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night which spawned club promotion company A Bit Ginger (playing on the hair colour of the duo who started it and on ‘ginger beer’, rhyming slang for queer). They went on to create Flesh, a monthly Hacienda night, which ran from 1991 to 1996 and fused ‘out there’ Madchester with camp flamboyance; ‘Queer as Fuck’ and ‘Practice Makes Pervert’ proclaimed the flyers posted around the city. 94 Inside, wrote one club reviewer, ‘clones in jackboots and spray-on hot pants wiggle moustaches and buns next to trannies with
Madchester may have been born at the Haçienda in the summer of 1988, but the city had been in creative ferment for almost a decade prior to the rise of Acid House. The End-of-the-Century Party is the definitive account of a generational shift in popular music and youth culture, what it meant and what it led to. First published right after the Second Summer of Love, it tells the story of the transition from New Pop to the Political Pop of the mid-1980s and its deviant offspring, Post-Political Pop. Resisting contemporary proclamations about the end of youth culture and the rise of a new, right-leaning conformism, the book draws on interviews with DJs, record company bosses, musicians, producers and fans to outline a clear transition in pop thinking, a move from an obsession with style, packaging and synthetic sounds to content, socially conscious lyrics and a new authenticity.
This edition is framed by a prologue by Tara Brabazon, which asks how we can reclaim the spirit, energy and authenticity of Madchester for a post-youth, post-pop generation. It is illustrated with iconic photographs by Kevin Cummins.
Manchester: Something rich and strange challenges us to see the quintessential post-industrial city in new ways. Bringing together twenty-three diverse writers and a wide range of photographs of Greater Manchester, it argues that how we see the city can have a powerful effect on its future – an urgent question given how quickly the urban core is being transformed. The book uses sixty different words to speak about the diversity of what we think of as Manchester – whether the chimneys of its old mills, the cobbles mostly hidden under the tarmac, the passages between terraces, or the everyday act of washing clothes in a laundrette. Unashamedly down to earth in its focus, this book makes the case for a renewed imaginative relationship that recognises and champions the fact that we’re all active in the making and unmaking of urban spaces.
Brothers to pitch a city-set crime movie to US film studios. The Mad Fuckers failed to excite Hollywood, though it did coin the term ‘Madchester’. A further unlikely boost was provided by the US magazine Newsweek which in July 1990 put ‘Stark Raving Madchester’ on its front cover and explained the new phenomenon for Main Street USA: ‘Punk was menacing; the new music is buoyant, almost goofy. The fashion grafts British football gear onto American hippie glad rags – with a soupcon of the Jetsons’ futurism. The
Manchester had on L.S. Lowry, Jacobson claims that it ‘imbued him with the particular melancholy that seems to blow in off the Pennines’, and ‘locked him in a quarrel with himself that was a spur to art’ ( Jacobson 2007a : 1). As is so often the case when an artist writes about another artist, Jacobson’s portrait of Lowry is clearly also a displaced self-portrait. Likewise with his tribute to Tony Wilson, the journalist, entrepreneur and driving force behind the ‘Madchester’ music scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s, whom he defines as embodying ‘the soul of Manchester
Hitman and Her came to town, in early 1989, what most people think they know about the Haçienda had not happened yet. The club was not yet a global byword for the Madchester youthquake. Financially, it was getting back on an even keel after several years of heavy losses. These were regularly made up from ‘benefit’ gigs by New Order, the band which had become – through gritted teeth – a cash cow for the club and its parent music label Factory Records. From 1989, after the TV show aired what was still an
a sense of excitement may be generated. To repeat, The Smiths’ glorious career is here recalled positively but in no sense fetishised or singled out for special attention. As one report makes clear, they are in this sense just one Mancunian band among many: ‘The Stone Roses, The Twisted Wheel, The Hacienda, Madchester, That Sex Pistols gig, The Smiths. Manchester is never shy of quoting its rich and diverse musical heritage as a reason it stands out from other cities in the country.’37 Another report includes the group as merely one of the stellar names
to the music scene in ‘Madchester’ in the 1980s – and these certainly are high points in Manchester’s history. But this narrative is too easily woven into another story, that of a history of cultural ‘decline’, from a supposed heyday as a great Victorian city to a provincial cultural centre. The writer W.G. Sebald, who taught at Manchester University for two years in the 1960s, participates in this story, in his semi-fictional account of the artist ‘Max Ferber’. Ferber tells the narrator about his arrival in Manchester in 1945, descending on foot after walking
roof level, I could find visual delight in the architecture of the centuries past, seeing the same past sights as the very people who built the nineteenth-century city. As the Madchester T-shirt had it, ‘And On The Sixth Day, God Created Manchester.’ If the city was on its knees by the early 1980s, the new millennium has seen a remarkable revival, with an astonishing jump in Manchester’s success, confidence, investment and importance. Some also see brazen greed, disastrous planning and gross bad taste, and
, they include only minor hometown markers – Noel Gallagher’s tribute to Burnage record shop Sifter’s on Definitely Maybe , and ‘Mersey Paradise’ in the Roses’ chiming-guitar Arcadia; the river associated with Liverpool actually bubbles up in Stockport and snakes its way to the west coast. Barry Adamson’s 1989 Moss Side Story used his inner-city neighbourhood for a film noir soundtrack. Madchester era rapper MC Tunes’ 1990 cover for The North at Its Heights reimagines Piccadilly as a graphic