The untold story of the Haçienda's Last Stand

It’s impossible to tell the story about the Haçienda’s last stand, without telling my own story along with it. The two stories will, for me, be forever intertwined and are impossible to separate.

My story starts in January 2000, two weeks after my 20th birthday. This was nearly a full three years after the Haçienda had closed its doors forever. Back then, Manchester was a city undergoing a transformation. New buildings were starting to be thrown up and old buildings were being demolished and the sites turned into luxury apartments and student accommodation. There was even talk of turning some of Ancoat’s Old Mills into flats! The Madchester era as it had been known was over. Ian Brown was just about coming out of jail after threatening to chop an air hostess’s hands off and the Chemical Brothers were just coming of age. Outside my old student house in Victoria Park painted onto one of the neighbours walls was proclaimed the message “FREE IAN BROWN”. It was also painted around the corner on Dickinson Road, close to where the Chemical Brothers had lived when they were students in Manchester.

Who is Ian Brown? I had wondered the first time I saw it. How little I knew. But that was all about to change.

In January 2000 my friend and I moved out of our house in Victoria Park owing to a fallout between my friend and his girlfriend who we also lived with. They had irreconcilable differences and so my friend and I moved out.

It was the best we move we ever made.

After a long search, we found space in a terrace in Rusholme Place behind the Sangam curry house. The property was already inhabited by two French school teaching assistants, who it transpired had already completed their degrees and were basically working in the UK to improve their English.

One of the two girls was dating a local guy who lived just off Great Western Street, but he quickly disappeared after there was some kind of dispute between her and him over purchasing tickets for a night out somewhere. We knew something had gone wrong when the £30 she had given him to buy tickets for something turned up shoved through the letterbox. So he left and shortly after the girls met another guy in an internet cafe (no Wi-Fi, laptops or i-phones in those days!). He was also French and worked as a waiter at Henry’s up by the Gmex. Previously a surfer from Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, he was in the UK also to improve his English and to travel.

Once we formed this group of five, this is where the adventure really started.

Had you asked me if I had ever been in a nightclub prior to the year 2000, I would have said “Of course I have, I go every week!” However, a visit to Planet K up on Oldham Street (now Mint Lounge) gave me my first indication that maybe I was in the wrong. By 2000, Planet K was a bit of a dump. But it was the first place I ever saw where the crowd danced facing the DJ booth. I had never seen that before. Additionally, Planet K had two very unique features... the first of these were the flashing lights behind the bar (which coming from the back-water post-industrial town of St Helens, I’d certainly not seen before) and secondly, the door to the men’s toilet is the only door I’ve ever pushed open and have it open faster than the force I pushed it with. Sounds bizarre I know, but trust me, it was made of matchwood.

My trip to Planet K was my first in a ‘proper’ nightclub. But I didn’t dance, not really. Firstly, I didn’t know how to. Secondly, I was too afraid that if I bumped into anyone they might hit me, because that’s what goes on in every nightclub in the world, right?

A week after this, our new housemates came home at nearly 5am one Sunday morning having gone to something called ‘Tangled’ at ‘The Phoenix’. They said it had been amazing. And judging by the state of the guy that one of our housemates brought home that night with her there was certainly something unusual going on at The Phoenix.

They told us that there was another ‘Tangled’ night on the following Saturday and suggested that we should go as it was so good. We shrugged our shoulders and said “Okay, we’ll come”.

Saturday came. I was quite nervous going into the place and made a point of becoming as intoxicated as possible shortly after arrival to take the edge off the nerves. Why was I nervous? Well, I was quite introverted and shy at that age, short on confidence and low on self esteem and I knew I was heading into a place where I would be expected to dance! that made me pretty nervous.

Let me say, that stepping into the Phoenix nightclub for the first time was like stepping into another world. I had never seen anything like it. Although it was still early, the place was already packed full of people, all of them dancing whilst facing the DJ booth and most bizarrely of all, people were SMILING! It was incredible. The crowd seemed to be at one with one another and I could see that this was pretty much a very local crowd. There were very few students in this place, or at least I certainly couldn’t identify any that were what I would call ‘studenty’.

Shortly after handing my coat into the cloakroom, I started dancing in a dark part of the club near to the back where no one would see my shocking attempts of trying to move with any sense of rhythm, and of course, I had made a point of getting pretty intoxicated. However, being inexperienced in such matters, without realising it I had had too much without realising it; in fact I was so intoxicated that at one point I heard a friend of mine shouting me from a far away hill-top. But then her voice got louder and louder and I realised that she wasn’t shouting me from a hill-top, but was in fact stood right in front of me shaking me! I hadn’t even realised she was there!

This was the first time in my life that I had ever been in a trance and I had never experienced anything like that before. At that exact moment, a tall man with spiky hair walked right past me chuckling, he’d clearly seen what had happened and was smiling to himself about it. I was to find out in the subsequent weeks that this was in fact Terry Pointon, one of the Tangled resident DJs. I walked to the bar just after this feeling my chest was about to burst and decided to get some water. The girl on the bar took one look at me, smiled and said, "Now what can I get you?"

The night was amazing. The people were amazing. The music was amazing. The after parties we held at our house in Rusholme every Sunday morning were amazing, and they went onto the early hours of Sunday every time.

Every Saturday I went to the Phoenix. My confidence soared. I learned to dance and became a Tangled regular. I stopped associating with people at my Uni and hung out only with my housemates and other clubbers. No one on my course at Uni had any inclination of how good those experiences were and it would have been impossible for me to convey it to them. So I never attempted to. Only when people asked me where I had been at the weekend and I told them ‘The Phoenix’ did I get a few funny looks. No one on my course went to the Phoenix. One of the bouncers had been shot there not long before and therefore only crazy people and student hating Mancs went to the Phoenix. That always made me laugh. Being from a family of Scousers, being a massive Liverpool Football Club supporter and having played football against Steven Gerrard at youth level, I couldn’t take such prejudices seriously when it came to The Phoenix. And you know, eighteen months earlier in 1998 when I was just 18 years old, I had been headbutted in Manchester because of my accent in O’Shea’s pub; someone with twenty years on me had overheard my accent and taken exception to it. The truth was that although there were a lot of Scallies in The Phoenix and some older types with shaved heads who you’d expect to see on the terraces of Maine Road every Saturday, none of them gave a fuck where I was from. It was always about the music.

So on it went like this from February 2000 onwards. .The last day of April arrived and at this point, my next door neighbour told me that he was going to attend the Reclaim the Streets anti-globalisation protest the next day at Piccadilly Gardens. He asked if I wanted to come but I turned him down as I had lectures. He, of course, didn’t have lectures. Let me tell you about my next door neighbour... before I got to know him well, I was very wary of him and regarded him as being a bit dodgy. Going to the Phoenix taught me to be far more open-minded and to take people as you find them, and as I got to know him a friendship grew.

His story was that he had come to Manchester from South Wales with a friend of his who was being sentenced that day. After attending court to give his friend a hug before he was taken away to serve his custodial sentence, my next door neighbour realised that he didn’t have the train fare to get back home. So he’d stayed in Manchester that night on the street, blagged work somewhere the next day and decided to stay on in the city for a while longer. Then he found a place in Rusholme and that was how we met him.

Anyway, the 1st of May was always the official day for ‘May-Day Protests’ against Capitalism. You may recall that some of the banks in London got a good caning on the 1st of May 2000, well some of them did in Manchester too. Not that there was large scale civil unrest, but it certainly wasn’t a peaceful protest either.

My next door neighbour came home in the late afternoon of the 1st of May, telling me excitedly what had been happening and that also someone at the protest had given him a piece of paper with a phone number on, and that you had to call it to find out where the ‘Warehouse Party’ was being held that evening.

As my neighbour didn’t have a mobile phone (BT had long ago disconnected him) he asked if he could use my mobile phone to call the number and find out where the party was. I was of course also invited. Knowing how crazy my neighbour was, I knew there had to be something in this so I said I was definitely coming along too.

Shortly after, the French guy I lived with showed up at the house after coming back from Leeds. I told him about the alleged Warehouse Party that evening and said he should come, but he was sceptical; mainly because he was extremely tired.

Anyway, as he was tired he took some convincing but he finally agreed to come with me and I was glad to have him come. Being five years older than I was, I felt safer knowing that he would be there alongside me whatever happened.

However, my other housemates said that there was no way that they were coming. The girls had to work in the morning and the other guy had an assignment to write for Uni the next day. To some degree, they mocked me and said it would more than likely be a wild goose chase with no end result. To be fair, that seemed the most likely outcome, however we decided to ignore their comments and when darkness came we phoned the ‘Party Line’ and followed the directions it gave. We didn’t have to walk too far, but the directions given on the recorded voicemail took us to a park in Hulme.

When the three of us got near to the park, we were horrified to see it completely overrun by police. Clearly there was going to be NO partying tonight. However, we still continued towards the park and then suddenly, from out of the shadows came a lad in his mid-twenties who whispered to us, “Are you here for the party?” So we said “Yes”. He responded, “Okay, follow me but don’t say a word...”

So now the four of us approached the park and walked directly towards the police. I was starting to feel a heady mix of excitement and fear as the lad we were with approached a WPC and asked “Can we go in the park please?” She said, “No, not tonight”. To which the lad responded “Oh pleeease? We really want to play on the swings!” The WPC just laughed and said “No, not tonight, come back tomorrow”. So we walked away from the police, passed the park and kept going into the bowels of Hulme. As we turned into numerous different streets, the lad kept looking over his shoulder making sure that we weren’t being followed and then after a short walk, we entered a darkening, rear entry. We walked down the entry and then the lad knocked on the rear gate of house’s back garden. Someone opened the gate and we saw there were already about 60 people in the garden quietly waiting. So that was the plan! The party wasn’t in the park, but was being used as a meeting point to collect people. Very clever.

The lad who had dropped us off there once again disappeared into the darkness, presumably to pick up more stragglers. We stayed in this garden for about an hour, with more people being dropped off there in small groups as we had been. With so many people waiting in the garden, it was inevitable that the noise levels were going to increase as we chatted. This led to someone having to shout “SHHHHHH!!!!” every so often, after all; we didn’t want to give ourselves away.

After we were shushed for the last time, it was announced that we were now going to make our way to the secret party venue and that we had to make our way there in silence and try to stay as close to one another as possible. The people leading us were extremely organised, they had radio walky-talkies and were very specific in their instructions.

As we emerged from the garden in pairs into the rear entry, we were greeted by another gate opening on the opposite side of the entry from which another group of people were spilling out! So there were two groups of us now and in total there were something like 200 of us. We started making our way excitedly to wherever the hell we were going, taking all of Manchester’s back routes, pedestrian tunnels and quiet streets around Hulme. At one point the group had become too spread out and we all paused so that everyone could catch up. The party organisers were just that – organisers. By communicating with spotters via their walky-talkies, they were able to know when it was safe to cross the road and exactly where the police were located; in fact, they had completely outsmarted the police and had spotters on various rooftops all over the city centre.

We arrived into a part of the city centre that I recognised and we paused as the organisers explained that we were now going to head up the steps of Deansgate Station and take the pedestrian bridge across Whitworth Street West to the opposite side. It is of course possible to just walk across the road on foot, however the party organisers were rightly concerned that if spotted, 200 young people crossing the road on the same evening that there had already been trouble could arouse police suspicions.

So we ran up the steps of Deansgate Station onto the platform. Back in those days, I was built like a greyhound, super-fit from all that clubbing and I had a 28” waist. So needless to say I was right at the front of the group. Sprinting up the station steps towards the platform, there was a security guard sitting on a bench on the station platform. Seeing me and a couple of lean others that he probably could’ve taken on, he stood up as soon as he saw us; however a second later 200 other people spilled onto the steps behind me and he quickly sat down and folded his arms!

Our group leader ran to the pedestrian footbridge but to his dismay, it was locked. He attempted to kick the door down but quickly gave up when he bounced off it, so we went back down the steps to many bemused looks from the well-to-do looking passengers sitting in First Class on a waiting train.

We started crossing Whitworth Street West just as a police riot van was driving past along Deansgate itself. Miraculously, it didn’t see us so we crossed the road safely and headed up the steps on the opposite side. We ran towards the Metrolink Line and then headed down the side of the canal. As we were now in the city centre proper, I was beginning to wonder where in the hell we were heading. I had been expecting that we would break into some industrial complex in the arse end of Hulme, but now we were in Central Manchester so where the fuck where we going? I had no clue. I turned to a guy I was running alongside who was about ten years older than me and I said “Any idea where we’re going?” He said “Yeah, I think it’s the same as last time”. So I said “Where did you go last time?” He responded matter of factly “The Hacienda”.

The Hacienda! Wow! It was impossible for me to put into words the surge of excitement I felt at this point. To be fair, I could barely believe what I was hearing. By the year 2000, the Hacienda had already passed into the status of legend. Closed for three years which was one year before I came to Manchester, it always hurt me that I had never had the opportunity to go – I was too young. Having gotten so into clubbing by this point in my life, for me, the ultimate dream would’ve been to go the place where it all began in Manchester, the Hacienda. For both me and my housemates, just to go once would’ve represented the ultimate dream. To break into the place and go to an illegal rave hadn’t even come into the equation. None of us would have ever dreamed such a thing would be possible. And it was possible, although it shouldn’t have been as there had already been one illegal party the year before which the police had shut down. Surely it should have been impossible to use the same location again?

I was still in shock as we went along the side of the canal, under the Albion Street bridge and to the side of the building itself. The Hacienda’s main doors were of course at street level, but we weren’t at street level; walking in through the main doors would have been a bit too obvious, so up the steel fire escape stairs we went at the building’s side, from canal level, two at a time like animals entering Noah’s ark, only in complete silence. As I reached the top of the staircase we arrived inside the pitch black building. I could see nothing, only darkness, and hear nothing, other than the whispering of other people who had gone in ahead of us. With so many people to get in through the door we had to back up to let everyone in so it took some time. We were all very nervous but as the last person came in, the heavy, steel fire escape door was closed behind us. We were in!

Then we heard it ,”VRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR”. Then again, “VRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR”. The noise was deafening. My French housemate turned to me and said “What the fuck is that?” He had no idea what was going on. But I knew. Being handy with tools I’d have recognised that sound anywhere. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t see anything. “They’re drilling the door shut”. I told him “They’re WHAT?” he asked. I explained “They’re drilling the metal door shut, presumably so that the police can’t get in later”. My housemate looked really shocked; presumably this wasn’t the norm on Reunion Island.

Just after, the lights came on. Yes, the LIGHTS! I don’t know if they had by-passed the mains supply, or if there was a generator, but we had electricity and this was my first ever glimpse of the Hacienda’s interior. It was a big space, with a high ceiling and two staircases against the back wall leading to the mezzanine above. The most distinctive element of the club was the (now famous) black and yellow girders that structurally supported the building. The raised dancefloor was surprisingly small and made up of wooden laminate, that had long since broken on its edges and was worked loose. We were all called over to the dance floor area of the club and given a welcome speech. The girl giving us the talk who was no older than 25, explained that this was going to be an all night party, we were all going to be in there until the end as there was no way out as we had locked ourselves in. The police were expected to attend at some point but our organisers didn’t know whether they would be likely to break the doors down and charge us, or exactly what their tactics would be. We were also told that it was likely that we would all be arrested and charged at some point and we were then given the name and phone number of a solicitor to call if that happened. Some pens went around and we all wrote the numbers down wherever we could. For me, that was on my forearm. With the housekeeping over, we were told that they would now put the music on and that it was time to “Fucking Party!!!”

So we did. The music went on through the loudspeakers (God knows where they had got those from) and everyone began to dance and enjoy themselves. I decided to go for a walk around and explore this famous old club; I headed towards the back wall and was amazed to see that the bar was open. Romantically lit with candles, they had staff serving and I bought two bottles of organic beer and took them back to my housemate. I always remember how surprised he looked as he said “Where did you get those???” I said “The bar”, he said, ”The what?!?” I said “The bar! Look, the fucking bar is open!!!”. And it was. And really, this was no normal bar, they sold beer, but they sold a lot more too. You could buy anything at that bar. Anything. And we did, as did most of the other people in the club. They were very organised. Even the toilets were open, lit with candles and signed with homemade notices. Even the men’s and women’s toilets were signed and separated.

I decided to call my other housemates from my mobile and tell them what was going on. When I called, they were all at our place in Rusholme. When I told them where I was the response came in absolute disbelief “Fuck Off!” was the reaction. They thought I was lying. But I wasn’t. As the reality sunk in with them that they could have been here with us, they said that they were coming down immediately. I told them that they wouldn’t be able to get in as the doors were drilled shut but they said that they were still coming anyway!

So I went back to partying and we danced and danced and danced. From time to time, the music was stopped and an announcement would be made. The first one went along the lines of “Okay, the police know we’re here now. We’ve been speaking to them by phone but we’re not sure what their intentions are as they’re not giving much away. There’s no more news at the moment but just be prepared in case they do break the doors down and come in heavy handed. If we get any more news we’ll let you know. But for now – let’s keep partying!” Then the music went back on and everyone started dancing again.

Shortly after, my mobile phone rang. It was one of my housemates. He said “We’ve just driven up but we can’t get anywhere near to you. The police have cordoned off Whitworth Street and the whole surrounding area. I’ll call you if we find out anything else... I can’t believe I didn’t come with you...” Another one of my friends texted me just after and said I was “Living his dream”. And maybe I was, but soon it would become a nightmare.

But not yet...

At this point my nextdoor neighbour approached me and asked me if some of his acquaintances could use my mobile phone. I’ll be honest, I was a little wary of this and wondered if I’d ever see my phone again. I gave it to him anyway, how could I refuse after he was the one who had invited me? Fifteen minutes later he brought it back to me.

You might think it’s a bit snotty to have an attitude like that, but I should point out that unfortunately, parties like the one I was attending didn’t just attract nice people, they also attract crazy people and some downright nasty people. I saw some mild aggression that night between attendees, but nothing major. More than likely just the results of someone being overly coked up. I saw some funny stuff too. At one point, a local guy came up to my housemate and recognising that he didn’t look English asked him “Where are you from?” My housemate’s response, “I come from a French, Tropical, Island”. The guy started laughing and said “What the FUCK are you doing in here?!?” My housemate just pointed at me and said “I’m with him”. Afterwards my housemate said to me “Thank you for this”. I just laughed.

I decided to have a look around the rest of the main room and climbed the stairs to the mezzanine floor. Up there was a view down to the dancefloor and there were also enclosed rooms or booths up there too. I was nervous looking around up there alone as it was so dark, but I went into one of the rooms anyway and noticed that there were sleeping bags laid out in there. However, I didn’t investigate further as I was quickly overpowered by the smell of human faeces. It was apparent to me that in order to organise a party like this, the building must have been squatted for some time, and there was the evidence. I didn’t like it up there, it was squalid and felt unsafe so I went back downstairs quickly.

Back on the dancefloor we were starting to sober up a bit as the party went into the early hours of the morning. But it wasn’t because we weren’t intoxicated... as I said, there are crazy people who attach themselves to this kind of scene and someone, somewhere in the building had decided to start a fire. Our first inclination of this was when the main room started to fill with smoke. The main room itself has a high ceiling so at first, we weren’t overly concerned, however as time elapsed the smoke began to fill the room and descend lower. Now in the real world, the normal thing to do is to exit via the fire escape. But we couldn’t do this of course as the fire exit itself had been drilled shut. At this point panic started to grip us all. The music was turned off. The girl who was doing the announcements told us that we were now going to abandon the party and attempt to leave the building, and that they were currently trying to open the door. But they couldn’t get it open.

In securing the door from the police, they had put us all in a death trap with no way out. People were really starting to get scared now as the smoke was starting to choke us up a bit, and I started to contemplate that I may not actually make it out of here at all. Then suddenly, at that moment salvation arrived. A man came running into the main room carrying a brand new looking fire extinguisher shouting “It’s out, I put it out!” Everyone cheered, but more with relief than anything else. At this point the girl doing the announcements pointed out to everyone that this was an old building and requested that people didn’t start wandering off onto the various floors or basements and doing their own thing. People had clearly been doing that and you have to wonder what their intentions were.

In any case, the fire was now out, the music went back on and we carried on partying! This went on for a while longer and I was still getting the occasional call from my other housemates asking me what was going on inside the building. I went back to the bar to get something to steady my nerves. Yep, a cup of tea. No, really. They had a stainless steel urn going on the bar as well and I had a cup of tea in a ceramic mug. They didn’t even charge me for it. Of all the experiences that night, having a cup of tea stood on the dancefloor of the Hacienda knowing that I was right in the centre of a police siege has got to be the most surreal. But it really happened, just like that.

Shaken up by the smoke incident, the party didn’t go on for much longer and about half an hour later the music was finally stopped and we were given our final announcement. It went something like this, “Okay, thanks to everyone for coming. We’re going to get the door open now and exit the way we came in. Anyone who wants to leave can do so. Anyone who wants to stay can also do so. We’ve been told that the police are here and are waiting for us in high numbers outside. Good luck.”

We moved slowly towards the steel fire door which was now being opened and the daylight streamed into the building hurting our eyes. In my possession, I had two items that I hadn’t arrived with. The first of these was the ceramic mug that I had been given my cup of tea in. The second was a piece of laminate wooden flooring that I had broken off the edge of the dancefloor a little earlier. This was to be my very own souvenir of the night, a keepsake to remind me of this one off occasion forever. However at this point, the reality dawned on me that it was likely that I was about to be arrested and the last thing I wanted to have on me was a sharp piece of wood that could lead me to being charged with carrying an offensive weapon and theft from the building. So as I neared the door, I tossed it. But the cup, I pocketed – surely there was no charge could be brought against me for carrying a cup!

We approached the door in twos and reached the top of the staircase. Looking down towards the canal towpath at the bottom, there were hundreds of police at the bottom waiting for us. They were completely kitted out in full riot gear, helmets, shields, batons, the full lot. We made our way down the fire escape stairs nervously as the police had left no space at the bottom for us to pass. I was quite close to the front of the group along with my housemate and some other friends we had made during the night. As we got closer to the bottom of the steps, the police stood firm behind their shields and raised their batons. Somewhere far behind us on the staircase, one dickhead shouted “Just fucking push through them!” That was easy for him to say from the back, but being nose-to-nose with a shielded riot squad gave a slightly different perspective. As we got to the bottom, the police backed off, leaving just enough space for people to get off the bottom of the staircase and walk back on themselves towards Albion Street. No one was allowed to walk ahead as the towpath was completely blocked with coppers. It’s difficult to explain how intimidating that was, because you have to remember that the canal towpath is extremely narrow, with a wall on one side and water on the other. If the police decide to attack you, you really have got nowhere to go, other than down.

But so it transpired that the police had decided to let the majority of us go. We walked along the canal towpath and there were police waiting along its length. The police lined the Albion Street Bridge and were pulling out known offenders from the crowd both in front and behind of us. Several times, I heard comments from policemen along the lines of “Alright Dave, fancy seeing you here. Now FUCKING GET OVER HERE!” as they arrested those people who were already previously known to them. But that didn’t apply to me and as we got away from the police, the sense of relief was tremendous. At this point I started to realise that not only had I had just the most fantastic night of my entire life under dubious legal circumstances, but it appeared that I was now also going to get away with it.

With my housemate, nextdoor neighbour and some girls we had met in the club, we walked into Castlefield, crossed the white pedestrian footbridge and slowly made our way back to Rusholme. What a night it had been.

Needless to say, I didn’t make it my lectures that day; how could I? For one I was still in shock from the whole experience and secondly, I hadn’t slept. So we went to an off-licence and bought alcohol, before we made for Whitworth Park and sat around an old concrete foundation near its centre on which we started a fire. So you have to picture the scene, its 7:30am in the morning on a weekday and we’re sat around in the centre of the park drinking alcohol by a fire. People are walking and cycling through the park, making their way to work and to lectures. It must have appeared truly bizarre. I particularly remember the looks on the faces of the Malaysian students as they made their way past us (earlier than the English students I noted) and we shouted to them “Morning!” or “Cheers!” They didn’t know what to make of us and I guess they must have thought we were homeless. If only they had known that I could have been quite easily sat next to them in one of the lecture theatres!

When we returned home we felt like heroes. Everyone congratulated us and wanted to hear the story again and again. We were all clubbers and took the whole scene very seriously, and for my housemates, it had been an immensely proud moment that we had had some of our own at this one off historic event. It is always like that when you have attended something amazing. And this had certainly been that.

And now, eleven years on I've decided to finally tell this story. I haven’t told it to many people, as It’s not a story you can tell many people without getting either judgmental looks or looks of extreme jealousy. So generally, I have kept it to myself.

After May the 1st 2000, I carried on going clubbing at Tangled, and to this day, some of the best times I have had in my life were during this period. Even now the hair on the back of my neck stands up thinking about those days

But sadly, despite all of this the period ended poorly for me and by February 2001, our friend group had broken up due the combined effects of some poor decisions being made by different people in the house, whilst at the same time being too into the house music ‘lifestyle’. I went clubbing a couple of times in 2005 and 2006, but never again to The Phoenix which felt like the scene of a crime after the break up of my friend group. That aside, my clubbing days were finished and I had some very difficult years to get through.

Fast forward to 2011, which is ten years on from the last Tangled I attended in early 2001. In March, I was laid off from my job due to the recession and left the UK to find work overseas. This I was successful at and I found work teaching English in South America. Out there, away from the rat race and the pressures of life in the UK, I finally rediscovered what I had lost all of those years ago; my love for life. I realised that what had happened to me all those years ago had taken an entire decade to fully recover from. But, in South America, I found myself going out to house music clubs and I made friends with some of the other teachers out there who were into the dance music scene too.

I returned back to the UK at the end of August and decided to start looking into what had happened to the whole scene after I walked out on it. Tangled it appeared, had gone. I had missed the boat but managed to read all about it's winding down through articles I found on the internet. Now there were only one-off occasional parties. And so it turned out, I was in luck as I realised that they were holding Tangled's 18th birthday party just a few weeks later.

So of course, on the 2nd of September 2011, after a ten year hiatus, I returned to Tangled. And for the first time ever in my life, I went clubbing alone. The whole experience for me was fantastic, and I danced all night, although I saw very few familiar faces. During the whole night, although it was packed in there, I recognised just three people. One of them was Terry Pointon, one was Steve Thorpe and the other a guy an ex-girlfriend dated before me. And that was it. But it was still a very friendly and up for it crowd. For me, the whole experience was very emotional and it invoked feelings in me unfelt for a decade.

Before the event I’d arrived into Manchester very early and went for a walk around my old haunts. I decided to have a pint in the Phoenix pub, which I was horrified to see had been closed down. What a tragedy.

A week later I attended another clubbing night alone in Manchester called Micron. Micron is finishing actually, it appears that it has been born, run for years and is now closing without me even knowing of it as I had been so out of touch with things. I had a lot of fun at that too.

So that’s pretty much it. As I said in the title, from Tangled, to the Hacienda, and back again. And I am back. And although I’m older now I feel in the best shape of my life and let me tell you, I can still dance. I’ve started clubbing again and I have no intention of stopping.

See you on the dancefloor. If you recognise me from the clubbing scene all those years ago be sure to introduce yourself and maybe you can come over for a cup of tea sometime – you can drink it from my Hacienda mug, of course I kept it!!!

The following photos were all taken circa May - September 2000 and nearly all at Tangled in The Phoenix. What memories...