Ah, the 1990s. What a strange time. Hold on – let me just stick on my rose-tinted glasses. Where was I? The 90s. Yeah! What a wonderful time! The wall had come down, the west had emerged victorious from the cold war and the repressed peoples of the communist block were free to buy Levis, get rich and come and suckle at the plentiful teat of late stage capitalism. 9/11 was a millennium away (sort of). It really seemed the only way was up and things could only get better. Or at least that’s what Yazz and that scruffy science bloke off the telly sold us.
It was all chronicled by the greatest magazine that ever was or ever will be, loaded, which celebrates its 30th this year (you should look it up – it really was the dog’s bollocks). I’d say it was the best job I ever had – I was there in the late ‘90s for five years – but I can’t remember a fucking thing after my first story. Good thing I wrote some of it down. Also racking up 30 loops of the sun is the greatest club night to ever take place (except maybe Feet First at the Camden Palace circa October half-term 1992) – the legendary Manumission. A club which you could argue shared the same spirit as loaded – they were very much not of the mainstream but became the blueprint for it. Both drew from the fringes and celebrated the absurd. They were subversive and naughty. But above all, they were a joyous celebration of all the best things in life.
So, with that tenuous link established, let us take you by the hand and welcome you to wonderland and tell you the story of Manumission…
It starts in 1994. While the summer of love and the rave scene that grew around it was a fading memory, clubland was in rude health with places like Cream, Ministry and Sankey’s packing them in every week. In the guitar and indie universe, the nascent Britpop scene was stomping on the dying embers of grunge. Elements of what would later be labelled Cool Brittania were crystalising. In amongst this milieu was a brief but significant flash in the nightlife of Manchester, where a small night called Manumission was taking the gay village by storm.
Founded by brothers Andy and Mike McKay, Manumission ran for 12 weeks at the start of the year. Such was its impact that it ended those three months at number one on DJ Magazine’s club chart. It was a club like no other, displaying a penchant for the theatrical with transvestite dancers adorning its podiums and the DJ booth suspended above the floor. Things that are now the norm were unheard of back then. Audience participation in the event beyond dancing was encouraged. “It was situationist – clubbing had become a bit sterile. Acid house had come and gone, and the Hacienda wasn’t as good as it used to be,” says Griff, Manumission’s resident DJ. “We’d do things like have a coach trip in the middle of the night – the punters would all come out, get on a coach and drive around Manchester. You’d go past the Hacienda and give the finger to the bouncers, get off somewhere and go in somebody’s front room for a drink and then go back to the club. Nobody in their right mind now would think ‘let’s take 50 people spending money out of the club for a good hour’. But that was Manumission in Manchester. I remember this one kid – we gave him a potato and said ‘if you come back next week with this potato, we’ll let you in for free’. He came back the next week with the potato. People buzzed off things like that.”
Gangs were a massive issue in Manchester clubs back then, and it was a run in with a disgruntled mobster that brought Manumission’s Mancunian misadventures to an end. “Some guy wasn’t allowed in, and he took great offence at this,” Griff says. “So he came back with some petrol and poured it all down the stairs. Luckily it wouldn’t ignite. It could have been a real disaster. After that, it had to finish.”
Not wishing to add human torches to the cast for the evening’s theatrics, Andy and Mike and their partners, Dawn Hindle and Claire Davies, called it a day in Manchester and headed to Ibiza to wash the petrol fumes off in the Med. “I heard that Ibiza was everything we’d ever tried to do in Manchester and more,” says Dawn. “Initially Andy and Mike went out – I had my exams, so I stayed home – and were offered Monday nights in the Coco Loco bar of Privilege, or Ku, as it was known then. In the main room was a night called Black and White. We went from getting a few hundred people in to having thousands of people wanting to come, so we did a deal with them, and Manumission took over the whole club – probably after about a month. We were probably getting about 4/5000 people in at that time, and then it just grew to about 6000 people, and 12,000 by the end of our 14 years there). We did a deal with Privilege and we went back the year after, and it just grew every year after that.”
As the club grew, Mike and Claire became the face of it, performing on stage (including the famous sex shows) and hosting the night, with Andy and Dawn more behind the scenes, focusing on the business side, pulling it all together and making it happen. What they came up with was unlike anything the island had seen before.
“The Independent said it was ‘surreal clubbing for the previously disenchanted’” says Dawn. “And it really was. Mike and Claire were very much into the big statement, girls and sex, but me and Andy did the rest of the entertainment. We’d do things like putting name badges on people, contacting people like Kellogg’s cornflakes and saying ‘can we give everyone cornflakes for breakfast at the end of the night?’”
“There’s be people sitting on toilets peeling potatoes,” says Griff. “The white socks police taking socks off people if they had them, all these things.”
“Oh, there were some brilliant ones,” says former flierer, pyrotechnic troubleshooter and then ops manager, Elliot Cox. “In the early days the entertainers used to get body painted like green elves, some would go round shining shoes. One I loved was we’d get people dressed up like some random mystical, mythical character, and they would grab people who were off their heads and give them a key and say ‘here is the key to the special door. If you can find the door, behind the door is a special VIP lounge with free drinks and free food’. We got the keys in the local DIY store – they didn’t fit anything. By the end of the night we’d given out a hundred keys to a hundred wankered tourists who were going round trying to open every single door. There was a guy who used to dress up as a television set, and another guy that dressed up as a suitcase. He fell in the swimming pool once and nearly drowned. Potatoes too, they were a big thing.”
The production side of things became more ambitious each year now there was a whole club to fill. Themes changed each season, be it 1998’s Murder At The Manumission Motel or 2004’s Good Ship Manumission. Another year celebrated Claire’s pregnancy with a large egg being hatched on stage each week. There was constant reinvention. Acrobats, pyrotechnics, whole chorus lines of dancers and more elaborate set design became standard. And in the cavernous and warren-like Privilege, the canvas for painting the night was huge. As was the planning needed to execute it.
“We got the De La Guarda acrobats to come over from New York and do aerial stuff. Fischerspooner to come over to be our resident band. We had Harmar Superstar and Electric Six. We flew to Cuba and recruited acrobats and dancers,” Dawn says. “Manumission was the party we wanted to go to. We would sit down and think of all the things we’d like to have at a party and then work out if we had any more money left and spend it all. That was how we did it - more is more, and we just kept going and recruiting more people. We got Mark Fisher, an incredible set designer – he did Pink Floyd, U2, the Superbowl – to design the sets for us.”
“We started hiring in heavyweight production managers in from the UK,” says Elliot. “Up until Christmas we came up with ideas, and then in the New Year we’d get into the planning, breaking down what the project is, what staff are going to be needed. At the end of April, we’d be building everything in a way that it could be taken in and out on a weekly basis. We had team of over 400 people at its peak.”
“Manumission stood on its own pedestal,” says Ian Allchin, one-time drinks-gopher and latterly PR team manager. “Every single club in Ibiza you could use superlatives to describe it. Pacha was the most beautiful, Space was the clubbers’ club, Amnesia was relentless – there was nowhere to sit down, you were clubbing all the way through there – and Es Paradis, again stunning in its classical way. But Privilege was just huge, and it was the only place that Manumission could have worked. No other club night before, and I imagine since, made Privilege feel as good as it felt when Manumission was there. The whole point of Manumission was big ideas – ridiculous, impossible ideas, that were only achievable with a canvas as huge and as sprawling as Privilege. It was the perfect place to try those things out. You had the big stage where you could put all the backdrops and decorations and have people falling from the ceilings, acrobats that swing down over people’s heads, you had a massive pool in the middle with a DJ booth suspended above it. You had all these things to play with and Manumission exploited brilliantly.”
With most clubs relying on big name DJs to bring in the punters, Manumission itself became the draw, and didn’t advertise who was playing. Sometimes, on the rare occasion a DJ’s name appeared on the flier, its positioning was dictated by the artwork, and it was fit in around it. This stance even went as far as seeing FatBoy Slim playing in the toilets.
“Because we spent so much money on shows and entertainment, we were in a position where we couldn’t afford the superstar DJs,” says Elliot. “Andy came up with this idea to say any superstar DJ is allowed to come and play, but we won’t bill them, and we’ll pay them 1000 euros. And we had David Guetta, we had Carl Cox, Sasha, Pete Tong, Judge Jules, FatBoy Slim – we had all of the biggest DJs at the time who wanted to play so much for Manumission that they were happy to do it.”
But as with all great things, the end always comes. And rather abruptly in Manumission’s case. A dispute with the owners of Privilege led to the club being locked on the evening of the party one night in 2008. A hasty move over the road to Amnesia followed, but it was never the same. After a season in the new place, Manumission was extinguished, closing its doors for the final time in October 2008.
“Manumission means to set a slave free,” Dawn says. “The whole ethos of the party was freedom from the slavery of your everyday life, and that’s basically what we were trying to do. We were just trying to give people the best party of their life.”
Colin Peters, resident DJ in the Coco Loco room, sums it up perfectly: “When people say it was the Studio 54 of our generation, I don’t think it’s an understatement. It was a complete madhouse.”
Manumission changed the face of clubbing. Any club going today that has a splash of the spectacular and a taste of the theatrical will forever be in its debt. There’s never been anything that has come close since. Like with loaded. Aped by many, equalled by few. And if a 30-year anniversary is seen as good time for a resurrection, as it clearly is (see this magazine) then surely it’s time for Manumission to rise like a pilled-up Phoenix from the ashes, firing lasers out of its eyes and glitter from its arse. Over to you Dawn and Andy and Mike and Claire.
Sidebar
Great moments in Manumission
The Manumission Motel
Dawn: One year the theme was Murder at the Manumission Motel. Mike and Claire had the idea to turn the theme into reality and actually have a motel. It was a crazy place. There was a shanty town on the roof, and the Pink Pussy strip club on the ground floor with a bar. We got a local architect to design that – it was like walking through a giant vagina. It was quite Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. A lot of people lost the plot at the Manumission Motel.
Griff: It was a flame that burned brightly, but not for long. It was a former brothel. When we were gutting it, we found the old first aid box – it contained a tube of lube and a condom. It was like the Hotel California – you got the feeling that if you didn’t get out of there soon you could possibly never leave. You’d see people you would never imagine from Kate Moss to Kathy Lloyd to Maradona, with Johnny Golden the dwarf bouncing the door. We twigged that if we woke up there on a Wednesday, then they’d always do a boat to Formentera, so we aimed to be ending our night out after Manumission at the motel so we could get on the boat.
Working there
Gabby Sanderson (dancer/DJ/Ibiza Rocks radio host): It was the longest shift ever. We’d start with a parade around Ibiza Town – we had this rickety bus that was always breaking down, which we called the Happy Bus. We’d go into hair and make-up – the Manumission dancers and Mike and Claire – and we’d do the parade around Ibiza. Then we’d get to the club around midnight and do a quick costume change for the stage shows, at least one an hour, maybe more. That would take us until the sun came up, and the last couple of hours at Manumission we would be dancing on top of the bar in the Coco Loco room. Then as soon as the club finished, God knows what time that was, we’d all pile into the Happy Bus, cross our fingers that it would make it to Bora Bora and the café/restaurant place across the road from Space. We’d sit there in our fancy dress and have breakfast – maybe a be a bit of food but it was generally a lot of alcohol. Then we’d stagger into Manumission’s official afterparty, Carry On, at Space and then be still working and dancing until 4pm. God, I think I’d die now.
Lee Carroll (Stage crew): We needed to soundproof the roof of room two for Ibiza Rocks’ first gig (in the back room of Manumission). We had to cable tie cloth to the ceiling and to do it we hired a scaffolding tower. It didn’t have any supports, so we just tied it off to the side. I had to carry an enormous sound cloth up the scaffolding, and on the way up the gaffer said to me “if the tower starts to go, just hold on and accept you’re going to break your arms”. Nice pep talk.
P-Diddy and his saxophone
Griff: It was Radio 1 night until 6am, and then we were to come back on. We were like ‘we need to be doing something Manumission at 6 to say Radio 1 is finished now’. I was convinced that it would be a good idea if I climbed to the top of the club and zip-lined into the DJ box holding a record. I’d come in, and everyone would be like ‘look at the DJ coming in on the zip line’ and I’d take the record off and put it on, and everyone would go mad Brilliant. So, I’m going down the zipline and nobody’s really looking at me. It’s a bit weird. I get a few meters from the DJ box and because it’s quite hot and sweaty, I can’t unclip myself. I’m struggling on the zipline trying to get free and out of the corner of my eye I see my mates laughing in the VIP. In the DJ box I see Pete Tong and then I notice there a black guy playing a saxophone, and I think ‘that’s odd’. Then I look down and see he’s got white arms. I eventually free myself and see that the person playing the sax is P-Diddy, but Conor, our sax player, is behind him doing the fingering. I couldn’t have picked a worse time to do it. P Diddy was super super famous back then.
Ibiza Rocks (Born in the back room of Manumission, and run by Andy and Dawn to this day)
Griff: Nobody expected it to work. Ibiza Rocks didn’t work at first – most of the first few shows were sparsely populated and had such things as Soul II Soul supported by Towers Of London, which would make no sense in a million years. It kinda worked in Manumission when the club was full and you could have Babyshambles and Fischerspooner and the Rapture on in the backroom, but as a standalone it was very difficult. Live music in Ibiza was heresy almost. But then Kaiser Chiefs was the final show, and it was just as they had gone really big, and everyone came to that. Then we thought “hang on a minute, this can work” and that’s where it was born.
Simon Guirao AKA Acid Ted (loaded staffer from the 90s and latterly Ibiza Rocks resident DJ): Being involved as a DJ for five years, I had no shortage of triumphant moments behind the decks. But the one that still haunts me was my first set at the Ibiza Rocks After Party in Eden. I began celebrating my debut earlier than I should have, well before the gig, and after a banging first hour, my brain dissolved, and some questionable music choices were made. I’d like to think it was 2ManyDJs coming on in the other room that cleared the dancefloor in the backroom that night. On an unrelated note, I still think the Scissor Sisters are awesome, but there’ll be a cold day in hell before I ever drop a song called I Don’t Feel Like Dancing in a club context again.
Amazing moments
Elliot: There were some amazing moments. I can’t remember any of them.
Top ten Manumission tunes
- Sun Is Shining – Bob Marley (Funkstar Deluxe remix)
- You See The Trouble With Me – Black Legend
- Pasilda – Afro Medusa
- Hideaway – De Lacy
- Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love) – Spiller
- Needin U – David Morales
- So Much Love To Give – DJ Falcon
- Weak Become Heroes – The Streets (Ashley Beedle Remix)
- Song 2 – Blur
- Insomnia – Faithless