The Manchester scene in the late 80s and early 90s created perhaps the only kind of music that really makes me want to dance. Fuelled by acid and ecstasy, the blend of new beats with 60s influences and psychedelic guitar effects was just irresistible. Now I'm pretty sure most EasyTV viewers are familiar with names like Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets and Charlatans, so today we're going to take a look at some more minor bands who had some accordingly minor hits.
Intastella was an oddity of Madchester in that it had a female lead singer (I can only think of Saint Etienne as the other prominent example). It didn't hurt that the singer was quite attractive, and so maybe Intastella should have had bigger success than what they had. Truth be told though, I just don't think they had a good enough line-up of songs, and there just were too many better bands around at that time. Nevertheless, let's have a peek at one of their better singles, which I think is still pretty groovy:
Maybe the song that typified best the Madchester sound and spirit was this hit by Northside. If you don't dance to this, you must be dead:
It's songs like the above that made everyone wish they could "take a trip" to the Hacienda club and be part of the craziness of the nascent rave culture. Living outside of England, it was difficult to find similar scenes or at least hear the hits on the radio, as consolidation and extreme commercialization were taking care of the nice diversity of musical offerings that could once be enjoyed through "free" FM radio in the early to mid-80s.
Luckily we now have the internet and we can retroactively and nostalgically discover songs such as this one by World of Twist:
The guy sings very much like Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream, I wonder who copied who?
I have made myself a nice little compilation of hit singles from that era, and we should one day throw a party somewhere and dance to this stuff. Who's in?
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