Interview Dave Haslam, 23.08.2009, Manchester

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”. 

Interview Clint Boon, Manchester 21.08.2009

Hier noch ein Interview mit Clint Boon, das ich in Manchester geführt habe. Abends haben wir dann noch gemeinsam aufgelegt, eine unglaubliche Erfahrung.

Can you explain why Manchester is such a vibrant City musically? 

CB: There’s a lot of reasons but a big factor is the weather because it isn’t very reliable. So you spend a lot of your days and nights indoors. Over the years we get to listen to a lot more music than somebody in Barcelona or Brazil where they go out play football or enjoy the sunshine and drink beer. In Manchester the weather sometimes is so bad that you’re stuck in your bedroom with your radio, cassette player or CD player. So over the years we have built this community that absorb a lot of music. The other reason is that we are quite central in the British Isles and we used to have a big port where people from all over the world came into Manchester. Now we got a big airport where people still fly in from Japan, Russia and so on. So we’ve always been exposed to international cultures and international music. So when house music arrived in Britain in the late 1980s it pretty much arrived in Manchester from Chicago. So DJs were coming to Manchester to play the Hacienda or Cream in Liverpool. In the 1960s a lot of American beat music came in via the ships into Liverpool and Manchester docks. So the geography of Manchester is very important and another fact is that the north of England is well known for being a very warm and open minded kind of person. So if you’re an artist in this part of the world your art is pretty well supported. There’s always an audience whether you’re a musician, a painter or a designer there’s always somebody who supports your work and tells you to keep going. At the end of the day we’ve got about 40, 50 years of amazing music coming out of the city that inspires the next generation. Now you’ve got Twisted Wheel, The Courteeners, The Ting Tings are the new big bands coming out of Manchester. They’re pretty much inspired by the previous generation like the Roses, the Mondays or the Inspirals, or the Buzzcocks, Joy Division before them or Herman’s Hermits or The Beatles from Liverpool. It’s a self generating thing, I think. And because we’re well known for being a music city you got all these students coming in because of that. The Chemical Brothers are a brilliant example for that. They were coming here from the South because of the Madchester music. They met at Manchester University and started to make music and there you go they’re part of our musical tradition.

What was going on in Manchester before rave?

CB: I grew up in a town called Oldham, a suburb of Manchester, small satellite town. So my existence then was pretty much dominated by stuff on the radio. So growing up in the sixties and seventies it was a lot of sixties music and seventies Disco music and I heard a lot of Rock’n’Roll, fifties Rock’n’Roll music and that inspired me the most by then. Towards the end of the seventies Punk happened. I was so fortunate to see the Sex Pistols when they played in Manchester in December 1976 at the Electric Circus and on the same bill were the Buzzcocks, Johnny Thunder’s Heartbreakers and The Clash. Sex Pistols headlined, it was the Anarchy Tour. That was the moment when I decided I want to do that, I want to be in a band, I want to be in music. So the Punk scene got a lot of kids into that mood and Manchester was a very powerful and creative city for that. And that led into the early eighties with Joy Division and subsequently New Order and The Smiths arrived onto the scene. The Smith were very much a product of the Punk movement. Mid eighties music scene in Manchester was very much guitar based, shoegaze was the term of the British music press. So The Smiths and The Waltones were the most prominent bands at that time. It became somewhat inward looking, in terms of music a very introverted scene, very dark. So Manchester needed a revolution, needed something new to happen, even if The Smiths were brilliant. The reaction to that was the kids dressing up in colourful clothes, taking drugs and listening to psychedelic music and replicating that psychedelic music. In case of Happy Mondays they were replicates of Sly and the Family Stone, The Stone Roses were replicating The Byrds and Simon & Garfunkel. Suddenly the Manchester music scene was inspired by retro stuff but became something brand new with edge. It became very colourful, to me my memory of Manchester around ‘84/ ’85 was completely black and white. Even though I love The Fall, The Chameleons and The Smiths to me it was all black and white and red brick buildings and smokey chimneys. But when I think of ‘88/ ’89 that was fucking flower power and colourful like California in the 1960s. Subsequent to that the Madchester thing died off and the Britpop scene happened. Manchester was also a central part to that because of Oasis and The Charlatans. More recently bands like Elbow, Cherry Ghost, I am Kloot, Doves brought more maturity to the output of the city, they’re songwriters. They were doing stuff that hadn’t been done before in the city. More recently Ting Tings, Courteeners, Twisted Wheel and there are some new bands that are doing phenomenal stuff. So Manchester has always been a prolific music city even in fifties and sixties when I wasn’t part of it the Jazz music scene and the Northern Soul scene pretty much started in Manchester. Bob Dylan played the Free Trade Hall and used an electric guitar, that was when Folk became electric. So Dylan pretty much changed Folk music in Manchester, the audience was shouting ‘Judas’. This is a very important story in music history and it happened in Manchester. So I believe it is the most important music city in the world. There can’t be another city that equals what we do for such a small community.

What would you say was the initiation of rave? Was there a certain event that kickstarted it?

CB: You could argue that the seeds for rave and Madchester were sawn in July of ’76 when the Buzzcocks got the Sex Pistols to play Manchester because that moment inspired Tony Wilson and New Order who weren’t New Order at that time, inspired all these creative people who created a community called Manchester. From that came Factory Records, New Order, Central Station Design. All these great things happened and that was when rave was born. In terms of a date on the calendar I’d say when the Hacienda started to book American DJs. Or when Mike Pickering and Andy Weatherall who were working at the Hacienda as DJs started to play American house music. Somewhere between ‘86/ ’87. It was a coming together of these records being played at this amazing night club, The Hacienda, in front of a lot of people who needed something new. It was bands like the Mondays and the Inspirals who started wearing Paisleys and bowl haircuts and suddenly it was like ‘fucking hell drum machines and sequencers sound amazing’. It was something that fitted in the sound we were doing. It was a moment in time which can’t be replicated and will probably never happen again in such a beautiful level.

What role did drugs play?

CB: I think it accelerated everything. A lot of guys who wouldn’t have danced on their own in 1983 or ’84 because guys didn’t dance on there own then. You couldn’t walk in a club in ’83 in Manchester and dance on your own. You dance with a girl. Drugs brought people out of that shell and suddenly guys were going for it on their own. So it still is like that today. I am djing tonight in Wigan and tomorrow at South in Manchester and guys will dance alone with their arms in the air. Today it’s got nothing to do with drugs anymore but it’s still the way it was in the Madchester times. It played a very important part in it. As the Inspirals we famously didn’t involve ourselves with drugs for whatever reasons. I was the oldest member in the band when we started, I was 25 and had already been a business man. I worked as a company director. I knew that drugs could also destroy what we were doing. So I stayed away from it. It played an important part in that sense that it made people accept strangers more readily and accept new music more readily.

But with the drugs there was much more violence involved, wasn’t it?

CB: Yeah, the problem wasn’t the people who were taking the drugs it was the people who were selling it. And it was the people who were trying to get into the clubs to sell the drugs and the people who were trying to control the doors. Sure there were drug takers who died and that was tragic and bad publicity for the movement. The trouble started when the people turned up at the Hacienda with guns. A couple of times it had to close but Tony and his team managed to open it again by persuading the council that it will never happen again. In the end it happened one time too many and the rest is history. The place is no longer there and that’s a shame. I constantly regret it because it was a very important building in terms of Manchester’s development from the industrial revolution up to the present day.

How would you describe the impact of your band?

CB: I think we played a major part in the Manchester music scene but we were by no means the leaders of it. I like to think that we were always regarded as part of the big three. The Inspirals, The Roses and the Mondays. It was a great pedestal we were put on. We did a great work to create the style and sound of Manchester so we got credit for it. We created a lot of music. We made four great studio albums, 18 or 19 Singles, we did Top of the Pops a lot. In terms of the British music scene we contributed quite a lot but we would never be U2 or R.E.M. or Depeche Mode. We would never be a stadium band but as individuals we achieved far more than we ever set out to achieve. When we started the Inspirals one of my ambitions was to make a record, whether it was a single or an album. Something that is not a cassette tape, you know. In a nutshell I’d say the Inspirals were crucial to the Manchester music scene and we were also quite important in the British music scene. But I would never say we were the best and so on.

Was there kind of tight relation between the bands or strong competition?

CB: Definitely competitive but really supportive. The way the bands supported each other back in the days was brilliant. We were all friends before. Me and Mani had a band in 1984 called The Mill. I played Keyboards, Mani on Bass and we had a guy called Chris Goodwin on Drums and we split up in 1985. I started the Inspiral Carpets, Mani went to the Roses and Chris started a band called The High who were another seminal Manchester band. Before Madchester me, Mani and Chris had this band doing psychedelic music and it was almost a blueprint for what the Inspirals did. We were quite ahead of our times. We were all friends, we knew the Mondays from ‘86/ ’87. So we grew up doing the same gigs and there was always that competition like, ‘We wanna do Top of the Pops before them’. You can’t deny that. There was never jealousy I mean I’m a fan. I was always a massive Mondays fan and still am to this day or James, fucking hell, what a great band, what an amazing voice. The Roses, again what fantastic records. I never witnessed any bitchiness or any jealousy. It was always, ‘Fucking good for you, you’re on Top of the Pops, so there’s more chance we’re gonna get on Top of the Pops.’ It was a real brotherhood. And a good sign for that is that even today we are still close friends, me, Peter Hook, Bez, Shaun, Mani, Chris Goodwin. I don’t think this happens in other towns, you know.

What were the main figures for you in the rave scene?

CB: Happy Mondays, they were a band that very much embraced that dance thing. Very much embraced the house music ‘cos they were in the Hacienda selling drugs and they heard these amazing records from Chicago. They emulated that into their sound more that we. We always remained a psychedelic band. People like Gerald Simpson and 808 State were crucial to the scene. They were Manchester lads who started making American house music. They were that impressed by it. They started making records that emulated what’s coming in from Chicago and Detroit. That’s the original 808 State records that was alien to us, you know, machines making music, robot music. We haven’t heard anything like that which was brilliant. “Voodoo Ray” by A Guy called Gerald was crucial, “Pacific State” by 808 State was a crucial record. I’d say “Papua New Guinea” by The Future Sound of London was also important and N-Trance from Oldham put out a record called “Set you free” which I still put on every time I dj. A lot of people see it as a cheesy club record but that was when the robot music went vocal and fucking soulful and that’s when I fell in love with it. Even today it give me goosebones ‘cos it reminds me of that era. Primal Scream, the “Loaded” Album was also very important. Before they were just a psychedelic indie band from Glasgow and I think it was Weatherall who produced it who brought all the dance music techniques in. What an amazing record the “Screamadelica” record. But definitely the Mondays, I lover their first album, John Cale out of Velvet Underground produced it and it is very shambolic and baggy. It slows down and speeds up. Brilliant. And the second album is just another indie band going electric with Weatherall and Oakenfold as the producers. You can clearly hear all the drum machines and dance stuff on it.