Dear readers — “Might help fill in a few blanks,” says Shaun Ryder. “This book proves anything’s possible in Manchester,” says Aitch. If you’ve picked up a copy of Sacha Lord’s new memoir Tales from the Dancefloor and have skimmed the blurbs, you’ll know what various local music guys make of the book, which recounts Lord’s rise to success. But what, more importantly, does our cultural reviewer make of it? For one, Lord has the perfect personality for writing a memoir, Sophie writes — his complete lack of self-consciousness means it’s a juicy read. But as a cultural history of post-90s Manchester? It leaves a little more to be desired.
But before we get there — a Manchester-born artist is nominated for the Turner Prize and there’s a new health clinic on the Curry Mile in our news briefing.
Editor’s note: This essay is for paying members, which is why it’s paywalled part way down. If you’re not a paying member, join now to go deep inside the book being advertised to you on every street corner. Does it live up to the hype?
🏥 A new mobile clinic is opening on the Curry Mile as part of Our Future Health project, the government’s health research programme and the largest in the UK. 16 of these clinics are now open in Greater Manchester, with 84,000 people signed up. According to organisers, focusing on developing a more diverse set of volunteers will help address health inequalities. “This work depends on understanding more about what’s driving health inequalities,” says local GP Dr Mohiuddin Miah. “And then being able to find new ways to prevent and treat disease.”
🏙 Ian Simpson — the influential architect we profiled over the weekend along with his business partner Rachel Haugh — tells the BBC the city centre would be a better place to live if its population rose to 200,000, almost triple the current number. Simpson’s philosophy is that more people would mean better services, overall creating a “real buzz”.
🏆 Claudette Johnson, the Manchester-born visual artist, has been nominated for the Turner Prize. Her work includes a portrait of the slavery abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond, which was commissioned by the Guardian for its Cotton Capital series looking at the paper’s — and Manchester’s — links to slavery. This year’s prize has only raised £30,000 in sponsorship, reports the Times. That’s not even enough to cover the prize money. It has raised questions about the relevance of the prize, first awarded 40 years ago this year.
By Sophie Atkinson
At the beginning of Sacha Lord’s memoir, Tales from the Dancefloor, the nightlife entrepreneur admits to “two major slices of luck”. The first? Being born in Manchester, “an incredible city to be who you want to be, where you can write your own story”. The second bit of good fortune was when he was born, enabling him: “to be around when the acid house explosion changed the face of nightlife for ever.”
But has Lord’s rise to the heights of the nightlife sector — signing books for queues of fans, his face peering out from adverts across the city — been lucky? In the book, Lord and his co-writer Luke Bainbridge (a former editor at the Observer Music Monthly) detail a childhood which mixes the rough with the smooth. Yes, he grew up in Altrincham and his parents could afford to pay a tutor to help him get into Manchester Grammar School. But on the other hand, there’s his father — a man whose only moment of parental pride in the book is when his wife stumbles across then-schoolboy Lord’s porn stash. There are plenty of moments where his father’s lack of business sense leaves the family short of money.
Plus, there’s all the graft required to make it to the top of the nightlife pile: after getting the bug by putting on a few nights at the Haçienda, he starts a student night at the now-defunct club Home. After less than a year, he moves to Paradise Factory, and eventually reopens Sankeys in 2000 alongside his business partner David Vincent. All of this involves lots of wrangling: with corrupt bouncers or managers (who want to take bribes as their “tax” for working for Lord’s nights); with rivals; with gangsters; with council officials.
At a certain point, it becomes clear to Lord that it’s far more profitable to run one-off events (or a series of events, a la the Warehouse Project) than it is to run a nightclub. But running the Warehouse Project from 2006 onwards turns out to be the biggest challenge of all. Finding a location for the club night proves tricky in rapidly evolving Manchester, where old warehouses are making rapid costume changes into flats. With one key exception (we’ll get there), his story sounds like it involves far more hard work — trying and failing and trying again — than it does luck.
Telling his story involves looking back — a natural part of a memoir. But in the intro, Lord suggests he’s against dwelling excessively on the past: “Nostalgia can be a disease, and at The Warehouse Project and Parklife we’re always looking forward.” It’s a nice enough sentiment, but it’s hard to believe he really means it when half of his chapter titles are derived from Smiths songs (“Bigmouth Strikes Again”, “Belligerent Ghouls Run Manchester Schools” and so on) and if, like this reader, your promotional copy of the book sent to Mill HQ comes in a box bracketed by CDs, where opening the lid makes it pipe out a tinny version of Bicep’s 2017 anthem “Glue”.
The turntable isn’t even the most bombastic part of the book’s marketing. If you have a pulse, two functioning eyes and have been in the city centre over the past two weeks, you’ll have seen the billboards, which are everywhere. You can watch the trailer for the book on the enormous video screen on the skyscraper just behind the Britons Protection, which pummels the bystander with names of events, festivals and venues associated with Lord: The Warehouse Project; Parklife, The Haçienda. Of course, the question remains whether anyone who regularly attends The Warehouse Project (wired 19-year-olds) or spent their weekends in the Haçienda (homeowners in Heaton Moor) would buy this book. And if they wouldn’t, who is it intended for?
It’s an interesting question. The billboards become funny once you dig into Tales from the Dancefloor, because a small and not uncompelling slice of the memoir is devoted to Lord’s enthusiasm for marketing. You get the sense that he believes that he can cajole virtually anyone into buying what he’s selling — and given the popularity of so many of the events he’s behind, this might be a fair assessment.
“Flyers and flypostering was our social media, and they were hugely important to nightclubs,” he explains. There’s a great story about Paul Mason, the former operations manager at the Haçienda, opening his curtains to find there’s been an eclipse — despite it being morning, his flat is plunged into darkness. Mason goes outside and finds that someone — Lord admits that he was probably responsible — has fly-postered over the entire window of his flat. To add insult to injury, when Mason goes to scrub them off with soapy water, a police car stops to caution him for fly posting.
This energetic approach to marketing doesn’t appear to wane as the years go by. In 2014, the marketing team for Lord’s annual festival, Parklife, figures out a way to text everyone in their database while changing the name of the sender. This strategy works perfectly when the database receives a text from that year’s headliner, Snoop Dogg, telling them ‘It’s Parklife, biatch!’ with a link to buy tickets. It’s rather less successful when the same team, emboldened by their success, decide to use this technology to send a playful text from ‘Mum’, encouraging those attending afterparties to make it home for breakfast — resulting in a predictable backlash from those whose mothers had passed away or who they’re estranged from.
Stories like this are threaded through the book — and it’s great to see how willing Lord seems to cop to his mistakes. Tales from the Dancefloor made me realise just how many memoirs there are in the world which should never have been written: tactful, discreet works. By contrast, Lord has the ideal personality for a memoirist, harbouring almost zero self-consciousness.
He has no problem admitting, for example, that he’s the sort of square who used to iron his jeans every morning as a twenty-something in the 90s. Or that, the first time he tried to go to the Haçienda, he was turned away because he rocked up in a suit and tie. Or — bizarrely, for someone whose entire career has been about nightlife — how he never went to a club outside of Manchester until an international dance music conference in Miami at the age of 30.
But his openness isn’t his only quality that makes him a good fit for writing a memoir. He also seems reluctant ever to relinquish a single grudge — and as such, has plenty of material to share.
