In 1988, I spotted a paper nightclub flyer in the smoker’s common room of the Manchester sixth-form college where I was studying for my A-levels. A smiley face logo had been given a sunshine hat in honour of Hot, the new Wednesday night starting at The Hacienda, two miles down the road.
Summer 1988 brought us Inner City’s Big Fun, Sterling Void’s It’s Alright, Joe Smooth’s Promised Land, CeCe Rogers’s Someday and early pressings of Lil’ Louis’s French Kiss, the most gleefully pornographic acid house record I’d ever heard. For a fleeting two months during the year, I wore dungarees and grew my hair. In the hands of the right DJ, these records represented resistance, a joyful fightback against relentless societal grimness.
House music in its first incarnation carried about it the promise of utopia. Those sounds quickly colonised even the most unsmiling corners of a room full of taciturn Northerners sucking hard on our Benson and Hedges.
Manchester in the Eighties was hardly the Costa Brava. Thatcher’s Britain had depleted neighbourly goodwill to warring factions of internecine local one-upmanship.
Grown adult men could be seen weeping, shuffling up pavements clinging onto P45s, as unemployment soared. Local chief of police James Anderton was running a one-man morality crusade against any branch of fun that was not strictly Biblical. It rained, a lot.
In a city full of division and gloom, it didn’t take a psychoanalyst to figure out why our little enclave of Northern youth wanted to go out, get splattered on disinhibiting party drugs and dance to Love Sensation at ear-splitting volume, soaked to the skin with the overspill of a novelty paddling pool on a midweek night. That night was christened the start of our Second Summer of Love. It was my “I was there” moment.
I was thinking about that summer last week while listening to Drake’s unexpected musical pivot to house music on his Honestly, Nevermind record. Then I heard Break My Soul, Beyoncé’s brilliant homage to classic house, and was swiftly gripped by the middle-aged impulse to whack up the radio for an impromptu shuffle around the kitchen.
Both were direct echoes of my youth, perfectly recreated for a new generation to see their singular slivers of hope in. Perhaps parents and grandparents would join them, too, this time. House music, as both superstars know, is no longer a revolution. It is merely a musical shortcut to joy.
That feels like enough right now. “You won’t break my soul” is a pertinent hook for our times. It represents poignant messaging for the striking rail workers, anyone struggling to pay their energy bills or horrified at supermarket/petrol receipts. It fits those watching a Windrush statue unveil as compensation claims stack up or Boris Johnson and his wife smiling from the concourse of a Rwandan airport.
Those five words will, no doubt, act as perfect aural balm for the legion of Glastonbury revellers. “You won’t break my soul” is a timely reminder of the simple, beautiful power of house, a redemptive musical force for good.
In other news...
It is now all but impossible to read a news story about the Murdoch family and not view it through the ironic prism of Succession. Rather than five minutes’ contemplation on the sadness of any marriage ending, I’ve been thinking about the dissipation of Rupert and Jerry Hall through visions of Logan Roy pacing up and down his Manhattan apartment, making irate calls and covering all tracks with his Machiavellian stomp.
I see the wan smile of Marcia Roy as she reconciles to the Logan affair slipped into season three. Then Shiv, Kendall and Roman arguing about how much of their inheritance has gone up in smoke at the potential misstep of a hasty pre-nup. This may be the ultimate triumph of fiction. I see the invented version of Succession’s source material as more real than reality. Perhaps it’s easier that way.
