It was, for a while at least, the only place to party. While all the jobs were moving down south, carloads of clubbers would be on the motorway heading north. Their destination: Manchester. A city packed with hedonists determined to have a good time, no matter what damage it might do to their neurology or job prospects. Their playgounds: The Haçienda and The International; later Checkpoint Charlie’s, Sankeys Soap, The Boardwalk and Herbal Tea Party at the New Ardri.
But what happened to those revellers once The Haçienda closed, their student grants dried up and they were forced to get jobs and grow up? That was what Beate Peter, an academic from Manchester Metropolitan University, has set out to discover in a new exhibition and research project opening in the city on Saturday.
The Lapsed Clubber, showing at Twenty Twenty Two in the Northern Quarter, asks what became of the ravers of 1980s and 1990s Manchester once they’d hung up their glow sticks and swapped their Joe Bloggs for sensible slacks.
Peter set up a Facebook group asking for veterans of the scene aged 40-55 to get in touch and tell her what they were doing now.
About 50 people submitted photos of themselves, then and now. Some showed that age had not withered their alternative spirit. Richard sent one of himself in a bath in the 1990s, relaxing at an after-party, bare-chested under a sheepskin coat, a bucket hat on his head and a pendant around his neck. He also enclosed a new shot captioned: “In India, mid-life crisis. And now I’m yoga teacher (what else?). You couldn’t make it up.”
Andy submitted one showing him “dancing and sharing the love. Herbal Tea Party, Manchester, Summer 1994”. His “now” shot showed him and his bride this summer on the dancefloor at their wedding in Bangkok.
Others have calmed down, the dilated pupils replaced with photographs of the former clubbers enjoying their gardens or a quiet ramble. Helen Darby, 44, found a shot of herself wide-eyed and nose-pierced in an alien T-shirt, taken at the Phoenix, a little two-floor venue in the University Precinct Centre on Oxford Road, round about 1995. The modern-day Darby finds her fun in the Lake District, and can be seen at the exhibition halfway up Skiddaw.
For a while “going out was everything”, Darby told the Guardian. She missed the first rave wave centred around The Haçienda. The mid-90s were her era and she danced to trance and techno at Bugged Out, Megadog and Havok, going out three or four times every week. There is one particularly precious memory she holds from those days. “I know it sounds completely cheesy and ridiculous – I swear I even had light sticks and UV paint on, though not white gloves, that was earlier – but I remember looking across the dancefloor and locking eyes with another woman. We were dancing perfectly in time. There was this communion with a complete stranger, with no judgment, no implications for sexuality, just complete joy.”
She stopped clubbing not long after a trip to Goa in 1999. “I stopped taking drugs around 2000, then about two years later I was in Sankeys Soap and this young girl in the toilet was holding my hand and telling me she’d taken three pills. She asked me how old I was and literally dropped my hand dead when I said 32. She was appalled and repelled that a 32-year-old would be in the same club as her. I understand that in a way: the young are entitled to have a domain that’s theirs.”
Peter’s interest in Manchester’s nightlife began when she arrived as an exchange student from a Berlin university 15 years ago. A keen clubber until her two children came along, the boundaries between her play time and her academic research blurred, until she wrote her PhD on the Madchester club scene, entitled Jung on the Dancefloor: Clubbing and the Subconscious.
Her new exhibition, which is part of the ESRC festival of social sciences, will open on Saturday with a panel discussion at 4pm featuring one of Manchester’s finest lapsed clubbers, Herbal Tea Party organiser Rob Fletcher, and former Haçienda DJ Dave Haslam. Visitors will also be encouraged to share their own memories of Manchester’s club scene, interviewed anonymously by a computer called Voice Box, designed to encourage complete candour.
