Freaky Dancing: The Complete Collection

by Paul Gill, Ste Pickford, Gerald Simpson (Foreword)

Freaky Dancing was the unofficial Haçienda acid house fanzine. It ran for 11 issues between July 1989 and August 1990. The first eight issues were given out free to people in the queue to the club on a Friday night. Later issues were sold around Manchester and reached a peak circulation of 750. The fanzine was put together by Paul ‘Fish Kid’ Gill and Ste Pickford with help from their friends and Haçienda regulars. It was written and drawn during the week then printed out using the photocopier in Ste’s office after work on a Friday. The photocopier didn’t survive. During the fanzine’s lifespan The Haçienda became the most famous - and infamous - nightclub on earth. It was a year of incredible highs and dark lows. Ultimately the scene imploded in paranoia, shootings and way too many drugs. Freaky Dancing documented this journey from blissful optimism to inevitable self-destruction. Famous fans included Peter Hook of New Order, DJ Mike Pickering and Tony Wilson, who described it as, “The most important piece of journalism I’ve read in the last twenty years.”This collection contains a foreword by Northern techno legend A Guy Called Gerald, all 11 volumes of the fanzine, The Highs Of Freaky Dancing, never seen before strips plus a scrapbook of sketches, reviews, fliers and photographs. It’s a potent capsule of a special time and place in all of its ragged psychedelic glory - essential for rave scholars and fans of DIY culture alike.

Genres: Music

276 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 31, 2019

Reviews

[Ian McHugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved reading this. I was just a little too young to get to the '89/'90 heyday of the Haçienda - I *did* manage to get there afterwards in the brief reopening a couple of years later but, as you can track through the issues of this fanzine, the club was a very different place then.

As a piece of social history this is really funny, entertaining, and insightful into 'club culture' of the period. Cartoons show the mind-altering perception brought by the drugs of the period and the various scenarios the heroes of the strips get into provided some familiar nods on my part.

The overarching theme is one of youthful exuberance and a pride in the 'scene' Gill and Pickford became a part of. The cartoon reflections on each issue and the context provided gives a great sense of the time and the authors.

If you were there (or, like me, thereabouts) I'd highly recommend. Not least for the music reviews and the playlist you can create from it...

[Rue Baldry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection successfully archives a moment in British cultural history. It is a complete collection of the zine which was handed out to the queue for the Hacienda Club in Manchester in the late 80s & early 90s.

The comic strips, reviews etc are vibrant, youthful and obsessed with dancing and the drugs popular at the time - mostly ecstasy with some side orders of acid and dope. There is an editorial end-strip added to each of the reprints of the 11 editions of Freaky Dancing, written & drawn by the editors, Paul Gill and Ste Pickford recently. It’s really interesting to have their reminiscences of how the issues were put together and their current opinions of those times and the zines.

I wasn’t cool enough to go to the Hacienda or take E, but I recognise with fond nostalgia other details in the strips and prose sections. This is a unique book which is well worth taking a look at.