Until the summer of 1990 I must confess to believing the stroboscope a complete waste of time. My first real encounter with it had occurred in December ’83 while collapsed insensible after a mugfull of Leb-infused coffee in a mate’s bedsit. I was electromagnetically slapped from my Rimbaudian slumber and forced to endure several minutes of blinding white light that pulsed chaotically. One of the lads had rigged a computer up to a strobe, before proceeding to dance around the room to B-Movie’s “Nowhere Girl”. We thought it was shit. Computers were yesterday’s news and strobes were distractions for simpletons.
When Manchester went Mad in 1990 – became that bizarre poet-hooligan-intellectual-grafter-student-musician hybrid I call the Queerbeast – my imagination recoiled from the weirdness of reality; there was no longer any need to fantasise; everyone had finally decided to join us at the crater’s edge, and it was game on. Despite clubbing it several nights a week, I couldn’t name a single famous Madchester DJ or House tune to save my life. I only ever met two DJs; a stocky kung fu roughneck from “the” Ancoats, who threw nun-chucks and back-flips as I signpainted a steakhouse-nightclub off Albert Square that opened in the late spring of 1990, and a black lad with a ponytail who regularly drank in the Flat Iron on Salford Precinct in early ‘91. They were both natives, and they sounded like it. An all-pervading urgency gripped Manchester back then, as we locals fumbled for purchase on the beadage generated by the Queerbeast. When World Cup Italia kicked off, we made a couple of bizarre new friends: The Jew and the Pakistani, who seemed to have their fingers in everything; snide England football shirts, construction and roofing, child’s toys, witness protection. You name it, they were dealing in it. Some outsourced from the Orient, and some made in England. They had the cash and we were the gears in the machines of their personal launderette. Having passed my test a week earlier, I was enlisted by Big Andy to drive to Tottenham with the press-stud machines for the England shirts. It was a grey M6-M1 day packed with traffic, all moving at high speed in the absence of cameras. The snide machines were heavy duty, and we didn’t even have to touch ‘em. We called at a greasy spoon immediately after dropping them, and as I sped toward the M1 Andy stripped his butties of fat and mine of protein, busily redistributing the macromolecules to his advantage, thinking I wouldn’t notice. When I sank my teeth into that oily mattress I noticed, but bacon’s all about the lipids, so why moan? We were back in time for the Egypt game in the Jew’s luxury flat, him shouting and urging England to kill the Egyptians for their crimes against Israel. The Pakistani was displeased at our defection to the Promised Land; he found Andy a “job”, minding a woman who’d grassed up a member of the “heavy mob”. She was in a house in Miles Platting fitted with an emergency alarm button (wired to a local nick), two Rottweilers and a couple of pickaxe handles. Andy declined that suicidal earner, sensing the maelstrom-mangle of Q2 lapping at his heels. There were distractions from the workaday inanity, of course, such as Gentlemen’s Mornings, where you shagged strippers onstage while United’s firm cheered you on. Meanwhile, the industrious others hurriedly knocked out World Cup swag. “The other teams’ aren’t as good” – explained Al in the Forresters, opening his jacket to proudly display a freshly-printed “The Nightmare Returns” t-shirt with its tricolour font, and a picture of a bulldog smashing out the barred window of its Mediterranean prison. When Al said teams he meant teams; mobs, crews, sets, firms, all skilled at injecting vibrant jelloid inks into fabrics via the magic of UV light and rotary presses that they kept hidden away in lock-ups and industrial units. But UV was one thing and strobes were quite another, I would learn. We were in our mid-20s and jaded by clublife, the overgrown youth cauldrons that charged a couple o’ funt (pounds) to put you in among the pigeons – our crew – like a mess of dolled-up muscular Cyclopses; ingrown bristles polka-dotted like glowing boils on unshaven jowls and throats, awkward patterned shirts, swilling Newkie Browns in the Cyprus with pockets full o’ drugs. Thistles dressed as flowers, contemptuous of the semi-flares, preferring £9.99 Salford Rugby League tracky bottoms from the souvenir shop on the Precinct, leather jackets from flea markets, old style Adidas trainers, cashmere jumpers, and strange shirts nicked from everywhere. What a sight. Cosmopillocks of both genders swarmed clubland, a hint of Estuary in their voices, prime targets for “nemming” (ripping off, shagging, etc). One night, Andy tore a corner square off a red Rizzla packet and knocked it out as acid to some pseudo-Manc Queerbeasts. They came back an hour later for more: “Brilliant, that, mate!” We weren’t past hijacking the mic and belting out a brief Dino or Tony Christie before being dispossessed by DJs or shouted down by the Estuary voices belonging to people who didn’t realize what mechugannas they were dealing with. We provided refreshment to lads like Blue Chris, who was put in a coma last year on Derby Day, and introduced to the Young Guvnors, who tried to communicate to no avail. Wayne turned up, a City legend, freshly deported from Oz after he crashed a stolen jeep on acid, and was met at Ringway by GMP for further interrogations; he’d twatted some chancer on CCTV on the all-night bus, made a proper mess and fucked off to the antipodes where his own insanity snared him and sent him home. Swinging from Wayne’s 6’6” neck and supping champers swiped from a Guvnor King and one of his many wives, raising the subject of plastic Africans and embarrassing everyone. And then it happened; the strobe came on, obliterating what had been until then dark amber space full of coiling marijuana smoke and trippy soundwaves, instantly zapping us into the 25th Century. A flickering mass of dancing baggies took my breath away; it was a Roses tune, an airy Olympiad guitar riff that competed for our attention with the strobe before the two fused and paralysed us in amphetamine-THC suspension. Eventually the riff squelched back into that throbbing bass and the strobe disappeared, causing me to physically collapse into my own legs as if my spine had been vaporized. Never has sound and light held me so buoyant before, I reflected, as Mani’s swift swamp anaconda dragged me out of my tree for final engulfment and blackout. Vague memories followed, of a Rainsough Fagin sending two little scallies in a stolen motor to deposit me on Andy’s couch and then excreted into a Salford pub the following noontime. But it wasn’t over. An old bloke in tweed got up and put “Made of Stone” on the juker, and I knew the Queerbeast had vanquished the city then. The rest of that year was an exhilarating rodeo on the scaly back of the Beast, the ill-lit booths and boozers serving to camouflage the wheeling and dealing amid Madchester’s spectator sportsmen, every one symbionts or parasites on the gigantic weird flanks of the bucking bronco from Manchesmagoria. And every one believing they were really pilot fish. The stroboscope began to penetrate even the most traditional pubs, who set an evening aside for music and dance, anxious not be left behind by the cultural eyewash of electronica and Ecstasy.
League Cup Final day 1991 found me sign-writing buses in Blackpool, working for shady yuppies who lent me a brand new Vauxhall Astra for efficient propulsion to my artistic pursuits. Yuppie left a nice jacket in there, with little packets of white powder and shotgun cartridges in the pockets. I stole it. Mine was not to wonder why, but I concluded they were dickheads either way. I spent that evening with my missus of the time in a flat in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, playing cards with Ian Brown. Some lads arrived from Wembley (I imagined they were the rest of the band, but imagination was no longer a requirement, remember), having seen Sheridan’s scorcher sink the Reds. They cosied up with a spliff to take away the swedeful of mither football had become that day. The yuppie’s jacket was full of shotgun cartridges, and how I wished one would accidentally fall out to impress my famous Q3 counterparts, but no, it wasn’t to be, and being Q1 I wasn’t about to do it on purpose.
The following year against Forest we went in a van. Andy had a ridiculously large brown paper bag full of whiz from which we snozzled deeply. The driver, Swill Briggs (deceased) drove at 100 MPH with successive cans of Holts precariously balanced on his dashboard the whole way there, his eyes bulging toward Wembley like a migrating penguin suddenly gifted with flight. Numerous joints were rolled and passed around, and their contents discussed in increasingly detailed and competitive attitudes. Arriving at the designated boozer in London, I did the rounds, knocking out the product in my best grafters voice (which is better than any you’ve ever heard, you cunt). At one point, speeding, stoned, and pissed, I fell down a short flight of stairs, destroying a large table full of drinks and wetting the giant paper bag in the process. It was snatched from me and stuffed into the spare tyre by a disgusted Andy. I’d obtained tickets for the lads off a groundsman who got them off a well-known player. Sixty quid a fucking pop. Andy snatched one for fuck all outside the ground, screwing it into a disrespectful ball in his cyclopean, vandalized hand, absent-mindedly firing it at the turnstile attendant as he bent someone’s ear vis-à-vis his latest scheme for domination of the amphetamine market. Dave-B- and I stumbled into Wembley, but midway through the first half, some cunt and his cunt of a kid tried to pretend we were in their seats. A steward was summoned and tickets presented. He scrutinised our coordinates and pointed high over our heads to where we should have been. We followed his finger, and saw our mates, distantly performing Navy semaphore, trying to guide us in. As we lumbered up the rear spiral stairs, there was a vague roar. United had scored, but I was too pissed to register. I collapsed in my seat, and upon awakening assumed the scoreboard was broke. I pointed out the southerners’ ineptitude to my neighbour, a middle-aged man who looked at me like you would a dog turd. If Forest turned up we certainly didn’t bump into them, which was a shame cos Andy had fancied slapping their legs and had invested considerable energy into questioning our capabilities all day to wind us up like angry toys. JB made a bid to wreck a boozer in Staffordshire on the way home when he realised there was no in-house strobe, but we stopped him after a couple of smashed chairs. I finally collapsed on the plywood latrine in a back corner of the van (which had been hired on my licence as it was the only clean one out of ten), and my jeans were soaked with piss from the spillover of urinating in cans when I woke up. When the t-shirts, the drug-dealing, the clubs, the violence, and the music became too much, I knew I had to “smishe” – get away. And off to Cairo I went, on a one-way ticket; returns were for shithouses. But then again, so were strobes in 1983. Things change, but not all things. In case you’re wondering: Could Andy, Chris, Wayne, or Dave-B- name a single DJ? Could they fuck, you fucking Queerbeast!
