Saturday nights at Manhattan’s were part of the musical routine of my teens: Wednesdays were spent at the Pier in Wigan dancing to the Charlatans; Friday nights meant the Tudor House, where the walls were grooved with years of graffiti and the jukebox played the Stone Roses and Nirvana and Hendrix and, for some inexplicable reason, OMD’s Enola Gay.

Then there were the ramshackle gigs in the back rooms of pubs, scout huts and community centres, the afternoons passed riffling through the vinyl at Alan’s Records and Steve’s Store. You carried all these times and places around preciously in your head, like the timetable of the boy you fancied.

There is, I learned recently, a Manhattan’s reunion taking place this Christmas, which will conjure afresh those heady nights when Newcastle Brown Ale was on special before 11pm, the toilets always flooded, and couples sat on the steps to make out. They played the Smiths, Jane’s Addiction, Pixies, the Violent Femmes, and were quite shamelessly disposed to including three Pulp tracks in one set.

Barely a Saturday night passed by without Sultans of Ping FC’s Where’s Me Jumper making a flourishing appearance. It startled me to think that over a decade has passed since we danced there, when the smell of the smoke machine is still so fresh in my mind. Shortly after the Manhattan’s invite, I received a MySpace friend request from a band named Fleck. “We were the inventors of piss-poor indie,” I read on their page.