Freaky Dancing

Here's a really cool thing that I've been meaning to do a post about for a while: The Quietus's new publishing arm, TQLC, has pulled together as a single volume every issue of the ravezine Freaky Dancing, which as the Happy Mondays-derived title suggests was the unofficial house organ of the Haçienda.  You can get it here.

Created by Ste Pickford and Paul Gill, the zine consisted almost entirely of comic strips, cartoons, illustrations and visual-led spoofs 'n' satires.

                                                  


Starting July 1989, the duo gave it away free to punters queuing outside the Haçienda on a Friday.

It ran for 12 issues.

The eleventh issue came out in August 1990, by which point the Haçienda scene was souring in a miasma of drug excess and paranoia, gangs and guns. Which brought the hostile attention of the authorities - such as "God's Cop" James Anderton, the chief constable of Greater Manchester -  and ultimately led to the club's demise.

There was one final issue, in May 1994, when the Haçienda had a re-opening night, but that consisted of reprinted highlights from the original run of issues.

unfinished strip for abandoned Freaky Dancing revival issue, circa 1994 

Freaky Dancing: The Complete Collection is a marvelous document of a cultural moment happening in real-time - hats off to The Quietus for putting it out and Ste & Paul for doing it in the first place.


Oh and A Guy Called Gerald wrote the foreword.

a fighter and a lover

                                        

Here's something I really enjoyed researching and writing - a feature for RBMA on Luigi Nono, the great "militant modernist" composer of the late 20th Century. It focuses on his electronic and tape works of the 1960s, his exploration of vocal extremes, his support for liberation movements around the world, and the surrounding context of Italian Communism in the post-war era.

The twin pegs for this piece are the fiftieth-anniversary vinyl reissue of Musica-Manifesto N. 1 by Die Schachtel and the publication of Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews by the University of California Press.

     Nono at work with his prime collaborator, the sound engineer 

  Marino Zuccheri, at the Studio di Fonologia in Milan.