Breaking Into Heaven: THE RISE, FALL AND RESURRECTION OF THE STONE ROSES by MICK MIDDLES

Author:MICK MIDDLES [MIDDLES, MICK]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-85712-789-1
Publisher: Omnibus Press
Published: 2012-01-25T16:00:00+00:00

“It’s a fucking nightmare, Madchester, you go down to The Hacienda and there’s all these guys in their mid-thirties, suddenly wearing Day-Glo T-shirts and dancing very badly. Same guys who used to go to punk gigs. They are pathetic. Madchester is pathetic. That’s why I moved to fucking Edinburgh … to get away from all those cunts.” Mark E. Smith.

Smith had a point. While the entire city celebrated (though what it was celebrating wasn’t exactly clear), Smith saw the intelligence of the Manchester scene draining away in a dizzying mess of headlines. Walking along Whitworth Street, or Deansgate, or even through dank, unlovely Piccadilly, gave you the odds-on chance of an encounter with some eager film crew, hastily assembling footage for some projected ‘Madchester’ documentary that would never get made. Alternatively, there would be some industrious hack, haunting the café bars, scribbling down notes, affecting a Paul Theroux worldly travel writing stance, attempting to pin down the heart and soul of Madchester. And the city that eventually emerged, via a hundred of these pieces, remained largely unrecognisable. A mythical city emerged from the blizzard of journalism which descended on Manchester, grafted from the chemically assisted musings of a thousand students, all ready to spew forth tales of a dance trance nirvana, of a city of strobe lights and Orangina, of an encroaching café bar network. A sci-fi vision of a hypnotic, pulsating, vibrant scene. But few people, other than Smith, noticed that in the heady rush to sample a peaking city night life, the enchanting post-industrial arrogance that had always marked the city’s character was silently draining away. The point needs to be made. Madchester was a state of mind. An exciting, numbing, dizzying state of mind, for sure, but it wasn’t the soul of a city.

If one is to be pedantic about this, it all began as a marketing joke. NME‘s Danny Kelly, among others, would claim the dubious honour of burdening the city with the ‘Madchester’ tag, but the real source stems from the fevered mind of Factory film maker, and one half of The Bailey Brothers, Keith Jobling. After a tongue-in-cheek suggestion by Jobling, Factory produced three daft T-shirts. The first, a curiously vicious take on the government’s Anti-Heroin campaign read, ‘JUST SAY NO TO LONDON’. The second, and most idiosyncratic, shirt bore the inexplicable legend, ‘MADCHESTER. NIGEL MADSELL FROM THE ISLE OF MAD’, while the third adopted the title of The Bailey Brothers’ never-to-be-completed filmic tale of joyriding, ‘MAD FUCKERS’. And that, basically was that. Despite the heavy protestations of Happy Mondays, Factory Records insisted on calling their groundbreaking release, ‘The Madchester EP’; the image of a city insane, simply mushroomed overnight, and ‘MADCHESTER’ screamed from a million unofficial (and all too swiftly shrinking) T-shirts.

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