IT was the club that turned Middleton into a dance music Mecca - showcasing legendary DJs like Carl Cox, Grooverider and Laurent Garnier.

It even played host to a little-known Manchester band called Oasis.

The Hippodrome, affectionately known as Hippos, drew ravers from as far afield as France and it still has a loyal following today - old-school clubbers held a reunion night in Manchester before Christmas to commemorate the venue, formerly on Corporation Street.

Promoter Colin Boulter, leafing through a collection of flyers he recently unearthed while cleaning out his house, still speaks of Hippos with a great deal of fondness.

"It was one of the most exciting, special times of my life and I feel proud that I was anything to do with it," he says.

"I’m not from Middleton but the experience meant so much to me that I bought a house in Alkrington and I’ve been here ever since. The people of Middleton have been very good to me."

Colin, originally from Harpurhey, started off in the Manchester club scene working in Venue Sound on Whitworth Street - selling and repairing sound and lighting equipment.

He saw nightclub owners struggle to make the transition from disco to dance music in the early 1990s and decided to set up his own promotions company Clash, along with the Thunderdome’s resident DJ Jay Wearden, from Openshaw.

The pair put on their first night in Manchester at Barclays, off Market Street, early in 1991, with Jay behind the decks along with the DJ Moggy - a precociously talented and ‘cantankerous’ 16-year-old from Harpurhey.

Thanks mainly to a publicity blitz from Colin and Jay, it was a huge success and Clash made a killing. But, unfortunately, the club burned down before the team could put on another night.

Colin, inspired by their initial success, decided to approach Ken Leary, who had shares in the Hippodrome - a nightclub that was once the Empire Cinema.

"Ken was in his 40s or 50s and didn’t really understand new dance music and DJs," Colin says. "He didn't know where to start so he was happy to give us a try. He ended up practically handing the keys to the place over to us."

The first Clash night at Hippos was on Friday 26 April 1991, with Jay and Moggy spinning the tunes. It was a relative success, with about 500 curious ravers turning up.

Within weeks, however, the club was rammed with more than 2,000 people and the queue to get in was winding around the town centre.

"The queues were right down to the subway, about seven people deep as well," says Colin. "There were coach loads of people turning up every week. Middleton didn't know what had hit it."

Anthony and Patrick Ward were the security on the door, and did a ‘brilliant job’, according to Colin. But to stop rejected clubbers from milling around outside the venue, Colin happened on a novel idea.

He arranged for songs from much-lampooned crooners Des O’Connor and Max Bygraves to be pumped out of a sound system to the disappointed ravers, causing them to slope away in to the night.

But inside the club, the quality of the music matched anything on offer elsewhere in the north west. Dance music acts and DJs still hugely revered to this day - such as The Prodigy, The Orb and Ritchie Hawtin - all played at Hippos.

A youthful Oasis also played at the venue’s indie music Thursday night, in April 1992, just as they began their rise to rock ‘n’ roll stars - that night supporting Peter Hook’s band Revenge.

With 5,000 members, the club continued to thrive, leading to Clash’s own dance music show on the now-defunct Sunset Radio, at weekends from 2am to 5am.

But eventually the music had to stop.

Clubland can be a fickle place and as lemonade raves at Bowlers in Trafford became increasingly popular, Hippos saw its numbers dwindle.

Amnesia came in and took over from Colin’s Clash promotions in the mid-1992 and by November Hippos had closed. A year later, two South Yorkshire-based businessmen with big plans bought the club and announced it would re-open the following February after a £250,000 facelift.

That venture also failed and in 1997 Hippos closed for good. It was left to rot for years until the building was finally razed to the ground to make way for the new Middleton Arena. It was the end for one of the town’s cultural icons.

But the memories live on for Colin and a number of fanatical 30-somethings, who have set up a tribute website and organised a reunion rave in Manchester’s Scu Bar with Jay Wearden once more taking to the decks.

"It’s brilliant that all those people have given up their own time to set up the reunion and they invited me down as one of the guests on honour," says Colin, now the owner of Alkrington photography studio in Kirkway precinct.  It's fantastic because doing those nights at Hippos meant the world to me too. It's hard to explain the feeling I got standing at the back of the DJ box watching people having an amazing time - it was contagious and infectious. I was working until 7am in the morning most weekends but it never really felt like work, it felt like the best job in the world."