Another dispatch from the frontlines of 2020s music - although in this case it sounds freakily like 1970s music - here's Kieran Press-Reynoldswith a review ofDOMi & JD BECK's hyper-fusion freakout Not Tight for Pitchfork
A dispatch from the frontlines of 1970s music - my old Melody Maker comrade Frank Owen with a memory-lane guided tour to punk-era Manchester landmarks a.k.a. his old stomping ground.
Dispatches drawn across decades in the form of Rolling Stone's 200 Greatest Dance Songs, largely selected and written up byMichaelangelo Matos. Nice to see Mescalinum United "We Have Arrived" in there - in between Fatboy Slim and somebody called Oliver Heldens.
Here's a really cool thing that I've been meaning to do a post about for a while: The Quietus's new publishing arm, TQLC, has pulled together as a single volume every issue of the ravezine Freaky Dancing, which as the Happy Mondays-derived title suggests was the unofficial house organ of the Haçienda. You can get it here.
Created by Ste Pickford and Paul Gill, the zine consisted almost entirely of comic strips, cartoons, illustrations and visual-led spoofs 'n' satires.
Starting July 1989, the duo gave it away free to punters queuing outside the Haçienda on a Friday.
It ran for 12 issues.
The eleventh issue came out in August 1990, by which point the Haçienda scene was souring in a miasma of drug excess and paranoia, gangs and guns. Which brought the hostile attention of the authorities - such as "God's Cop" James Anderton, the chief constable of Greater Manchester - and ultimately led to the club's demise.
There was one final issue, in May 1994, when the Haçienda had a re-opening night, but that consisted of reprinted highlights from the original run of issues.
unfinished strip for abandoned Freaky Dancing revival issue, circa 1994
Freaky Dancing: The Complete Collection is a marvelous document of a cultural moment happening in real-time - hats off to The Quietus for putting it out and Ste & Paul for doing it in the first place.
