Ecstasy and the bomb

The summer of 1996

I spent most afternoons waitressing in a café on the edge of the city centre serving a set lunch menu to staff from the grey municipal building, the Manchester outpost of the BBC, on the opposite side of the road. Occasionally someone exciting off the telly or a musician would peer over a menu. Most of the time it was producers and researchers who would slurp their vegetable broth, sip cups of tea and be underwhelmed by the lasagne - all part of the meal deal for under £5. I got to know their faces and their table manners. The man in black who ate alone. A muso. Never made a mess. The woman with mental health issues who ordered beer with ice and coated everything with mayonnaise.

The kitchen staff were mainly international students. Eric from Ethiopia with the gentlest soul, sent money home to his family so they could buy a goat or a sheep for their smallholding. Luis from Madrid who I went to see Almodóvar films with at the Cornerhouse cinema. They were all so sweet, finding their way and they worked hard for paltry wages.

David appeared at the door. Looking like a young, skinnier version of Tom Waits he was handsome in a gangly way. He popped in to say hi with a big cheery smile.

“I’ll see you later,” the words lilting out on to the street as he exited as quickly as he arrived.

He was over from Derry staying with me on my living room floor. We’d be going out. That’s what we did. Any money I earnt was burnt on Marlborough Lights, the gas and leccy and the occasional Top Shop splurge to meet sartorial needs. The rest was for clubbing and cat food. I got fed at work.

One of the clubs we went to in NYC

A couple of months earlier our mutual friend Susan and I had gone to New York. We’d saved hard for a year putting in extra shifts. It was an absolute riot. We stayed at The Gershwin Hotel on 27^th Street but rarely slept as we were dancing at drum n bass nights or gay clubs. Our tired legs carried us along Fifth Avenue, down 23^rd Street, past the iconic Hotel Chelsea, where if you squinted you could almost see Patti Smith hanging on the balcony. The districts, the accents, pancakes for breakfast, the squalor. We did a runner from a diner at 5am. Gawped at the mafia in Little Italy. The hipsters were so achingly cool and cocaine thin. We visited The Guggenheim to see a Bill Viola show and bought records from the Lower East, cheap make-up from Walmart and drank beer in cool bars hoping to spot Jon Spencer.

Bar hopping NYC

I regularly scanned the jobs pages of The Guardian and the Manchester Evening News but had given up trying to find anything interesting. The black biro poised to circle vacancies was redundant. I’d enrolled to start a course in September, with a plan to leave for Japan the following year to teach English. I was fed up with the drudgery. Never having enough money and the partying was starting to take its toll on my health. The course was six months I’d get a visa and be off. As I wiped down the tables, and made coffee, my mind had relocated to Tokyo, the architecture, the energy.

Once my shift ended, I boarded the number 85 bus and stopped at the corner shop to pick up a loaf of sliced bread, milk and a packet of digestive biscuits. I was living in Whalley Range in Manchester in one of the many back-to-back terraces that ran across blocks of the city. Just like Manchester’s famous soap opera Coronation Street. When you live there you don’t see it, but it was smoking chimneys, cats perched on the walls of ginnels and pubs on corners. The lines of red brick, forming grids.

Aside from the northern stereotype of cobbles and flat caps Manchester had a gang problem and these same streets witnessed more than matchstick cats and dogs. A young lad lived next to the corner shop. He was feral. He terrified me. What’s more, he knew he terrified me. He’d thrown a firework at me one evening. I had every reason to be fearful. When you looked into his eyes they were pools of darkness. He had no value for life – his or anyone else’s and he wasn’t yet twenty.

One morning I awoke to the sound of a low groan. A man was doubled over in the middle of the road, bloodied. He’d been stabbed right outside my house. “Someone help me please.” I peeked through the curtains and called an ambulance and then the police. They asked for my name, and I wouldn’t give it. The hymn we sang in school Cross Over the Road popped into my head. Would you walk by on the other side when someone called for aid? Would you walk by on the other side and would you be afraid?

I felt sick for leaving him alone on the street, but I didn’t want to get involved. I could see other curtains twitching. No one left their house. An ambulance arrived.

David and Susan were a gas. Lovely people in pursuit of hedonism or freedom or something else entirely. We’d swap clothes and stories. I’d provide hugs and a floor to sleep on when needed. David was moving to London. Susan was moving down the road from me, but they were both in-between and I had space and pillows, and I was always glad of the company. I felt pretty ignorant about the history of Northern Ireland. They would tell me things when they wanted to, and I learnt a little more. I got pulled up one night in the 24-hour Spar for saying Derry and not Londonderry by a strident, young Irish lad. Susan told him to fuck off and it got a bit antsy.

June 13^th 1996

For my birthday Susan bought me a ticket to go and see Irvine Welsh in conversation at The Hacienda. He’d got a new book coming out Ecstasy so where better to launch than the cathedral of dance. The night arrived. I dressed up and we got the bus into town together. The club was packed. We headed to the bar and jostled to be served. There was music playing and the clamour of excited chatter. I spotted a couple of friends, and we exchanged hellos, but it was a bit too noisy. I quite liked the lad, had a bit of a soft spot for him, but he was taken.

Ticket courtesy of Manchester Digital Music Archive

Around 500 twentysomethings thronged towards the stage awaiting the arrival of the literary supernova Irvine Welsh. Trainspotting had become an instant cult hit when the film, directed by Danny Boyle, was released earlier in the year and the Scotsman’s star was in the ascendant. To me, Irvine Welsh always looked a bit old. I was 25 and I reckon he looked over 40. I liked his work, but I found the youth posturing outside of his work unconvincing, but I guess he was still a young man to have so much success and acclaim.

Anthony H Wilson stood in his customary black suit and white shirt, spectacles perched on the end of his nose as people sat cross legged on the floor or perched on some of the blocks – I squeezed in on the end of a seat next to some blokes. Susan sat on the floor nearby. We both had a pint and there was a loud cheer as Irvine Welsh took to the stage. The patron saint of modern psychedelic literature.

He read prose from his new book, quietly confident and comfortable in the limelight. He sat on a small sofa that was too low for him and chatted with his familiar host sat opposite. Then in a rather strange turn of events when things were thrown open to the audience a young guy, wearing a bright Celtic green shirt, got up and picked his way over people’s legs climbing onto the stage, and sat next to Irvine and asked him if Scotland were going to win the football? He was Scottish too. The whole thing was a bit surreal. I wondered if he was a plant. A set-up for added drama. There were hecklers.

Things dissolved and the music returned. The blokes next to me struck up a conversation. One of them claimed to be friends with Irvine Welsh, he was up from London, and bought me a drink. He was flirting and I really wasn’t interested. He persisted. His charm was thick and beer flowed, we danced and the night wore on, he leant forward and kissed me. I could feel the eyes of the friends I’d spoken to burning into my back. Judging. Kissing in public was pretty crass.

He was a bit pushy, I gave him my number, but figured he’d be off back to London the next day and that would be that. He was tall, claimed to be half Italian. Susan and I left at two and got a taxi home. I was in work the next day and she was heading home for a couple of weeks.

June 15^th

It was my day off. I was at home and had finally got the house to myself. I’d not long got up. One of my cats, Kevin, had been sick. Not unusual he was always catching things or stealing them. He’d been known to come home with Saris pulled from washing lines or sausages from my neighbour’s kitchen. I cleaned it up and was just getting out of the bath when I heard a bang and low rumbling, in the distance, but thought nothing of it. Then the phone started to ring. I didn’t have an answer phone and it rung off and then started up again and again. The first call was my dad – checking I was ok. There’d been a bomb in the city centre. A massive explosion. I turned on the news.

Shit. My stomach flipped. I called my mother to tell her I was ok and then I started to try and call friends. Pretty much everyone I knew lived and worked in Manchester. I couldn’t sit down and just stood in the middle of the room with the television on. The bomb was the biggest to be detonated on British soil since the Second World War, 3,300lbs blew a hole through the city centre taking out windows, buildings and blowing shrapnel around the corners of the streets.

It was timed to coincide with the Euro 96 match between Russia and Germany the following day at Old Trafford. The city would be hosting fans, in the hotels and cafés. People would be heading to the pubs to watch England vs Scotland which was kicking off at 3pm that day at Wembley. Shoppers would be browsing around the Arndale Centre. My friends working in French Connection, Kookai, and the independent bars and restaurants earning a living on a busy Saturday.

The IRA had parked a white van on Corporation Street. Someone had called to tip off a number of organisations including hospitals that it was due to go off in an hour. Incredibly the police managed to evacuate the city centre in sixty minutes. Over 80,000 people were guided away from hairdressers, shops, bookies, pubs and offices. It was a miracle that no one was reported dead. Several hundred were injured and Manchester was cordoned off.

Later than afternoon I got another call. He said he was worried about me and knew I worked in the restaurant. He’d just been to Wembley to see the match. England beat Scotland two - nil. He was happy. Could he see me again?

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I didn’t find Jon Spencer in NYC but I did go and see him at The Forum in London in April 97. A brilliant gig. Jon Spencer Blues Explosion Wail.