For me, it was a dark room in Swansea, white clouds misting the air from cheap fags and a smoke machine. The carpet was alcopop-sticky, the dance floor reeking of White Musk, body odour and vomit. But the music, and the volume, and the darkness, turned Barons into a dreamland. The Breeders’ Cannonball, the Stone Roses’ Fool’s Gold, Jane’s Addiction’s Been Caught Stealing pouring out of the speakers, and the noise of us – teenagers laughing, flirting, almost bursting – slowly becoming ourselves.
One of Dave Haslam’s places was a huge room separated by pillars, buzzed diagonally with black and yellow stripes. A DJ who played Manchester’s legendary Haçienda nightclub (that hotbed of primary-coloured postmodernist architecture and, a few years after its institution, revolutionary dance music) 450 times, he is also the author of two books inspired by his own cultural heritage (pop city memoir Manchester, England and DJ history Adventures On the Wheels of Steel). He is well placed to write Life After Dark, a research-heavy journey through the worlds that exist beyond the velveteen rope, the bouncer, the cloakroom.
As much as it is a story of music, Life After Dark is a story of Britain’s cultural psyche. Our cities often include two or three unassuming places, Haslam begins, where “life-shaping moments” happen often. Eyes meet, lovers romp, bandmates bond, worlds explode. These modest clubs and venues have quietly shaped music histories, and nurtured communities “away from the mainstream” – here, gay people created secure, exploratory spaces, goths came out of the dark, even straight men wore makeup. Murky buildings you passed on the bus, their heavy doors closed all day, contained multitudes of opportunities, possibilities – and, crucially, alternatives.
Life After Dark is also a story about the working classes, tracing the British nightclub’s beginnings to the era of the music hall (moneyed banquets, bacchanals and balls have no relevance here). Taken deep into Victorian Britain, our prejudices about the “good old days” are quickly broken down. Take the sign outside the 1872 establishment that states “all persons are requested, before entering the dancing saloon, to leave at the bar their pistols and knives, or any other weapon they may have about them”. We meet the heckler at London’s Wilton’s Music Hall who gets killed by the performer he heckles; the killer gets only 14 days’ imprisonment, “on the grounds of gross provocation”. This anecdote lingers in the mind 35 pages later, when a pint glass thrown by Sid Vicious at London’s 100 Club severely injures a young woman, and 12 chapters later, when police are sitting outside Liverpool’s Cream superclub, with guns, threatened by gangs. There was blood before punk and rave. Who knew?
Haslam also shows us, consistently, how music venues are palimpsests, taking on different names as the times, and their fashions, move on. Punk HQ the Roxy in Covent Garden began life as a disco club (membership cards had “disco” crossed off them when that didn’t work out). Streatham Locarno in south London began life as a dance hall, then the place where the Clash’s Paul Simonon first enjoyed ska; then a funk and disco venue, the Studio, before featuring female boxing contests and cage-fighting in its last incarnation as Caesars (it was demolished this spring). More fascinating details about the venue are peppered elsewhere. A Mass Observation experiment was hosted there in the 1930s (“I was surprised at... the number of arms round shoulders, and the number of people holding hands quite noticeably”, the observer blushes). Then there’s the fascinatingly liberal reaction to a ban on non-Caucasian customers in 1929. “We do not believe in mixing water with wine and black with white,” club owner HS Kingdon had blustered. After his regulars bombarded the local paper with complaints, the policy was quickly dropped.
Full of vivid anecdotes though it is, Life After Dark’s chronological structure presents problems. The book’s typical reader will most likely have their heart tied to particular places and memories, so following the stories of other venues through the book, and remembering how these strands fit together, is a tough task. Birmingham’s Old Hill Plaza, for instance, set up by wily female boss Ma Regan in 1962, deserves a chapter to itself. She bossed Brian Epstein around with a booking of the Beatles, hosted nights that brought together Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and John Bonham (and, rather brilliantly, Slade’s Noddy Holder, who roadied for them in his dad’s window-cleaning van), before turning it into a bingo hall in 1972. She died in 2008 at the grand old age of 97. Today, the Plaza is an Asian banqueting venue. But this story gets dampened when it’s spread throughout the book.
Perhaps a more engaging read would have been offered by 12 in-depth chapters on special venues that say something about the British scene, and with more photographs than the slim plates in the book’s middle.
Make no mistake, though: Life After Dark is as subtly political as it is sentimental. Throughout, it rails against a world in which “clubs have become car parks, discos have become Tescos”. Many of these venues’ legacies have been forgotten in the community too, although Haslam doesn’t dish blame around.
And he’s especially good when he’s asking a befuddled Korean restaurant owner in Bristol to show him his basement – a man totally unaware that this is where The Dug Out club, trip-hop’s starting point, began.
Haslam is on to something when he talks about the role clubs played in communities as the 20th century wound on, how “embedded in the cultural and social life” they were, “in the same way that, traditionally, a university, cathedral or a factory” might have been. Early in the book, one phrase read a little histrionically: “News of the closure of venues can be greeted like a dagger in the heart of the city, with shock and mourning.” After meeting the people who made these places happen, it feels entirely apt. After all, what the clubs offered to people – the opportunities for abandonment, liberty, transcendence, acceptance – is a legacy that deserves to have its volume pumped up.
Life After Dark is published by Simon & Schuster (£20). Click here to order it for £16.
