Flesh

The nights Hot, Nude and Temperance Club might be synonymous with The Haçienda, but equally important was the club’s monthly gay night, Flesh. A riotous collision of Queer Northern energy and pure hedonism, it was the perfect antidote to clubland’s encroaching lad culture. There from the beginning, Paul Flynn was one of the night’s disciples. He looks back on a time when his home city went from Madchester to Gaychester…

For the decade preceding October 1991 and the opening of The Haçienda’s peerless monthly gay bacchanal, Flesh, Manchester built part of its robust, say-what-you-see identity on casual homophobia. This strand of the city’s character had obvious figureheads. Portly stand-up comedian, Bernard Manning engendered a ‘backs to the wall’ atmosphere at his Embassy Club, parlaying gay male sexuality as nothing more evolved than a predatory desire to bum anything that moves. James Anderton, the city’s puritan Chief of Police, famously responded to the AIDS pandemic by saying gay men were ‘swimming in a cesspit of their own making’ on ‘Granada Reports’. The central joke of Mike Baldwin’s affair with Deirdre Barlow on ‘Coronation Street’ was that husband, Ken, was a bit too gay for her because he read books.

Where there is thought, there is counterthought. The local response to all this had been coalescing, forming a perfect storm ready to eventually congregate on the Haçienda dancefloor, the spot where the sad city found its happiness. “The first Flesh was the proudest moment of my club career,” says the night’s co-promoter, long-term Haçienda employee, Paul Cons. “Seeing the best club in the world fully and explicitly going Queer was historic.”

The Haçienda was one of a small number of venues across the city that Mancunian LGBT+ folk already felt invested in, like The Royal Exchange theatre, the King Street Vidal Sassoon salon, clothes shop Geese, vegetarian café The Eighth Day and The Cornerhouse cinema. “It was massively important for Queer Mancunians to stake their claim on this juicy territory,” says DJ Paulette, the Flesh figurehead who DJed downstairs at the Gay Traitor.

LGBT+ people worked The Haçienda. We manned the cloakroom and the canteen. Cons was our representative wizard behind the curtains of its Oz. The pre-acid house ‘straight’ crowd was sophisticated (local translation: pretentious) enough to know gay and lesbian people and all looked a little bit bisexual anyway. “Lots of us had already been going there a lot, and loved it,” says another of Flesh’s resident DJs, Kath McDermott. “Quite a few of us had been thinking, can you imagine this full of Queer people?” When it happened, says Cons: “It felt like we weren’t at the margins anymore. We’d taken the temple.”

The Flesh storm had other, more oblique portents. New Order’s debt of gratitude to the gay clubs of New York was stitched into their story early. ‘Blue Monday’ had been crafted with the same programming machinery Bobby Orlando used to fashion hi-NRG hits for Divine and The Flirts. Like Robert DeNiro, Tony Wilson’s dad was gay. “I always remember Tony’s gay dad turning up at the opening of the [artist] David Mach exhibition in 1986,” says Cons. “There were giant columns on The Haçienda dancefloor, made out of thousands of unused sleeves of the [New Order] 12-inch ‘Confusion’ single. He started dancing on his own a bit pissed until he was gently removed by security. There was always an undercurrent.”

“That confidence Tony had in his own campery,” says McDermott. “Calling everyone ‘darling’. Wearing nail polish. He sent Paul Cons to New York for the summer on sabbatical to see what was going on in the gay clubs there. Imagine that now?”

An aborted early attempt in Haçienda history to mount its first LGBT+ night, Gay Mondays (1983), climaxed with Divine, growling along to a succession of flawless Bobby O cuts to a quarter-full main room of men in overcoats and women with Cocteau Twins hair. The night lasted less than six months. By the time it got a second shot with Flesh, which lasted six years, The Haçienda had accrued its own legends, good and bad. The period when gangland Manchester peaked, briefly dubbed ‘Gunchester’ had shut down its doors for a season. Solutions needed to be found to open again. Cons suggested turning the entire venue gay, an idea which was rejected.

You could see where he was coming from. There’d been a recent growth spurt in confidence of Manchester’s LGBT+ underground. In 1989, the ‘No Clause 28’ March against Margaret Thatcher’s proposed bill to ban the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in the classroom formed the largest street protest in Britain. The following summer, ecstasy began filtering into the gay clubs of Manchester. Smoke machines were installed and the carpet ripped up at The Number One club, a compact box tucked footsteps from Anderton’s Bootle Street Police Station HQ. Saturday night resident DJ, Tim Lennox adjusted his sets to the tempo and stimulants of the times, as whistles blew, Vick’s VapoRub merged with the 174_DISCO_POGO

ever-present aroma of poppers and tobacco, sweat dripped gracefully from the ceiling. A new archetype, the gay raver was born.

“The Number One was amazingly important,” recalls Cons. “Tim sewed seeds and built a scene that was ready to explode when transported to The Haçienda.” Lennox’s Saturday nights at The Number One were our big gay secret. “It was the temple,” says McDermott. “That influenced us to set up Loose, so young Queer Liverpool was galvanized. Dave [Kendrick, beloved Flesh main floor resident alongside Lennox] was doing Jungle in Leeds, so that crowd was ready to go. Manchester was obviously set up.”

In a final flourish of local Queer hospitality history, former Boddingtons Brewery marketing man, Peter Dalton opened Manto on Canal Street, the first glass-fronted gay bar in the country. The staff were pretty, the music new, the finishes sleek and European. You could buy Gitanes cigarettes over the bar. A newspaper stand housed Le Monde and Die Welt. “Manto was massive,” says McDermott, “It really kicked a door down with the big plate glass windows. ‘It’s on, we’re here. Fuck off, we’re beautiful, screw you.’”

If we had our own Dry Bar, why couldn’t we get our hands on The Haçienda? “That’s quite a Manc attitude, isn’t it?” says McDermott. “Manchester’s gay clubs had been so segregated before. The music was appalling. We wanted to push all that segregation and Stock, Aitken and Waterman into the canal. We knew there was change coming because we were that change.”

Buoyed by the success of co-promoting Attitude at The Academy (over 800 tickets sold) and her takeover of The Haçienda for The Lesbian Summer of Love (notoriously the biggest bar take in the club’s history), Paul Cons began Flesh as another co-production with Lucy Scher. “Lucy was a neighbour in Hulme,” says McDermott. “When she told me she was going in with Paul at The Haçienda, I was completely evangelical. Paul with all that bedrock knowledge he’d learned from New York clubs, Lucy completely keyed into a grass roots community of dykes in Hulme? Now we’ve got something interesting.” She remembers flyering for Lucy ahead of the first Flesh. “We did it for free because we believed that strongly that this had to happen. Standing on the corner of Aytoun Street persuading people to come along wasn’t a job, it was a passion.”

“I wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t for Lucy,” says Paulette.

“Her modus operandi,” says McDermott, “was: ‘Where’s the women?’”

“She put us upfront on the flyers and posters,” says Paulette. “She was gentle, funny, direct and sharp. She made me believe I could do anything I wanted to.”

In almost all respects, the night The Haçienda turned gay was just evolution at work, the club transmuting into a portal through which the Queer city found its true Dionysian head of steam. On October 31 1991, Flesh’s first night nerves lasted approximately half an hour, before The Haçienda began swelling with mid-week ravers from across the North on the last Wednesday of each month. There were more than any of us crammed into the 200-capacity Number One club had ever really imagined possible.

I was still a teenager when Flesh began. Despite being well schooled in nights at The Haçienda and Number One, it was almost as if picturing the two conjoining was a Queer leap of faith too far. Yet combining the raw energy from The Number One with the Brutalist sophistication of The Haçienda felt instantly epochal, capturing a vanguard junction of Northern gay culture at its most blissfully and romantically untested. A friend turned to me that first night, while looking over the balcony onto the main dancefloor and said: “It’s a bit like watching everyone interesting and gay in the city lose their drug virginity at once, isn’t it?”

Miss Flesh: Paul Cons top right with actress Margi Clarke below.

Flesh took something already in the ether and crystallized it into pure nightlife magic. As early as Flesh #2, a wasted Masonic bond had begun to trace friendships formed there. Taking over The Haçienda was our shared triumph. The secret was out. Homophobia was not indigenously Mancunian after all, despite the ideas James Anderton had banked his professional reputation on. “Playing the Gay Traitor was like playing the wildest house party that was flooded 90% of the time,” says McDermott. “It was wild and great and free.” “Flesh pushed Queerness into a club where Queerness was unexpected,” says Paulette. “From the day it started, it turned the clubbing week on its head. Mid-week became the weekend. The town centre became aspirationally gay. House and disco ruled.”

Stories began gathering around Flesh. “The tickets used to say: MANAGEMENT RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE ADMISSION TO KNOWN HETEROSEXUALS,” says Cons. “Prior to Flesh you would have been hard pressed to find straight people frequenting any Queer establishment,” says Paulette. “Life in the 90s was riddled with isms and phobias.” Yet monthly, straight nightclubbers hoping to gain entrance to Flesh would ritualistically get off with their gay and lesbian mates at the check-in to prove to Jemima and Renika on the door that, if not quite 100% aligned to New Queer Manchester, they might at least be persuadable after nibbling the corner of a disco biscuit. “Straight people pretending to be gay in order to get in?” says Cons. “Incredible.”

Paula Yates hosted the debut Flesh beauty pageant. Flesh FC inaugurated The Haçienda’s first gay football-themed party. Take That played an early Flesh, to a mostly indifferent crowd, turning into regular punters instead. They recorded Dan Hartman’s ‘Relight My Fire’ after witnessing Tim Lennox raise the roof with it as his trusted end-of-the-night Flesh crescendo.

For Haçienda regulars used to hearing Mike Pickering and Graeme Park polishing off a Saturday night with Loleatta Holloway’s ‘Love Sensation’, the singer’s gospel explosion during the bridge of ‘Relight My Fire’ – ‘You’ve got to be strong enough to walk on through the night/there’s a new day on the other side’ – announced itself with a spinetingling new charge.

Hartman died six months into the night starting, of complications due to his AIDS diagnosis. Owing to the medical emergencies of the times, not all who went to Flesh survived its six-year run. When the night began, we were still five years away from combination therapies curtailing the assumed death sentence of an HIV infection. The impulse to dance is rarely more urgent than when dancing for your life.

In 1992, Paul Cons revived the idea of a more regular gay Haçienda takeover to his bosses at the club. “I tried to stage a coup in ‘92 and turf Mike Pickering out of his Friday night slot. But the pushback was swift and firm. So, I don’t think it would have ever happened. In hindsight, I should have gone further and asked for Saturdays as well. It would have been a major success and the club might still be open.”

At the Flesh second birthday party, when Michael and Gerlinde Costiff’s Leicester Square party, Kinky Gerlinky visited from London, Cons described Flesh to me as: “The most glamorous night Manchester has ever seen.” He still stands by the statement. “Oh yes, of course. How could Leigh Bowery giving birth on stage not be glamorous?” For Paulette, the Kinky Gerlinky Flesh felt like its crowning moment. “Flesh excelled itself each month, but the Second Birthday is probably where it all came together on a national scale, with Patrick Lilley, Princess Julia, Jeffrey Hinton and Luke Howard in attendance and all the glamour that came along with them.”

Somebody started a rumour that night about Princess Julia mixing two records from the spaceship DJ booth above the main dancefloor with the heel of her stiletto. “This is the party that the press came to,” says Paulette, “everyone from The Face, Mixmag, Attitude and DJ. Photographers and TV stations were there.” Fleetingly, ‘Gunchester’ begot ‘Gaychester’. Granada shot and aired a one-hour Flesh TV documentary.

“Flesh informed a generation,” says McDermott. “Playing the main room was completely visceral. I’d say to the guys who did the lights: ‘When the piano breakdown happens in this one, make it go absolute sunburst orange.’ They’d hold it for the entire breakdown. These were theatrical lights, 180_DISCO_POGO

better than anywhere else. Being at the helm of that, looking down at what was going on was completely overwhelming. Stressful as fuck, but incomparable, really.”

After the third birthday, Lucy Scher left as co-promoter. A sea-change felt afoot. “It lost some of the diversity that having a lesbian co-running it brought,” says Cons. By now big room gay parties had spread across country, including Vague at The Warehouse in Leeds and Love Boutique at The Arches in Glasgow. Flesh had proven hungry audiences existed. A feeding frenzy began. It had done its job, shifting Manchester’s central sense of itself. It continued, with intermittent flashes of genius, until early 1997.

There were repercussions. Manchester City Council appointed an evangelical, unofficial ‘Minister For Fun’ in gay local councillor, Pat Kearney to sell the city’s new LGBT+ groundswell to the world. To his eternal credit, it worked. Peter Dalton bought the old Factory Records building on the corner of Princess Street from a bankrupt Tony Wilson and for a couple of glorious, ecstasy-addled years we got our full-time gay Haçienda in Paradise Factory, with Flesh’s longest standing main room residents, Tim Lennox and Dave Kendrick as Saturday night heroes.

Canal Street exploded, to the point where Channel Four commissioned burgeoning television genius, Russell T. Davies’ ‘Queer As Folk’, a drama centring on its patrons, a bit like Tony Warren’s ‘Coronation Street’ with its pants off. Handbag house brands like Hed Kandi took a sliver of the tough, cheeky, New York house energy of Flesh and, briefly, successfully sold it back to straight Britain, one fluffy bra top at a time, corporatizing and ultimately killing the unique flavour of DIY Northern wit, glamour and heads-down Queer boogie that made Flesh so golden in the first place.

This being Manchester, everyone decided they hated Canal Street by the time it became popular. Another old Flesh regular and Manto DJ, Luke Cowdrey and a band of his Queer chums, including Kath McDermott started Homoelectric, a boutique anti-mainstream Queer club in the old Clone’s leather den, Rockies, a venue James Anderton had raided in the late-80s. After cannily tracing the shift of interesting Manchester nightlife out to Hidden in Salford, Homoelectric gained a new momentum more redolent of Berlin nightlife than Mancunian, now hosting a 10,000-capacity affiliate annual gay rave, Homobloc, at Mayfield Depot.

Paulette is officially a superstar DJ and writing a first memoir about her scintillating journey through the night. Kath McDermott is a producer at Radio 6 Music and intermittent nightclub DJ, when the correct mood and night takes her fancy. “For Manchester to become one of the key Queer cities in the world,” she says, “was unthinkable when we first walked into a basement club positioned next to James Anderton’s police station. From that to today is just seismic. Flesh was a big part of that story.” As if to emblemise the passage of Manchester from a place of hostility to one of acceptance, Anderton’s daughter eventually came out as lesbian.

Tim Lennox left DJing for good to become a funeral director, inspiring more than one Queer Mancunian to coin a nightlife epithet on his behalf: From the rave to the grave. He stepped out of retirement for a Flesh 20th anniversary night at The Factory, the old Paradise Factory which Peter Hook was by now renting back from Peter Dalton.

Paul Cons made the shift from The Haçienda to managing the elite London confectionery company, Konditor and Cook, with his husband. “Ecstasy, sugar, it’s all drugs,” he once told me. Lucy Scher died at 53, in the summer of 2018. She’d returned to her first love of filmmaking, helping initiate an accessible screenwriting resource. Dave Kendrick? Reader, I married him.

In early summer this year, Dave, Kath and Paulette were booked by Cons to play the Flesh room at The Haçienda reunion at Tobacco Dock, London. Flesh is starting, at last, to be written into club legend, on its own terms, celebrated for the absolute ball it once was. Nobody has a critical word to say about the night The Haçienda turned gay. Which, if you know Mancunians, well…

“I am massively proud of my involvement,” says Paulette. “It was ground-breaking in every way. My presence as a Black, female, Queer woman commanding the decks and hosting the second room for four years is poignant and powerful. Every month I saw my beautiful mixed crowd grow into a faithful family, some of whom are lifelong friends. I managed to become successful enough to join the world of white, heterosexual, cis male DJs, meeting them on their own territory. That’s pure poetry.”

They are all still friends. “I know, it’s so funny,” says Kath McDermott. “We went through so much together. Once you’ve been there with a swimming pool bursting on the side of the dancefloor at The Haçienda, everything’s quite normal to us.”

She’s proud of Flesh, too. “You can see bits and pieces of it in every cutting-edge Queer club that exists now,” she says.

It’s just a different edge that’s being cut now.

“Yeah, and you have to get through that first battlefront to get where we are now. We did that.”