May 31, 2009
life in a northern town (chapter two excerpt)
sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months
By some accounts, Manchester is the rightful home of rave. So it’s claimed in the 2002 Michael Winterbottom film, 24 Hour Party People, a morbidly antic faux-documentary of Manchester’s musical history that takes its title from a song by native sons Happy Mondays. The story begins, inevitably, with the apostolic moment of the Sex Pistols’ 1976 show at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, and the tiny audience of disciples who hold the seeds of the city’s musical flowering: The Buzzcocks, Joy Division/New Order, Morrissey of the Smiths, Simply Red, the producer Martin Hannett, and Tony Wilson — the lattermost a television host and incipient music mogul whose character, despite his somewhat haphazard mien, serves to give some order to the film’s stumbling narrative.
The real Wilson even had a theory which situated 1989 in an implicitly Oedipal cycle of rebellion and repression.
I was 13 in the school playground when the Beatles happened, I was 18 and went to university when the revolution in drugs happened, and I was 26 and a tv presenter with my own show when punk happened. And then I happened to still be alive when I was 38 when Acid House happened. Because it's a 13 year cycle... 1950 - 1963 - 1976 - 1989... my big ambition is to be around for 2002 when the next thing happens.As an account, it’s more nuanced than the local t-shirts that proclaimed “Woodstock ’69, Manchester ’89” (though, as we’ll see, the invocation of the hippie past was crucial to rave’s vision). Still, Wilson proposed his “13-year cycle” theory in the nineties; there’s little credit in being a prophet of what has already happened. Using a historically richer analytic in 1986, Wilson was a bit more able to see the future.
I saw Malcolm McLaren last week in Los Angeles, and his theory at the moment is that it will never happen again. He's saying that there are now so many avenues open to music that there's just no chance. I said to him, “Just like fucking Lenin, right? There's a continuous dialectic going on until you've had your bit. As soon as you're in charge, that's the end; no more world revolutions.”For all his seriocomic erudition, Wilson was most notable not as a wit but as founder of Factory Records and the Haçienda. The latter was a nightclub named from a passage in the estrangingly poetic utopian text, “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” by Ivan Chtcheglov — a novelty song of a manifesto for the Situationist International. In July 1988, following on the mild success of their Nude parties, Haçienda started a night called Hot, with a swimming pool on the dance floor and sounds imported from the clubs of Ibiza (along with music from locals like Gerald and 808 State).
Such a commingling of utopia and hedonism would pervade the sensibilities of rave culture, along with the effects of Ecstasy and the corresponding need for unregulated spaces where this new world could be invented — an invention that extended beyond club hours. “That whole period just felt so special because no one had a clue what we were doing,” recalled Mike Pickering, one of Hoot’s DJs. “The authorities didn't have a clue. We used to come out of the Haçienda when it finished and go back to the Kitchen in Hulme, which was just two old council flats knocked together.”
In the end, the city’s best-known contribution to rave would be the “baggy” sound developed by the live bands of “Madchester,” named for “loose-fitting clothes, a loose-minded, take-it-as-it-comes optimism, a lose-limbed dance beat descended from James Brown’s “Funky Drummer.” Foremost among these were Happy Mondays and Stone Roses, distinct but for their birthplace. Predating the Second Summer of Love by a handful of years, the Mondays nonetheless found their likeness and logic there. They attempted literally to flesh out rave’s promised pleasures: a sound system both for and of wasted lads, for whom the demented excess of the party was the only tolerable end, and better endless. The Roses might be described as musical history’s attempt to reaffix acid house to the guitar band; while their monumental self-titled 1989 album felt to many like a culmination of rave’s ascent, it appears equally as the wellspring of a later phenomenon, that of Britpop.
Both acts are nonetheless attempts to grasp the moment, and figures through which the subculture tried to do the same. For the Stone Roses it was “the perilously vague creed of “positivity””; Happy Mondays endeavored to embody the shambling hedonism peculiar to the brief age. Both of these are aspects of rave’s set of ideals. Nonetheless it would be a mistake to seek the ideological moment in any given band, any given song, just as it would be a misrecognition to accept any singular origin city as cradle to the rave.
Manchester, once the foremost industrial city in the Western world, stands in complementary relation to London: one a massive, stolid national city representing domestic values; the other a world city, gleaming, vital, but with an international character viewed with suspicion in the provinces. This is caricature, of course, but it gets at the dynamic. London’s cultural crossroads provided the global materials and laboratories to develop acid house as a style, but in 1988, with “rare groove” having its night in the clubs, going raving was one option among many. In Manchester, to invoke Thatcher’s iron phrase, there was no alternative; the city’s post-industrial ennui and cheaper spaces provided the conditions for the rave party to develop as a concrete phenomenon.
As it happened, acid house parties – raves – would realize and then consume themselves in a renegade auto-da-fé that took place in neither city, in no city at all. But that is getting ahead of the story.