Life After Dark

by Dave Haslam

  If the fanzine crowd were sceptical, the majority of Mancunians were oblivious. There was no pent-up demand to go to a cavernous old yacht showroom on a Wednesday night and dance to Hewan Clarke playing amazing records like ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’, as the management found out every Wednesday for months after the club opened. The decor wasn’t what people were used to. The usual discotheque decor, like carpets and potted plastic palm trees, were nowhere to be seen. In imitation of the best New York clubs, DJs stopped talking between records.

  The project and the design were very influenced by clubs New Order had visited in New York, especially Danceteria. The resident DJ there, Mark Kamins, was a big fan of New Order. In 1983 Mark took Larry Levan to see New Order play Paradise Garage. There was a lot of cross-fertilisation between the Factory Records crowd and New York in that period; New Order worked with producer Arthur Baker. Quando Quango worked with Mark Kamins. In December 1982 A Certain Ratio performed at the Danceteria, supported by Madonna. They all made friends with the New York booker and promoter Ruth Polsky.

  The Danceteria was a magnet for interesting young creatives; Keith Haring would hang out there, the Beastie Boys too, before they were the Beastie Boys. Factory wanted some of that atmosphere in their club, for it to be a hangout. Mike Pickering always talks of how Rob Gretton was the prime mover behind the idea of the Haçienda. ‘We just want to have somewhere to go,’ Rob would say. Pickering was a co-founder of Quando Quango, a good friend of Rob’s, and was entrusted with booking all the bands and the DJs when the Haçienda opened.

  The Smiths played the third gig of their career at the Haçienda on 4 February 1983 supporting 52nd Street, a funk band signed to Factory. The first Smiths appearance in London was in March, supporting Sisters of Mercy. In the summer they played headline shows at the Fighting Cocks in Birmingham and the Midnight Express Club in Bournemouth, as well as a nicely organised little foray over the Pennines to play Leeds (Warehouse), and on to Hull and Newcastle. On 16 September 1983 they played at Moles in Bath. A few weeks earlier the Cure had chosen Moles as the venue for a special warm-up show before a trip to New York to play two nights at the Ritz. On New Year’s Eve 1983 it was the turn of the Smiths to play New York, making their American debut at the Danceteria. Morrissey fell off the stage.

  Back at the Haçienda, the failure of the endearing punk enthusiasm to match the grand ambition was beginning to take its toll. Mike Pickering: ‘None of us who started working there had ever worked in a club or a venue before. But it was like one big party. I remember putting on Club Zoo with Teardrop Explodes and there were about a hundred people there and Julian [Cope] and everyone took acid and had this fucking mad party in the middle of it all. It was all very irresponsible.’

  The DJs and the management hadn’t found the music or the method to nurture a regular audience for the disc-only nights. The only one that worked was the Tuesday ‘No Funk’ night with John Tracy. His playlist appealed to the kind of crowd who’d visit the club to see gigs by the likes of the Birthday Party, although he’d throw lots of other things into the mix. John had come to the Haçienda after several successful years DJing in Sheffield. He’d DJ’d at a club called Penny’s (on Arundel Gate, later called Isabella’s) where he would play War’s ‘Galaxy’, Japan, Grace Jones and – going way out on a limb – the likes of Lizzy Mercier Descloux’s ‘Mission Impossible’. In 1981 Paul Morley wrote a feature on ABC based around a visit to one of John’s nights at Penny’s. The playlist was a collection of all the influences ABC were absorbing and Morley enjoyed the evening, although what most impressed him about his night out with ABC at John’s club was ‘the best set of haircuts I’ve ever seen’.

  John Tracy had gone on to pilot the first year of the Leadmill’s Friday ‘Videotech’ night, but then moved all his efforts over to Manchester, and gigs at the Haçienda. The Leadmill remained a popular venue, and continued to go way beyond the provision of live music and DJs. At the beginning of 1985 it was open all day, 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. The venue received subsidies from Sheffield City Council and offered workshops, including some in music, acting, pottery and graphic design. There was a café, a theatre night on a Monday, and Sunday afternoons had become a popular part of the week. This was an era when nothing much happened on Sundays – there was no football, no shops – but alternative music types would gather at the club just to hang out, listen to music and read the papers.

  During the mid-1980s, venues were a valuable means for alternative communities to build. In Birmingham, Mark ‘Mack’ MacDonald started a night called ‘Sensateria’, with cool psychedelic flyers and playlist. In Glasgow in the late 1980s, the ‘Splash One’ nights took place at a crappy disco called Daddy Warbucks. Wire and Sonic Youth played there, as well as bands like the Shop Assistants and the Pastels. They both appeared to be uncommercial, their music choices a little far out, but they thrived; they nurtured pockets of interest away from the mainstream.

  The Leadmill’s varied programming incorporating all kinds of cultural interests was a reflection of the tendency in the mid-1980s to connect interest in music with other art, and the world. Post-punk music fans were often culturally and politically engaged, they shared that interest of Ian Curtis’s of being outside the system somehow, and were interested in alternative culture and ideas. It was an era when NME would run a column called ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Consumer’ where the likes of Tracey Thorn, Morrissey or Pete Wylie would list their favourite books and films (Morrissey’s included The Killing of Sister George) and other favourite things (which is how we learned that Blixa Bargeld from the Birthday Party was a fan of Ulrike Meinhof, and that Lydia Lunch liked The Night Porter and ‘skinny boys with black hair’). In the same era Mark E. Smith worked with dancer Michael Clark.

  There were a number of venues around the country that nurtured this sense of an alternative culture wider than music, including the ‘Zap’ in Brighton, launched by a team that hosted events at various venues including the Brighton Belle on Oriental Place and the upstairs of a pub called the Richmond. From November 1984 the Zap had its own building, two converted seafront arches on King’s Road in Brighton, with a programme including live music, cabaret, comedy and club nights, and a mission statement declaring itself to be a ‘club for artists, run by artists who understand performers and their needs’. Zap club events always had variety, with an avant-garde edge; the likes of the Wild Wigglers dance group, for example, and the appearance of writers such as John Giorno and Kathy Acker. Live performers in the first few years of the Zap included Marc Almond, James, 23 Skidoo, Hank Wangford and Nick Cave.

  The core business of the Leadmill remained its music programme. Not just the bands, but the club night; according to an issue of i-D from the end of 1984, ‘It seems that at some point or other everyone in Sheffield goes to The Leadmill.’ That December, Pulp played there (two years earlier Jarvis Cocker had written and directed a Christmas pantomime at the venue). DJ Jools was particularly popular on Thursday nights playing Screaming Tony Baxter’s ‘Get Up Offa That Thing’, ‘Planet Claire’, ‘Shack Up’, Sheffield acts like the Cabs and Chakk, and 23 Skidoo’s ‘Coup’. Her music policy was more eclectic than you’d get elsewhere in the city but in 1986 even some of the DJs who had always played lots of goth music started throwing Cameo’s ‘Word Up’ into their sets, then the Beastie Boys. As we’ll see in the next chapter, change was just around the corner.

  Elsewhere in Sheffield there was a club called Genevieve’s on Charter Square; it was pretty much a dodgy disco, and makes an appearance as such in Ken Loach’s 1981 film Looks and Smiles. There was a second club hidden away behind Genevieve’s called Mona Lisa’s (later it became Scuba). Richard Barratt (better known as Parrot) had been a fan of John Tracy’s DJing, particularly the way he incorporated alternative stuff with the likes of War and New York electro, but John was no longer DJing in Sheffield. Parrot was a bit bored of the Leadmill and the Limit and, together with some mates, including Matt Swift, went looking for a venue
where they could start their own night, ‘Jive Turkey’. Parrot loved Mona Lisa’s: ‘It was a proper little backdoor club which, at the time, had been unchanged since the 1970s, so it was all flock wallpaper. There were all these fantastic plastic screens up with bare-breasted Afro ladies looking fierce and righteous upon all the walls, with a big flashing star over a round dancefloor. It was as seedy as fuck. Just right.’

  The plan was for Matt and Parrot and the others to take turns DJing but Parrot became the main man on the decks, throwing down all kinds of quality music, from Northern Soul to electro, with bursts of Was (Not Was), New Order and Cabaret Voltaire. Richard H. Kirk was drawn to ‘Jive Turkey’; it was his kind of club. There’s footage of Cabaret Voltaire live at Mona Lisa’s, first broadcast on BBC Two’s Whistle Test on 17 December 1985.

  The crew running Jive Turkey would be central in what was going to happen in Sheffield over the next few years and, of course, the Haçienda would evolve too, as electronic dance music began to dominate dancefloors. Other venues with their roots in the post-punk era – from the Zap in Brighton to the Leadmill in Sheffield – would be invaluable for the next generation of live bands: Pulp, the Stone Roses, Blur. John Keenan’s shows continued, moving on from the Cosmo, and then Brannigans, through the 1980s and beyond to the Duchess of York on Vicar Lane in Leeds city centre. Nirvana played their first gig in Leeds in October 1989 at the Duchess of York and Kurt Cobain slept on a battered old sofa in an upstairs room. The Manic Street Preachers played there on 31 January 1991 (as did, five days later, the Afghan Whigs). Radiohead appeared at the Duchess of York in October 1992, and Oasis in October 1994.

  In a number of towns and cities the post-punk generation had created alternative venues operating as a focus and a catalyst for independent, idiosyncratic action, some with low ceilings, some with dodgy toilets, some in a shady part of town. Derelict workshops, old warehouses and factories had turned into rehearsal rooms, venues and record shops. At a time of post-industrial malaise, dead spaces in towns and cities had been revived by the native creativity of local malcontents, musicians, promoters, fanzine editors, sympathetic venue owners, aspiring writers and actors, fashion and graphic designers, specialist radio shows and small label operators; out of desire or desperation. The point was to make something out of nothing. Customise your clothes, customise your life.

  Venues, labels and an infrastructure of sorts had developed, as had a number of mythologies; the stories we tell ourselves to validate or shape the past and to direct or inspire the future. Punk had announced itself on screen with Bill Grundy with two ‘shit’s, one ‘bastard’, one ‘fucker’, one ‘sod’ and one ‘fucking rotter’. Six or seven years later, in towns and cities throughout Britain, a small group of people had made their own culture, and left a legacy. They’d demonstrated a belief Richard Boon has articulated: ‘Part of my, and that punk, rationale, was [to] make things happen,’ he said. ‘Make the place that you happen to be living in a place that you want to be living in.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Wild Bunch, headless pigeons, a track with no name

  Hyeonje Oh has never heard of Massive Attack and is a bit sceptical about the whole story I’m telling him. He owns the award-winning Surakhan restaurant on Park Row in Bristol, situated between a hairdressing salon called Hobbs and a pub called the White Harte. The Surakhan serves authentic Korean food. Mr Oh wasn’t expecting someone to walk in off the street wanting to look in his basement. He’s very polite and doesn’t throw me out. He offers me a menu. Korean food, he tells me, is spicy – ‘spicy tasty not spicy hot’.

  His restaurant occupies the building that was once home to the Dug Out, a venue with an only occasionally charmed history, but in the early and mid-1980s earned its place as one of the most significant venues in our history, specifically as a result of the integral role it plays in the story of Massive Attack. Massive Attack’s success and the work of other graduates from the Dug Out went on to encourage Bristol acts like Tricky and Portishead and fed into the work of the Mercury Music Prize-winning Roni Size/Reprazent.

  The layout of the Dug Out changed during the 1980s with the addition of a video room, but customers from the late 1970s into the early 1980s recall queuing down a small corridor, and then descending into the basement. There was a back room. The music was mostly bass-heavy reggae, and the crowd a bohemian mixture of black and white, accomplished dancers and feisty girls, expunks and guys skinning up. Some nights would offer discounts to students and nurses. Regulars remember hearing stuff that wasn’t reggae, like ‘Jamaica Funk’ and ‘I Wonder If I Take You Home’. They remember ganja, Red Stripe, Jack Daniel’s and Coke, a Space Invaders machine and murals on the wall courtesy of Delge.

  Delge was Robert Del Naja, a Clash fan, useless at school but enthusiastic about the culture surrounding hip hop, especially graffiti. At times, he was too enthusiastic; after one graffiti spree in August 1984 he was charged with criminal damage. By this time he’d started hanging out at the Dug Out, in particular with a crew of DJs and MCs called Wild Bunch. He became part of the crew, they evolved into Massive Attack, and he was known as ‘3D’.

  The Wild Bunch performed, played and partied at the Dug Out. At the outset, the Wild Bunch included Miles (‘Milo’) Johnson, Nellee Hooper and Grant Marshall (‘Daddy G’), then Claude Williams and 3D, followed by Andrew Vowles (‘Mushroom’). Grant had already started DJing at the Dug Out on Wednesday nights. Miles and Nellee had worked together DJing at parties around the Clifton area of Bristol and pre-Dug Out hangouts like the Prince’s Court, just round the corner off Park Row.

  There was a vibrant post-punk scene in Bristol. The Pop Group, fronted by Mark Stewart, had led the way with an unsettling but stunning mix of noise, dub, jazz, politics and punk. After their demise two former members, Gareth Sager and Bruce Smith, became part of Rip Rig & Panic; Neneh Cherry was the singer. Nellee Hooper played percussion with two local bands, Maximum Joy and Pigbag. As well as post-punk, Milo and Nellee liked Parliament and Lonnie Liston Smith. Milo met Grant Marshall in the Paradise Garage clothes store; Grant was the reggae specialist at a record shop called Revolver. Miles later recalled the first time the Wild Bunch played together was at the Green Rooms at the end of King Street. ‘I didn’t think being a DJ was a career back then, not at all, it was fun, and money was just a bonus not a goal.’

  Delge was a useful addition to the Wild Bunch, not least because he knew how to design cool flyers, a useful asset in the competitive world of sound systems. Among the other sounds in Bristol at the time, and featuring at the annual St Paul’s Carnival, were crews including City Rockers, Enterprise, the FBI Crew and the 3 Stripe Posse. In 1985 and 1986 the Wild Bunch made appearances at the Barnabas Centre and the Redhouse on Portland Square, but the Dug Out was their home. Dug Out regular Karl Harrington remembers how it rocked, but there was as much listening and grooving as outright dancing. ‘There was always a very strong sweet smell of herb – no problem getting some there. You had to smoke herb to let that throbbing fuzzy bass do its thang! People who went to the Dug Out found their own sense of belonging and uniqueness; if it was a tad delusional, so what? There was a strong sense of “something happening” and whether you were a part of it or purely coasting, it left you with something that was original.’

  In this chapter we’ll visit some of the 1980s clubs where the future was formed, the Dug Out among them. Many nightlife histories have understandably concentrated on those 1980s clubs and venues that created the blueprint for the huge explosion of house, techno, ecstasy-driven clubs in the 1990s; the likes of the Haçienda and Shoom, the Clink Street parties, the Blackburn raves, the Trip and ‘Spectrum’. It’s understandable because, as we’ll see, the pioneering acid house clubs had a transformative effect on music and fashion, changed the music industry, and established ecstasy as the drug of the 1990s. It’s an intriguing story of how something that was originally a clear alternative to high street nightlife ended up becoming high street nightlife.r />
  But those pioneering venues with a key role creating and establishing Britain’s acid house scene weren’t the only influential clubs of the 1980s. Through the 1990s and deep into the twenty-first century there have been further adventures in the sonic landscape developed by Massive Attack and their confrères in Bristol and elsewhere, with speaker-shuddering basslines, hip hop and herb-infected dynamics, and slower tempos. The Dug Out and the activities of Soul II Soul are both examples of ecstasy-free innovation in the mid-1980s, laying the ground work for the subsequent evolution of music in Britain: acid jazz, trip hop and chill out, from Mr Scruff to the Streets, through jungle, Wookie and dubstep to Dizzee Rascal, Holy Other and Four Tet.

  Since the era of Duke Vin in the late 1950s we’ve seen how a Jamaican sound system was a primitive but potent way to get a party started. The New York hip hop crews which were established in the 1970s were a remodelled Afro-American version of Jamaican sound systems – with two turntables and a microphone plus breakdancers and graffiti artists – and were as much of a response to the pseudo-glitz of disco as punk.

  Punk had stimulated a DIY sensibility throughout the music industry, inspiring a growth in independent record labels of all kinds. Networks of record distribution via independent retailers like Revolver were being established. Changing technology was making music-recording cheaper and quicker. We were entering an era in which DJs and producers took opportunities to make music quickly and get it distributed, often as white labels or one-offs.

  Rob Smith and Ray Mighty of the 3 Stripe Posse produced two off-kilter down-tempo soulful hip hop cuts, both Burt Bacharach/Hal David covers: ‘Anyone (Who Had A Heart)’ and ‘Walk On By’. Along similar lines, the Wild Bunch released ‘Look of Love’ on Fourth & Broadway with singer Shara Nelson and a raw, semi-industrial hip hop beat. This was 1987. After something of a falling-out, Nellee Hooper began working with Soul II Soul in London, one of the Wild Bunch (DJ Milo) moved to the States and three of the others (Mushroom, 3D and Daddy G) regrouped, took the name Massive Attack and, with production help from Smith and Mighty, cut the first Massive Attack single, ‘Any Love’. Hip hop, reggae, funk, soul; the music they played melted into the music they made.