1986: The 10th Summer around the Haçienda – goodbye punk, hello hedonism by Gonnie Rietveld

1986: The 10th Summer around the Haçienda – goodbye punk, hello hedonism
by Gonnie Rietveld
Reader at London South Bank University

In 1976 I was 16, living in Rotterdam. We, us Dutch youth, heard of punk in England. It all sounded very exciting! No more need to feel as though we had we missed out on the wild 60s; we got our own thang to pogo to. And so I fell in love with all things English music and those thin pale boys who had a liking for stimulants.

At just 19, I met one on holiday, Mancunian soul boy Mike Pickering. He really knew his music and I was suitably impressed. By 1980 we started to make our own music, in punk inspired DiY style. No pogo, no guitars, oh no, nuh-nuh-nuh - instead raw electronic tracks with additional acoustic rhythm work: "dancing with Quando Quango is fun", Mike declared boldly on record. By 1982 he was re-called to Manchester by his mate Rob Gretton, to lead the musical programming of the Haçienda, a hangover of punk's arty Situationism that was to be the beginning of a new era in clubbing. Accelerating into tunes like 'Love Tempo', our little electronic combo joined Factory Records.

In 1986, I was a 26-year-old divorced woman, living in Manchester. The last 10 years had been an epic journey. That summer, our band made its last demo. One of the three tracks, 'What Price Beauty', originally with Stephen Morris' haunting toms, appeared in a lighter version on M-People's first album, Northern Soul, as 'Kiss it Better', in 1992.

Everything we knew seemed to come to an end in 1986. Punk was laid to dust and the Haçienda reduced its offerings of bands, experimenting instead with fashion, cabaret, sexuality and DJ music. The club needed to change its managerial strategy: playful DiY had been fun, but there comes a point when only a slicker organisational machine can keep the party going.

And it did, bigger, better and bolder, diving head first into hyper-hedonism during Thatcher's hard years. Disco's DiY cousin, house music, arrived in the UK by October of 1986 and The Face magazine wrote its first article about the drug Ecstasy in the same month. This seductive couple, house and E, dragged us into to the acid house era by the end of the 80s, making us go raving mad.

So, what else happened in the Haçienda, in 1986?

The Haçienda's music policy at the time says something about the changing face of music in the mid-80s. For example, in February-March, Mike and Andrew offered electro / funk / reggae with Simon Topping's Latin beats at their regular Friday NUDE night. Meanwhile on stage we heard Kurtis Blow's electro sound; Cabaret Voltaire's post-punk creations; the hardcore of Swans; and King Kurt's lush psychobilly mayhem. And there was a definite undercurrent of psychedelic rock … upstairs on the dance floor and down in the basement, where chemically enhanced hairdressers provided, erm, surprisingly fine haircuts. Question: how many psychedelic hairdressers does it take to cut your hair? Answer: Three - one to hold your hair up, one to cut and one to direct the scissors' trajectory.

1st of May, Dave Haslam's student indie night was launched, The Temperance Club, offering a mixture of Soft Cell and the Smiths. According to Shaun Clysedale's report on the opening night,

… as if to prove they had gone totally mad, the management lost the free (night) buses. Tony Wilson suddenly appeared, promising free taxis and apologising gracefully. He disappeared into a sea of bouncers taking his promises with him.

Eventually pound coins appeared …

Other experiments in that week were to invite the Salvation Army Band, but they declined, as, according to the club's concept producer Paul Cons, it wasn't their scene. Anarchist Paul also sneaked some red flags onto the club's roof for Labourday: "unfortunately, capitalists own the flag poles", he said, making the display a mere fleeting leftie statement.

21st of May, the Haçienda's 4th birthday – this was celebrated with a fair ground theme. Mr Manchester's Diary, MEN, reported the next day that,

Alas, a few fairground folk lured in for the evening were less than happy (…) I spotted an hysterical woman flapping around hunting snatched teddy bears. "I'm disgusted," exclaimed stallholder Maureen Brown. "I asked a lad to return a cuddly toy and in reply he lifted his mini-skirt."

Fashion designers were heard saying they preferred Manchester's new mid-80s buzz to London. Paul Cons initiated 'fashion PAs', during the Haçienda's dance nights. Its dressing rooms became a beehive of flirtatious designers and hairdressers - their creations strutted with equal panache on stage. Although dance records continued in their flow without any interruption during those nights, they seemed to attract a new in-crowd.

And so into the Festival of the Tenth Summer, held between 12 and 20 July in Manchester, England: Art; Design; Photography; a Booklet; Music; Music Seminar; Peter Saville-designed merchandising; a Graphic Design exhibition; and Film & Video were all featured. Event Number 10, the actual festival night, took place on the 19th of July at the G-MEX Centre, with The Smiths, New Order, the Fall, Cabaret Voltaire, Wayne Fontana, John Cale ….

I seem to have missed this festival of grant musical nostalgia and instead hung out with some of the creative fashion folk I had met during that week, heralding a new dawn in Manchester with event Number 2: 'Clothing the Naked Flesh with Flowers', featuring ten new clothes designers. Doing some cat walking for the occasion, my nice bob was shaven off at the sides and back by a Vidal Sassoon stylist - ironically because I did not ever want to be a model.

I wandered about in designer goddess wrap outfits made of sweat-shirt materials. To represent '86 meets 76', a long white version of this was photographed in tandem with wild looking Sue clad in torn fishnet stockings and sporting a backcombed Mohican hair-do. Meanwhile, young designer David Foley was overheard to say about punks that 'Leathers, chains and thongs went out years ago and they think they are so original' … Goodbye punk, hello stylists? Was that what the 80s were about?

By October, style magazine The Face noted concern amongst early Ecstasy users (mostly from professional classes): E's secret should not be given away or it could be abused by the press for sensational headlines, or repressed by the state, or corrupted by the masses. "It's not the pill that's the problem, it's the people", commented one E fan. Twenty years on, in 2006, we all know what different things can be achieved with an E – from therapy in small chilled gatherings to full-on loss of self in crowds of thousands. The latter type of context was not `advised by earlier E manufacturers who, instead, seemed to envisage orderly middleclass living room parties, or Bagwan love-ins. Yet dancing on E had already become prevalent during the early 80s in, say, New York's hedonistic gay clubs – this is where, it seems, dancers had discovered E to go well with house music.

Checking the state of music by the autumn of 1986, the Haçienda still offered an eclectic mix of indie music at Haslam's Temperance club as well as 'black working class' electro/soul/reggae at Mike's Nude night. The bands that appeared were, by now, all electronic dance in some way or another: Trouble Funk's go go music; hip hop crew Full Force, with female MC Real Roxanne and Lisa Lisa; duo Erasure; and the avant-garde disco of the Residents. The electronic dance sound continued with the arrival of house music. By November, Manchester's City Life complained: "That House Sound (is) reaching saturation point in the more upfront clubs". They had not heard anything like it was yet to come.

To top off 1986, following New York nightclubs and Manchester's art centre Cornerhouse, David Mach produced an art installation in the middle of the Haçienda club, creating Babylonian pillars from stacks of New Order's unsold 12" vinyl copies of 'Confusion'. Say no more.

And now, in 2006, 30 years on, I'm 46, living in London with a PhD on cultural meanings of house music under my belt. I've been promoted to Reader for my publication work on dance cultures. I live in a world of management strategies and reflection, of conferences, teaching and administration. But the music plays on: during the launch of the second edition of Brewster and Broughton's book Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, the other night, DJ Rocky opened his set with an original copy of Quando Quango's track 'Genius', which still sounds cool, 21 years on – a few nights later I heard it played out again at Patrick Forge's and Phil Asher's club night. Bumping into people who have somehow survived on the wild side makes me realise what a quiet life I lead these days, even though, perhaps, not quiet enough for some of my academic colleagues to comprehend. In another 30 years, will there be an old people's home for party people like us?