The city’s leading cultural commentator John Robb finds himself back in 1989…
Ten minutes into this long and fascinating play and I’m feeling the dread of nostalgia for acid house. That eruption of anarchy and good times in the late eighties that revolutionised music but somehow has been written out of music history.
Acid house was a genuine mass movement with the power and cultural shift of all great pop cultures. It was a million stories that had been boiled down to a handful of clichés and completely enveloped the then moribund indie scene, and the mainstream and changed so much in pop culture, that it’s strange there were never any big spreads in music media on its legacy.
This play is one of the rare moments when the cultural impact of acid house is examined in a complex and ambitious work that interlaces it with the Peterloo Massacre into one narrative and asks many questions.
Polly Wiseman, who wrote the play explains: “The play is about a pair of revolutions, one political and one cultural, that changed the world,” she says. “Both were peaceful events on which the authorities came down disproportionately hard; and both led to changes in the law.”
The Peterloo Massacre took place in Manchester city centre in August 1819 when the cavalry tore into a crowd of 60,000-80,000, brought together by reformer and orator Henry Hunt, killing 17 people and injuring hundreds who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation, with Lancashire having just two MPs that could only be voted for by the rich. It was the beginning of a century of radical Manchester and is woven deep into the city’s consciousness.
The play weaves acid house into part of this revolutionary history of Manchester and starts outside in the street in the city centre with ravers taking the audience to a secret warehouse location where a club scene unfolds before suddenly switching to the Peterloo Massacre – with the build-up to the march and then the sabre-wielding militia putting down the people’s call for the vote and representation.
The play compares and contrasts the drug-fuelled ecstasy freaks and the idealistic Peterloo Massacre victims who re-emerge in the middle of the rave as ghosts in funny and fascinating scenes and examines the hedonistic period when the youth rose up in a different way and created their own good times, which in many ways was also a revolutionary act with a great soundtrack.
The play is enthralling, thought-provoking and gives you pangs of nostalgia for those endless nights running around the warehouse and squat party scene in the late eighties Manchester fuelled by drugs and an insane optimism. At the same time it also puts it into context of the revolutionary Manchester of the 19th century – a city that was the revolutionary hot-bed of a new Europe and the Peterloo Massacre – a history that everyone should know just to remind you of the real history of the UK, and not the usual list of Kings and Queens that passes for history.
Manchester Sound: The Massacre runs until Sat 6 Jul 2013. You can book tickets online or from Cornerhouse Box Office on 0161 200 1500.
To read more from John Robb, visit his website.