EDITOR’S NOTE:
STAT Magazine has upset quite a lot of people in its relatively short history. We have, in various ways, slagged off and annoyed artists, musicians, marketers, right-wingers, establishment politicians, book shop owners, journalists, curators, other magazines, potential dates, potential friends, Peter Hook, full-time Instagram commenters, and no doubt many others.
We have become known for what some will call “contrarianism”. We prefer to call it a stubborn appreciation for honest critique. But after years of tearing things to shreds, we knew it was high time somebody gave us a good hiding. And who better to solicit such an arse-whooping than ourselves? What follows is a negative critique of our event, VERMIN. We thought the gig was pretty good. Our reviewer did not.
Scurry This Way: A Review of VERMIN
STAT + GMTU
The Kings Arms, Salford
22nd May 2026
The rat is not a pleasant animal. It lives in squalor, spreading filth and disease wherever it goes. It breeds across cities until you can’t walk down an alley without seeing one scamper between your feet. It latches onto your pantry, infesting your house with its shit and spawn. It hides in your floorboards and hangs in your curtains and sleeps in your hat. No wonder societies have nearly universally decreed them pests.
At the same time rats have become something of a relatable, even celebratory, icon. For those similarly disparaged, those viewed as social parasites – unwanted filth, vermin – a rat becomes a friend, an identity. Queer subcultures, fringe anarchists, recovering addicts; those who get no love from the world and systems around them are drawn to the rat. Endless posters, badges, stick-n-pokes, and raves bear the name and sigil of the rat as a symbol of defiant pride and self-acceptance. You’re right! We’re rats! We like it! Fuck you!
So too did VERMIN, STAT Magazine’s collaborative event with the Greater Manchester Tenants Union, wear the rat as a badge of honour. On Friday May 22nd, at the Kings Arms in Salford, the organisations came together to celebrate GMTU’s grand return to activity, raise awareness of renters’ rights, and “Keep the City Centre Weird”. And it was kind of shit.
The opening act Renslink was the most interesting. Buoyed by layers of effects and ambience, for ten minutes a man sat on stage and ripped a chord organ apart, using its death rattles as material for his quasi-noise set. Aside from a brief technical error – in his enthusiasm he apparently ripped out a load-bearing cable – it made for a well-executed mood setter. Talking to the artist after his set, he told me that he’d owned and loved the organ for years. It’s been a few days now, and I’m still thinking about that organ.
This mood was not maintained for long. Following a brief poetic analysis of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, complete with a proud affirmation of our collective ratty status, a horn-based duo called Philip’s Rat took the stage and swung the night hard into farce. The bulk of the performance consisted of a trombone, a french horn, and a trumpet blasting random notes across one another, miraculously avoiding making music the entire time. Mouthpieces were removed and discarded. A nearly naked third performer recited passages from Wrongness by Ruth Novaczek and announced the death of Judith Chalmers. The set ended with a vocal cover of Daniel Johnston’s “True Love Will Find You in the End”, reminding me how good outsider art can be.
VERMIN is not the rat’s first excursion to Manchester. RATRACE raves, local DJ legend Rat Heart, busker icons The Piccadilly Rats; Manchester’s less mainstream subcultures, scenes, and lifestyles are well integrated into the rat’s growing anti-hero popularity. Still, rats are only part of Manchester’s breadth of low-fidelity grime. Our most recognisable recent breakout star is the alleged 19-year-old obese alcoholic Mancunian Jim E. Brown, with bangers including “I’m Not Perfect (I am Pure Shit)” and “I am the Fattest Person in the World”. It is a thread tying together great swathes of our art scene is that perpetual self-depreciating pride, an often explicit affirmation that we are what we are, and we’re not something to be fixed.
The rat identity is a comforting one. It promises that you can’t sink any lower, and that where you’ve already sunk to isn’t really that bad anyway. I’m sympathetic to anybody claiming rats as kin, and even have a questionable rat-themed stick-n-poke myself. But comfort can become a crutch, and Manchester’s embrace of the rat accompanies a broader artistic scene that has grown complacent and one-note.
Too much of the art produced in this city carries a semi-ironic, semi-sincere air of realness. Poetry readings navel-gaze about the banalities of a Tesco trip. Photography exhibits brandish out-of-focus rave shots of hairy men in jorts. The abandonment of aesthetic purism, in theory, allows art space to be meaningful and challenging in different, more creative ways. But endless reruns of how mundane and grimy and edgy we are isn’t challenging, or meaningful. It’s stale. Look at us! We’re rats! We like it!
Fuck you!
The third act, Hedgehog, picked up where the second left off. An ensemble that I’ve enjoyed plenty of other occasions, Hedgehog tonight took pride in pretending not to know how to play their instruments. The band veered between lo-fi indie folk-pop, some of which I’ll happily admit was pretty pleasant, and extended bits of pretending to get angry with each other and talking a lot at the same time, which were not. The xylophonist enjoyed an occasional vape on stage. I excused myself during the final song to sit down with a glass of water.
No sooner had my arse graced the cushion than the final act of the night began, and I trudged back into the hall. Rat Hog, an amalgamation of the previous two groups, was the point where I stopped taking notes and started just letting it wash over me. It was the same bloody act again: a bunch of people on stage bashing their instruments together, reading aloud from books, and occasionally stumbling into something that sounded rather good, only to discard it in disgust after two successful seconds. STAT’s own George livened up the party by dressing in a rat costume and throwing himself around the room, clinching the pantomime vibe the event had long suggested. After 20 aimless minutes everyone decided that they’d had enough, and the night came to a rather abrupt end.
Maybe I’m taking it all too seriously. It was a fun night, and everybody seemed to enjoy themselves. I’m not immune to the charms of a slapstick rat, and I chuckled at the clothesless man reading from books. A different review could assess VERMIN as a pleasant, unserious fundraiser for GMTU. Points off for repetitive humour, points on for the bit where the rat hit himself with a table, a good time was had by all.
But I keep thinking about that chord organ. For 10 minutes, a man ripped apart an instrument and made music of its death. It wasn’t funny, or farcical, or rat-themed. I don’t know the history or intentions of the artist; maybe they were taking the piss as much as everyone else. But when the rest of the evening felt like a city-wide inside joke that I wasn’t cool enough to get, those ten minutes were a bastion of what felt like real artistic intent, just as off-beat and amateurish as the rest of the performances but aspiring to something more than the night was capable of providing.
Ultimately, VERMIN’s sin was its monotony. Past the first act, the barrage of bizarre antics lacked any juxtaposition, any contrast to heighten either the night’s weirdness or the art’s beauty. Where this contrast did briefly emerge – the Johnston cover, the glimpses of Hedgehog’s indie chops – VERMIN was at its best. By standing strangeness shoulder-to-shoulder with artistic intent, these moments showed the genuine potential of ‘weird’ art, heightening the impact of both contradictory impulses. But these moments were few and far between, and by the end of the night everything had receded into a pale beige. Rat Hog didn’t even feel that weird.
Sure, VERMIN was tongue-in-cheek, a bit of a laugh. But so is every fucking event I go to in this goddamned city. We seem allergic to sublimation, to subtlety. Our sincerity comes wrapped in self-conscious irony, and rather than using art to explore and connect to our experiences in transformative ways, we drag our art down to the level of our experiences like crabs in a bucket. Why try to make interesting music, when we can just revel in the realness of being crap? Why bother with art at all?
VERMIN was a microcosm of Manchester’s most uninspired impulses. Art shouldn’t have to be traditionally ‘beautiful’, but that ship has long since sailed, and defying long-dead artistic standards alone isn’t exactly a bold statement in 2026. VERMIN, like much of Manchester’s scene, was intent on cramming quirkiness down your throat. The dirty, the amateur, that’s where the art should start, not finish.
As acted out by Manchester, this whole “rat” shit is getting obnoxious. If we want to escape the tired cliches and stereotypes of Northern identity, we need to support art that stands and speaks on its own terms. Swapping out one bland, one-dimensional portrait of Northern culture for another, particularly when both remain shackled to external perception and endless self-depreciation, will not rescue our art scene. Our art suffers if we continue to insist that the dirt under our fingernails is the most compelling thing about us. Alright, we’re vermin. We’re filth. We’re pests. Now say something beautiful about it.
I suppose VERMIN was a success. The night was perfectly in line with the title, and the artistic spirit thus represented. But can we not do better than this, aim higher than this? Is our identity forever going to be a revolving door of incurious redeclarations of our low status? Even if we are just rats, can’t our art be something more? I keep thinking about that chord organ.
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