IT ARRIVED WITH ‘Hot’. On 13 July 1988, a different kind of club night was launched at the Hacienda in Manchester. There were palm trees indoors, a tiny pool by the dance floor, ice pops handed out to the crowd – and there was Ecstasy. For the next six weeks – the so-called Summer of Love – clubbers would arrive every Wednesday night in shorts and swimsuits, with whistles around their necks, to dance Ibiza-style, arms aloft, while the Happy Mondays and their cronies peddled small white pills that made you feel... ecstatic. Acid house had landed and British youth culture was changed forever.
The Hot night did not, of course, spring from nowhere. The Hacienda, a former yacht warehouse, had opened back in May 1982 as an experiment in club life, a ‘space’ to host both live bands and a disco. It was owned by the people behind Factory Records, the city’s premier label, and its design was spare, modern and deliberately ‘industrial’. They wanted an alternative to the city’s jaded nightlife.
Manchester’s most popular clubs and discos were outdated and dull. There was little buzz about the city at weekends. It seemed an uneasy, joyless place, still mired in the economic decline of the early eighties and the Stanley knife mentality of the Perry Boys, the recordings of Factory both reflecting and defining the gloom. ‘The Hacienda was looking for a direction in an era when the rock music scene was
jaded, struggling in the shadow of punk and Joy Division... Manchester was living off the past, rundown, beset by bad drugs (heroin, cheap speed).’21 Yet despite featuring artists such as Madonna, the Smiths and the Eurythmics, the Hacienda did not trade especially well – busy at weekends, dead in the week – until about 1986, when hip hop, techno and house music infiltrated from America, especially through DJ Mike Pickering, who was influenced by the ground-breaking Paradise Garage club in New York.
Acid house had been coming for a while, a culmination rather than an innovation. It had two essentials. The first was the music, a mix of sub-styles made possible by new technology and anchored by a pounding, incessant beat. House came from Chicago, techno from Detroit, blue-collar cities blighted by gangs. Techno pioneer Derrick May was himself in thrall to Factory figureheads New Order, who absorbed the sounds of the US clubs and then reinvented them, especially on their ground-breaking dance epic ‘Blue Monday’. There was something unsettling about techno in particular and its sudden shifts of tempo: an urban soundtrack from the collapsed industrial sprawl of Detroit, once Motor City but now Murder City, USA. ‘Six-year-olds carry guns and thousands of black people have stopped caring if they ever work again,’ said May. ‘If you make music in that environment, it can’t be straight music. In Britain you have New Order. Well our music is the new disorder.’22
Another key musical ingredient came from the bizarre and extravagant clubs scene on the jet-set side of the Mediterranean holiday island of Ibiza,
particularly Club Amnesia and its Argentinian DJ, Alfredo. Small numbers of Brits sampled the hedonistic delights of this al fresco disco, including a small group of south Londoners who tried to recreate the endless summer nights on their return to England. In the autumn of 1987, some of them gathered in Ziggy’s club in Streatham, south London, after it had closed to relive the Ibiza experience.
From that sprang the Shoom club and British acid house was born.
Ibiza also had its Manchester contingent, the kind of scallies found in most sunspots abroad – lads who live by handing out flyers, touting timeshare, occasional bar work. They were part of ‘a large working-class enterprise culture that emerged in the mid-eighties and continues to thrive among the generation that took Thatcher at her word and decided simply to help themselves to a slice of the action,’ according to Steve Redhead of Manchester’s Institute for Popular Culture.23 They brought a flavour of Ibiza’s freewheeling nightlife back to Manchester and their amoral, do-it-yourself ethic was crucial in the events that would unfold.
The other essential of acid house was Ecstasy, a chemical first synthesised by German chemists in 1912 before its more important re-synthesis in the USA in the sixties. It is believed to work on chemical neurotransmitters in the brain such as serotonin which, when boosted, cause a short-term sensation of well-being and alertness. It also increases empathy, the experiencing of someone else’s sensations as your own; indeed its first dealer wanted to call it Empathy. People who took a pill wanted to dance all night, to embrace, to love and feel wonderful about the world. Many claimed a
life-changing experience. Ecstasy was classified as a non-addictive class A drug and made illegal in the UK in 1977, before it was popular. It started to appear in the early eighties, brought back to London by clubbers from New York and sold for £25 a pop.
The first article about it was in The Face magazine in 1985, the year the first British seizures were made.
Under the influence of ‘E’, the music took on a new depth and resonance. ‘To the unattuned ear, it can sound at best numbingly repetitive, and at worst mindless. It usually begins with a dissonant shudder and builds, often in the space of one ten-minute mix, into something relentlessly bombastic, a noise that is brutally technological and utterly primal. These records are designed purely for the dance-floor and, increasingly, seem structured to enhance the Ecstasy experience, becoming an integral part of the extrasensory overload that is the very essence of the rave experience.’24 Or as writer Matthew Collin put it, ‘Ecstasy plus house music equals mass euphoria.’25
Incredibly, Greater Manchester Police missed what was going on. In 1988, the year the pills took off, they made not a single arrest for either the supply or possession of Ecstasy. The following year, they made only five arrests for trafficking the drug. In 1990, by which time it was the recreational drug for young clubbers and rave was a well-established media panic, they made just four arrests for trafficking E, compared to 310 arrests for dealing cannabis. It was a dire failing. The media, too, largely missed the story, focussing instead on stern warnings about crack cocaine, even though crack was virtually non-existent in the UK at the time.
Criminals were much quicker to pick up the new
Criminals were much quicker to pick up the new drug trend than either the police or the media.
It took a third ingredient, however, to turn Manchester into Madchester. The city’s nightlife sounds were further transfused with a wave of indie bands – the Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses, the Inspiral Carpets, 808 State and others – who matched guitar or synth music with club beats and dressed in scally terrace chic. The look and sound gripped not just Mancunians but the immense student population of the city’s four universities (including Salford). Previously, students and townies had rarely mixed; their night-time spaces were separate, their clothes, haircuts, accents and musical tastes often different. Now they came together, united by music, drugs and, most of all, by the Hacienda.
The Mondays were Hacienda regulars and became ‘perhaps the quintessential rave generation group,’ according to Steve Redhead of the Manchester Institute for Popular Culture. ‘In many ways they represent and encapsulate a lot of the values of this new enterprise economy. They grew up immersed in a help-yourself ethic, actually working among drug dealers before they became successful as a pop group. There are also a lot of entrepreneurs involved in running the rave scene and they are anything but disorganised pleasure-seekers. The business ethic is straight free-market enterprise.’
Club culture took hold in Britain in a way it did nowhere else, and Ecstasy was soon the third most popular drug after cannabis and amphetamines.
Almost subliminally, the street ethic and the central importance of E began to distort moral frameworks.
Suddenly blagging was cool, theft was okay, drugs
were rife and the scally was king.
***
Hot was a huge success and soon the queues snaked down Whitworth Street. Ecstasy keeps you going and the Hacienda clubbers did not want to be turfed onto the streets by the 2 a.m. licensing restriction and told they had to go home. So they began to head off to an after-hours dance den called the Kitchen, two bare-walled flats knocked together in Charles Barry Crescent in Hulme. Towards the end of the Summer of Love, brothers Anthony and Chris Donnelly also began organising warehouse parties. They had the right street credentials: they were Wythenshawe faces and nephews of Quality Street Gang veteran Jimmy the Weed. Acid house hit them and others like an epiphany.
‘The estate where we come from, drinking’s the thing, get proper out of it and have a top chuckle with your pals,’ said Anthony Donnelly. ‘We had a base in Wythenshawe where every activity in the world was going on from. One hundred young lads in there on beer, but all of a sudden five or ten of them have gone wayward, they’re coming in with fucking bandannas tied round their heads. From 1988 to the end of 1990 we didn’t touch a drop of alcohol, not one fucking drink... for two years we went on a mission from God, we were like Jehovah’s Witnesses going out promoting it.’26
The warehouse parties came to be known as raves, a term which gradually replaced acid house everywhere except in the newspapers. The most popular north-west location was Blackburn, a town with many disused industrial premises that could be
broken into and transformed into makeshift clubs.
During 1989 and 1990, thousands of ravers at a time descended on Blackburn for a series of illicit parties. They offered immediate pickings for the Salford lads who had just emerged from prison.
‘The raves of course were illegal but it seemed that they were getting away with it in Blackburn,’ said Paul Doyle. ‘So we started to go up there, a gang of six or seven of us, and we’d ask who was running the rave. These big heavy doormen would be there and they’d be looking at us confused, thinking, Who the fuck are these? So they’d say, “Why? Who wants to know?” All of a sudden the guns would come out and we wanted the whole night’s takings.’
Raves were made for violent young criminals.
Older heavies were not interested; they didn’t know what was going on, didn’t understand the scene at all. It was wide open for the football hooligans, the robbery gangs, the bodybuilders and the scallies. On one occasion, twenty Salford turned up at a Blackburn warehouse party to tax the door. ‘The money’s in the back room,’ stammered a petrified doorman. One Salford lad went in and found the cash. He also saw a window in the room, and instead of going back to his mates to share the loot, climbed through the window and legged it. It took them weeks to track him down, by which time he had spent the lot. ‘After we’d done that two or three times, they got sick of us and so they asked if we would do a deal and just take half the money on the night and leave them the other half,’ said Doyle.
‘They might have been big doormen but they soon realised that this was the late eighties and people don’t fight with their fists down our neck of the woods no more. We got a big reputation over that.’
All over the country, rave organisers were hiring the handiest men they could to keep away both the gangs and the police, but in Greater Manchester there was no-one who could keep out Salford. The raves taught them a lesson some would use with a vengeance: control the security of an event and you controlled not only who came in and out but who sold the drugs inside. It was to have drastic consequences for nightlife in Manchester.
By now licensed premises were catching on too, and new dance clubs were beginning to appear, but the Hacienda remained the scene’s home. ‘Acid house, for a few brief moments, seemed to unite the city: the outcasts from the north side of town, the scammers and grafters and chancers and characters mixing with the pop stars and students and fashion-conscious club kids,’ wrote Matthew Collin in his seminal Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House. Yet even as the scene was building to its exuberant, tranced-out peak, storm clouds were gathering. The problem was not so much the dealers but the gang members who were soon preying on them, taxing their money and taking their gear. They expected to get in without paying and refused to pay for their drinks at the bar.
The police, concerned at levels of drug taking and the activities of certain gang ‘heads’, already had the Hacienda under covert surveillance when, in May 1989, bar manager Leroy Richardson refused to let a Cheetham Hill mobster into the club without paying. The young thug – who, unusually for the Hillbillies, was white – threatened him.
‘You know where I am,’ said Richardson. ‘I’ll die before you’ll be let in.’
‘You’ll most probably have to,’ replied the mobster.
His name was Tony Johnson. They called him White Tony.27
***
The Hillbillies were at the height of their powers, feared throughout the city, their robberies ever more precise, more lucrative. As banks, post offices and security companies improved their security technology and procedures with time-lock devices, CCTV, explosive dye and other measures, so the robbers became more ferocious. In March 1989, guards were collecting foreign currency from a Manchester bank when an armed Hillbilly robbery team roared up and drove a stolen Audi straight into one of them, fracturing his skull. The gang escaped with £134,000 in foreign currency and £27,000 worth of travellers’ cheques. No-one was ever charged with the robbery but two Hillbillies in their mid-twenties later went on a spree in Spain, Portugal and other Continental countries on some of the proceeds, and police officers found a holdall containing some of the stolen currency. The pair, described in court as ‘professional criminals’, were later jailed for eight and seven years each.
It was merely a foretaste of what was to come.
Chinadu Iheagwara, aged twenty-two, and Steven Julien, twenty-six, both lived on Albert Fildes Walk in the heart of Cheetham territory. They were experienced bank robbers, and on an April morning a few weeks after the currency raid, they pulled on balaclavas, featureless clothing, and gloves to avoid fingerprints, and set off on a ‘job’. They had scanners to monitor police frequencies, a driver and stolen getaway cars, and had carefully planned their routes.
Their target was Coin Controls, a currency depot in Royton, Oldham. They waited for a Security Express van to pull up outside, then watched the two middle-aged guards, William Banham and Hayden Hooper, alight to collect cash. Iheagwara and Julien sprang from a silver Ford. Julien blasted the van door with both barrels of his shotgun, then re-loaded as the guards got out with their hands up. He demanded they open the cash chute, but when the electronically operated device jammed, ‘they just went mad,’ recalled Hooper. Iheagwara swung at Banham with a two-foot machete, knocking him to the ground and hacking his leg almost off. Julien then shot him three times in the groin and left thigh.
Banham somehow managed to crawl under the security van for shelter but left his right leg sticking out. Julien fired again. ‘I could see my leg was hanging off,’ said Banham. ‘I grabbed hold of it and curled up into a ball, waiting for the next blow to finish me off.’
Hooper ran, hoping the men would turn their attention from his colleague. He was shot in the back, shattering his pelvic bone, and fell. ‘I went numb from the waist down,’ he said. Julien then walked around picking up the spent cartridges so they couldn’t be used as evidence, as pupils at a nearby school watched agog against a fence. The robbers had apparently believed that there was a third guard still in the van, and that he would open it for them. They were wrong – and had now injured the two guards so severely that they couldn’t get into the vehicle to steal the money. They were driven away, leaving behind a bloodbath. Within days, Julien was on a beach in Trinidad, his parents’ homeland.
Iheagwara too had disappeared.
That kind of deadly violence was no longer the preserve of the Hillbillies. That summer, twenty-five-year-old Henderson Proverbs was drinking in the Spinners pub in Hulme when five men pulled up in a car outside. ‘Several people walked in,’ said Ron Gaffey, an experienced, phlegmatic Manchester detective with a passing resemblance to the former Z Cars actor Stratford Johns. ‘One of them fired a shotgun and blew his head off. When I got there his head was everywhere. The pub was splattered with blood yet people were still playing pool. One of them looked up and said to me, “He’s over there pal.”’
Proverbs died from massive injuries to this throat and neck. He had previously been involved in several skirmishes with a rival gang. This time the feud was over a woman, and a gang leader from Hulme was later jailed for life for the killing. Four other people were injured that month in two separate shooting incidents. The machete had been firmly relegated; arguments now ended in gunfire. ‘There is no hope, no future,’ said Hendy Proverbs’s mother, Jasmine. ‘In our generation, if there was an argument you just fought with your hands, but this generation now, they don’t even want to use a knife, never mind fight with their hands. They just want to use a gun.’
The Hillbillies took their gunplay into the city. True to form, they became the first of the black gangs to cash in on rave, which was largely a white scene.
This was especially noticeable at the Thunderdome, a new club located on Oldham Road in Miles Platting, perhaps the most desolate district of Manchester, a wasteland of rubble and ruined buildings dominated by a daunting clutch of decrepit high-rise towers. The club reflected both its
surroundings and the way the scene was going: ‘The Thunderdome was a very vicious sort of night, very
surroundings and the way the scene was going: ‘The Thunderdome was a very vicious sort of night, very