Down the road from the Haçienda, an underground acid house scene was jumping. Now a new archive has restored its rightful place in the history of dance
In 1987, Nigel Gilmartin was working as a mobile DJ in Blackburn: weddings, engagements and birthdays at community halls; the shirt-and-tie scene at weekends. That summer, he fell under the spell of the Sunday-night shows on Key 103FM as DJ Stu Allen played early acid house and hip-hop across Greater Manchester and Lancashire. Gilmartin would meticulously note the name of every track and then scour east Lancashire’s record shops with his list. One record shop staffer told him about Tommy Smith, a hippy Glaswegian hedonist who was looking for DJs for a new type of party in Blackburn. The next day, Gilmartin gave him a call.
Blackburn’s venues were uninterested in Smith’s designs on bringing house
music to the town until Clitheroe Kate – a key figure in the town’s gay scene around Mincing Lane – rented Smith a room at a bar called Crackers. “You knew something was happening,” says Gilmartin of the first party. “It was absolutely bouncing.” After a few weeks, demand was wildly outstripping Crackers’ capacity. Smith decided to take the parties to the empty mills – relics of Margaret Thatcher’s crushing impact on the former textile town. For Smith, the parties were a vanguard against the prime minister. “She was saying there’s no such thing as society,” he says. “We were saying there is, we’ll show you – here’s 10,000 people. It was political, it was taking them on: people could come together and share collective hopes and aspirations.”