Life After Dark

A History of British Nightclubs & Music Venues

Dave Haslam

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857207005
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Nightclubs and music venues are often the source of a lifetime's music taste, best friends and vivid memories. They can define a town, a city or a generation, and breed scenes and bands that change music history. In Life After DarkDave Haslam reveals and celebrates a definitive history of significant venues and great nights out. Writing with passion and authority, he takes us from vice-ridden Victorian dance halls to acid house and beyond; through the jazz decades of luxurious ballrooms to mods in basement dives and the venues that nurtured the Beatles, the Stones, Northern Soul and the Sex Pistols; from psychedelic light shows to high street discos; from the Roxy to the Hacienda; from the Krays to the Slits; and from reggae sound systems to rave nights in Stoke.

In a journey to dozens of towns and cities, taking in hundreds of unforgettable stories on the way, Haslam explores the sleaziness, the changing fashions, the moral panics and the cultural and commercial history of nightlife. He interviews clubbers and venue owners, as well as DJs and musicians; he meets one of the gangsters who nearly destroyed Manchester's nightlife and discusses Goth clubs in Leeds with David Peace.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• AUTHOR’S OTHER BOOKS
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Intro Wonderwalls, gold dust, discos become Tescos
• Chapter One Bare-necked ladies, shaggy-looking Germans, everyone is drunk
• Chapter Two Dream palaces, degenerate boys, jazz-mad dancing girls
• Chapter Three A bare room with lightbulbs, raves, what happened next
• Chapter Four Merseybeat, flashing eyes, a leg-over
• Chapter Five Pills, thrills, not keeping music live
• Chapter Six Cosmonauts, light shows, Clapton takes acid
• Chapter Seven Soul power, Big Julie, ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’
• Chapter Eight Secret gigs, home-butchered hair, love action at the Roxy
• Chapter Nine Posers, the Krays, a tribe called ‘goth’
• Chapter Ten Tape machines, modern drugs, unknown pleasures
• Chapter Eleven The Wild Bunch, headless pigeons, a track with no name
• Chapter Twelve Police raids, the Prodigy in a bingo hall, an MC in a cupboard
• Chapter Thirteen Celebrities, more ecstasy, music is life
• Outro Michael Stipe’s shoe, the cocktail from Hull, worlds emerge
• Acknowledgements
• Sources
• Notes
• Index
• List of Illustrations
• Endpapers