it, frankly,” he says.

Harry Styles had a hand in the venue’s design – Kevin Mazur/Getty

Davyd claims that for months from June 2022 MVT tried to meet with Oak View. When no meeting was forthcoming by January 2023, MVT “went public” to say how “ridiculous” it was. This resulted in what he calls an “extremely bitter and angry tirade at us on email” from the operator for going public. Davyd and Roden finally met last December. “I am genuinely sympathetic – I know it sounds mad – to the slightly uncomfortable embarrassing position that Gary now finds himself in,” says Davyd. “He’s a good [big] venue operator, he knows his own market, he knows his own sector. I don’t know why on earth he made those comments about small venues in that article.”

Roden declined to be interviewed (he’s quite busy to be fair) but he has said that Co-op Live is fully “embracing the conversation” about how to help small venues. He just doesn’t believe the £1 Taylor Swift tax is the way to do it. A Co-op Live spokesman says that the “challenges facing the grassroots music sector are complex and the industry and Government need to find solutions that support everyone in the grassroots music sector”.

The spokesman adds that Co-op Live is involved in numerous local initiatives to support grassroots music in Manchester, such as by supporting Mayor Andy Burnham’s Artist of the Month campaign, which will offer local artists the chance to play Co-op Live (a local band played before Astley, in fact). The arena is a founding partner of the local Beyond The Music festival and will give £1m a year to the Co-op Foundation charity, which helps a range of causes.

Addressing the tricky last few days, the spokesman says that the “scale and ambition” of the mega-arena are “enormous”, and that it is continuing to “refine and enhance the fan experience and put the finishing touches to this incredible venue”. A goodwill divi is factored in to Co-op Live – people genuinely want it to succeed (Davyd included, believe it or not). But, boy, have things got off to a discordant start.

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