Madchester

Do you remember Madchester? Maybe I am getting too nostalgic in my old age, but I have been thinking about that very brief gap of time when the city of Manchester was the focus of most of my attention, at least as a musical and cultural force. For a city with so many different bands and sounds in its history, it might seem strange to just pick one moment, but I am, as I said, nostalgic…and old. And I know that many of you have commented on how you like to hear about musical moments on my page. So, here I go again…

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“I wrote for luck.

They sent me you.

I asked for juice.

You gave me poison.

I made a line.

You formed a queue.

You tried it all on.

There’s nothing else you can do.”

(Wrote for Luck – Happy Mondays)

Not exactly the Beatles or Nick Cave, is it? Yeah, lyrically, the bands were pretty weak. Nothing sung, or maybe “recited” and “bellowed” are better words for it, stands out. What interested me more was the music and the sounds that came together, fused, clashed, came apart, and fed into each other as this moment in musical history grew and grew.

This began in 1988… There is some dispute about this, but I think that ’88 was the year when things took off and my ears turned to England’s great Northern sounds until the early '90s. I had visited the country in that same year (see the link here), but I must confess, I knew nothing about what was happening beyond England’s great Southern region. London had its own sound, and there were other noises coming in from abroad that were new and exciting (Björk, Public Enemy, various other indie bands, etc.) And I was not having the best of times with the relations I was with (I was a fourteen-year-old pain in the ass; my relative was a control freak who tried to make me carry a small and fragile statue in my luggage – don’t ask). I was focused on London. And then I came back home…

What the hell?

Who were these people, and what were these groups up to?

I came home at the end of August and started school…and my ears had been totally and completely adjusted. I was listening to more rap music than ever before, and dance music began to creep up the charts after many years of hard rock and heavy metal, along with some independent bands that I never thought would be loved (R.E.M. anyone?).

And then I saw her…

Neneh Cherry!

I had never heard a woman like that before. To hear her sing about something called a Buffalo Stance – still not sure what it is; still do not care – and to eventually see her perform on a program singing and dancing…while being quite visibly pregnant was a revelation. And I did my homework: daughter of the jazz musician Don Cherry – “Brown Rice” was a great discovery – and one of the earliest female figures in British punk; resident of Bristol (up in The North); friends with other musicians, like Tricky (soon to be on the charts), Massive Attack and Portishead…and I was hooked. And I kept up the research.

If Bristol could do it, maybe there was something in the water up there, especially in their close neighbour.

Now, this is not to say that I knew nothing about Manchester or its sounds. All the great beat groups from the sixties (Freddy and the Dreamers, The Searchers), and then the fantastic sounds of late-seventies (The Buzzcocks, The Fall, Joy Division – and should I point out that punk first gained a real foothold outside of London because the Sex Pistols were booked to play an unbanned concert by future members of the certain above-mentioned groups). Into the eighties, I drifted away from that sound for a while – New Order was not enough to pull me back – and it was years before I finally listened to the Smiths (a friend loaned me “Strangeways, Here We Come” and I worked my way backwards). So, I was intrigued when I kept finding out more about places like Factory Records (hello, Tony Parsons), The Hacienda…and the drugs, dancing and clothes.

…And the band names: Inspiral Carpets, 808 State (kind of revealed the source of their sound with this one), Stone Roses, Happy Mondays… Could you really guess what the bands were like with monikers like those? They were as unique as their names and I still feel a lot of affection for what they brought to the party. But I notice now that I am not so enamored of the ones that were popular at the time. Stone Roses were all over the British press before their album came out, and quite frankly, it did not do much for me (“I Wanna Be Adored” was fine; “Fools Gold” was much better). Primal Scream seemed the next big group that should have made it…and did not do a thing over here (I have much more respect for them now). Instead, I was drawn to the Inspirals (their motto was “Cool as F**k”; asterisks included...sometimes), 808 State (“Ninety” and “In Yer Face” were in my Walkman-ride-to-school collection), A Guy Called Gerald (“Voodoo Ray” should be studied and analysed by anyone interested in what a DJ and artist can do with the right technology), and more than any of the others, Happy Mondays. Seriously, how did a band that incompetent and drug-addled manage to produce so many records that were really weak in retrospect, but seemed exciting and different at the time (even a late release like “Yes, Please!” suckered me - and Factory Records - and my ears)? They reminded me of what a punk band could be…if that band did not really consider instruments important, and just wanted to dance and take drugs and have sex without the rock and roll. They still make me nostalgic, and they were the only Madchester group I had any merch for (where did that long sleeve shirt go?)

Why am I thinking of this tonight? As some of you know, I had been promising to finish this up for quite some time…and then I lost a close friend from my past; a past where she played a role in what I listened to and enjoyed (she was that first person to introduce me to the Smiths). And it is also the end of another year in one month. This is the moment when we all read about the top lists of music, movies, people, places, and other things that should probably never be on a list. Nostalgia and memory will not leave anyone alone at this time of the year.

There is also another fact that I cannot avoid: most of you reading this have probably never heard of most of these groups, not even the beloved Ms. Cherry. And I refuse to let this movement be forgotten and superseded by something like Cool Britannia (that was the cultural moment that followed the end of Madchester and gave us a truly dull group like Oasis). Those late nights listening to my imagined trip to the Hacienda and parsing lyrics like these should not be forgotten:

“Son, I’m thirty.

I only went with your mother ‘cause she’s dirty.

And I don’t have a decent bone in me.

What you get is just what you see, yeah.”

(Kinky Afro – Happy Mondays)

True bards of the age, folks…

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