Speaker Funeral at the Function Room
Strap in, it’s edition 47 of Laughing Stock, with Rich Walker bringing you a dispatch from a thrillingly unpredictable night following Blackhaine around some of Manchester and Salford’s most salubrious venues.
In the basement of the exemplary Peste on the edge of Manchester’s former industrial warehouse heart cum ‘coolest neighbourhood’ Ancoats, I am watching a film of a bright white skinhead man writhe topless on the black volcanic sands of a Canary Island, the sea foaming about his tortured torso, contorted into shapes reminiscent of a person in the throes of an epileptic episode. The music, turned up to 11 on the recently installed speakers, is what can only be described as ‘abrasive’. Accompanying the confronting imagery, the whole experience can only be described as ‘visceral’. It’s a lot. All the senses prickling with a not necessarily pleasant fission. There are electric strobe sections, pulsing, punishing, stopping just short of ‘I need to leave the room now please’. There are the scenes in blown out polytunnels in some kind of mountainous desert, the sun low, Blackhaine’s body still distorting to some unseen anguish. And all the time the noise, the noise, the noise, relentless in its pursuit of destruction. Emerging into the bright lights of the main bar at Peste, I feel a mixture of exhilaration and exhaustion, the senses having been heighten by the 30-minute film. But readers, this is the just the beginning of a mini odyssey of an evening, our host Blackhaine (aka Tom Heyes) the main protagonist, but not the disruptor who will momentarily derail the evening sending it spiralling into places I wasn’t expecting to be of a Sunday night.
Post-Peste, the Blackhaine caravan moves onto the unlikely venue of upstairs at the Britons Protection, one of Manchester’s oldest and best pubs. Constantly threatened by the rampant march of development in the city centre, the Britons has managed to hang on, earning reprieve after reprieve in the face of Big Manchester Money (aka foreign development companies encouraged by a desperate council to gobble up every available square inch of land for ‘regeneration’, with scant regard for current occupiers, history, or indeed aesthetics). In the shadow of a massive residential tower with an inbuilt digital advertising board showing a promo for nighttime-rent-a-gob S*sha Lord’s forthcoming book ‘Tales from the Dancefloor’ (lol), around 50 of us walk up the stairs to a room few of us knew existed in the city: the Britons’ upstairs function room. It’s a proper old school place: mad patterned carpet, seating along two walls, elaborate lightshades that aspire to, but cannot attain chandelier status, peeling wallpaper and a sense of a buffet just eaten for an 80th birthday. Seats are taken along the walls leaving the middle bereft, conjuring an atmosphere somewhere between a high-end catwalk show and a wake.
Blackhaine is due to perform here, back live in Manchester for the first time in a while post globe-trotting to every avantgarde music gathering across the world; post choregraphing for Kanye; post cementing his reputation as an unmissable act of chaotic, burning energy. But first, enter Croww, our chief disruptor. Back to the crowd, dead centre on a bar stool, he’s hunched over equipment that’s being manipulating to make an impressively unholy noise, a noise that is testing the capacity of the ancient looking speakers and the capacity of my increasingly ancient ears. Without earplugs (tinnitus is not cool, kids!) it’s impossible for me to endure, and an endurance it is. Sometimes noise can be cleansing, enveloping your senses and creating a kind of hypnotic blankness to get lost in, but here it’s relentlessly pummelling at volumes and frequencies that don’t quite agree with me.
Turns out it was at volumes and frequencies that didn’t agree with the speakers either. They’ve blown, and are declared kaput, out of service, gone the way of the 80th buffet. After a period of failed CPR, the gig is proclaimed postponed, refunds will be given at point of sale, dates might be rescheduled. A palpable sense of disappointment fills the room. Blackhaine here would have been something special, something thrilling, something rare. People begin to rise from the benches, the wake now triumphing over the fashion show atmosphere. There are pockets of quietly furious action in the corners of the room though, rapid fire conversations, negotiations, ideas popping. Minutes after the postponement, a voice pipes up over the hushed chattering: ‘Blackhaine will perform at The White Hotel in about half an hour, make your way there’. A reprieve. A revival. A resuscitation.
Presently the caravan reassembles; some on foot, some by carriage (taxi), others by cycle (me), making the shortish pilgrimage to Blackhaine’s spiritual home across the water in Salford, The White Hotel. Shutters are raised, bars are opened, unfathomable amounts of dry ice are pumped in, speakers are working, social media is proclaiming the second coming of the night, to be continued at 11.30pm. And so it comes to pass, the final act of the night, rescued from the ashes of the now presumably useless Britons’ speakers by the heroes of The White Hotel. It’s a set of events that feels unlikely to have happened anywhere else but here, with any other players, and is somehow all the more perfect for its many imperfections. Finally, Blackhaine performs, at least two and half hours late, and it’s everything the night has come to expect. On the floor in and amongst the small, dedicated crowd, who by now all have a sense of complete togetherness having pulled through the trials and tribulations of the evening as one, Blackhaine tears in, all ferocious energy, a volcanic eruption of intensity. It’s confrontational, intimidating, thrilling. Joined by two look-a-like MCs, as bald and bright as the man himself, it’s also confusing, disorientating, hard to distinguish who’s who, hard to know what’s being bellowed into the mics, who’s on top of who on the pile-on on the floor. Blackhaine emerges from the depths, the smoke, the heavy atmosphere, as a pent-up ball of fire, blazing through a set of wild force. He’s unlike anyone you’ve seen perform before, even in these thrown together, slightly chaotic circumstances. It’s what you wish every performance could be: unrelenting passion.
The night is wrapped up, it’s getting on for 1am. The fission inside me now fully positively charged, a giddy cycle home prickling with electricity, a night of combustion, both literal and metaphorical. There’s a new tale from the dancefloor here, one unlikely to make S*sha Lord’s ‘no holds barred!’ book, but one that wouldn’t be welcome anyway. It’s as far away from the faux-underground of Lord’s Warehouse Project, as far away from an advertising board on a residential tower, as far away from ‘development as progress’, as can be. For this is a tale of artistry over profit, of genuine connection, of genuine community, all too rare in this increasingly impersonal city of ours.
We’re a third of the way through 2024 now and for the last few months we have again been publishing an ongoing playlist. It’s very decent. You can listen here on Apple Music and Spotify. And if you haven’t subscribed yet, please do so below. ‘Tales from the Dancefloor’ is available in all good bookshops now. Those ads aren’t going to pay for themselves.
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