Life After Dark: A History of British Nightclubs & Music Venues

Description

Nightclubs and music venues are often the source of a lifetime's music taste, best friends and vivid memories. They can define a town, a city or a generation, and breed scenes and bands that change music history. In Life After Dark Dave Haslam reveals and celebrates a definitive history of significant venues and great nights out. Writing with passion and authority, he takes us from vice-ridden Victorian dance halls to acid house and beyond; through the jazz decades of luxurious ballrooms to mods in basement dives and the venues that nurtured the Beatles, the Stones, Northern Soul and the Sex Pistols; from psychedelic light shows to high street discos; from the Roxy to the Hacienda; from the Krays to the Slits; and from reggae sound systems to rave nights in Stoke. In a journey to dozens of towns and cities, taking in hundreds of unforgettable stories on the way, Haslam explores the sleaziness, the changing fashions, the moral panics and the cultural and commercial history of nightlife. He interviews clubbers and venue owners, as well as DJs and musicians; he meets one of the gangsters who nearly destroyed Manchester's nightlife and discusses Goth clubs in Leeds with David Peace.

Dave Haslam is a writer, broadcaster and DJ who played the Hacienda in Manchester through the late 1980s and has since appeared worldwide. He's written three books, including 'Manchester England' - a cultural biography of Manchester which was declared one of the ten books that best represent England (alongside works by Jeremy Paxman, Zadie Smith, and George Monbiot). His journalism has appeared in NME, The Times, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, and The New Statesman.