DJ Dave Haslam on his new book Life After Dark

Dave Haslam DJed over 450 times at Manchester’s Haçienda throughout the 80s and 90s. It’s telling that he can recall that number so accurately. Yet, despite the Haçienda's huge regional, musical and cultural influence, Haslam has always been keen not to be lumped in with the nostalgists still riding a filtered and fettering version of the acid house wave. To this end, he has published fanzines, launched labels, taught journalism and written celebrated books, such as 1999’s Manchester, England, which feverishly documents the much-mythologised city's untold musical and cultural stories.

Haslam’s new book, Life After Dark: A History of British Nightclubs & Music Venues, spreads the net further to document the seismic changes in our nightlife, from the music halls of the 1840s to the three-room mega-raves of the modern day. How does a writer so intrigued by the past fight the temptation to lose sight of the future?

“Twenty years ago, the Haçienda decided to release a compilation and asked me to write for the sleeve notes,” recalls Haslam. “My only comment was that ‘nostalgia is a device created by old people to deny young people their dreams.’ And two decades later, that’s still how I feel. So look to the past and take inspiration from the past, but the notion that it has the monopoly on good ideas is just totally wrong. The thing with popular culture, all kinds of culture, is that it doesn’t work unless the young people are allowed their dreams and the tools. And the tools might be an axe to kill whoever’s in the way. Otherwise what you get is just people buying tickets to Rolling Stones concerts and Haçienda reunion nights. Just give people an axe, and say ‘fuck em.’”

Life After Dark is an engaging historical document, but more than that, a strong ode to the seemingly timeless human desire to go out, drink and dance. It also resists sugar-coating the barriers that many new movements, from goths to gay clubs to New Romantics and, yes, acid house, have had to overcome in the face of the law and society. And while the rich details of the earlier chapters prove absorbing, the book undoubtedly peaks when Haslam himself begins his tenure behind the decks.

“When we started the Haçienda, there were lots of 1960s bands still around Manchester,” Haslam notes. “The Hollies, Herman’s Hermits, Freddie and The Dreamers; they were still a thing. And so we had to create a kind of year zero. Music that wasn’t on the radio, music that nobody knew. At the Haçienda, people would turn up and say, ‘Play something we don’t know.’ That was what people wanted: an adventure.”

But, as he happily allowed the misadventures and revolutionary spirit of the Haç to vanish into the rear view mirror, what further adventures did Haslam's clubbing life take him on?

“I would say, eight or nine years ago, walking into the Bierkeller on Piccadilly, investigating midweek,” he remembers. “And the place was packed, and I couldn’t work out what everyone was doing – the cut of the hair, and the trousers, the look of the girls – it wasn’t anything I’d seen en masse. And the music wasn’t anything I’d heard before; it refreshed my ears. And that was Will Tramp playing, and other people I didn’t know, and it was completely brilliant… If you’re in a situation when you feel like nothing is happening, you’re wrong. There’s always something happening.”

Still, Manchester’s selection of small venues does undoubtedly seem to be shrinking, with some having to lessen their operation, others suffering noise complaints and The Roadhouse already ripped out for real estate.

“The irony is, I think, there’s more venues around the city now than there have been for decades,” reckons Haslam. “Venues close, but venues open as well. People have used enough imagination to use secret warehouses, churches and function rooms. I think what is always difficult is the smaller spaces surviving. The Warehouse Project is kind of like the Ikea of clubbing. If you want a more underground or weirdo experience, that’s naturally going to be in a smaller space. And making that pay is quite difficult if you’re a promoter.”

Haslam isn’t necessarily disparaging the likes of Warehouse Project, acknowledging the ambition and sea change it represents, but simply prefers smaller venues and admits that he “tends to lose interest in an act when they get halfway to a stadium.” It’s a contrarian streak that translates as both ceaseless curiosity and tenacity. Despite being involved in the Manchester International Festival for the past decade, he recently posted a passionate and necessary blog designed to trigger debate on whether the city’s current perceived arts boom is self-serving, only for “an enclave of culture vultures living in the same city but on another planet.”

“Culture doesn’t work unless young people are allowed their dreams and the tools” – Dave Haslam

“I think the bigger problem is not to do with Manchester: it’s to do with the world,” suspects Haslam. “People are mesmerised by the big, obvious, mainstream, in a way that I don’t think they have been in the past. So you’ll always have the very interested people trying to do things, but what you want is the half interested people turning their heads and paying attention.”

Under the crush of the most right-wing government the UK has experienced in decades, might it be possible that the country’s creatives and a disillusioned public seek further refuge on the dancefloor, only to be denied of its power? Or, with the 'night time economy' booming, are clubs simply too embedded in society now to present any kind of radical allure?

“I haven’t yet worked out, despite having written 160,000 words on them, whether nightclubs are a particularly potent form of resistance,” admits Haslam. “I think they’re a fantastic escape and a cauldron for new ideas. But whether they could be in any way revolutionary, I’m not yet convinced. Yet, when you look at the way the police and the government have dealt with nightclubs, they must have seen something revolutionary.

“In the late 1960s, police began to raid psychedelic clubs like Middle Earth. That wasn’t about trying to catch a few people with a few joints,” he explains. “It was about society going to war with the hippie underground. And then in the 70s, black soul and disco really energised the white working class in the UK, which I think is a great story, as it was during an era of overt and institutional racism, and yet white people were dancing to black music and wearing badges with Black Power symbols on them. A whole generation or two of people who went to clubs and danced to that kind of music took home a different attitude.”

One more note re: that big old club that sat on Whitworth Street West. As someone who witnessed firsthand the senses-expanding grip that ecstasy took on the Haçienda and beyond, does Haslam ever feel that the sheer power of the drug at its peak actually reduced the political and social impact of clubbing? (Alongside clubbers’ ability to walk straight.)

“I’ve always seen nightlife, from the 1840s to now, as an opportunity to escape and enjoy a sense of community, to buzz off music, but to feel alive,” Haslam surmises. “And since the 1840s, people have not felt alive. They have felt either trapped by the mill or the workhouse, or now, perhaps trapped by austerity or they might have fluked themselves into a call centre job they hate. So the night time hours, when people want to feel alive, they want it as an extreme experience. And why shouldn’t they?”