With their haphazard songs and animal masks, the Rats were a busking phenomenon. After tragedy ended the band, a new documentary immortalises their story
By 2013, Garry Stanley was running out of options. An out-of-work jobbing actor, Stanley was working part-time as a litter-picker and a sign-holder for Pizza Hut in Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens. In search of extra pub money, he had the idea of forming a busking band with a couple of mates. “One of the lads was on benefits,” says Stanley. “He didn’t want to get done.” The solution? They bought large rat face masks from a fancy dress shop. The Piccadilly Rats were born.
Over the next five years, the band would become a fixture of Piccadilly Gardens. They performed their haphazard cover versions of anything from Elvis standards to Rod Stewart hits on the pavement next to a large Wetherspoon’s, and became embraced as a people’s band – beloved by locals and incoming visitors from the nearby station as a welcome shock of anarchy in a commercial city centre. When the flamboyant Ray Boddington joined as the group’s Bez-style dancer, it completed the group’s classic lineup.
