12 Manchester: Living a Hundred Years in One Night

THE BOSOM OF DARKNESS

Paramount Books on Shudehill, a family-run bookstore that’s occupied the same spot since 1956, is just a stone’s throw away from the Corn Exchange. You hear it before you see it, as opera and jazz rings out from the speakers positioned at the door. It is a claustrophobic treasure trove of literary delights: action comics, Picture Posts and vintage ‘girl’ mags with seemingly depthless titles like ‘Beautiful Britons’. In the mix is an extensive range of works penned by Mancunian authors. With the likes of Thomas Swindles’ Manchester Streets and Manchester Men (1908) and Harold Brighhouse’s Hobson’s Choice (1915), it comes as no surprise to learn the city’s literary history was shaped by themes of class and social justice often as trail-blazing as the industry that provoked them. Here, two Manchester writers stand out: Anthony Burgess and Thomas De Quincey, who both featured Manchester.
Published in 1962, Burgess’s  satirical black comedy novel A Clockwork Orange is set in a dystopian future where teenage gangs of youth subculture maraud nocturnally. Relating the criminal exploits of Alex and his drugs (or friends), Burgess pens passages of ecstasy further translated into blissful images of violence and terror:

‘Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. […] I knew such lovely pictures. There were decks and ptitsas, both young and starry, lying on the ground screaming for mercy, and I was smecking all over my rot and grinding my boot in their litsos.’

While set in an unspecified location in the distant future, there’s something of the novel’s depiction of the ‘nattily dressed, weapon-wielding Moss Side gangs’ of the 1920s and 30s, says Paul Morley, that truly evokes Manchester. As for De Quincey, it is he who, through intoxicating prose, is recognised as having invented the drug memoir. Born in Manchester in 1785, De Quincy was thirty-six when his sensational memoir of addiction, ecstasy and torment was published anonymously in 1821. Titled Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, his account sits within a period of England’s history in which opium was prescribed by doctors with abandon, for everything from upset stomachs to headaches, menstrual discomfort, and, even, hiccups. All the while, its glamour as an ancient, shamanic and supernatural tether through which otherworldly visions grew. Through tales of destitution, despair and rapture, from rain-filled streets to abandoned buildings and brothels, he describes, in vivid detail, the visions and dreams he experienced. Some, it was later said, rooted in his upbringing in Manchester.
In ‘the bosom of darkness’, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, De Quincey wandered through ancient cities ‘beyond the splendour of Babylon and Hekatómpylos’ crammed with ‘temples, beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles.’ Including sections on the pleasures and pains of opium, the main intoxicant on display, however, was his prose, which derived its power from being written in the grip of its subject. De Quincy beheld, in the ‘theatre of his mind,’ along with ‘more than earthly splendours’, horrors beyond belief: ‘vast processions of mournful pomp’ and ‘friezes of never-ending stories’ as terrifying Greek tragedies. Space swelled around him; time haemorrhaged so that he seemed to have lived for 70 to 100 years in one night. He especially dreaded a recurring vision of the ocean, ‘paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens: faces, imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries.’ To read about De Quincey’s experiences of descending, not metaphorically, but literally to descend, into chasms and sunless abysses, is one way to experience the depths below depths. The prose is the conveyable form of sensuous highs. The imaginative city thrived on inhaling, conjures a place of contrasts that is both paradise and incubus, or their meeting point. 

A MEANS OF SURVIVAL

From the pages of De Quincey to the photographs of English conceptual artist Gillian Wearing exhibited at the Whitworth, these accounts bear a chilling resemblance to scenes of intimacy and desperation lining the streets of the city in relation to homelessness. In a series of six images, a middle-aged woman named Theresa is shown in close relation to different lovers. From mothering a man that smokes a cigarette over her half-naked body, to latching herself, out of sorts, onto the shoulder of another. Primarily a story of addiction, hers is also a story of erratic love: unable to sustain fixed relationships due to alcoholism, Theresa relies on these men as her means of survival. 

THE PEOPLE'S PALACE

Standing in front of the bland and forgettable ‘Haçienda Apartments’. All lifeless, yet the street corner pulsates with the vivacity of time passed. The debris of chaos, punk and anarchy. Opened in 1982 in a former yacht showroom, the Haçienda was the birthplace of acid house in the north, and the epicentre of the ‘Madchester’ scene in the 1980s and 90s, the music and drug that fuelled the ‘second summer of love’. At the height of Manchester’s musical influence with the likes of the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, ‘Manchester, became the centre of the universe’ said Tony Wilson, the club’s co-founder and manager. ‘The best drugs. The best clothes. The best women. The best bands. The best club. Suddenly everyone wanted to be from Manchester; and if you were a Manc, everyone wanted to be part of you.
For a big city, Manchester is just small enough.’ From its Ibiza ‘Hot’ nights, to its ‘Nude,’ ‘Freak’ and ‘Flesh’ nights, the Haçienda is remembered as a chaotic, accidental and spontaneous burst of madness.
But what was it to experience the Haçienda in the day, in its call to all ‘Fags, Slags and Perverts’? Some anecdotes stick to the skin of the city.

FLESH

(In)famous for its controversial ‘no straights’ door policy, in its time, the club night ‘Flesh’ gained a name as the UK’s most outrageous gay night out. ‘The lesbian social scene was dreadful… bad lighting, bad music, bad booze and sticky carpets. The Summer of Lesbian Love was the opposite: music, dancers, sex, proud, far from safe, and at the fucking Haçienda!’ described Lucy Scher, co-founder of club night together with Paul Cons. Flesh nights, it is said, were wild. From the shower cubicles by the toilets, to cages hanging from the ceiling with male dancers writhing inside. And later, even, massage tables. Singer-songwriter Michael Hucknall insisted that it was only during Flesh nights that the so-called ‘gangsters’ – referring to those illegally supplying clubbers with drugs – would try a blowjob from the greeter just to see what it was like. While New Order bassist Peter Hook recalled, in his book titled The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club, the weirdest Flesh night as involving ‘an employee running up to Ang in tears because two guys at the back of the stage were dancing around with bottles shoved up their arses. He was worried about collecting the empties, I suppose.’ 

NAKED LUNCH

Aside from the many gigs and club nights, the Haçienda was also a place for performance art and the performance of literary works. In the year of its opening, the late beat generation artist, postmodern author and ‘godfather of punk’ himself, William S. Burroughs, was invited to read aloud from his seminal novel Naked Lunch. By use of an aleatory literary ‘cut-up’ technique, the novel introduces a savage satire on control in various forms, from sexual censorship to McCarthyite anti-communism and the worldwide spread of narcotics. While there was barely anyone present at the time, it’s still remembered as one of the landmark occasions in the club’s history. 

Did I ever tell you about the man
who taught his asshole to talk? […]
His ass would ad-lib
and toss the gags back at him every time. 

Then it developed sort of teethlike…
little raspy incurving hooks
and started eating.
He thought this was cute at first
and built an act around it…
But the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street…
shouting out it wanted equal rights.
It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags.
Nobody loved it.
And it wanted to be kissed,
same as any other mouth. 

Never profitable, ‘the Haç’ succeeded in becoming what its owners wanted it to be – a world-class venue for the people of Manchester. Since its closure in 1997, its legacy has been immortalized in books like New Order bassist Peter Hook’s The Haçienda, films like Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People (2002) and in a concert series Haçienda Classiçal, where the club’s pioneering DJs Graeme Park and Mike Pickering play tracks synonymous with the era, which have become Mancunian institutions in their own right. Most recently, in 2010, co-owner Peter Hook had six bass guitars made using wood from the club’s dance-floor, with ‘stiletto marks and cigarette burns’ and all.

MEAT DRESS

Published in The Mancunian Gay in 1982, under the header ‘Dildo Tango in the Witches (sic) Kitchen,’ a club-goer recounts: ‘It all finished with the singer ripping off her dress, exposing a giant black dildo and screaming. Only her screams of pain became sighs. Bits of offal and chicken, some wrapped in plastic and decorated with lucky bag rings appeared on the floor. What’s happenin’ here?’ ‘Here’ described the legendary Ludus gig at the Haçienda, in which Linder Sterling, arranged in cahoots with Liz Naylor and Cath Carroll, staged a protest against the casual showing of porn at the venue. This is the moment when Linder wore her famous ‘meat dress,’ a precursor to Lady Gaga’s famed version.

ORGASM ADDICT

In Piccadilly Records on Oldham Street, Manchester’s punk band Buzzcocks, headed by the late Pete Shelley, is playing. Listen to the title track on their first EP, Orgasm Addict (1977). 

Johnny want fuckie always and all ways
He’s got the energy, he will remain
He’s an orgasm addict, he’s an orgasm addict

He’s always at it
He’s always at it

And he’s an orgasm addict
He’s an orgasm addict

The record sleeve is as provocative and controversial. Designed by Manchester’s Malcolm Garrett together with Linder Sterling, it has become emblematic in its own right. Marking forty years since its release, a new generation of creatives were invited by Garrett to ‘fuck up his original artwork for the Buzzcocks’. Ranging from designs inspired by ‘tart cards’ in the phone boxes of the late ’70s, to a selection of notable orgasms from cinematic history and a sticky end, the series includes over 120 new images. As a testament to the enduring impact of the original in all its controversy, the series presents an elaborated index of carnal pleasure.
The project Orgasm Addict Reframed, took place during most recent edition of Design Manchester. It invited a new generation of creatives and leading designers from around the world, including Micheal C Place, Jill Mumford, Peter Saville, Craig Oldham, Swifty, and Tash Willcocks, to submit a personal graphic interpretation of the sleeve for Buzzcocks’s 1977 single Orgasm Addict. Malcolm Garrett’s original design featured a montage by Linder Sterling, which Garrett turned upside down and rendered in single colour to enhance the graphic impact of the sleeve.

MANCHESTER IS BURNING

The orgasm is now: Manchester’s LGBTQ+ scene. Where the Haçienda gay nights were notorious for barring access to those who didn’t look gay enough, Manchester’s Family Gorgeous is transforming the scene into one that’s more inclusive (and, for the first time ever for drag, one that’s is now longer confined to Canal Street). While New York is most often cited as the pioneering epicentre for drag performers because of the city’s roots in black drag ball culture, as documented in the 1990 film Paris is Burning, in recent years, Manchester has given birth to a new generation of artists and performers championing creativity in the north. Marked by a cultural explosion of shade and lip-syncing in tandem with RuPaul’s Drag Race, there’s been a rise of fierce drag queens carving out their own place in the city’s cultural landscape. While traditional femme queens were once confined to the clubs of Canal Street, reigning supreme with their impersonations of Hollywood starlets and conventional female archetypes, a growing awareness of drag culture has uprooted this tradition, and pushed the drag community out of the back rooms of cabaret bars and onto a public platform.
An influx of queens to Manchester’s queer Mecca began to reshape the parameters of drag performance, and with it came ‘Tranimal,’ ‘GenderFuck,’ and everything in-between. ‘Tranimal’ refers to a drag and performance art movement that began in the mid 2000s in Los Angeles. Deriving from ‘transvestite,’ the aim was to create interpretive, animalistic and postmodern interpretations of the ‘drag queen.’ ‘Genderfuck’ has long been part of the gay vernacular, and started to appear in written documents in the 1970s, as LGBT slang for what’s more widely known as a ‘gender bender.’ Drag balls, voguing and shade are also now all part of Manchester’s gender bending sisterhood, as well as the Drag Family model. Drag families, detailed in Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning, historically provided familiar support for young US men in gay ghettos during the 1980s and 90s. Homeless youth migrated to gay centres like New York and San Francisco to escape discrimination, and from this longing for protection, a new concept of family was born. For example, Family Gorgeous, formerly ‘Sisters Gorgeous’ of Manchester, is made up of Cheddar Gorgeous, Anna Phylactic, Grace Oni Smith and younger drag performers Liquoricee Black and Violet Blonde with Lill Queen floating somewhere between generations. Shying away from so-called traditional femme drag, Family Gorgeous redefines what drag itself could be, exploring new ways of living gender that no longer conforms to the binaries of society. Gorgeous, a tall, striking and polished queen, plays with masculine archetypes as much as feminine, traversing the line between butch-femme and femme-butch. Mother of the family,
Grace Oni Smith, is a trans woman who approaches the ‘trans body as a canvas’ for self-expression. Smith uses a ‘punky-genderfuck’ style which owes its roots to her childhood days listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees while smoking weed in her room: ‘I am a woman who was born a man, who performs as a man dressed as a woman.’
With a monthly night named Cha Cha Boudoir – open to all genders, orientations, and ages – Family Gorgeous and their fellow sisters continue to define a generation of artists that ‘blend what drag can be and what being Mancunian can be,’ says Cheddar. ‘The “fuck you, we are going to do it our way,” that has given Manchester its global prominence.’ 

DIRTY LAUNDRY

From Canal Street to Shudehill, in the evenings, street life is about the same as in London, only more crude, way more crude. A dilapidated sign hangs above a seemingly derelict shopfront. Tucked away down a dingy backstreet, it is deliberately hard to find. It’s deliberately ordinary too. The only indication that things may not be what they seem is the presence of what looks to be a doorman guarding the entrance to a fully functioning launderette. Business as usual. The space is crammed floor to ceiling with washing machines. Following hearsay, I book a machine and wait for the sign. The latch opens like clockwork. (Am I about to enter the den of iniquity never to be seen again?) Through the laundry machine I tumble head-first into a pile of sweaty bodies lining the bar. The lights are dimmed and the bar is teeming with barely dressed party-goers crammed around leather bunkers, tucking into a serious cocktail menu. Typically Manchester: its exuberance is out of sight. Into a back-alley in Salford and to Peggy’s on Barlow’s Croft, a former den of the drunk and the damned known as Corridor. This place isn’t easy to find, but its seasonal cocktails and daring performances are said to be worth it. Ask for directions in Manchester and you’ll be pretty sure to end up following a group of strangers. In Manchester passers-by become brothers, sisters, family. And so I followed. Temple on Oxford Street occupies a former gents toilet and is so small that it’s full with twelve people and a DJ – our group, just about. From Gloria Jones’ ‘Tainted Love’ to the Four Tops’ ‘I Can’t Help Myself,’ tonight’s DJ harks back to the syncopated fast tempo beats of Northern Soul.

BODY VICE

The clock strikes midnight and a performance at Soup Kitchen on Spear Street begins. Rubbery plastics, magnified mouths and what appears to be tubs of gelatine and cream – the freaky synth-pop circus of Natalie Sharp, otherwise known as the Lone Taxidermist, frame the environment. On stage groping herself in a costume made of fishnets and inflatable hands, there doesn’t seem to be any discernible difference between what she’s doing on stage and what’s happening in the audience. Nor does there seem to be any discernible difference between Sharp’s screaming, squelching and singing; her body becomes an interface for sound. Her collective of so-called ‘arsonists’, who look more like plastic dolls than human beings, begin to unravel a large roll of plastic, wrapping us all up in it. One big glutinous mess.
By the end of the night, those not quite ready to go home bumble towards The Square With No Name on Bridge Street, before heading to The Press Club on Queen Street, where people who don’t want to go home usually manage to find a second one.