It’s difficult to imagine a better Christmas gift for an older dance-head than a ticket to Sankey’s in the UK this December 27, where a full-on Haçienda reunion will take place. The Factory Records-helmed, New Order-funded club at the heart of Manchester was long a music-geek tourist destination, though it folded in 1997, long before Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People made it a wider pop-cultural referent. The Haçiendawas also a major incubator for what would become the UK acid house explosion, and the subsequent rise of DJ culture generally. Eight of its resident DJs play the Sankey's blowout: Mike Pickering, Greg Wilson, Hewan Clarke, Chad Jackson, Graeme Park, Jon Da Silva, Tom Wainwright, and Allister Whitehead.
For six years now, Andrew McKim’s Blog 51: The Haçienda has been a regular portal for ephemera from the club’s glory days, including a robust selection of live DJ mixes, particularly from the 1990s—to date, they’ve shared some 80 sets. In advance of the party, I listened to every one I could grab (not all the downloads still work, but most do) and chose a handful of the best by reunion participants (sadly, Blog 51 has no Hewan Clarke or Chad Jackson sets), including a non-Haçienda ringer. The names of individual club nights follow the dates, in chronological order.
Graeme Park: 1988 at Kula Shaker
Was Graeme Park the best British DJ of the ’80s? On Blog 51’s evidence, it seems entirely likely. Park first played the club February 26, 1988; as he told Luke Bainbridge in Acid House: The Real Story, “I actually played live on the stage [with the band] Groove before I DJed. I was still only 24 and there I was, this massive Factory fan, miming keyboards on stage at the Hacienda. I just couldn't believe I was doing it: ‘I'm performing on stage at the Hacienda, owned by Factory records and New Order!’ Then I DJ’d later at night and I thought, ‘This is great!’”
Fabulous sets from Park abound on Blog 51. November 24, 1990 is a full-on “Madchester” primer, loaded (geddit?) with the druggy-slow “Funky Drummer” breakbeats that spread through the town like kudzu. October 6, 1991 sounds positively dosed, keynoted by a vocal declaring, “I’ve got the sweet/Ecstasy feeling, ecstasy feeling,” and living up to it. But this one really captures the raging-to-live feel of ’88’s Edenic new Summer of Love—not least because it’s also hip-hop-heavy while still feeling utterly dance-centric. Unlike most British DJs of the time, Park could really mix; unlike too many DJs then or now, he could also really pace. He’s amazingly confident here at juggling both beats and moods, at a time when there were no walls on what “dance music” could be. Hand to heart, dear reader: The first time I played this set, about four-and-a-half minutes into side two, I found myself saying out loud: “Dude, you are murdering it.”
Jon Da Silva and Mike Pickering: December 12, 1990 at Void
A twofer—cheating, maybe, but good as Da Silva’s and Pickering’s individual Blog 51 mixes are, this back-to-back session rises above them. It’s stark and futuristically techy, as well as a snapshot of the way the music was beginning to splinter into bleep-and-bass, vocal house, etc. But here it’s all still connected, however tenuously, as when Da Silva and Pickering balance the First Choice “Let No Man Put Asunder” a cappella, long a house music staple, over Mr. Monday’s bleepy-techno “Future.” Lively, intense, and well recorded, it bubbles nonstop.
Allister Whitehead: August 1992 at Shine
“Acid house” had been the UK’s broad-beam term for the era’s electronic dance music, be it minimal or jacking house tracks from Chicago and headier Detroit techno. By the early ’90s, the Haçienda’s DJs were mainly just playing house—vocal- and piano-driven, more club- than rave-oriented, “mature” rather than teen-screaming. Whitehead, a Nottingham native who began playing in 1987 at age 17, fitted that path to a tee: This summer ’92 set points straight to the mainstream “superclub” house that would come to the fore a couple years later. He also shows how toothsome that style can be in un-stodgy hands.
Tom Wainwright: December 26, 1992
Boxing Day, Manchester—as Andrew McKim puts it on Blog 51, “Imagine the atmosphere, the vibe, the anticipation—Christmas Day is over... no work the next day, all your friends out with only one thing on [their] mind—party excess and letting loose.” Even now, that’s precisely the feeling here. It cuts in at the end of CLS’s “Can You Feel It?”—the most euphoric moment of the Todd Terry catalogue—and keeps the pace up for 90 straight minutes. “Rave” may have been a fading dream in Britain by that point, but you’d never know it from this.
Greg Wilson: August 8, 2010 at Big Chill
This is a major cheat, but it’s also unavoidable: Wilson was only a resident at the Haçienda for a few months in 1983, and the only item by him on Blog 51 is a nine-minute electro snippet—tantalizing, but not remotely fair a representation. Wilson is an erudite commentator on DJ culture as well as one of its sturdier practitioners, having been at it a long time (though he did retire for 20+ years). Though he’s never afraid to afraid to dip into surefire disco and pop and rock classics, he uses them cunningly. A Wilson set genuinely goes places, and this monster hour from a festival in Ledbury, Herefordshire, takes that to an extreme so shameless it’s blindsiding. I’m not going to spoil a damn thing. You’ll thank me for it later.
Bonus Beats
If more “Madchester” is what you seek, this Dave Booth set from 1990 isn’t so “Funky Drummer”-laden, but it’s still definitive. If house pianos and divas are your jam, run don’t walk to Tommy D Funk at Manchester’s Dry Bar 201, from 1995.