Manchester Diaries, Raw and Messy in the early 80s
A ramble by Stephen Wright, photographer
When you’re twenty-two, your ambitions are simple: listen to rock and roll, stay up all night, meet lots of girls, smoke weed and somehow find your way into the heart of everything. I tried my best on all fronts. In the early 1980s Manchester was the only place that mattered. I was a post-grad student, but my real education wasn't happening in the lecture halls; it was happening in the damp, electric air of the Hacienda.
The legend goes that Tony Wilson set up the Hacienda with all the money from Blue Monday. In reality, Blue Monday didn’t make any money; it cost more to make than it actually generated. But Tony always thought he’d made money. He was one of those few people who operated entirely on belief, despite the fact that the project was essentially bankrupting itself. Tony Wilson was very, very charming and very clever, and he was really the heart of the whole Factory story.
It was all happening after Ian Curtis had hung himself, and the space itself was an old boat showroom. Ben Kelly did the design, which was very avant-garde for the time. It had those bollard things with the cat’s-eye reflectors around the dance floor—it was just radically different from any other nightclub.
Most clubs back then were obsessed with exclusion: "You've got trainers on, you're not coming in," or "You’re wearing jeans, you’re not coming in." But in the Hacienda, anything went. That was the trade-off. It meant the atmosphere was wildly unpredictable; some nights it was great and glorious, and other nights it was just really, really quiet—dead as a doornail. You never knew what you were going to get, and that was the beauty of it.
I remember approaching Ginger, the manager, with the kind of brash, student-level cheek that only works when you’re young. I told him I could supply pictures for the student paper in exchange for access. It was a bluff, really, but it worked. I just went, you're gonna get more publicity from having a picture in of so and so published every week, and this is your captive audience, and it won't really cost you anything. I walked away with a pass, which meant that if I was in town anyway, I could go in for a cup of tea. It was it was my equivalent of the Garrick club. There'd be a big queue and, whether I had my camera bag or not, I'd know the bounces and I'd go, all right, Vinnie, how are you? Oh, I'm all right, you know, busy night Saturday, and so on.
The booker, and one of the DJ’s, was a guy called Mike Pickering. He was in Quando Quango who had a sort of late 80s hit. I can't remember what it's called, but he was a nice guy. What it meant was that I had access - so Curtis Mayfield, Orange Juice, Aztec Camera. Gregory Isaacs; all of these artists in late '82 early '83.
I remember seeing a young Madonna on a Tube special, messing around on a dance floor, just a short number of years before she was filling Wembley Stadium night after night. It was a fast-moving time.
Everyone remembers Morrissey. He was a fascinating, beautiful young man then. I remember him on the so called 'Interflora' tour, throwing flowers into a crowd at the Free Trade Hall that was heaving like a rugby scrum. The whole floor was bouncing up and down - you couldn't move. I climbed into the lighting rig just to get the shot. I only had one roll of film, thirty-six exposures. No memory cards, no digital safety net. You had to commit to the moment.
Then there was the Salford Lads session—the iconic shot that ended up on the sleeve of The Queen Is Dead. It was a bleak December day, cold and grey. My main skill was ‘live’ shots but ironically it’s this session that has become famous.
It was a lucky opportunity for a novice photographer to be the only photographer there.
The Queen is Dead image been accepted as part of the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Manchester Art Gallery and the Salford Art Gallery. All rather funny when the original film was processed in a bedroom / darkroom, with the chemicals kept in old drinks bottles!
There were other, quieter moments: Holly Johnson and myself, both completely broke, nursing teas at Afflecks Palace, neither of us with enough money to cover the other’s bill. We were just two people trying to figure out how to exist in a city that was rapidly changing.
A year later RELAX broke and he could have bought a tea shop or two.
Looking back at these photos now, they aren't just images of musicians. They are artifacts of a pre-digital, pre-internet era. They belong to a time when you had to be present to witness the music, when the 'story' wasn't curated by a PR firm, but captured in the dark corners of a pub or the back room of a concert hall.
There are loads of artists in my files. Some are there because I was interested, others because I liked the pictures, or because they’ve proved popular over the years. I’ve got a whole set of Meat Loaf live pictures; great photos of him dressed as a pirate. Nobody’s interested in Meat Loaf now, but at the time, it was a hell of a show.
I remember Nina Simone, too, in the glorious Albert Hall; she was marvellous. It was just her, a grand piano, and maybe a bass player in this enormous space. She just came out, very dignified, and did her thing. I’ve listened to her for forty-odd years. She was a world away from people rolling around on the Hacienda dance floor, or the spectacle of Wembley.
By the 90s, things shifted. Madonna’s The Blond Ambition tour—Jean Paul Gaultier, the corset—it was all a massive production. But the trouble was, once you moved from Manchester down to London, it was a shag driving in and out of London. In Manchester, you were three miles from anything; London wasn't a walkable city, and the access changed. You’d get three songs to shoot Madonna, and that was it. You had to lug your cameras away, and if someone hadn't given you a ticket, you wouldn't even see the show. By the time you’d get the artist on the other end of the stage, or near you with their backs turned, you had such a limited time to actually take the pictures.
I’ve had a long career, and I’ve seen the industry evolve from the raw, messy energy of the 80s into something much more clinical. But when I look at a picture of Miles Davis playing his red metallic trumpet, or a candid shot of a band before they were 'big', I’m brought back to that feeling of the lens in my hand and the absolute uncertainty of what would happen next.
It was a hell of a way to spend my youth.
Stephen Wright
