Madchester: Encyclopedia II - Madchester - Legacy

Madchester - Legacy

Madchester - Musical legacy

The immediate influence of Madchester was in inspiring the wider baggy movement in the UK, with bands from various parts of the country producing music in the early 1990s heavily influenced by the main Madchester players. These bands included Flowered Up (from London), The Farm (from Liverpool), the Soup Dragons (from Glasgow) and Ocean Colour Scene (from Birmingham). Blur, from Colchester, certainly adopted a baggy style in their early career, although in an interview with Select Magazine in 1991 they claimed, rather implausibly, to have "killed" the genre.

Subsequently, the influence of Madchester on Britpop in the mid-1990s was fairly clear, depending on which bands are discussed. Oasis are a clear example, and their guitarist Noel Gallagher worked as a roadie for the Inspiral Carpets during the Madchester era.

The "big beat" dance music movement of the late 1990s also owed much to Madchester's eclectic approach to clubbing, with the Manchester DJ-ing duos the Chemical Brothers and Mint Royale being heavily inspired by their experiences in the Manchester clubland of the early 1990s.

More generally, the Madchester scene was groundbraking in the way it brought together dance music and indie music, in particular the combination of the types of drumming found in funk and disco music (and sampled in 80s hip-hop music) with jingle-jangle guitar. In the 1990s, this became a commonplace formula, found frequently in even the most commercial music. Arguably, Madchester is owed a debt (or to be blamed, depending on your viewpoint) every time a jukebox plays an Alanis Morissette song.

From a marketing point of view, it might be speculated that the Madchester experience taught the music industry a number of lessons in the selling of indie and alternative music. Some might find it tempting to suggest that there is no coincidence in the development of hype around a set of alternative rock bands in Seattle (an industrial, north-western city of the US) soon after Madchester died down.

Madchester - Impact on Manchester

The cultural impact of Madchester within its home city and surrounding administrative areas was significant, although hard to assess in the long-term, taking into account the full picture.

The mushrooming of Manchester's nightlife has certainly had along-term impact, particularly with the subsequent development of the Gay Village and Northern Quarter. City centre living is also something that began to catch on in Manchester in the wake of Madchester. The city centre had not been seen as a residential area, but by 1994, high-end flats were selling for over a million pounds. The growth in the residential market in the centre of the city continues to this day.

The attraction of the city was such that, at the height of Madchester in 1990, the University of Manchester was the most sought-after destination for university applicants in the UK, a position shared year-on-year by Oxford and Cambridge in the normal course of things.

The scene also gave an undoubted boost to the city's media and creative industries. This was not only the case at the grass-roots. The BBC launched The 8.15 From Manchester, a Saturday morning kids' TV show (with a themetune by the Inspiral Carpets). This ran during 1990 and 1991, cashing in on the street-cred of the city at the time.

Organised crime became an unfortunate side-story to Madchester, with the vibrancy of the clubbing scene in the city (and the popularity of illegal drugs, particularly ecstasy) producing a fertile environment for gangsterism. During the 1990s, this was to get worse, with shootings becoming frighteningly regular in areas such as Moss Side and Longsight, and occurring from time to time in the city centre. Violent incidents at the Haçienda led to a campign against it by Greater Manchester Police, and contributed to its closure in 1997.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Legacy", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki