by Dave Haslam
Spiral Tribe set up a system at the Stonehenge People’s Free Festival, which took place in Longstock in 1991, and both DIY and Spiral Tribe were present at Castlemorton Common Festival in May 1992, a gathering of in excess of 20,000 New Age travellers, ravers and their sound systems, many of whom had been denied access to the annual Avon Free Festival near Bristol, which the police had halted. Many of those turned away made for Castlemorton in the Malvern Hills, Worcestershire. There, a free party lasted a full week, much to the consternation of the authorities and outrage in the media.
Castlemorton was in the minds of the legislators when the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act was being drafted; the Act targeted outdoor parties that played music ‘wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’. But the Act wasn’t a reaction to a certain kind of music, it was an attack on the lifestyles of the free party movement and on political dissent. Parts of the Act were clearly aimed at halting the anti-road-building movement and other ecologically minded travellers who had found common cause with the rave collectives.
The ‘Megatripolis’ nights on Thursdays at Heaven combined New Age ideology with rave culture. Megatripolis also promoted a number of parties at Bagley’s in King’s Cross and took a rented armoured car to a protest rally against the Criminal Justice Bill in July 1994, when around 30,000 ravers, eco-activists, squatters and travellers gathered in Trafalgar Square. There was a further rally in October 1994.
It could be argued, however, that by the time the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act came into force in November 1994, the days of big outdoor unlicensed raves, like Sunrise, were already numbered. Partly this was because of police harassment but also because ravers had found a focus at one or two permanent venues and at nights like Megatripolis and ‘Megadog’; commercial festivals were also beginning to incorporate the energy of the rave scene (Orbital featured at Glastonbury in June 1994). Not that causes espoused by the eco-activists, anarcho-punks and New Age travellers disappeared; they were that era’s episode in the long revolution which has continued to more recent protest movements, like Stop the City, Reclaim the Streets and Occupy.
In December 1993, Melody Maker sent two reviewers to a Megadog event at the Rocket in London. They rejoiced in the multicoloured drapes and lightshows, the body-painters, the humanoids on stilts, and the mix of DJs and live acts. On the evening in question, Eat Static played, as did Transglobal Underground, with Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia playing from behind a roof-to-floor screen, which owed something to the ‘ego-free’ performances of the kind favoured by some acts in the 1960s. Megadog was like some post-ecstasy remix of blissed-out late 60s psychedelic happenings played out to thumping techno. The Melody Maker reviewers staggered out of the venue, proclaiming Megadog ‘the very best club in the world’.
There was a strong tribal element to Megadog – a certain look, and a great sense of community. The events were a success too – the London events at the Rocket would attract upwards of 3,000 people. Thirty-three Megadog events also took place at Manchester Academy, a venue owned by the University of Manchester Students’ Union, with some impressive line-ups assembled: during 1993, Orbital, the Drum Club, Aphex Twin, Banco De Gaia, Ultramarine and Underworld all featured at Manchester Megadog.
There were other psychedelic techno nights too. The original home of Megadog, the George Robey, hosted a club called ‘The Far Side’, firmly embedded in the squat/free-party scene. Flyers promised DJs ‘spinning trippy trancey techno, delightfully deep house and pleasurable progressive for your entertainment’. And at least one flyer from 1994 also carried the slogan, ‘Fight the Criminal Justice Bill’. The New Ardri was an old Irish club neatly placed between Manchester’s universities and Hulme, an innercity area which had become home to many squatters and artists. ‘Pollen’ took place at the New Ardri from 1992, and then ‘Herbal Tea Party’ took up residence there. Herbal Tea Party booked DJs including Sven Väth and Billy Nasty, and went hard on the visuals. Among its successes was reaching out and turning on many traditionalists who frequented rock clubs like Jilly’s, introducing a new demographic to electronic dance music. On 21 June 1994 Orbital played live, with David Holmes the guest DJ. Holmes hailed from Belfast and, to this day, credits Terri Hooley and Good Vibrations as an inspiration. Like Hooley, Holmes got involved and made things happen. Among his activities were the ‘Sugar Sweet’ club night at Belfast Art College and recording as part of the Disco Evangelists.
By 1994, Ministry of Sound and Cream were established as two major superclub brands, but the likes of Goa-trance night ‘Return to the Source’ were determined to do things differently. Not every promoter wanted to be running a superclub and not every DJ chased superstar status. In January 1997 Andy Weatherall played a three-hour set at Herbal Tea Party. Weatherall had been among the pioneers – playing the top room at Shoom with his Boy’s Own colleague Terry Farley – and continued making and playing music very much to his own agenda, leading not following. At the time of the Herbal Tea Party booking he was recording as Sabres of Paradise, having hosted the ‘Sabresonic’ club night for several years at Happy Jack’s, London Bridge (which he once described to me as ‘really substance-fuelled’). Every time a club took a step towards superclub status, a smaller club opened somewhere else offering a dissenting soundtrack.
‘The Heavenly Social’ is a good example of what could be enjoyed and achieved away from the superclubs. Studying in Manchester, the duo who would later become the Chemical Brothers – Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons – had hung out at the Haçienda, Most Excellent and Eastern Bloc. They loved the Haçienda but wanted to do their own thing; they got involved in running ‘Naked Under Leather’ and played at various nights hosted by the magazine Jockey Slut. But Tom had always been making music, with a little studio of sorts set up in his student house. Tom and Ed began recording together as the Dust Brothers, and their recordings came to the notice of Heavenly Records based in London. Working and socialising in the capital with the Heavenly crew – Jeff Barrett, Martin Kelly, and Robin Turner – they collaborated on launching a Sunday evening, their first residency in London, in the basement of the Albany pub behind Warren Street tube station in October 1994. In retrospect, the Heavenly Social became a significant club, but according to Ed Simons the vision was that it would be ‘very low key, or we thought it would be. The Albany probably fitted about a hundred and thirty people crammed in. It was similar to Naked Under Leather, putting a soundsystem downstairs, a couple of Technics just about balancing on a table.’
The facilities were a little different at Cream where the DJs each had a fully stocked minibar behind the DJ box, and nothing was low key. James Barton sees 1994–96 as the quintessential Cream era. By the end of the period, the club had moved into three rooms, and there were certain nights when there could be 3,500 people inside and another 2,000 outside. ‘We weren’t underground,’ says James. ‘What Cream represented was big, commercial, bright, colourful. That was the time when we’d announce our New Year’s Eve parties and tickets would go on sale and we’d sell them all in a morning.’
Since her days at Eric’s and fronting Big in Japan, Jayne Casey had continued making music (as Pink Military and Pink Industry) and worked at and with a number of Liverpool’s cultural institutions, including the Bluecoat Gallery. She was aware how cultural activity could repopulate the spaces and rejuvenate the city. ‘Jayne was the first to see the impact of what we were doing and the times we were living in,’ says James.
Jayne studied some statistics provided by the local John Moores University and extrapolated from them that 70 per cent of applications to study there in 1996 had identified Cream as a key attraction of the city. ‘Jayne said, “Your influence has extended beyond Saturday night,”’ says James. ‘We realised she was right. We never thought about student numbers. We never dreamed that we would be filling every hotel room in the city. In fact we never thought it would matter; why does it matter that the Holiday Inn, the Crown Pla
za or whatever, that we fill their rooms for them? But it did matter, it does matter.’
Sometimes, when a business is at its most successful, it’s also at its most vulnerable. The achievement of establishing Cream, the impact, the pressure, every Saturday, meant no escape and no rest for James, Darren and the team. ‘To be honest we were being stretched a bit at this point, it was a bit crazy; we were stretched by the pace of change and what was going on.’
The 1990s were characterised by the astonishing market penetration of products like mobile phones, Microsoft Windows and Starbucks coffee shops, but the massive rise in the consumption of ecstasy is an even more remarkable example of booming sales and global spread in the decade. In the early and mid-1990s, there continued to be deaths connected with its use, at a rate of between eight and fifteen a year. Certain clubs became notorious: the Hangar 13 in Ayr suffered three ecstasy-related deaths during 1994 and was shut at the end of April 1995. Of all the ecstasy-related deaths during this period, one case became front-page news: that of Leah Betts in November 1995.
Leah Betts was only a very light user, but her last time wasn’t the first time Leah had done ecstasy; she’d had Doves before, pills marked with a bird logo. Having had an ecstasy tablet at her eighteenth birthday party at her family home in Latchingdon in Essex, she began feeling unwell and drank lots of water. Overheating and dehydration were known risks of taking ecstasy, and she was following general advice. Unfortunately her water intake was far too extreme (at her inquest it was estimated that she’d drunk seven litres of water in a ninety-minute period), causing water intoxication and swelling in the brain, which led to her death. As a warning to others, her parents – Paul, a retired policeman, and stepmother Janet, a nurse – authorised the use of a photograph of Leah lying in a coma in the hospital.
The case was tragic, and triggered a huge debate in the media, much of it expressing horror that young people were putting themselves in danger, but there’s no evidence ecstasy use dropped after Leah’s death. In fact, by the end of the decade, it had surged, partly because the risks were known but considered by many users to be minimal (Professor David Nutt, an advisor on drugs policy to the UK government, was sacked for suggesting horse riding was a more dangerous pastime than taking E), and partly the result of a flood of good-quality pills known as Mitsubishi (they were embossed with the Mitsubishi logo). According to Dom Phillips in his book Superstar DJs Here We Go!, ‘Drugs are cool, that is the problem. At least they are when you are twenty-one and feel indestructible.’
For Cream, the close relationship between house music and ecstasy was problematic. The issues that had almost destroyed the Haçienda in 1990 were now critical at Cream. Darren remarks: ‘It became more and more a drug-dealer’s paradise. As the gangs in Liverpool cottoned on to it, there was more money to be made and the bigger players got involved.’
James Barton knew his track record after the Underground and Quadrant Park didn’t look amazing, but the Cream organisation, with the help of Jayne Casey, worked on ways to avoid antagonising the police. At the Haçienda, Tony Wilson and Rob Gretton were music lovers and enthusiasts who had never expected that running a club was going to involve dealing with criminals wielding guns, but also, both were anti-authoritarian and libertarian and neither showed much eagerness to work with the police. The Manchester police wanted an easy life and would probably have closed every club in the town if they’d had their way. As a result, there was little common ground between the club and the police, especially when the Haçienda began employing a Salford door team the police were adamant had criminal connections. That was a move that looked like the club was selling out to the gangsters, doing a deal.
Cream decided to respond differently. They wanted the police to become their allies. James could see what was happening. ‘We will come under pressure, we will have problems with gangs, we know we will, and we said, “We need you standing right next to us when it happens,” and, guess what? They did. I don’t think anyone at that time would have dreamed to have taken away the licence from the one big positive thing that was happening in the city.’
Liverpool was one of Europe’s biggest centres for the international drugs trade in the mid-1990s, and wracked by drug-gang disputes. The murder of David Ungi in May 1995 sparked a gang war and almost fifty shooting incidents in the following twelve months, although most of these incidents were in neighbourhoods including Dingle and Kensington, with the trouble kept away from the city centre. James points out: ‘Not only were Merseyside police sitting outside Cream on a Saturday night with guns but they were also outside McDonald’s in the city centre. We had a tough chief constable who famously said, “You’ve got a gang, you’ve got guns, but we’re a gang and we’ve got more guns.” He made sure there was a visible deterrent on the street.’
The alliance between the club management and the police in the face of gang problems didn’t mean the relationship was cosy. The police made sure the club were aware of their responsibilities as licensees, and undercover officers carried out extra-close surveillance at Cream for a ten-month period through and beyond the second half of 1995, leading to the arrest of a member of the security firm employed to operate the door, along with twenty-two other people. None of the Cream management was charged as police were satisfied they weren’t in any way connected with the alleged drugs ring.
In the feverish atmosphere in and surrounding the club, Cream didn’t quite control the chaos, but according to James they didn’t have big problems (‘A few threats,’ he says). ‘We made everyone aware that we were not interested in doing a deal,’ says James. ‘We’d hear about criminals, gangsters, or whatever, known troublemakers; we’d hear this person, that person, is out in town this weekend, and we’d make it known they weren’t coming in. It was a siege mentality, we were standing up to them.’
You were protecting what you’d built for yourself, and the people of Liverpool?
‘Yes, and the sad thing is that anything good attracts the shit and the shit eventually infect it and fuck it up.’
Police standing outside Cream with guns didn’t dissuade clubbers from descending on the club in their thousands. According to James, it all appeared to add excitement, a dose of rebel chic, to proceedings. ‘I remember [journalist] Ben Turner writing an article about turning the corner of Seel Street, seeing the police helicopter circling above the club and knowing this is the place; this is where the action is,’ he says.
A lot happens when you’re running a nightclub that the punters never know about.
‘Yeah, so much! So much. But we always had a philosophy, whatever happens outside, inside the doors three thousand kids are having the night of their lives.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Celebrities, more ecstasy, music is life
The first two years of the twenty-first century have been dubbed ‘the acid house recession’ by Dom Phillips, a former editor of Mixmag. In those years a boom in superclubs and superstar DJs turned to bust. Many of the rave pioneers had become the new establishment and, as such, were now ripe for mockery and rejection by the emerging generation; such are the cycles of revolution and reaction that power youth culture. In addition, nightclubs generally were struggling with changes to what was on offer after dark, as the liberalisation of licensing hours blurred the lines of demarcation between a bar and a club.
The Haçienda had been one of the first big club casualties when it closed in 1997. The numbers Cream was attracting, its ability to attract the name DJs and its profile all served to highlight that by the mid-1990s the Haçienda’s sense of uniqueness had gone, as other clubs imitated or overtook it. There were still good times though, especially around 1993 and 1994 on a Saturday night with Graeme Park and Tom Wainwright installed in the DJ box. Another highpoint of the Haçienda in the 1990s was the weekly gay night Flesh founded by Paul Cons and Lucy Scher – the loudest, proudest gay club Manchester had ever experienced. The music was uplifting, the crowd both exhibitionist and friendly, and specia
l events like the Miss Flesh contest and some of the other drag shows were unforgettable.
Kath McDermott, turned on to the notion of DJing by experiencing sets played by Tim Lennox at the No.1 club, became one of the Flesh residents along with, at various times, Paulette Constable, Dave Kendrick, Princess Julia and Guy Williams. A policy of positive discrimination was introduced. Flesh publicity material warned: ‘The management reserve the right to refuse entry to known heterosexuals’. It was a great strategy. The glam gay night did what the metal detectors and huge bill for security staff seemed unable to do – it kept the gangsters away.
Nevertheless, the Haçienda’s surrender of its place as a pioneer, plus ongoing problems with violence and the rising costs of security forced the final closure of the club in 1997. The last night turned out to be Saturday 28 June, with Elliot Eastwick and me DJing. It was packed that evening (one of a series of successful ‘Freak’ nights promoted by Paul Cons), but outside the club some dispute about who could and couldn’t get in escalated, a car mounted the pavement, a mob from Salford and, it was said, from St Helens battled it out and then a doorman got a wheel brace slammed into his skull. If that wasn’t bad enough, the trouble erupted in full view of a minibus of local councillors, licensing magistrates and police out on a research visit to Manchester’s nightlife hotspots. On the following Monday the licence was revoked with immediate effect. The club had huge debts to the bank, the Inland Revenue and the brewery, and no viable options to retrieve the situation. Opened in 1982, it had lasted fifteen years, which – particularly in the context of some of the clubs around during and after the rave revolution (Shelley’s, the Eclipse and Cream) – was maybe longer than could have been expected. Subsequently it was announced that the Haçienda would be demolished to make way for a block of apartments, and Tony Wilson expressed his disdain for any attempts to keep it open and turn it into a museum.