Teenage Perverts at the Hacienda

How I spent one Monday evening way back when…

Some might say the five years before the Haçienda’s rave and Madchester years were the club’s most creative period. An era of William Burroughs, Burning Spear, videos, fanzines, self-defence classes, and teenage perverts.

For the first year or two after the club opened (in May 1982), the Haçienda was open most evenings. Of the DJs in 1983, the one I listened to the most was the long-serving John Tracy. His Tuesdays were one of my regular haunts. That, and Monday nights at the Ritz.

One of the key parts of the innovative design and programming, were two big screens on either side of the Haçienda stage. One of the early descriptions of the venue given to licensing officers before the opening was a “Videotech” rather than “Nightclub”. The video operator in the early days was Claude Bessy. Claude spliced, cut-up and compiled idiosyncratic film montages, all on slightly wobbly VHS. These were projected onto the screens. He favoured shots of dancing girls, Nazi rallies, hot air balloon disasters, and clips from films by the likes of Luis Buñuel. It was the least MTV-ish video selection imaginable.

The Haçienda was on the outskirts of town, and, like the most interesting things and the pioneering ideas, on the edge of culture. Being on the edge of culture wasn’t much help commercially. On plenty of occasions, taxi drivers would respond to my request to go to the Haçienda with “The where? The Hassy-what?”. Now, of course, taxi drivers will proudly point out the site of the club to passengers as they wait at lights on Whitworth Street West.

I’d started a fanzine called ‘Debris’ (issue two, published in January 1984, featured a long interview with Morrissey). In September 1983 I’d bought a Walkman, on 29th September I enrolled on a course to learn Czech, which fell by the wayside after four lessons. I went often to the Aaben cinema in Hulme, seeing films including Another Time, Another Place.

I was a Haçienda customer on average twice a week, maybe more. I recall going in there, sometimes alone, or with a book, and sitting at a table at the front of the balcony and watching the video cut-ups. Don’t cringe. I was happy with my life choices. I was twenty-two. I was in love with it all.

Among Tony Wilson’s ambitions for the club was for it to make a significant contribution to Manchester. He explained one of its aims; “to restore a sense of place”. Taking ‘Debris’ in there to sell at an Associates gig, getting mesmerised by Claude’s clips of eyeballs being dissected and the Soviet Army in Berlin, the club felt so much more than a music venue; it was also about ideas, art, fashion, cities, communities, life.

You may have heard it was always empty, but it wasn’t always as bad as the received histories make out. I recall it being full the night Burning Spear played (February 1984). New Order always packed the place out. The music was often top quality and interesting, with some outstanding live shows, although the DJs, as usual, have - to a greater or lesser extent - re-written their playlists to appear more cool, but in those first few years there was also lots of happenings that were culturally significant for sure. The night William Burroughs read from the stage, for example.

It was like some unpredictable, risk-taking, music-loving, art project. If the Haçienda had opened in 2025, it would have received piles of National Lottery funding. In May 1983, around the time of the club’s first birthday, there were two nights of a play; Tales From the Newgate Calendar, an adaptation of the book by Rayner Heppenstall.

Making good use of the video screening facilities, for a short while Monday nights were given over to film screenings. In my memory, this lasted just a few evenings at the beginning of 1984. They were mostly arty or political. I attended at least three of them.

I recall a surreal Polish film called The Hourglass Sanatorium and a showing of something by Kenneth Anger – possibly Scorpio Rising (but when I saw it in Paris in 2016 it didn’t seem at all familiar). My diary lets me down a little as there are Mondays when I write that I’d been to the Haçienda to see some films, without giving any detail; except on the 27th February 1984 when I make a note that the screening was of Carry Greenham Home, a 1983 documentary about the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp. I’m not sure who at the Haçienda organised the screenings; probably Penny Henry or Paul Cons, although I’m not sure he’d started working at the club at that time.

In that period – late 1983, early 1984 – there was a busy-ish programme of live shows. November and December 1983 included gigs by the Cocteau Twins and a packed Smiths gig (supported by James). For a period on Mondays that winter, there were self-defence classes for 50p a session. This was mostly aimed at women who wanted to add something extra to their strategies for dealing with street violence and harassment by men. It was an era of ‘Reclaim the Night’ marches. Berlin, a basement club down at the bottom of King St, had a weekly event called ‘Women Reclaim the Nightclub’, on women-only Wednesdays.

Back at the Haçienda in the early months of 1984 gigs included appearances by Orange Juice, the Go-Betweens, Nick Cave, and that Burning Spear show; you see what I mean about the outstanding music? On the 27th January 1984 a singer called Madonna made her European debut at the club. One Thursday at the end of March 1984 featured the Rochdale Performance Collective. I don’t know what exactly that was about.

On 2nd March 1984 I co-hosted a night of music, literature & art at the Hacienda, working alongside a couple of friends of mine from the Medlock College of Fine Art (part of what was then Manchester Poly). We invited students to cover the walls with art, sold copies of my fanzine and I DJ’d. I played 'Coup', 'White Lines', 'Do the Du' and 'Shotgun'. It was my second set at the Haçienda; the first was a month earlier warming-up for a band called Bourgie Bourgie, which barely a dozen people attended, but at least there wasn’t rain dripping through the roof.

One of the film nights featured a documentary produced by the London Lesbian and Gay Youth Video Project called Framed Youth: The Revenge of the Teenage Perverts. I recall thirty or so of us were in the audience. One of the main elements of the film is gay and lesbian teenagers interviewing people on the streets of London about their views on homosexuality. A couple of people confess they don’t know what a “lesbian” is, or hazard a guess. The attitudes are mixed, but there’s some outright hostility. Even the language around these issues seem to confuse people; one woman is asked if she’s “heterosexual” and recoils in horror, exclaiming “No, no! I’ve got three kids and a husband”.

In addition to the vox pops with the public, the film includes members of the project talking about their early sexual experiences, coming out to their family, prejudice, and gay-bashing. In a trendy self-referential way we also see the group in the throes of editing the film we’re watching. The soundtrack is decent, starting with ‘Love is a Stranger’ by the Eurythmics.

Around twenty-two minutes in, one of the participants in the film starts singing. The friend I was with and I looked at each other. He has a great voice. On the bus home it was our major take away from Framed Youth. That wee gay fella has a gift!

A few months later the wee gay fella – real name Jimmy Somerville - had a record out. I heard it on Radio One. A synth player, Larry Steinbachek, had heard Jimmy sing in the film, and very understandably was impressed; Jimmy, Larry, and Steve Bronski got together and Bronski Beat was born. The song I’d hear on Radio One was their debut, the magnificent ‘Smalltown Boy’.

‘Smalltown Boy’ launched the band. On 31st October 1984 Bronski Beat headlined at the Haçienda. Tickets were £4 but three hundred were put to one side for the unemployed (holders of UB40 cards), who could collect their tickets direct from the club. This was just before the release of the one and only Bronski Beat album The Age Of Consent; “a soundtrack for isolated homos everywhere” in Jimmy’s words.

By the Summer of 1985, Jimi Somerville had left Bronski Beat. His next venture was with Richard Coles in the Communards. Richard is also in the film Framed Youth: The Revenge of the Teenage Perverts. We see him first three and a half minutes in playing a soprano saxophone. Richard - now a high profile broadcaster and writer - has mentioned his appearance in the film a few times since, describing it as “the documentary that brought me and Jimmy Somerville together”.

Mark Ashton had been born in Oldham, studied at Catering College in Northern Ireland, and took himself off to Bangladesh for three months in 1982. His political awareness and engagement were strong. At time the film was made he was a volunteer with the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard, and an active member the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Mark first appears in Framed Youth thirty-five minute in, vividly describing his first sexual encounter. A little later in the film, his political awareness is articulated; “I started to question other things. I started thinking, well, if that's what they say about sexuality, then what about the rest of life, you know? And I started to see that basically, the whole country is not geared for the people. It's geared for the few people who are making money out of it”. He also talks about not trusting the police, who were invariably hostile to the gay community.

Mark had a notion of a culture of solidarity, which he put into action later in 1984, when he formed, with his friend Mike Jackson, the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) and collected donations for the miners on strike at the 1984 Lesbian and Gay Pride march in London. The story of this support group forms the central narrative in the film Pride (released in 2014). Actor Ben Schnetzer plays Mark. In December 1984 a concert in London called ‘Pits and Perverts’, to raise funds for the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners campaign, was headlined by Bronski Beat; this event is featured in Pride.

One of the other participants in Framed Youth: The Revenge of the Teenage Perverts is Joe Lavelle. He lives in Liverpool, and has been writing since the 1990s, first as freelance writer contributing to the likes of The Big Issue, Gay Times and other publications but, subsequently, as a short fiction writer. Six stories form his book short fiction, Alone with the Germans: gay tales from Berlin and beyond which was published in 2016.

Near the end of the film Isaac Julien appears, talking about the power of documentary film to reach a wider audience and get ideas across, but his presence isn’t acknowledged in some of the online information about the film. Isaac was in his early 20s and studying at St Martin’s School of Art at the time. He’s gone on to be a feted and high-profile maker of lyrical and documentary films and video art installations, his works later in the 1980s including Territories, This is Not An AIDS Advertisement, and Looking For Langston (described as “the artist’s pivotal film exploring Black, queer desire”). In 2023, the Tate Britain in London held a major retrospective of his work titled What Freedom Is to Me.

Framed Youth: The Revenge of the Teenage Perverts won a Grierson Award for Best Documentary, and more than forty years after thirty of us sat next to the dancefloor and watched the film on a Monday in February 1984, it’s now considered a groundbreaking and illuminating piece of work, however informal and rudimentary it appears. It speaks to the perils and challenges of the lesbian and gay life, but also the joys of community.

It captures also a specific moment; what looks now like the end of an age of innocence, before the tragedy of AIDS engulfed the gay community. In 1983, when the film was finished and released, there was awareness of the existence and dangers of AIDS and its particular threat to gay men, but, of course, absolutely no conception of just how deadly the epidemic was going to be. By 1985, though, AIDS was an all-too visible issue, often, in the media, and elsewhere, discussed in brutally homophobic ways.

The film was broadcast on TV for the first time on Channel 4 in December 1986.

It’s available here, in full…

After Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, Mark Ashton continued his political campaigning. However, having been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, Mark died in February 1987. The song ‘For a Friend’ on the album Red by the Communards was written by Jimmy Somerville and Richard Coles in his memory (the song plays over the end credits of Pride).

As for the Haçienda, a year on from the film show, Friday’s weekly ‘Nude Night’ was causing a stir in the hands of DJs Mike Pickering and Martin Prendergast. It would evolve into an influential and pioneering house music club night.

In 1986, the Haçienda commissioned artist David Mach to create an installation in the club. He stacked thousands of 12" singles of 'Confusion' by New Order around two of the central steel pillars, cutting down space available on the dancefloor. It was a reminder of the quirky, artistic side of the Haçienda, while - in an effort to rejuvenate the club - the management were rolling back live shows, and had begun concentrating three nights week – Mike and Martin’s ‘Nude Night’ and Thursdays and Saturdays; I was there DJing both those nights. I was even more in love with it all.

Eventually Paul Cons instigated regular weekly Wednesday club nights too. First, ‘Zumbar’, and then, from July 1988, ‘Hot’. For ‘Hot’ a swimming pool was installed by the side of the dancefloor, almost exactly at the spot where we’d sat on chairs and watched films about growing up gay, and the protests at Greenham Common. It’s something of an understatement to say that the contrast, after just four years, was mind-blowing.

The rave revolution created a sea of possibilities and, as it turned out, opportunities for a new medium for gay pride. By 1992, the flamboyant, out and proud, queer as fuck monthly ‘Flesh’ at the Haçienda - the brainchild of Paul Cons and Lucy Scher – had become established as the biggest regular gay night in Manchester’s history.

The Communards, ‘For A Friend’ (1989)…

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