Still Breathing

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

  The next warehouse party we did was ‘Sweat It Out 2’ on New Year’s Day 1989. We did it in a bed factory in Ardwick, on the fourth floor. The police turned up, but the only way up to the warehouse was by the lift and we locked them out by pushing the lift up a floor. They were arguing with us all night through the lift shaft. The police turned up at all of our events but whether they got in, that’s a different story. With Sweat It Out 2 we picked the worst night possible; we must have been mad. We’d been out all night at The Hacienda on New Year’s Eve and then decided to do a party the night after – we thought everyone would want to continue the party. The hard-core was there but it didn’t achieve what we set out to do. It turned out to be more of family party … the immediate 200 or 300 E-heads who always turned up.

  The next morning the police were happy to let people go home but they wanted to come in and see who was left. They found me running about with Mike Pickering – as always the last to leave.

  Our relationship with Factory had really started to strengthen. One night I was summoned to the roof of The Hacienda to meet Rob [Gretton] and Tony [Wilson]. I was on the dance floor and someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘They want you upstairs.’ I’d never been on The Hacienda roof before. I got up there and we were smoking weed and discussing what can be done with the club. It was beautiful. I was young and it’s a very attractive, shiny business, the music business, or that’s how it appears on the surface. We were being sucked into all this. We’re starting to build all these connections and the main men wanted to talk to me. I felt like I was in charge.

  We were invited to go to Box studios in Bath where New Order were recording the album Technique for an Acid party. Box was part of Peter Gabriel’s recording studio, Real World Studios. It was all filmed. Tony [Wilson] filmed it. No one’s ever found the footage. We got the coach down and I was sitting with Pickering. I put a little parcel of E in Rizla papers, everyone was eating them; we were calling them ‘E bombs’. I was off my barnet dancing with Tracey. Stephen and Gillian [Morris and Gilbert, of New Order] were saying to Tracey, ‘Who is he? Is he mithering you?’ Bernard [Sumner] knew me already.

  It was around the time of the big importations coming into the North-West, so there was good charlie starting to creep into the scene as well. We were up all night and Peter Gabriel was coming back, so they had to try and get us all off the land – fifty-two Ecstasy-crazed Mancs with eyes like fifty pence pieces, no one knows what day it is. This was the A-Team of the E heads from The Hacienda, hand chosen. It was a New Order party for the crème of the crop. When we were leaving the coach got stuck and there were six or seven of us thinking we had the strength to push it out of the mud.

  Christopher: They might have been there recording six weeks and they were missing the Acid House vibe so they booked a coach that left from The Hacienda. We all drove up, had a full-on night, and then got on the coach in the morning to come back. On numerous occasions I recall being on the dance floor with Bernard and his missus, Sarah. When New Order released Technique [January 1989] they asked us to organise a rave in The Hacienda basement. It was strange the way they did it – like a VIP party that went on all night. By now the scene was getting recognition in the mainstream.

  I came back from Ibiza and I put Top of the Pops on and ‘Big Fun’ [by Inner City, released late 1988] was on. It was a great tune but in the video they all had smiley face T-shirts on and everyone was dancing in this uniform way. It had gone to the masses. It was our thing and all of a sudden the vibe changed. We still loved it. We still believed in it. But it wasn’t as pure. It was our beautiful thing and then everybody woke up. It was getting bigger and I wanted to keep it for us, just the original Acid House corner. Like anything cool it becomes a trend. We were already starting to look for other things to do.

  Anthony: Rob [Gretton] loved how we operated. We were asked to organise the rave for New Order in the basement of The Hacienda but we had our own plans by now. We couldn’t vouch for anything that went on inside. We didn’t want any responsibility. And these people were now our mentors. All we did for that party was provided a service – we supplied the doormen and we didn’t take wages. I couldn’t work out why they had a buffet? Why they wanted food in a rave? Anyway, they were very appreciative and the doormen we supplied were really grateful because they got paid well.

  The Hacienda then did a joint party with The Roxy club in Amsterdam [May 1989, The Hacienda’s seventh birthday party]. The Mondays went over on a coach and I flew there. [New Order bassist] Peter Hook didn’t go, so I stayed in his room. I was with Bez. We saw a bird onstage – a transvestite – with a hat on, naked, ramming a chocolate cake up her fanny. We left the club and there was this other girl we’d been with and she started talking like the devil on the pavement. That freaked me out. Six in the morning, dusk meeting dawn, that nice happy, medium light, and she’s rolling about speaking like Lucifer. We were all on acid. But Amsterdam wasn’t ready for us – they were so far behind. They had some beautiful drugs but the scene was really raw. Once again, the circus had been and gone and left its mark.

  Christopher: The party that goes down in folklore – anyone who was there will tell you – was my twenty-first birthday [May 1989]. It was held at my mum and dad’s farm in Stockport. Graeme Park, Mike Pickering and Jon DaSilva were DJing. I whitewashed the whole barn. Every warehouse party we did, we painted the warehouse first, whitewashed it, because we wanted it to be clean. Then I sprayed all weird symbols and pictures on the wall of the barn.

  The Roses were there, the Mondays, New Order were supposed to be bringing Quincy Jones – why I don’t know. Anybody who was anybody, my grandma, my mother-in-law, some of my aunties, thousands of my pals from all over the country. It went on all day and night and into the next day. I’ve got all the footage. It was complete cross-section of people. It felt like we were all in the mix together – the wrong ’uns from Wythenshawe were together with pop stars. The police said we’d thrown this party under the guise of being a twenty-first but really it was a rave. In the end they said if we filtered everyone out slowly they wouldn’t make any arrests.

  Mike Pickering: I used to play everything for them. I was like their family DJ. Chris’s twenty-first birthday party was amazing. I’d been asked to DJ later because they’d got a kid in to do the early slot; he was used to family weddings, etc. I remember there being all kinds of goings on outside. The police had walked up and down the road, smashing a load of windscreens – it was the obvious standoff. It got to about eleven and this DJ went, ‘Right, I’m off.’ Anthony asked him, very politely, to stay on for a bit but he wasn’t having any of it. He picked up his records and went to walk out. Next thing, I heard June say, ‘Oh, Anthony,’ and he had the lad by his neck and lifted him back across the dance floor. I said to the DJ, ‘I think you should stay, mate.’ It was a mad party. I recall stumbling into a barn full of telephone boxes that Arthur had picked up from somewhere at one point.

  Anthony: We were now going to Ibiza and [the club] Amnesia, when it had no roof, with DJ Alfredo – the legendary DJ. We were having it with people like him, we were putting our own nights on, we were still doing the tickets [touting] and basically it was really taking off. We are now known as key players on the Acid House scene and people are saying, ‘They’re going to smash it, those two brothers!’ And now the thing we detest most, the farm, because it’s so far from the estate, has become a valuable asset because everyone wants a venue to put an illegal rave on. At some point we thought someone should put E in the reservoirs to get the message across to the people of this country about how great Ecstasy was, that’s how insane we had become.

  Christopher: The farm became somewhere we could use. We’d have bonfire nights and barbeques there … there were a hundred of us and it was proper military. Now we were a ‘team’. That was it, full on. We’d be at the farm clay pigeon shooting and that was how we rolled – the farm became a retreat for us. Our old firm still look after each other and it
still exists to a certain extent today, but obviously a lot of them are dead. I mean a hell of a lot of them. If we could we’d go to every party in the country.

  There was a firm from Blackpool used come to Manchester every week. They became friends of ours. We went up there for a period of time to a club called Oz on the pier run by Magoo – nothing like The Hacienda; it was an old-fashioned club. After the club had finished, you’d get to a service station and all the boots would be open on the cars. People would be dancing at the side of the cars with the tunes going. All that was going on. That’s not a myth – all that used to happen. We wouldn’t be involved in that shit, but some pals of ours were charging people to go on the service station and these fuckers were happy paying to get on.

  The first year of Acid House passed largely under the radar of the authorities and the mainstream media. Then, in July 1989, sixteenyear-old Claire Leighton died after taking a £15 E at The Hacienda. A moral panic ensued as Acid House was explicitly linked to this relatively unknown new drug. The Sun ran an infamous ‘Evil of Ecstasy’ front cover. In 1988, the Greater Manchester Police had not arrested one person for the supply of Ecstasy. Now they were beginning to take a real interest. James Anderton, head of Greater Manchester Police, was particularly eager to crack down on warehouse parties in the city. As a consequence, the nearby Lancashire town of Blackburn would become a focus for an explosion of warehouse parties in the summer of 1989. There was talk of the Blackburn firm ram-raiding a shop window to acquire a generator and police patrol cars set alight outside their parties that attracted up to 10,000 people.

  The Government also began to act. Home Secretary Douglas Hurd ordered an enquiry into unlicensed parties. The BBC banned Jolly Roger’s ‘Acid Man’ track. One thousand police, with dogs and tactical aid, busted an Energy party. The Pay Party Unit was formed with 200 intelligence officers to police raves. They began monitoring names, vehicles and telephone calls. In this climate, The Donnelly Brothers were planning their most audacious rave yet: Joy in August 1989.

  Anthony: Now we were going for the monster raves with our cousin Tony. A friend chose to do it at Stand Lees Farm, Ashworth Valley in Rochdale. The farm owner was related in some way to a member of the Donnelly family. I hated the land because it was on a slope. Between Sweat It Out 2 and Joy there were no raves – we just went very intense, setting up a big operation. This is when we were forging links with people in Essex and London, people in Leeds, Liverpool, the main firm from Blackburn. We were working with someone from London on Joy – we were affiliated with someone, one way or another. Joy was a north/ south coming together, the only one done illegally.

  If we were doing a party the last thing we would want would be a load of other people doing parties on the same night. So we went to Liverpool, to the Underground, where James Barton [now the celebrated owner of Cream] was putting a night on. James was like us in a lot of ways, he used to sell tickets like us. We’d say, ‘Listen, we’re putting a party on we don’t want you to have your night, so we can get all your crowd to our party.’ We’d go and speak to all these people in different towns to ask them not to put on their event on the same night. It was all friendly, and maybe they would end up doing the tickets in Liverpool or Blackburn or wherever. Together [rave organisers] Genesis, Sunrise and Energy had done events down south that attracted up to 20,000 people. It’s not about warehouses any more; it’s about these massive events with lasers, fairground rides, and huge sound systems. That’s what we were aiming at.

  Christopher: A warehouse was already built. You broke in or rented it, put in a smoke machine and strobes. Joy was a major challenge. We had to build a humongous stage, hire fairgrounds, generators, lighting rigs – we were putting on an outdoor event. The police were flying around in helicopters looking for marquees going up. They were actively out trying to stop these events. The police have got light aircraft on the look out.

  Anthony: Inspector X was in charge of licensing. He was the Acid House squad, and he would try and follow us. If you were into raves, you were into pills – that was his logic. But putting raves on doesn’t mean you were a drug dealer. These things cost a considerable amount of money to put on and the finger of suspicion was always on us: that we were involved in the illegal supply of Ecstasy to fund the event. I categorically deny that. Our backers raised the money through sponsorship with drinks companies. Rumour has it that certain celebrities also financed it. But, also, you can’t go and put something substantial on in a town that’s twinned with Chicago without being affiliated in some way, it just doesn’t happen unless you’re connected.

  For two weeks we had scaffolders on site, the production, the marquees and the fun fair – these things can’t be dropped on site on the day. That’s why they, the police, were in the air looking for things like this being built. It was a really expensive production –£5,000 on fireworks, etc. Grooverider, Sasha, Paul Oakenfold, Mike Pickering, Laurent Garnier, Graeme Park and Frankie Knuckles were all booked to DJ.

  Cyril Smith was the MP for the area where the farm was in Rochdale. He started to put a case together to oppose the party – this was played out in the Manchester Evening News. Then some bright spark told Cyril to get on a plane to the Houses of Parliament so he could drum up some support to get an injunction signed. They had to hire three seats for the fat bastard on the plane. In Parliament, he called us, Christopher and me, ‘menaces to society’ and ‘the main organisers behind this revolution they call Acid House’. The injunction was passed – it was actually hand-written because they didn’t have time to type it before he got back on the plane. The next morning on the front page of the Manchester Evening News, the headline was, ‘It’s Off’.

  Christopher: The police were on the top of the hill filming us setting this big rave up: two carloads with suits and binoculars. It was like Life on Mars, they’re up there and they’ve got the broad ties on and silly blazers and we’ve got the All Stars on, tie-dyed T-shirts. They couldn’t stop it. The feedback that came to us was: are they going to have 10,000 kids on drugs all whizzing round these mountains looking for this party and the police telling them to go home, or is it easier to just let them go into this field and fill their boots? Contain it all and then fuck everyone off home when they’ve had enough.

  Anthony: They served Mike Pickering with the injunction. They couldn’t find anyone to serve it on except for Pickering. He was named on the flyer. Pickering had to evidence the fact that he wasn’t in the area at the time of the rave. [Tony] Wilson videoed Pickering holding up the front page of the paper, stood under a clock … on the front page of the paper it said, ‘Party Goes Ahead’.

  Mike Pickering: I couldn’t play Joy. I had a flat above the Arndale at the time; on the Friday morning the police kicked my door in, dragged me out of bed and said I had to be in court by 10 a.m. the same day. They were saying there was an injunction being placed on me by Rochdale council because I was planning to DJ an illegal rave. I rang Tony Wilson and Anthony and they were all sat in the public gallery. I managed to get a lawyer at the last minute. They put an order out saying I couldn’t go within a fifteen-mile radius of Rochdale for the whole weekend. It was unheard of, but that’s the effect these raves were having.

  Anthony: Twenty thousand people turned up. We built a stage that was 200ft long, like Glastonbury. We had a big wheel and dodgems. We marketed T-shirts. This was an illegal rave but it had an official T-shirt and a programme. It had everything. We had a World War Two searchlight and I was sat on the light because you had to sit on it to move it. I was out of my head. I kept swinging the thing onto the people trying to sneak in and they would freeze like rabbits. We called them E bunnies. You could see these E freaks coming over the hill, groups of ten, trying to sneak in without paying their fifteen quid. One kid got sectioned because he reckoned an angel came down and visited him. It was the light. He was on acid.

  Christopher: Our mum and dad were there. They weren’t taking drugs or anything, just watching events unfold.
In 1988, on New Year’s Eve, my mum and dad were in The Hacienda with us. They saw midnight in and went off to do their own thing while we carried on partying all night.

  [My wife] Natalie’s dad, Jack, was at Joy. He was the most chilled out nice fella, a painter and decorator. He was in the tent where the money was and he was there all night trying to keep an eye on things for us. Money was going missing on the night because it was all cash and everyone wanted paying in cash. You can’t account for how many have come to the event unless you get your tickets back. We were open to snides [fake tickets]. It was a difficult thing to control. Hard work. There was no ultraviolet or hologram on the tickets, and even if there had been we were in a field surrounded by mountains in the pitch black. How ironic – the ticket touts are being touted. Funny.

  Anthony: It was happening everywhere: people were forging tickets for raves. You just want to smoke pot at that age, get up late and go to a club. So, who’s dealing with the holograms, who’s dealing with the people taking the phone calls, who’s distributing tickets, who’s going to collect the money? I just wanted to dance all night. I was one of the last to leave.

  Joy was a big success but no one got paid. We didn’t get paid. I went to collect some money from Spin-Inn Records in town and there was a bird I didn’t even know collecting the ticket money. It was a free-for-all. There was money everywhere and a lot of suspicion about who had the majority of it. People were just grabbing what they could. Ultimately, there was no back end and everybody lost money.

  It caused a few complications. People who had not been paid needed paying. It got a bit heated. I had people coming to see me and basically they were very upset about not being paid. I had to explain that I’d not been paid. It culminated in me and some other people from London going to see somebody who’d been paid handsomely for the event. It ended up in a bit of a fallout, resulting in a car ending up looking like Swiss cheese. It was intense – the trouble over the non-payment – so I went to Amsterdam to chill out.