Still Breathing

by Donnelly, Anthony; Donnelly, Christopher; Spence, Simon

  Stuffed Olives was like a preacher’s meeting. It was a very select crowd. Everyone started to ask about it and we had to call it ‘Gaff X’ to put people off the scent. It only held 150 people. It was semi-illegal. Everyone was out of it on E. The rush of proper MDMA powder – when you’d not had anything like that before – was exhilarating. It used to start at the bottom of your legs and go, whoosh, right up – this warm feeling. The next thing you know, you’re thinking on a different plane and you start dancing because of the beat of the music. It made you feel so good. All your problems, whatever shit was going on in your life, just disappeared.

  At The Hacienda there was only a handful of us at the beginning – the Happy Mondays were part of it. The rest of the club would be just shuffling along and our corner would be like a freak show, bouncing and dancing. People were asking, ‘What’s going on here? What are these people doing?’ Slowly more people got enticed into it until it reached a tipping point, and then the whole club was on fire with Ecstasy. But at the start there was probably about twenty or thirty of us in the corner. The scene in those early days was full of duckers and divers, all unemployed working-class scallies. Everyone knew Anthony and Chris as a couple of villains. I mean, if you didn’t know, then obviously you weren’t in the know. Everybody from the street, shall we say, knew what Anthony and Chris Donnelly were about.

  Anthony: After taking Ecstasy, I went back to our pals on the council estate in Wythenshawe and for the whole of the next week I was saying to Chris, and everyone, ‘You’ve got to do it, you’ve got to do it!’ I was absolutely convinced. They formed a queue. But to score E you had to know one or two or three key people – supply was extremely limited. Our friend ordered a load for our own use. It was sent from London because he knew some people in Brixton. They sent it by Red Star [Red Star Parcels, owned and operated by British Rail]. The pills turned up in a video case in bubble wrap and each tablet was individually wrapped. They were called California Sunrise and had originated in the States. We took the tablets and we went to Stuffed Olives.

  From being pot-smoking and drinking scallywags, we were transformed. We didn’t drink beer for twelve or eighteen months, not a drop of alcohol. The pills were given to somebody in a pub in Ancoats called The Angel. They knocked the letters, A, N, G and L, off the pub sign and were calling the pub, ‘The E’. The pills had been distributed from there. So we’re at the boozer the following weekend trying to buy some gear back. It was only a week since that parcel landed but it had all gone.

  Christopher: Stuffed Olives played a massive part in Acid House history in Manchester. Everyone thinks The Hacienda was the club but it was Stuffed Olives first. There were probably a hundred people in the whole of Manchester that were into Acid House and Ecstasy and that’s where it happened – on a Sunday night at Stuffed Olives. It was open from ten o’clock until four a.m. and that was the place. You’d pull up round the corner and there’d be people in the street with their hands in the air because they were already up on E. No music, all outside, all dancing. They gave out little tickets when you walked in – I later pulled the slogan off the ticket for one of our Gio-Goi T-shirts: ‘Ecstasy, once is all you need but it’s seldom enough’. There was no alcohol. Everyone used to hold on to this banister when they first took an E and you had to get them to let go. We used to put poppers in the smoke machine. It was great! They’d play James Brown or The Commodores’ ‘Brick House’ or ‘I Know You Got Soul’ by Bobby Byrd. You could buy half a tablet in Stuffed Olives for £12.50 and the geezer would bite it in half in front of you and put it in your hand. After I’d had the E, I was in town the following week and I walked into a [clothes] shop called Identity [in Afflecks Palace]. They had this music playing – Acid House. I went up to the geezer at the till and asked, ‘Where’ve you got this? Can I buy this?’ He said, ‘No.’ It was just one tape. Our Tracey did us a copy of that tape. Me, Anthony and all our pals all had this one tape. No matter whose car you’d get in, it was just like ‘the tape’.

  Anthony: I heard an amazing Acid House tape at a party at [New Order singer/guitarist] Bernard Sumner’s house. It was the only Acid House tape in the town then. [Actor] Keith Allen was also at the party [Allen was making a TV series in Manchester called Making Out and New Order were doing the music for the show]. About twenty of us went back to the house and Bernard was handling this tape like it was a piece of precious jewellery. It was new and it was like the Holy Grail. I spent the night stoned with Keith Allen and Bernard listening to the tape. So there was now E and Acid House music and we know what it is and where we can get it. We need to build on it. There were ten of our firm on the Acid buzz and it was going off for six months at Stuffed Olives like you can’t believe and it was getting a little bit bigger. The Hacienda was warming up for it and there was a real hard-core building.

  Christopher: Ecstasy made that period what it was, without question. That was what brought the Acid House explosion to Manchester. [Hacienda DJ] Mike Pickering was bringing [Acid House] music back from Chicago, but it was definitely the combination of house music and Ecstasy that made The Hacienda blow up. From our area there were ten of us and it spread: you’d convince someone new, then see them an hour later on the dance floor and there was no words spoken – it was just eye-to-eye. All around Manchester the same thing was happening.

  At The Hacienda in the corner underneath the balcony there’d be a hundred people going off. It would be like a zoo. Eric Barker was on the podium, whistling [with his fingers, leading to the popularisation of whistles on the dance floor]. People would come in just to watch this corner. They would say, ‘Have you seen these fuckers all throwing their arms in the air?’

  I went from wearing a pair of hiking boots, a pair of jeans and a polo shirt – all this heavy stuff – to, the week after, shorts, T-shirt and [Converse] All Stars. I also used to wear quite a lot of paisley shirts and a headband because I grew my hair to my shoulders. I looked like Cochise, the Native American.

  Anthony: The people who I’d grown up with knew me as a thief and a scally and a football hooligan and now thought I’d gone mad. But once they took the tablet, they joined in; they were mad as a box of frogs too. I have a mental image of Chris and me sitting in a car and we had All Stars and smiley face T-shirts on way before all the masses had them. At The Hacienda, by the summer of 1988, Wednesday night’s Hot [started on 13 July 1988, with DJ Jon DaSilva] and Friday night’s Nude [DJs Mike Pickering and Graeme Park] were wild – really unbelievable. We ran The Hacienda for the next two years but you were the elite of the E scene if you had been to Stuffed Olives. We ran The Hacienda from the front door to the emptying of the bars – we’d take the bar to our Acid House parties. Leroy, who ran the bars at The Hacienda, would let us walk out with the stock; they would pass it out to us for our raves. It wasn’t intimidation – although we were notorious as people. There was rarely any trouble – most of the doormen at The Hacienda, they’d be on door and then you’d see them later on the dance floor. The Hacienda had great doormen – Jimmy, Fred, Donald – who really looked after the people and you’d respect them like they’d respect you. There was no gangster vibe in the club at the time – we were as rough as it got. I’d be shouting to the doorman in the queue, ‘Have you got our names on there? Tonight it’s Anthony Donnelly plus twenty.’ It was the most friendly place in the world at that time.

  Christopher: We could do what we wanted in The Hacienda. It was our club. I had my own guest list. People would come up to The Hacienda and say, ‘I’m on Chris Donnelly’s guest list.’ Anthony had his own guest list. That’s not because we were running the door; that’s because we were nice. We were not enforcing any power on anybody. We were there to have a night out. We were part of this whole thing, at the forefront – pioneers of the Acid House period. When Anthony says we own The Hacienda, he makes it sound gangster. It wasn’t like that. We were welcome – we’d go to the front of the queue and get waved in – not because we were being thugs but because w
e were at the forefront of this explosion. Don’t get me wrong, we were still in there with the lads who are from our area and you had other crowds in there, but at that time there wasn’t any trouble between any of the firms.

  At Stuffed Olives there was an eclectic mix of music but at The Hacienda it was pure dance music. Once the dance thing kicked in I was full on into dance music. Only the DJs knew the names of the tracks, though. I was constantly saying to Mike Pickering, ‘Play Swan Lake, play Swan Lake.’ He’d say, ‘I’ve just played it for you.’ I’d be thinking, ‘I’ve not heard it.’ I learned six months later it was ‘Voodoo Ray’ [key Acid House track by Manchester’s A Guy Called Gerald].

  Anthony: I watched my mate, the chef, in the queue at The Hacienda. That amazed me. I watched the queue, before the doors opened, being served. He was going along the queue and shouting, ‘Ecstasy,’ and people were waving £20 notes waiting to be served. There were hundreds of people in the queue. It was amazing. The police wasn’t on it with the tablets at the start.

  Christopher: The first time Anthony and me went to the Kitchen [an infamous Acid House era illegal after club hours meeting place that consisted of a couple of squatted flats in Hulme with a hole crudely knocked through the adjoining wall], Kermit from the Ruthless Rap Assassins and Black Grape was on the decks. We walked straight into the main room and started dancing – Anthony, me and a couple of lads from our estate. All these black geezers burst into the room and were staring: ‘Who are these skinny white kids who’ve just come into our gaff?’ Kermit was playing Public Enemy’s ‘Don’t Believe the Hype’ and we were losing the plot to it – they couldn’t work out what it was. They were freaked out.

  At the time the Kitchen was a shebeen, a smokers’-type place. Within the space of a week, two weeks, it turned into an Acid House thing and the place was bouncing. I came out of The Hacienda one night and saw our cousin. I walked up the road to the Kitchen with him and he was saying, ‘This is just what Manchester needs.’ Our cousin was the last person you’d expect to get into the dance vibe. You’d see him as the person who was always the first one to steam into a fight, now he’s on the dance floor getting down with me. It was a real buzz.

  Anthony: We went to London for the launch of the Happy Mondays’ second album, Bummed, at Spectrum [September 1988, in London, a Monday club night, with DJ Paul Oakenfold, where Acid House began to be popularised in the capital] – just for a night out. I had this Page 3 girl in tow. I love what Noel Gallagher says about Liam when they used to go to the zoo when they were kids and the chimps would go get their kids to come out and look at Liam. It felt like we belonged in a zoo. We went to the club and everyone from London was like. ‘There they are – that’s what we’re hearing about in Manchester.’ The amount of drugs being consumed was unbelievable. The London E scene was much bigger for the raves but nowhere near as out of it as Manchester – it became a religion up here.

  At Spectrum this kid came out of the toilet and flicked water all over me. All he wanted was a hug. Before E I would have kicked off. I didn’t give him a hug but I certainly didn’t attack him.

  In Manchester I’d see all the hard-core football hooligans going to games and there was no violence. There were a lot of people at Old Trafford and Maine Road E’d up. The knives were put down. The football hooligans ended up going to the away games and, instead of fighting, meeting up and going out clubbing. That’s where the link came with all the other towns. The main crews, the kids that were always at the forefront of football and fashion, they was now embracing each other and they were buying Es and getting on the dance floor together. It was a revolution. Mobile phones started kicking in. You could get things and do things. We were communicating with people. The lack of Ecstasy actually brought people together. We were Ecstasy takers and suspected of being Ecstasy suppliers. It truly changed my outlook on the life that I knew. As people, Christopher and I were transformed. We come from such a volatile background and now it was like we were being moulded into something else.

  Christopher: I was going to Liverpool for a night out whereas before the Acid House explosion I would never have gone to Liverpool – not with a Manc accent. Manchester and Liverpool was not cool because of the football, but Acid House broke all those barriers down. Violence became non-existent. The main football heads were on the dance floor and not just hooligans but proper geezers – I called them dancing gangsters. We were partying with all the main heads in Liverpool, we were treated like royalty over there and they were treated the same when they were in Manchester.

  We loved the scene that much we decided to do Manchester’s first illegal ‘warehouse’ party. It was seize the day. The Hacienda closed at 2 a.m. and we wanted to party all night. We called the party ‘Sweat It Out’ and on the flyer we used an image of a lad who used to go to Stuffed Olives – he was a black geezer who wore these big, weird goggles on the dance floor. We were promoting the party for about a month.

  It was advertised as Store Street. We were going to do it there but the warehouse was that bad we couldn’t put it on there – but the flyers had already gone out. So what we did was we sprayed a smiley face and sign at that venue saying, ‘Wait here at 11 p.m.’ Everybody waited, hundreds of smiley faces, and then they were transported to somewhere else – there’d just been a whole load of railway arches done up by the council. We’d built a stage out of scaffolding, used our dad’s wagon to transport it, bolt-cropped the railway arch doors, drove the wagon in and we built it all in there.

  We had Mike Pickering and Jon DaSilva DJing. It really kicked off. We had five or six strobe lights; never stopped once, right though until ten in the morning. It went off with a boom, not a bang. The police turned up in the morning and they didn’t have a clue what was going on. All they could find was water and juice and probably a hundred bottles of Bollinger champagne for the little VIP area we had in there for Tony Wilson and friends. The police couldn’t get their head round putting on a big party and there wasn’t any beer. They were confused. They didn’t know what to do. Bottles of water everywhere. Wilson really liked what we were doing. He was into the punk thing and this scene was the only other thing that moved him. Anything we did, a rave or warehouse party, Tony would be there.

  Anthony: Sweat It Out was 8 October 1988. There were about 1,500 people there. It was a great success. Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton [New Order’s manager, Factory Records’ partner and cofounder of The Hacienda], New Order and Noel Gallagher were all there. At one point my neighbour passed out and looked dead. I spent half an hour worrying about trying to get rid of his body. We carried him out of the building. ‘Don’t let him die in here.’ He soon came round as we carried him to the car. Me, Shaun [Ryder] and Tony Wilson were in a backroom and I pulled out a big twelve-inch blade. Wilson looks up and goes, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Shaun was laughing. Then I pulled out a bag of powder and put the knife in and then Wilson was laughing. I was snorting the powder off the blade. Someone was filming us. We didn’t care nor did we know when to stop.

  Christopher: We ran out of drinks at one point. I had a Fiat Uno and all the drinks were in the back of my car. We lifted up the shutters of the warehouse and it was thick with smoke, there was people dropping with exhaustion because we had the strobe lights on. I put the hazard lights on the Uno on and slowly drove it into the crowd. It was like E.T., everyone was staring at the car, waving their hands in the air. It was definitely about putting the thing on rather than making money – the doormen charged three quid to get in but it was twenty-five quid for a pill off the guys who were serving in there. Ecstasy was getting to be big business for the dealers.

  Tracey: I was put in charge of all the promotions at Factory, so I arranged all the T-shirts, photography and all that. If Anthony and Christopher were doing [bootleg] T-shirts anyway, I’d want them to be involved. It was a way of getting them into it. I think they did an early Hacienda T-shirt. It was Sweat It Out though that changed things.

  I invited Tony Wilson, he
came down and they’d made a little VIP area for him. Don’t forget the last thing he had heard of them two is the big fight on the door at The Hacienda. But he was blown away and he became their biggest fan from that moment – he noted their ambition and talent.

  Mike Pickering: I loved Anthony and Chris. Sweat It Out was brilliant. At another party of theirs the coppers arrived in the morning and me and Chris were sweeping up all these water bottles and Fanta cans. We said, ‘Look, as you can see, it was a really sober event. Tony Wilson from Granada Reports was here.’ There was nothing they could say to that so we managed to get away with it. Brilliant night.

  That was right at the beginning of the revolution. At that time, if you were in that movement, it was like being in a secret society; no one knew about it. The first eighteen months was the whole beauty of it. It was only really when News at Ten and The Sun got hold of it that our cover was blown. We could do anything and go anywhere and the police didn’t have a clue, all they could see was people that used to cause trouble not causing trouble anymore and no one drinking. They didn’t realise that there was Ecstasy or anything like that at the time.

  Anthony and Chris organised another rave in a warehouse just behind the Mancunian Way. To get in you got on this flatbed lift which took you right up into the middle of the rave. When the police came we left the lift at the bottom so they couldn’t get up. They were stood at the bottom, going, ‘Get this lift up!’ We were at the top looking down, going, ‘No sorry, we can’t. It’s broken.’ Anthony laughed at the thought of a dozen policemen negotiating on his terms – we weren’t coming out until we were finished.

  Anthony: As things progressed we got on great with all Tracey’s crowd. When it came to the Acid House era The Hacienda was taken over by the lads. As soon as we decided it was going to be ours it was ours and not hers. As soon as the E pill dropped it was our thing and all her crowd suddenly wanted to come to our parties.