Hier das letzte Interview für heute, mit Hacienda Resident DJ Dave Haslam im Folk Cafe & Bar in Didsbury, nicht weit der Orte, an denen Musikgeschichte geschrieben wurde, zum einen Burnage, wo die Oasis-Lads aufwuchsen zum anderen die King's Road, in der Morrissey aufwuchs. Ich verließ die S-Bahn an der Haltestelle Burnage und schlenderte die Fog Lane hinunter, direkt vorbei an Sifter Records, der Plattenladen, der durch Oasis' Shakermaker und der Zeile 'Mr. Sifter sold me songs when I was just sixteen.' unsterblich wurde. Leider war Sonntag und ich konnte nicht mal rein gehen. Vorbei am Fog Lane Park, wo die Gallaghers die anderen Jungs von Oasis beim Fußball spielen kennen lernten und über die Palatine Road, wo sich die Büros von Factory Records befanden, dem Label, das uns Joy Division, New Order, die Happy Mondays, A Certain Ratio, OMD und Durutti Column zu Gehör brachten, erreichte ich das Cafe, in dem Dave bereits auf mich wartete. Nach dem Interview hab ich dann noch der King's Road einen Besuch abgestattet, bis es dann mit dem Bus durch Moss Side, dem Viertel in dem Ian Brown von den Stone Roses lange gelebt hat, zurück in Manchesters Innenstadt ging.
Can you explain why Manchester is such a vibrant City musically?
DH: Big question, that’s the reason why I wrote a book about it. I traced it back to 170 years ago, the birth of the city. When you take a look at peoples lives you go back to the beginnings, you know, when the personality’s formed. There’s a similarity in the case of cities. If you go back to Manchester in the 1840s/ 1850s, what you find there is that the city was a very young city. It suddenly exploded in the Industrial Revolution, the population boomed. People came in to Manchester from Ireland mainly, other parts of England, Eastern Europe, lots of Jewish people, Scottish entrepreneurs. All these people came into Manchester. The work that the workers were doing in the mills, in the factories was really hard, some of it was like white slavery. It was that bad. What developed in Manchester in that time which was noted by one of our favourite Germans, Friedrich Engels, was the hedonism in the city. Engels described walking through Manchester at the weekend and he is amazed by the amount of drunkenness he sees in the streets. Even on a Sunday night he remarks there are people lying in the gutters. So what you have is that then you have a combination of a continuously evolving population and you have an inbuilt hedonism. And I think that’s still what the vibrancy of the city is about. It’s about the fact that we are constantly reenergized by students coming every year. We have a massive student population in Manchester. That means you have 15.000 new young 18/ 19 years olds coming in the city to take part in the city. And you have obviously since the 1830s immigration into Manchester from Ireland, Scotland, the Caribbean, and so on. And that hedonism, that urban madness that was around 170 years ago is still around. It was almost a desperate escapism. In kind of general terms that’s where the vibrancy comes from. It comes from factors that were there when the city was born.
How would you characterize the rave phenomenon?
Well, obviously the word rave is a lot older than 1988. Again I would trace it back to history. Obviously in the sixties the word rave was current. The songs were about rave or going to a rave which were mod songs of the sixties. It’s funny that every generation thinks that rave is about staying up late. Even in history staying up late is like a kind of escapism or a kind of rebellion since the beginning of time. When you and I talk about rave we talk about one of the recent examples of the phenomenon of behaving like a hedonist chicken. I would cut it to rave as a kind of possibly predictable explosions of hedonism which happens in pop culture. The roots of the rave scene we’re talking about has got two or three sources. One of them is Northern Soul which is a particular version of mod in North Western England. It included a lot of pill popping, dancing to black music, staying up late, and getting busted by the police. So it included a lot of things we experienced in modern rave. It’s a kind of continuation of the Northern Soul, mod thing and also a continuation of the hedonism I was talking about of the 1830s and ‘40s. In Manchester there was a kind of political dimension to it. In the 1980s unemployment was quite bad in Britain and Mrs. Thatcher had almost a policy of allowing unemployment to rise. There was a phrase which the British government used at that time which was ‘Unemployment is a price worth paying in order to feed the economy’. So as a result you got thousands of young people unemployed. The industrial cities of the North were particularly targeted, the ones that relied on the old manufacturing industries of the old factories. There was a sense that we didn’t have much else. In 1986/ ’87 going out and the music were the two things we really had to hang on to. Morrissey got a song called “Rubber Ring” which is about that. I think it was his experience and as we know he wasn’t such a raver, how powerful music was in that era. You had all that stuff going on and you had the Hacienda where music fans luckily congregated. In ‘85/ ’86 they were losing money and they brought in a new manager to save the club. Tony Wilson went on holiday in the summer of ’86 to China and when he came back we assumed he would close the club. But when the new manager came in he worked in a club in Nottingham called Rock City which was a similar club to the Hacienda and when he was there he started doing more club nights than concerts. He started doing club nights at the Hacienda. That was quite a departure because that post-punk generation was more about rock music and live music. The Hacienda as a discotheque was quite controversial. They started to employ DJs in mid-86, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Me on a Thursday, Mike Pickering on a Friday and two or three other DJs and me on a Saturday. We were told to go out and play whatever we wanted. We never had a meeting on what we should play. Me and Mike Pickering and Graeme Park had quite an eclectic taste in music. When Mike started he’d play SOS Band “Just be good to me” and he’d play Simple Minds. When I started djing I’d play “Think” by Lyn Collins and I’d play “Rebel without a Pause” by Public Enemy and I’d play “Sweet Jane” by Lou Reed. So what happened was we were pushing quite eclectic playlists and that began to open people’s minds musically. And it laid the foundations for rave music which for me was about opening up your mind. We were already doing that with music. And then what began to happen was as music lovers we began to hear what was coming in from Chicago ant Detroit. I was doing Thursdays and Saturdays with another guy so I had to constantly search for new music to play every week. I built up a relationship with all the record shops to find out what’s new and what’s going on overseas. Me and Mike Pickering once had a discussion about that new kind of music that by that time had no label. We didn’t call it Techno. I remember one night I was playing three or four of these new records from America and a guy came up to me and said ‘That Acid House stuff you’re playing is brilliant.’ I had never heard it before and had no idea what genre it was. So in the beginning we were playing Techno and House in the context of an eclectic club night. Then what happened was the drugs arrived, Ecstasy arrived and it accelerated this open mindedness. And Ecstasy accentuated people’s willingness to take onboard an eclectic playlists. To me that was what rave was all about, people arriving in a venue, ready to accept an intense musical and communal experience. That didn’t happen overnight it happened week after week and it evolved out of eclectic music and accentuated drug use and it was kind of fueled by this natural hedonism and escapism. It was a coming together of all these things in a very slow kind of way, there was no one saying ‘I’m creating rave right now!’. We did all these things by instinct and therefore created rave without really defining it. We were just trying to create the best ever experience for the people coming to the Hacienda. What then happened was, funnily I remember that Rough Trade Germany did a compilation in 1990 called “Rave On” in terms of documenting what was going on here. It had My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream and St. Etienne on it. I went over to Germany with Flowered Up and My Jealous God, both from London. We did a mini tour of Germany selling that compilation. It’s that moment when people didn’t know what rave actually was. Rave was coming from that indie, Hacienda type of idea of rave. It was kind of like Flowered Up, Happy Mondays, Stone Roses stuff, white. In Germany it hadn’t had a club which played black Techno. So this was the way it was sold to people.
Can you name one event in time that was crucial to rave like Clint said the Sex Pistols gig?
DH: Oh, why that? I’d disagree with that. Out of that developed Factory Records but rave would also have happened without Factory. There was stuff that was in the air. It was that political music stuff of the 1980s. Sounds a bit bizarre. So if he takes a Punk gig I’d say it was the first HipHop gig in 1987 when Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys and Run DMC were playing in Manchester for the first time. That period of HipHop get a bit overlooked when it comes to club culture because in the rave era Manchester still was a white rock city. Look at the bands that came out of the punk and post-punk movements, Buzzcocks, Magazine, 10cc, Joy Division, The Smiths, New Order, all white rock. The point of rave is that black music had an impact on music making in Manchester. If you give someone a pill which turns an indie kid into a raver it can get you some of the way there but not all of it. So how could that happen then? That little moment of HipHop made people look over to America again especially the Def Jam stuff. In the sixties we did that, we looked at Motown and Northern Soul but we got out of that habit, we got into that white rock habit. Then came that gig in ’87 and I went to that gig with John Peel. I was sitting at home and got this phone call from him saying, ‘Hi Dave, this is John Peel I’m coming to Manchester for the gig and have a spare ticket, wanna come?’ and I said yes. We went for a curry and went to the gig at the Apollo and the audience was 90% white but the music was 100% black. At that time the Beastie Boys were talked about as the new Sex Pistols, they were very controversial. Everyone thought it would be a riot but they were absolutely wiped off the stage by Public Enemy and Run DMC. That was when the kids went ‘I’m gonna buy black music sampler and I’m gonna go baggy.’ The HipHop reenergized the city and opened a predominately white rock city for black music from America. So HipHop was the house of Techno with releasing samplers. It was basically like a bomb going up in Manchester. I think that is a good theory of mine, better than Clint’s. You know, all the people who are running newspapers, television programs and radio stations grew up in the seventies. So their formative years were the punk years which they consider the most important. Years ago everything was full of Woodstock and The Rolling Stones. Give it another 10 or 15 years and we’ll hear about how the Pet Shop Boys were the beginning of music.
You know, the intriguing thing about Manchester is how that confusion that Rough Trade Germany suffered from in 1990 are still a bit prevalent. The definitions of rave and Madchester, some people see them as all interchangeable. Well, I don’t because for me rave started out as something very open minded where you could hear slow music, fast music, all kinds of music then evolved into Acid house and Detroit Techno. So rave went from kind of anything goes, eclectic to Techno. Whereas Madchester went the other way. It started listening to Acid house and Techno then starting to make all kinds of other music. Madchester was anything from “Voodoo Ray” to “I am the Resurrection” to LSD. See where they meet? So if you talk about rave in 1990 you talk about Techno but if you talk about Madchester you talk about rock bands playing Techno influenced music. It’s not the same thing but there was obviously a confusion which Rough Trade Germany had when they brought out “Rave On”.
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