Manchester Mania : Is the blue collar rock ‘n’ roll revolution of the ‘New Liverpool’ going to catch fire in America?

Tony Wilson, who has been called both the Donald Trump and the Brian Epstein of the local rock scene, placed two blank pieces of white paper on the desk in front of him.

The personable, stylishly dressed Wilson then picked up a pen and spent nearly an hour filling both sheets with names and dates--all with the deliberateness of a history professor embarking on a new lesson.

It’s his outline of the events that led to the recent emergence of a rock scene here that is so flashy and bountiful that much of the pop press in England has begun describing Manchester as the new Liverpool.

“The revolutionary thing about what is happening (in Manchester) is that this is the first blue-collar revolution in pop since Elvis in 1956,” Wilson said.

“The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Sex Pistols were very middle-class. . . . Art college. The old joke is the Beatles’ mommies gave them their first guitars. . . . The Manchester groups stole their first guitars.”

John Squire, guitarist for the hugely promising band the Stone Roses, smiled at the mention of the joke during a separate interview. Actually, he said, his first guitar was a Christmas present.

But, he added quickly, Manchester’s most acclaimed band paid the rent on its rehearsal room for years with money from the four members’ welfare checks.

Tony Wilson is known to sometimes over-dramatize his theories about rock, but there is a spirit in the music scene here that represents as radical a reaction to the bleakness of life for working-class British youth as the punk uprising of the late ‘70s.

Oddly, this generation of young people has chosen an almost totally opposite approach. Instead of the anger and harsh symbolism associated with Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols, there is gentleness about this rebellion in which its followers find comfort and community. The future may be no brighter in Great Britain for those who dance at Manchester’s pivotal Hacienda club than it was when Johnny Rotten declared “There is no future . . . for you,” but the ultra-fast disco-rock gets them through the night.

“That’s what is exciting about it,” Squire said. “There (weren’t) a lot of goals when we started, because we didn’t have any goals. There’s not a lot of future for most kids in England--unless you come from a wealthy family.

“But rock gave us a strength, and we built our own scene. We hope we can pass on whatever strength we have . . . give other people the idea to try to do something themselves, whether it is be in a band or just get through the week. The idea is for everyone to be able to find a way to walk around with their head up.”

The first words Wilson wrote on the pages were Ibiza (an island off Spain in the Mediterranean) and 1986 . He then tapped Ibiza with his pen.

“That’s where the working-class British kids have been going for their holidays for years,” he explained. “They have these big outdoor discos, and in 1986, Ecstasy, the yuppie drug, arrives from New York, and the workers on Ibiza all begin taking it. The following summer, it spreads to the kids on the dance floor and this new scene was created.”

By the end of the lecture, Wilson had explained how the vacationers brought ecstasy home, where it became part of a new disco scene in Manchester built around rapid beat “house” music from Chicago. The center of the new movement was Wilson’s club, the Hacienda.

(Ecstasy, also known as MDMA, is one of the so-called “designer drugs” that was developed in the mid-’80s to circumvent existing drug laws and subsequently declared illegal.)

By 1988, young people from all over England were heading to Manchester on weekends to dance at the Hacienda--and, in some cases, take Ecstasy.

It was a revolutionary moment, Wilson said, because it merged the rock culture and the disco culture in an easygoing hippie-like atmosphere. He likened it to San Francisco in the early days of the psychedelic movement.

Concurrently, a new wave of young Manchester bands emerged, many of them incorporating a disco-compatible dance beat into otherwise traditional, guitar-oriented rock.

The scene continued on an underground level until late last year when some key Manchester bands--most notably the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays--dominated the year-end reader polls in the key British pop weeklies.

The Stone Roses, which is not affiliated with Wilson’s Factory Records label, finished first in the New Musical Express’ readers’ poll in best band, album, single and new band categories.

The scene comes complete with its own community store, the Afflecks Palace, an old, multistory maze of tiny shops, including a variety of clothing stores offering everything from the famed 26-inch-cuff dungarees to sweat shirts proclaiming, “On the Sixth Day, God Created Manchester.”

Other Afflecks attractions: a record shop where you can buy the latest dance records, local fanzines or Bop City, Manchester’s own rock magazine; a barber shop where you can gaze at photos of your favorite Manchester acts while getting your hair shaped into the shaggy, ‘60s style favored by the Roses’ Ian Brown and John Squire, and a rock poster shop.

All this energy and excitement has sent pop journalists from around the world--including Rolling Stone and MTV from America--scurrying off in recent weeks to Manchester, which has been playfully dubbed Madchester . Record companies have also been here, hoping to tap into the action.

Trying to make sense of the scene whose wardrobe symbols include flared trousers and floppy sweat shirts, the journalists--also including a television reporter from the Soviet Union--invariably end up at Wilson’s door.

“The woman from Russia asked me how it feels to be the leader of this scene,” he said, sitting in a straight-back chair in the bare-bones Factory Records office. “But I’m really just a follower.

“I’m not telling the kids to wear these pants with the wide bottoms. I didn’t tell (deejay) Mike Pickering to start playing house music at the Hacienda. I didn’t tell the Happy Mondays to develop this upbeat rhythm. I just watched it all.

“In a sense, I’m like a Charles Dickens hero. All Dickens heroes are complete nonentities who know 217 wacky people. I’m the guy who knows all the wacky people and the creative people. I just stand in the center and help explain it to others.”

The energy of the Manchester scene has already spilled over into Europe, where hundreds of British rock and dance fans follow Manchester bands and deejays to weekend shows in such cities as Paris and Amsterdam.

Now, the Manchester sound is testing the waters in the United States. Hacienda deejay Graeme Park will be spinning the records from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. on Friday at the new Mayan nightclub in downtown Los Angeles (1038 S. Hill St.). The appearance is part of a 10-city “From Manchester With Love” tour that is designed to give U.S. dance fans a taste of the energy and atmosphere of the Hacienda.

Meanwhile, the Stone Roses--the most successful band on the Manchester scene--will be in concert June 29 at the Hollywood High School gymnasium as part of a four-city U.S. tour.

Despite the huge success in England, the Roses are still very much a cult item in the United States. The group’s debut album was a big hit on the college/alternative rock scene, but reached only No. 86 on the mainstream pop charts. Still, there was enough of a buzz on the Hollywood High date to sell out all 1,700 tickets in less than 10 minutes.

You don’t even have to look beyond Manchester rock clubs to find people who scoff at Wilson’s suggestions that a rock revolution is under way here.

Sylvie Thomas, a 23-year-old secretary and frequent club-goer, said it’s fun to be the center of so much media attention, but she doesn’t feel the momentum is building the way it did in the ‘70s when the punk explosion changed the face of rock in Britain.

“You can’t pick up a newspaper or magazine without finding a story about Madchester,” she said, waiting for a local band to take the stage at the International club, where the recorded music before the live show was typical of the range of styles featured in Manchester clubs--from rappers Public Enemy and N.W.A to the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays.

“But there’s not really a lot behind it,” Thomas continued. “There’s nothing that binds us together. The punk thing was a definite statement against what was happening in music and in the country . . . the way the kids felt helpless against the authorities. There was anger, and there was a sense of taking control.

“Now, a whole generation of working-class kids has grown up without expecting much future. It’s almost like they’ve learned to adjust to it. They just go out to the clubs and have fun for the night.”

Tim Lawton, 19, a college student, agreed.

“The best thing the scene has going for it is that it is so democratic,” he said, taking a break at the bar from the hectic dancing at the Hacienda.

“The way the buzz about Manchester all got started was that people from London found it was more fun to come up here. There’s none of the snobbishness that you find in London clubs. . . . The media started checking it out, and they got caught up in it, too. You can’t help but get a buzz when you stand on the dance floor here.”

What about the suggestions about a pop revolution under way here?

Lawton shrugged.

“Revolutions are based on ideas, and I don’t see any philosophy emerging--unless having a good time is a revolutionary statement.”

Before returning to the dance floor, he turned and laughed. “But you know, maybe that is a statement . . . that you can still have fun.”

Revolution or not, Manchester is the center of rock ‘n’ roll energy in England at the moment--and that British energy has filtered across to America so many times over the last three decades--from the Beatles and Liverpool in 1964 to the Sex Pistols and London in 1977--that any build-up deserves monitoring.

U.S. record companies are racing to make sure they don’t get caught napping if Madchester catches on in America.

The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets, 808 State, and the Charlatans are just some of the Manchester-affiliated bands that have released albums in the United States or will do so shortly. There’s no uniform sound. The approaches range from the techno-dance sounds of 808 State to the trance-like dance-rock of the Happy Mondays to the primitive ‘60s retrospection of the Inspiral Carpets, who’ll be at the Roxy in Los Angeles on Thursday.

Sire Records’ Seymour Stein, who has been responsible for the signing of such trend-setters as Depeche Mode, Talking Heads, the Pretenders and the Smiths, thinks the Manchester scene is a focal point of rock at the moment.

“Manchester has been strengthened as a music center by the decision of so many bands to stay in Manchester rather than move to London--the way bands from Liverpool and other British cities have often done over the years,” he said. “Bands from all over England used to head to London to get started. Now, a lot of them end up in Manchester.”

Though the Stone Roses and the Hacienda dance scene are invariably lumped together in reports on Manchester-affiliated music, they are separate entries in the rock world.

There is a strong, funk-like dance current in the Roses’ latest single “Fool’s Gold,” but most of the band’s debut album is as close to the Byrds as to the dance-happy house music featured at local rock clubs.

“There really are two issues in Manchester,” said Adrian Deevoy, a London-based staff writer for Q magazine. “The Stone Roses really are happening. They just released a new single and it’s really, really good. We just put the Stone Roses on the cover for the second time this year.

“They’re in a whole different league from the other bands--at least at this point. I think a lot of the other bands will just disappear after a while. The Manchester dance thing seems to be more transient.”

The four members of the Stone Roses also downplay their connection to the Manchester scene.

“It’s the songs that’s important, not where we live,” snapped lead singer Ian Brown in an interview. “That will decide whether people like us. All that talk about Manchester versus Liverpool or Manchester versus London is just a way to fill space in papers.”

The Hacienda nightclub, with its colorless exterior, appears on a cold, dreary, weekday afternoon to be as unlikely a starting place for a pop revolution as Sun Records’ storefront studio in Memphis did in the 1950s.

Even without much competition for the eye in a northern city of 2.5 million that is invariably described as “drab” and cited as an example of “industrial desolation,” the Hacienda is hardly worth a second glance from the window of Tony Wilson’s sleek, late-model Jaguar.

But then again, who would ever cast the dapper Wilson as the guru of the wild and wooly Madchester scene?

Wilson might easily be pegged as a lawyer in his stylish business suit as he drives by the club--at least by anybody who doesn’t watch a lot of British TV.

He is in, fact, one of the most famous faces in England. A television journalist who now hosts a weekly debate show, he has been a news anchor for the Granada Television network for much of the last two decades. But he’s also been involved with rock for most of that time.

In the late ‘70s, Wilson, fresh from Cambridge, talked Granada Television into letting him host a rock music show. After presenting some of the conventional rock acts of the period, he got caught up in the emerging punk movement and eventually brought on such landmark groups as the Sex Pistols and the Clash.

He later started a record company, Factory, that introduced some of the most influential bands ever in England, including Joy Division--whose gloomy, eloquent explorations ended when singer Ian Curtis hanged himself, just hours before the group was to begin its first U.S. tour--and the Smiths--another group that dealt in deeply personal, frequently melancholy sentiments.

The Factory lineup now includes the Joy Division spinoff New Order, and Happy Mondays, rivaled only by the Stone Roses as the city’s main new attraction.

Even before Factory Records, Manchester had a rock tradition, dating back to Herman’s Hermits, Wayne Fontana, the Hollies and Freddie and the Dreamers. The punk movement introduced the Buzzcocks, the Fall and Magazine, while Simply Red emerged in the ‘80s.

Mike West, a member of a band called the Man From Delmonte, said Manchester attracts a lot of groups because there is a large student population in the area and relatively cheap housing. There are also lots of places to play live.

“Even though there is so much emphasis on deejays and dance music in the clubs, places like the Hacienda got people into the habit of going out and having fun,” he added. “So, it created more of a demand for live acts.”

The Hacienda seemed a crazy gamble by Wilson and some partners: a New York-style disco in a city known for its downbeat rockers.

“People asked, ‘Who did you build this for?’ and we said the kids of Manchester,” Wilson said during the interview in his office. “They said, ‘When did you last see the kids of Manchester? They are all wearing black raincoats and watching groups on stage. They don’t want anything to do with a disco.’ ”

But the Hacienda prospered--and the colorless building comes alive at night. The dance floor is an amazing swirl of bodies moving to records that are played so loud and whose beats are so fast that it makes your pulse race. The flashing lights and heat rising from the twisting bodies give the room a smoky, dreamlike quality.

There is such constant movement and perspiration in the Hacienda that it feels as if you had stepped into an advanced aerobics class, where someone had altered the record player so that the music goes 50% faster than normal and the exercisers had forgotten to change from their street clothes.

The dress--mostly the jeans and floppy, loose-fitting shirts and sweat shirts--is functional. It’s simply too difficult to move about at that speed with anything more form-fitting. For all the intensity, the atmosphere is extremely polite, almost a community--hence the comparison to early San Francisco rock days.

Wilson is right at home in his suit as he walks across the packed main floor, not unlike Marcello Mastroianni moving along the Via Veneto in the film, “La Dolce Vita.” For much of the pop crowd in England, the Hacienda, at this point in 1990, is the sweet life.

Wilson finally ends up downstairs in a secluded area known as the Acid Corner, because it’s where the drug dealers reportedly used to hang out in the club. Shaun Ryder, leader of Happy Mondays, is already there--the only place in the Hacienda where it’s possible to shield yourself from the throbbing dance music. He’s talking about coming to Los Angeles to record the group’s next album.

A club-goer who appears to be in his early 20s wanders up and asks Wilson for a pen. The young man then borrows a piece of paper from a reporter and draws, very deliberately, some long, crossing lines.

When the man finishes, he looks at the paper through glazed eyes and smiles. He then rolls it up and puts it in the reporter’s jacket pocket. He then returns the pen to Wilson and moves across the room, where he stares at the ceiling for several minutes.

What about drugs? How widespread are they on the Manchester scene?

It has been a ticklish point at the Hacienda since a young woman died after taking Ecstasy at the club. Wilson said Hacienda doormen and bouncers have been instructed to keep known dealers out of the club, though police have complained that the club should also hold the dealers so they can be arrested.

Wilson said he is reluctant to do that because of the violence associated with the drug scene in Manchester. He’s afraid it would lead to retaliation against club personnel. Until the issue is resolved, he said, the club’s status is in doubt. He said other private dance operations--held in old factory buildings and often drawing as many as 3,000 people--have already been halted.

Some fans at the Hacienda said the drug use is exaggerated--that only a small percentage of the dancers are actually on Ecstasy or some other drug. Others, however, say the drugs and music are interwoven. “E (the nickname for Ecstasy) gives you the energy to keep dancing and it makes you feel good,” one dancer said. “The scene really got going when the two came together.”

Wilson describes Ecstasy as a “soft drug” and doesn’t believe it is dangerous except for people with rare blood conditions, but he admits he has a liberal attitude toward drugs.

However, a spokeswoman for the Center for Chemical Dependency of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles warned that Ecstasy--a hallucinogenic amphetamine--can cause paranoia, depression and psychosis in certain individuals. It has also been known, in rare cases, to cause death.

“People are outraged by the Mondays and the reports of them taking drugs, but I don’t think the Mondays are taking any more drugs than the Beatles or Stones were in the ‘60s,” Wilson said.

“The Beatles and Rolling Stones didn’t talk about it as much. The Mondays are working-class and they are not self-conscious the way the Beatles and Stones were.”

Wilson was ready during the interview in his office when asked if the Manchester scene--either the Hacienda dance tours or the live bands--will catch on in America.

“There is a problem,” he said, pausing for dramatic effect.

He then wrote on the paper in front of him a new word: Disco.

“ Disco is an ugly word for the people in the United States, but it is an even worse word for the record companies because they lost so much money on disco in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s that they can’t even bear the word.

“New Order had a great track with the word disco in it on the last album, but someone said, ‘We have to change the title. . . . It’s a swear word (in the U.S.).’

“The thing about America is that the rock community doesn’t dance anymore. I go to clubs, and people just stand there. People have this hang-up about moving their feet. It’ll be interesting to see if this music can bring about the same (merger) of rock and dance cultures the way it has here.”

Wilson put down his pen and smiled.

“You know, there is something fascinating about all this if it does spread to America,” Wilson said. “To me, it reminds me of what happened in the ‘60s. America invented the music and it comes to England. We mess around with it and it goes out to Hamburg . . . or Ibiza . . . and we sell it back to you. The first time it was the Beatles taking Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. This time, it’s building on house music.”

But what about the charge that the Manchester dance movement lacks purpose?

“This is extremely political if you would accept my point of view that (the Beatles’) ‘Please Please Me’ was the most political song ever written,” Wilson said.

“To me, youth culture, when it is strong and stands together, is very political because it is the child saying no to the parent. It is essentially negative in that sense. It unites people who haven’t given in yet--the way most adults have. It’s the awakening of a new generation. That’s what this music means to me.”