Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (61 page)

Bright’s act reached the statute books at the moment the conflict was turning decisively against the rave organizers. In the early hours of 21 July 1990, a mass arrest took place on a
scale that had few parallels in the history of British law enforcement. Organizers of the Love Decade rave broke into a large shed in a village on the outskirts of Leeds. Once the shed was full,
they effectively barricaded their customers inside by parking a van behind the doors so that the police would have to force an entry. This the police nevertheless managed to do and in the ensuing
melee made 836 arrests. Elsewhere, police tactics were also finally having an effect. Posing as rave organizers, they had started disseminating details of bogus rave locations to pirate radio
stations. Increasingly, partygoers did not know whether their journey would end in a successful night out, or in a cul-de-sac with a policeman at the end of it telling them it was late and well
past their bedtime. The
initial excitement of trying to outsmart the police became wearisome as the police increasingly proved to be one step ahead,
transforming the long drive in search of a party into a wild goose chase. Meanwhile, the organizers found they had more dangerous enemies to worry about than the local constabulary. The drug that
was fuelling their customers’ appetite for dancing was also making their own business empires precarious. Comprehending the profits that were being made, major drug dealers started making
demands for a cut. This often took the form of the criminals’ enforcers and local football hooligans offering ‘protection’ to those organizing parties on ‘their patch’
in return for money, along with the hint that all might not go well if the offer was rejected. Jeremy Taylor hired a posse of ex-SAS soldiers to keep him from harm – a precaution to which he
had never had to resort when organizing the ‘Gatecrasher Balls’ for teenagers in tuxedos and taffeta. The threat to their livelihoods from gangsters as well as judges convinced the
organizers that their window of opportunity was closing fast. Colston-Hayter duly returned to his other career as a gambler, and Jeremy Taylor went off to run Noel Edmonds’s Crinkley Bottom
theme park. Paul Staines became a professional blackjack player, then a hedge-fund manager, before declaring himself bankrupt. He subsequently established himself as the controversial political
blogger Guido Fawkes.
²⁵

The illegal rave scene had been crushed, its defeat made manifest when the police felt able to close down the Pay Party Unit in September 1991. But the war had been won against unlicensed
parties, not against Ecstasy or rave music. While Graham Bright’s act cracked down on illicit raves, at the same time a more liberal attitude to licensing hours ensured that all-night dancing
to house music could be enjoyed at established clubs instead. These extended entertainment licences paved the way in the 1990s for vast new clubs like the Ministry of Sound in Vauxhall to become
global brands. House lost its rebel edge and became overtly commercial (the Ministry of Sound was owned by the son of Lord Palumbo, the ex-chairman of the Arts Council). The popularity of Ecstasy
endured. It was impossible to quantify even loosely how many MDMA and derivative pills were being popped by the mid-1990s, with regularly quoted but unverifiable estimates suggesting half a million
taken every weekend; that half of British youth had taken drugs and that the dance scene – legal and illegal – was worth £1.8 billion a year and thus on a par with the
nation’s newspaper and book publishing industries. At any rate, Customs and Excise’s records suggested a rise of 4,000 per cent in foreign Ecstasy coming into the UK between 1990 and
1995.
²⁶
As an exercise in creating a market from almost nothing, and then successfully meeting soaring demand, it was a story of commercial
success that many multinational corporations might have struggled to replicate. Instead, it was made possible by organized crime’s increasing focus on the narcotics trade as a source of
profits. Ultimately, no other phenomenon in eighties pop culture rivalled the long-term influence of house music.

Madchester

Drugs and music were the twin motors of Manchester’s continued prominence as the country’s pop capital in the last days of the eighties. And it was primarily drugs,
too, that brought the experiment in urban renewal through clubbing to the brink of destruction. By 1989, Tony Wilson’s prophecy that the city’s cultural renaissance needed his flagship
club as its focus appeared to be well founded, with the Haçienda continuing to pack in clubbers and musicians and its fame established across the country. Unfortunately for its backers
– principally Wilson’s Factory Records via its most famous signing, New Order – the Haçienda returned great profits not to its owners but to Manchester’s drug barons.
After all, it was difficult to make money from customers who, having taken their ‘happy pill’ before arriving (or in a quiet corner of the club), proceeded to drink little more than
water at the Haçienda’s bar. But, in the meantime, salvation appeared to be at hand from a band Wilson had spotted in the club and signed to Factory. Led by brothers Shaun and Paul
Ryder, The Happy Mondays consisted of six scruffily dressed Salford lads who combined the guitar aggression of alternative rock with the cheap hedonism of house. Posturing and staggering around on
stage was part of their appeal (a freedom enabled by their being able to turn the switch on pre-recorded material). Indeed, beyond shaking maracas, jiving around artlessly was virtually all that
Bez (Mark Berry) was able to bring to their live concerts, thereby blurring the distinction between performer and audience, stage and floor. But there was more to The Happy Mondays than freaky
dancing. For those seeking ‘authenticity’, they appeared to be the genuine article. Ravaged by late nights of vodka and drugs, Paul and Shaun Ryder cut the dishevelled figures of
delinquents who might as easily hot-wire a parked car as make era-defining music. This was part of their appeal, taking a trainer-kick to the flimsy partition between art and real life.

Bogusly claiming to vote Conservative as part of his mission to shock, Shaun Ryder identified himself as one of Thatcher’s children in ways that would have mystified her: ‘We dealt
[drugs]. They called us criminals, but the way we saw it, we were enterprising business people. She laid the cards out and people had no choice but to play the game.’
²⁷
Yet, unlike so many eighties indie acts, the Mondays were not remotely interested in politics, nor in being moulded into a glamorous brand like the decade’s more
overtly commercial stars. A section of the music press identified this as representing the most exciting shake-up to record industry complacency since the anarchic snarls of The Sex Pistols in the
Queen’s silver jubilee year of 1977. In
the United States in the meantime, rap and hip hop had dared to speak unvarnished truths to power. By comparison, British
mainstream acts appeared either banal or, in the case of master-songwriters like Morrissey and Marr, arch and straining to be clever. In contrast, Shaun Ryder’s vibing lyrics – mostly
disconnected ramblings about street life and tripping – offered a sort of rap for scallies, accompanied by rock and house instrumentals. Not everyone got it: a giant consignment of Kit Kats
was sent to The Happy Mondays’ office after the manufacturer, Rowntree’s, mistook a photo of Shaun Ryder lovingly unwrapping the chocolate bar’s silver foil as a good publicity
opportunity.
²⁸

It was The Happy Mondays who popularized two terms that came to represent their place and time – ‘Madchester’ and ‘Twenty-Four-Hour Party People’. During 1989 and
1990, the city, its bands and its clubs led the way for British pop culture. Another Manchester band, The Stone Roses, spiced house with funk and psychedelia, conjuring up the sort of sound that
might have emanated from The Beatles if they had stayed together and settled in San Francisco. What came to be considered Madchester’s defining moment took place on 27 May 1990 at a concert
The Stone Roses performed on Spike Island in the Mersey estuary in front of almost thirty thousand (appropriately stoned) young people, many of whom struggled to hear much of the music projected
out from an inadequate PA system, but for whom the occasion’s significance became magnified in the memory.

Perhaps the Spike Island concert came to be shrouded in so much nostalgia not because it was the start of a new experience but, in retrospect, because it marked the beginning of its end. With
international recognition assumed to be merely round the corner, The Stone Roses tried to dump their indie label for a major, only to find that legal action by the jilted Silvertone Records
prevented their follow-up album coming out until 1994, by which time they had drifted from their Madchester moorings and utterly lost their bearings. The downfall of The Happy Mondays was –
all too inevitably – less prosaic. Paul and Shaun Ryder became heroin addicts and Factory Records sent them with the rest of the band to Barbados (an island deemed not to be awash with
heroin) to record their fourth album. Unfortunately, Barbados – as the Mondays soon discovered – was flooded with crack cocaine. When the band ran out of money, they sold the furniture
in the recording studio to fund their new habit. ‘The real trouble was that I wasn’t interested in writing any music,’ Shaun Ryder explained, without evident self-reproach.
‘I had no ideas. I went over there and just totally enjoyed myself.’
²⁹
By the time he and his band-mates were plucked from the island,
the album’s recording costs had spiralled towards £400,000 and the producers had not yet managed to coax Ryder into contributing any vocals to it. Unsurprisingly, the album’s
release had to be delayed and it was
not very good even when it was finally turned into something vaguely saleable in 1992. Besides marking the downturn in The Happy
Mondays’ creative fortunes, it destroyed what was left of the finances of Factory Records. As New Order’s Bernard Sumner saw it, the fault lay less with the irresponsible behaviour of
the pop stars than with those who indulged it: ‘No one should have allowed the Mondays to spend nearly so much, but money was never a major concern at Factory. With Tony [Wilson], the artists
always got what they wanted.’
³⁰
It was an approach that had resulted in some of the most important pop music of the period, but which had in
it the seeds of its own destruction. Damaged also by the failure of New Order to produce a new hit album in time and by an ill-judged move to expensive new offices, Factory went into receivership.
Its dream for Manchester was also turning sour as the city’s drug gangs settled their turf wars by drawing firearms. Though it finally shut its doors six years later, the Haçienda
never fully recovered after shootings forced its temporary closure in January 1991, when Tony Wilson issued a clear statement: ‘We are quite simply sick and tired of dealing with instances of
personal violence.’
³¹
In 1992, the club’s security bill alone came to £375,000. On one occasion, the head of security was chased
through the club by a disaffected youth wielding a sub-machine gun, escaping summary execution near the fire exit only because the Uzi jammed.

Madchester, it seemed, was aptly named. Yet ultimately even its creative successes, while commanding a nationwide following, had struggled to be heard far beyond. Unlike the New Romantics or the
new waves of synth-pop and heavy metal, Madchester never deeply penetrated the American market, which, during the 1990s, moved from the happy hedonism of house to the depressive wails of grunge.
The nineties were not to be an age in which global pop culture was primarily shaped in the United Kingdom. Specific bands succeeded, but not whole movements. Having cornered one third of music
sales in the United States during the early and mid-eighties, British acts struggled to account for more than a few per cent during the following decade. The eighties had been a special – and
not to be readily repeated – era in British pop history.

No Such Thing as Society

None of Thatcherism’s critics coined a phrase more damning or suggestive of its corrosive consequences than her own claim that ‘there is no such thing as
society’. The extraordinary assertion suggested that the fracturing of traditional patterns of community was not a regrettable by-product of government policy or a mysterious consequence of
the modern world, but rather the deliberate goal of a prime minister committed to the triumph of the unencumbered individual. The outcry that followed her statement could hardly have been louder if
she had quoted approvingly the assertion of the occultist Aleister Crowley that to ‘do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’. Twenty years later, when Thatcher’s statement
was still regularly being cited as the fitting epitaph for her effect on national life, the Conservative politician turned journalist Matthew Parris suggested it was actually ‘one of her few
really interesting remarks’.
¹
By a few months, it anticipated the April 1988 release in the UK of the film
Wall Street
which spawned
the catchphrase ‘greed is good’, and together the two pronouncements captured the popular imagination as the embodiment of the age’s selfish materialist values.

Thatcher’s most memorable philosophical musing was made during the course of an interview with
Woman’s Own
and was published by the glossy magazine in October 1987, four
months after she had won her third successive general election. The transcript of her conversation with the interviewer, Douglas Keay, shows that her actual words were considerably more nuanced
than was implied when the quotation was shorn of its context. The prime minister was discussing her fear that too many people were inclined to look at their predicament and conclude ‘I have a
problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!’ – whereas in reality ‘life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the
obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation’. Unemployment benefit, she thought, was there to help the jobless while they looked
for work, but was not an alternative to finding work, because: ‘It is your neighbour who is supplying it and if you can earn your own living then really you have a duty to do it and you will
feel very
much better!’ It was to those who believed they had a right to live at the expense of others without offering anything in return that she warned: ‘There
is no such thing as society. There is a living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to
take responsibility for ourselves and each of us is prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.’
²