by Dave Haslam
The Soul II Soul sound system had evolved out of the reggae sound Jah Rico, and was renamed by system operator Jazzie B, who was installing his rigs and hosting parties and events at a number of warehouses and other spaces, including Paddington Dome, under the arches near King’s Cross railway station. He could see the culture of black music in Britain changing. He wanted to go beyond reggae and nurture a soul, funk and hip hop audience.
In 1986 Soul II Soul launched a regular Sunday-night gig at the Africa Centre at 38 King Street, Covent Garden – a building that had opened in 1964 as a meeting place for African and other overseas students. It had always attacted a wider African community too, particularly for its music events. Baaba Maal and Salif Keita both performed there and a long-established club night on Fridays called Limpopo featured Ugandan DJs who sourced and played tracks directly imported from Africa. The Soul II Soul nights also occasionally included live music but could always rely on DJs like Trevor ‘Madhatter’ Nelson, Norman Jay, Judge Jules and C.J. Mackintosh to provide a joyous mixture of party hip hop and classic funk.
In the mid-1980s there were several club nights of note in London, many of them hosted by graduates of Blitz. Among the regular weekly slots were Steve Strange and Rusty Egan’s own nights at the Camden Palace, which rode the mass acceptance of the scene they’d helped to create. Among the one-offs were parties at Mayhem Studios in Battersea hosted by Chris Sullivan. The transgressive impulse stirred by Blitz stayed strong, and some promoters pushed the boundaries further, like David Claridge at the Skin Two fetish-themed nights at Stallions and the polysexual club night ‘Taboo’, launched by Leigh Bowery in January 1985 at Maximus, Leicester Square.
There’s perhaps a degree of performance in the way people conduct themselves on a night out, and Taboo was extreme evidence of this. Customers didn’t just wear mad outfits; they became new people. At Taboo, Leigh Bowery replaced the post-Blitz mainstream version of ‘gender-bending’ with something more hardcore and outsider. One of the ace faces at Taboo – a prominent character among all the other characters – was Bowery’s friend Trojan; they’d met in November 1981 at Heaven. Trojan had extreme style.
Other graduates of Blitz, while eschewing the overtly sexual adventuring and flamboyant sartorial delights of Taboo or Skin Two, created a buzz with their musical offering. At Le Beat Route, DJ Steve Lewis, a former Crackers regular and a fan of Mark Roman, was playing electro funk on New York labels like Sleeping Bag and West End. When Le Beat Route closed some of its crowd moved to the ‘Dirtbox’, hosted by Phil Gray and Rob Milton (both Le Beat Route regulars), and Jay Strongman then became one of the resident DJs. The first Dirtbox event was in an old West Indian club above a chemist on Earls Court Road, and others followed at various found spaces throughout the middle years of the 1980s. Other one-offs in offbeat locations included Circus, promoted by Jeremy Healy and Patrick Lilley. Patrick had immersed himself in London’s clubland since leaving Birmingham in the punk era. Jeremy Healy was known for his work in the band Haysi Fantayzee, but later became a high-profile DJ on the club circuit.
Warehouse all-nighters were also promoted by the fashion emporium Demob and run by Chris Sullivan and Chris Brick. Noel Watson was one of the regular Demob DJs. Noel knew the Bristol crew, including Sean Oliver from Rip Rig & Panic, who would DJ with Noel and his brother Maurice Watson in London. Together, in 1982, they were running an illegal party for 300 people every Saturday in a disused school on Battlebridge Road at the back of King’s Cross. Neneh Cherry and Andrea Oliver would run the bar; Jazzie B and Daddy G both visited. It was mostly hip hop; Maurice was an ace cutter, mixer and scratcher.
Chris Sullivan and Ollie O’Donnell opened the Wag Club in October 1982 in the venue formerly known as the Whiskey-A-Go-Go. They also installed Jay Strongman as resident DJ on Saturdays. Mondays became The Jazz Room with DJ Paul Murphy. A few months after that, flamboyant club operator Philip Sallon asked Jay Strongman to man the decks at ‘The Mud Club’, housed in a venue called Busbys on Charing Cross Road.
Away from the Wag, Gilles Peterson was beginning to make a name for himself playing jazz when he took over at the Electric Ballroom after Paul Murphy left. ‘Family Funktion’ and ‘Shake ’n’ FingerPop’ warehouse parties included DJs Norman Jay, Judge Jules, Paul Anderson and Derek Boland (who was a rapper known as Derek B); they’d be playing rare groove, retro and reisssues, funk and soul to good crowds, and mixed races. The Fridge in Brixton, owned and run by the ex-Roxy promoters Susan Carrington and Andrew Czezowski, was one of the few legitimate clubs that captured the spirit and energy of the funk and soul warehouse parties (Soul II Soul presented some Africa Centre nights there). They’d first opened the Fridge at the small, but established, Brixton club the Ram Jam but eventually made their home at a converted 1913 cinema.
Away from London there was a lively jazz dance scene. Venues like Rock City in Nottingham would host all-dayers featuring DJs including Paul Murphy, Colin Curtis and Gilles Peterson playing very new and upfront jazz funk and Latin, but also retro-jazz. DJ Jonathan Woodliffe had played an active part in creating a scene at Rock City with a strong Friday funk, jazz and soul night, then a Saturday afternoon hip hop session where, among the young breakdancers and hip hop kids, you might have seen Goldie, who occasionally travelled over from Wolverhampton. On the jazz scene there were dance troupes and fusion crews, with moves that were more balletic than those of breakdancers, but sharing links to older jazz dance forms like lindy hop. Perhaps, too, it would even be possible to trace their moves back to ‘breakdown dancing’ in the nineteenth century, the style popularised by Dan Leno.
In Manchester there was a devoted jazz crowd at Colin Curtis’s Tuesdays at Berlin at the bottom of King Street, including a dance troupe called the Jazz Defektors, who began making music and were signed to Factory Records. Factory had already signed Kalima, a jazz act that had evolved out of the Swamp Children; they played a gig at the Tropicana in Manchester in August 1984 alongside DJ Paul Murphy. An audience of boys in zoot suits and girls in pencil skirts would come out of the woodwork for nights like that – ‘Jazz, Be-Bop & That Latin Beat’ it was billed as – and to see acts like Sade and Blue Rondo à la Turk (a band founded by club impresario Chris Sullivan). One of the young promoters in Manchester at the time was John Kennedy. He booked Blue Rondo à la Turk to play a big show at the Ritz in October 1982 and offered the support slot to friends of his, the Smiths – their first-ever live appearance.
Although the Haçienda would go on to dominate the story of Manchester clubs it was primarily a live venue in its first four years. It drew a regular crowd of sorts for the gigs and the i-D-sponsored parties, but in many ways the smaller clubs were more fun as long as you knew which venues to pick on which nights. In addition to the jazz nights at Berlin and Cloud Nine, the goths at Devilles had a good thing going, the psychedelic Tuesdays at the Playpen with DJ Dave Booth were full, as were Greg Wilson’s nights at Legend, where he was pushing the sound of New York electro. And further out of the city centre, two miles south in Moss Side, the Reno was still operating in tandem with the Nile, and stayed open for hours after the clubs in town shut. Like the Dug Out, it was a place to score weed; you could buy enough for two spliffs for a pound.
By the mid-1980s one of the best-loved Reno DJs, Persian, had left the club, but the quality of the sounds were maintained by others including Hewan Clarke and Tomlin. In 1986 the Nile and the Reno were demolished by the council, leaving no trace of either (the site, on the corner of Princess Road and Moss Lane East, has never been redeveloped). Hewan had been an original Haçienda resident and was still very active, particularly in Moss Side. There’s film of one dance he played at, at the Moss Side Community Centre in September 1986. The footage features a dance troupe called Foot Patrol, who’d established themselves on the jazz-fusion scene but developed moves specifically for early Chicago house.
The Foot Patrol footage is intriguing because received opinion has it that there was resistance to hou
se from those who considered themselves soul and jazz fans. This was indeed usually the case, especially in London, but the resistance clearly wasn’t universal. Jive Turkey in Sheffield also attracted jazz-fusion dancers who didn’t leave the dancefloor when the DJs played early house. In 1986 and ’87 Foot Patrol would visit the Haçienda, the floor clearing to make space for them when they went into their soft-shoe shuffles and lindy hops. One of their number, Samson, was a flamboyant dresser, a great athlete and a massive enthusiast for music.
Foot Patrol were most often found at the Haçienda on Mike Pickering’s ‘Nude’ night on Fridays. Pickering was still booking the bands, although Quando Quango had come to an end. In September 1985 a Nude night featured Mike DJing with Andrew Berry and a Latin break courtesy of Simon Topping, a former member of A Certain Ratio. By mid-1986 Martin Prendergast had joined Pickering on the decks; both of them enjoyed the likes of Farley Jackmaster Funk’s ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’ and Adonis’ ‘No Way Back’.
When ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’ was released in August 1986, in some quarters of London resistance was total. Although it got plenty of play in gay clubs, according to Mud Club DJ Mark Moore the trendy straight clubs in London were less enthusiastic, even hostile (he says the hip hop crowd thought the music was ‘faggy’). Kiss FM DJ Steve Jackson told the TV documentary Pump Up the Volume, ‘Most of the clubbers were into rare groove and hip hop. No one was used to that tempo and energy. It took a while, but up North everyone was into it, long before us.’
Manchester’s embrace of electronic dance music strengthened. In some ways it was an easier transition. London had busy, established retro and rare groove clubs, strong fashions associated with the clubs, and press coverage – so why evolve? High-tempo dance music, though, had been a feature of Northern Soul and, the likes of Kalima notwithstanding, the Factory roster was full of bands who embraced drum machines and synthesisers, most notably New Order, who’d recorded the electronic dance classic ‘Blue Monday’ back in 1982 (described in a BBC Radio 2 documentary in 2005 as ‘a crucial link between 70s disco and the dance/house boom that took off at the end of the 80s’).
In its early years, the Haçienda hadn’t much success in establishing DJ-only nights, with the exception of John Tracy’s alternative nights, which drew three or four hundred most Tuesdays. The efforts of DJs including Hewan Clarke, Greg Wilson and Chad Jackson weren’t rewarded with much of a regular crowd. One Saturday night I was looking after Sonic Youth on one of the first occasions they were in Manchester and they were aware of Factory, and Factory’s New York connections (and vice versa), so we went into the Haçienda. There can’t have been more than seventy-five people in there, and I remember the DJ played ‘Ring My Bell’ and we beat a hasty retreat.
Paul Mason arrived in January 1986 from Rock City in Nottingham and, with Paul Cons, instituted a new regime; they were responsible for the day-to-day running of the club and the promotion and marketing. Live music was clearly not making the Haçienda any money. Mason had employed DJs like Jonathan Woodliffe at Rock City, knew the potential of strong DJ nights to bring regular weekly cash into the club, and accelerated a switch into club nights. It turned out to be the right decision at the right time but it was made less for cultural than financial reasons. At that time having DJs playing was so much cheaper than booking bands; if Paul Mason and Paul Cons hadn’t found a winning formula in 1986, Tony Wilson would have closed the club.
Then Mason and Cons came to hear me DJing a hundred yards down the road at Venue. Mason had some reservations about what I was playing, which was ‘too art school’ he said, but that was something I could live with. I loved Factory’s ethos, and that their vision always seemed to involve a search for an alternative. I was invited to launch a Thursday ‘Temperance Club’ in May 1986. I started off playing New Order, hip hop, the Smiths and the Stooges. I’d dare myself to play tracks beyond the obvious, new releases from labels like On-U Sound, stuff that needed airing like Colourbox’s ‘The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme’. DJ Justin Robertson later talked about the lure and allure of the Haçienda even before the ‘Madchester’ moment went overground. ‘I remember walking into this stark, industrial space. Dave Haslam was playing Shinehead, “Who the Cap Fit”, which has this electronic backbeat that sounded incredible in there. I fell in love with the place. I started basing my entire life around going there. It was very stark but massively cool.’
Saturdays were more funky, and drew a slightly older crowd, including more i-D readers. I was partnered by Dean Johnson. Dean played specialist modern soul, jazz and reggae. One or either of us would play New York electro funk like D-Train’s ‘You’re the One for Me’. I played hip hop and then hip-house. We were lucky in that we had an audience who understood and wanted music that wasn’t just what they already knew. In the summer of 1987 ‘Pump up the Volume’ by MARRS was released, a sample-heavy slice of electro, musically a bridge between hip hop and house, which filled our dancefloor and broke into the charts. But those records made even more sense on Nude night. Mike Pickering cleared the decks, literally, to fill his playlist with house. He also formed T-Coy with Simon Topping and keyboard player Richie Close, and released the ground-breaking electro/Latin/house single ‘Carino’.
By the end of summer 1987 Jive Turkey in Sheffield had moved up several levels since their early weeks barely scraping enough money together to make their payments to Max Omare. Parrot’s audience had no resistance to early house. In the first months Parrot played Northern Soul, early hip hop, electro pop and Cabaret Voltaire, but he grew into the resident DJ role and continued chasing down music to play. ‘The first house records had started to come out around that time so you’d be buying Chip E records thinking “What the fuck is this?” but it seemed to fit perfectly with the vibe of the Cabs records. Then we started getting black kids coming down.’
One of the reasons Jive Turkey had progressed well was that the team had been strengthened. A group of young black dancers – the Footworkers – were really into the sounds Parrot was playing. They’d take to the floor dancing to Latin or minimal electronic sounds and one of them, Winston Hazel, became a regular at Jive Turkey and started DJing there. ‘He always wanted to be a DJ,’ says Parrot. ‘And in terms of his attitude he was miles in front of me. And we carried on from there.’
Jive Turkey, in various locations and associated events under the banner ‘Club Superman’, continued to develop house music in Sheffield. Journalist Jon Savage visited one Friday in the autumn of 1988 when the club night was holding monthly events at the City Hall ballroom. Winston and Parrot were playing tracks like ‘Hip Hop Salsa’ by Bad Boy Orchestra. In his report in the Observer, Savage quoted Deno Thompson, a regular: ‘The nice thing about coming here is that you get no hassle; the mix of types creates a more relaxed atmosphere.’
No doubt those of us in love with or involved with clubs and venues are right to focus on the power of music and to celebrate pioneering music promoters, venues, DJs and nightclub operators energising communities and refreshing or even revolutionising music, but there are often more prosaic reasons why certain clubs mark their difference from the competition and attract good audiences. In every era, for example, women are on the lookout for a hassle-free environment safe from predatory men. Some people are turned on by clubs with VIP rooms where footballers might gather, others go where the drinks are cheapest. Most people like a safe environment; such a thing was surprisingly hard to find in many cities in the mid-1980s and perhaps remains so. In his report Jon Savage heralds Jive Turkey’s survival in the face of what he calls Sheffield’s ‘randomly violent club life’. In the mid-1980s if you found a discotheque where you knew there wouldn’t be a fight, you’d definitely go back.
Stringent dress codes were no guarantee of a trouble-free night. Rotters, on Oxford Street in Manchester (on the site of what is now a multistorey NCP car park), requested all male patrons should wear a shirt, tie, dark trousers and shiny shoes. They were, it seems, under the
misapprehension that a psycho becomes a pacifist by putting on a tie and shiny shoes. There was a chip shop up the road just before you got to the Odeon (now demolished). If the crowd from Rotters weren’t fighting each other inside the club, or fighting the doormen outside the club, they’d find a reason to start fighting after 2 a.m. in the queue for chips.
Ironically, considering what was to happen in the club, the Haçienda in the mid-1980s was the safest club in Manchester city centre – and it had no dress code. It policed itself in that people who liked to battle it out at closing time were generally not likely to enjoy ‘Let the Music Play’, ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ or ‘Drop the Bomb’. But then when Nude night started at the Haçienda, the club decided to underline its position. ‘I consciously reversed the dress code all the other clubs had,’ says Mike Pickering, ‘Anyone who wore a shirt and tie, we wouldn’t let in.’
Like other cities, Liverpool had its share of unsafe venues. In the mid-1980s, James Barton was stuck for places to go. Most of his mates were going to mainstream Top Forty clubs in town, including the upper floor of the building where Eric’s had been. ‘Gatsby’s was one of those places . . . it always kicked off in there, someone glassed in the face with a pint pot or something, and that was just not my bag at all.’
James and I met to talk about his life up to and through the days when he was running Cream in Liverpool. He has always been into his music – in his teens he was blagging his way into the Royal Court to see the Jam. Then at some point, either outside the Royal Court or outside the Empire, he came across ticket touts and decided it was the perfect job. Even before he was eighteen he was working for one of Liverpool’s most famous ticket touts and travelling across Europe following the likes of Prince and U2. On the ‘in’ he’d be selling tickets and on the ‘out’ he’d sell merchandise.
