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PILLS'N'THRILLS AND BELLYACHES
Wednesday 22.00 - 22.30
4 parts, starts 1/10/03
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| The programmes will be available to hear again for seven days after transmission via the BBC Radio Player. |
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ESSENTIAL MUSIC / LINKS
Stuart Maconie presents a four part series looking back on the period when Manchester became Madchester, and rock bands learned to dance. Here, he shares his memories of the time.
In 1989, Ian Brown, then possibly the coolest man in British music, "It's not where you're from. It's where you're at." This is an appropriately cool thing to say. But he could only say it, and it only carried any weight, because actually he was from Manchester. And in 1989 coming from that city meant a great deal indeed, wherever you were at.
I was from Wigan and working at the NME in London. This gave me a pretty neat perspective on things. As far as the Southern Rock Media Bourgeoisie were concerned, I was from Manchester (For many of the public school boys of the rock press, once you got past Nuneaton, it pretty much all became ice fields and wattle and daub huts anyway).
As far as I was concerned most of the time I was from Manchester. But actually I was from about twenty minutes down the A456 and this, I felt, gave me the right amount of critical detachment.
I have to say though that it was a critical detachment I rarely employed. I was lucky enough to be in at the birth of Madchester and I maintained a healthy immersion in it and love for the city's barmy new scene until it all very quickly went "snidey", as we used to say, and certainly long before the Stone Roses wretched public demise and the Mondays descent into squalor. I got involved two days after I first heard Bummed by the Happy Mondays and, smitten in a grubby sort of way, persuaded the NME to let me take the train up to Manchester to meet them and write about them.
It seems like I spent most of the next 18 months there, part of the strange mutual courtship dance and subsequent embrace between the paper and the Madchester scene that propelled it into the psyche of the world. This week, I start to tell the history of that fecund, buzzy, hedonistic, chemically crazed scene in Pills And Thrills And Bellyache in four weekly. Part one concerns the origin of the scene, its roots in the club dalliances of New Order and their nightclub folly the Hacienda. Part two looks at the crucial appurtenances of Madchester, the crazy clothes and associated drug culture. Part three looks at the halcyon era of Spike Island and stadiums and part four traces the eventual decline.
Was it that great? Well, I'm biased but I think it was. There may have been some dodgy characters and awful clothes but there were some moments of generational euphoria, a feeling that this was our music and that the voice of the estates and alleys could be heard above the empty din of London's pop chatter. That voice is heard in these Five Essential Madchester Tunes.
Stuart Maconie
MACONIE'S TOP MADCHESTER MOMENTS
HAPPY MONDAYS - WFL
Bummed's Wrote For Luck transformed into a bug-eyed house anthem
THE STONE ROSES - She Bangs The Drums
A sunny psychedelic afternoon in Didsbury
THE CHARLATANS - The Only One I Know
Floppy, funky, bags of Hammond; The definitive baggy track
INSPIRAL CARPETS - Joe
Not as well known as This Is How It Feels but brasher, more manic and indeed more Manc
THE STONE ROSES - Fools Gold
Madchester's finest moment.
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