Sonic Youth Slept on my Floor by Dave Haslam

 'I was under the impression that somehow, as you got older, things became easier; you'd feel comfortable in your skin, untroubled by anxiety. I expected to find a map of where to find happiness. Ask me now and I'll tell you: there is no map. But I always had music through the good times and the bad.'

In the mid 1980s, Dave Haslam started a fanzine called Debris (launched in Berlin - no not that Berlin, a basement club in Manchester.) He had no contacts, he wasn't fashionable, he just loved music and wanted to meet, as he puts it, 'interesting people' - musicians, artists and writers. 

In 1982 Factory Records (ie Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus) and New Order opened the Hacienda.  In place of filthy swirly-patterned carpets, tacky glitz and plastic palm trees, the Hacienda looked like the warehouse it had once been. Designed by Ben Kelly, inspired by Danceteria and the Mudd Club in New York City, it was a club like nothing that had gone before - at least not in Manchester. Haslam used to sell Debris to people in the queue before going in to see the bands - the Smiths, Orange Juice, the Fall, Happy Mondays, 808 State, Stone Roses and numerous others played there. 

'For any real form of substantive youth culture to thrive in a city, there has to be a place to go, somewhere to meet.....The Hacienda had to be built' 

(Tony Wilson, The Face, 1982)

One of the DJs had a hectic social life, which meant that he couldn't always meet his commitments to the decks. In 1986 he asked Haslam, who was already DJing elsewhere, to stand in for him. Almost forty years later, Haslam is a celebrated author and broadcaster. He's written for The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The Times, New Statesman and NME and published several well received and influential books. And of course he's still DJing, not just in Manchester but around the world.  

The Hacienda (Image: Wikipedia)

Sonic Youth Slept on my Floor is a memoir of Haslam's DJing career, largely (but by no means exclusively) at the Hacienda in its heyday. It's about the music he played, the people he met, the crowds who turned up to dance, and later, the problems that eventually led to the club's closure.

'A DJ...needs some instinctive grasp of musicology, in the sense of knowing the sonics of what works in a song, in a hall, to make people dance...to read the behaviour and rituals of tribes and crowds, to get some sense of the music tastes of the hundreds of strangers in front of you from how they dress or interact...to connect with people....to find a route into their consciousness.'  

These were the days before set playlists and record company diktats. Haslam spent hours trawling record shops and reading the music press, then into the DJ booth he went, armed with his boxes of vinyl. Sometimes he hadn't even decided what to play until he'd gauged the mood.

The Hacienda transformed the city's music scene, and Haslam was at the epicentre of that transformation. But Sonic Youth Slept on my Floor is also a memoir of life in Manchester itself, from the days of the miners' strike to the Manchester Arena bombing, of a city's spirit, resourcefulness, inclusivity and resilience.

'Among Tony's ambitions for the club was for it to make a significant contribution to Manchester, and not just to its music scene, but to its sense of identity and self-worth too.'

This book is a wonderful, very personal, account of those formative years. Its author wanted, above all, 

'to do something that makes us feel alive....I liked hanging out with other people with fanciful ideas or, better still, people who wanted to change the world.'

Dave takes us through his early years at home in Birmingham, life with his parents' many foster children,

'My parents' fostering gave me an insight into the lives of other children, their precarious, volatile home life, their distressing stories'

evenings spent watching Top of The Pops with his siblings, listening to Motown, absorbing heavy metal, reggae and disco, reading NME,

'By 1977, waves of music were washing over me and I was devouring books. I'd realised that there were ways of seeing beyond the obvious, conspicuous stuff. I was aware that....there was an alternative world, maybe several, where you might find marginal and oppositional creative activity, underground newspapers, books, music, films....I was fascinated by the idea of what was off radar. I'd be sitting watching TV shows like Are You Being Served?...thinking there must be more to life than this.'

Oh yes Dave, a generation (mine) hears you. 

The Troubles in Ireland, the Cold War, Watergate, were all going on at the time, 

'(illustrating) how endemic deceit and cover-up were among the governing classes...I looked for clues, and followed rumours of where and what the counter culture might be.'

By the age of 17 he has found his tribe,

'too young for punk but thrilled by new, adventurous music...by 1979 there were spiky, dubby, weirdo bands playing in venues in most towns and cities.'

He reads Dostoyevsky's Notes From the Underground, looks for Paul Morley and Ian Penman's work in NME, listens to John Peel, and ventures into the dead spaces of inner city Birmingham to see Blondie at Barbarella's. Local bands start to emerge in many cities, releasing their own music or being signed to independent labels. Haslam sees them all, and even asks to go behind the scenes.

So a fanzine was a natural progression,

'I had unearthed an important revelation about cultural activity; if you want to be involved, you don't need money, just resourcefulness.'

Not everyone has that resourcefulness, but Haslam just got on with it. Debris was criticised as pretentious, and arty, but he didn't care - 'arty', he points out, has been attached to some of the best things ever,

'I like people who challenge greyness and limited expectations, especially when it's a brave thing to do.'

Having never been inside a London hotel nor met an American writer, he gets an interview with Raymond Carver just because he asks. He takes chances (but chances for which he always does his homework) and sometimes they pay off. How many of us would have asked for that interview? 

Yet Haslam is endearingly truthful about his failures. He's hopeless with women - he can read a dance floor, ask a major American author for an interview, but rarely picks up the signals from girls; he thinks he's perhaps the only man who didn't sleep with Carol Morley (Paul Morley's sister and one of Haslam's closest friends.) When he does form a relationship and becomes a father, he admits to finding parenthood challenging,

'When people asked me if fatherhood suited me, I usually said it was the hardest job I'd ever had, which, considering the only things I'd ever done were writing a fanzine and DJing, wasn't really surprising.'

As drugs - particularly ecstasy - start to take over the Hacienda, so gangs looking to control the supply in the club follow. In 1989, a sixteen year old girl dies after taking Es there. The club is temporarily closed in 1990 and Haslam starts DJing at The Boardwalk. When the Hacienda re-opens he returns, but it's never the same. His Saturday nights at The Boardwalk are also becoming fraught. Despite the stress, he keeps up his Friday night 'Yellow' sets,

'There was something political and spiritual in the way we were creating communtiies, sharing music and good times. As for the pressures, you harden yourself, learn lessons, keep your fingers crossed. They were great nights in dangerous times. You can't let the badness win.'

On 28th June 1997 Haslam DJed at the Hacienda's final night. No one knew that at the time. Haslam had closed his session with Nuyorican Soul's It's Alright, I Feel It.' Unfortunately it wasn't.

A gang fight had broken out outside the club's doors - in full view of a minibus giving councillors and magistrates a guided tour of Manchester nightlife hotspots. The club's licence was revoked with immediate effect. 

Haslam continues to DJ in the UK and around the world. He's hilarious on the awful requests he gets - 'nine out of ten requests are rubbish',

'"Can you play something good?"' Usually, if you ask them to be a bit more specific it'll turn out that haven't a clue: "You know, something good."'

He's also been asked if he has somewhere a customer can charge his phone.

Private bookings can be tricky; he only discovers a week before an event that it's a 50th birthday party for Eamonn Holmes, whose favourite song is apparently The Combine Harvester. Stars from Coronation Street will be engaging in some karaoke. On the night itself Haslam's misery is further compounded when Jeremy Kyle asks him for something by Black Eyed Peas. 

Even the life of a super-cool DJ isn't all A Certain Ratio and Cabaret Voltaire.

Since 2011, Haslam's run Close Up - very successful live onstage interviews for which his guests have included Jarvis Cocker, David Byrne, the late Terry Hall, John Lydon, Jonathan Frazan, Viv Albertine and Jeanette Winterson.

He's happy to recall his Hacienda days, but is rightly censorious of nostalgia and of older people telling the young that 'everything was better in their day',

'Nostalgia is a device created by old people to deny young people their dreams.'

I remember thinking along similar lines as a teenager myself; all I ever heard was adults comparing - always unfavourably -  our present to their past. And now I see so many people in my own generation doing exactly the same thing. I always try to challenge it. We can't have our youth back (which is, I'm sure, where so much of this stuff comes from - we resent the young) but we can keep looking forward, engaging in new ideas, music, books, art and life, and asking our children to keep us informed. These may be depressing and dangerous times, but we can still have great nights. As Armistead Maupin says,

'You don't have to keep up, you just need to keep open'

Dave Haslam has lived through one of the most exciting periods in Manchester's, and indeed the music world's, history, but he's still keeping open, still curious, adventurous, and keen to give young people a  hand up the ladder,

'It was liberating to be able to enjoy and champion new things...I was asked to DJ at Florence and the Machine's first show in Manchester; a showcase in a clothes shop. I was so keen to be involved I agreed to do the event in exchange for a pair of Diesel jeans....I wasn't satisfied just being part of the 'collective history', but in addition wanted to more proactively configure the future.'

'By the time you're fifty you should be a giver of opportunities, and aspire, at least, to stay hungry for the now and never rest.'

The book ends with two cataclysmic events, the terrorist attack on the Bataclan in 2015 and the suicide bombing at the Manchester Arena. Paris, and then Manchester, fight back. The title of the book's penultimate chapter is Hate Won't Tear Us Apart. Sonic Youth Slept on my Floor is a record of Dave Haslam's constant efforts to bring people together, 

'I'm not a spokesperson for anyone, I'm just a guy who believes the project of being human should be fuelled by talking, connecting, positivity and love. And music, of course.'

Amen to that. 

Sonic Youth Slept on my Floor by Dave Haslam is published by Constable. I borrowed my copy from Aberdeen Central Library.