“It was all about the nights”—Max Mara’s Ian Griffiths shares a first person account of the 'club kid life' of 1980s Manchester
had died, and I came across a photo of him walking in Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s history-making Pirates collection circa 1981, the same year as the Royal Wedding. Combined, these two events seemed like watching pages from fairy-tales come to life.
Everyone knew that you were a kid who lived on a council state, [who] probably didn’t have a job. And in your own mind, and everyone else’s mind, probably didn’t have any kind of future at all. Everyone knew who you were, and that didn’t matter, it’s who you could appear to be for that night at a club.In 1979, 1980 [PSV] was all very postpunk.
Someone asked me recently, ‘Could you describe Manchester days and Manchester nights?’ And my answer was, ‘Well, the days were spent but waiting for the nights, it was all about nights.’ We were all parts of a group that defined itself as other, and people could move quite fluidly from one to the other. We styled ourselves, we did our own makeup, our own hair. We did look slightly look down on people who had to buy their clothes. We even slightly looked down on people who had to buy things like Westwood, because to us it had greater value to be making your own culture.
I finished up in hospital on a few occasions. In fact, on one occasion I was not admitted to hospital. I was sent home and told, ‘What do you expect? If you dress that way, this is what will happen to you.’ So you attracted a lot of very negative attention, but that created a sense of camaraderie. There are some very, very painful memories too, from that time. It wasn’t all fun, at all, but it seemed—I don’t know—a fair price to pay.A great deal of it was homophobia.
Looking back, it would be easy to say that [there was a connection], but, again, we saw that as being extremely mainstream, and a world that we had difficulty with. The Royal Wedding really meant very little to us. I got into all the clubs for free. It was enough to have enough money to buy a drink, one drink. We didn’t drink heavily or take drugs; we spent all our money on lining material to make new clothes. And I didn’t eat, so food wasn’t a requirement. We lived on nothing; I mean really um, nothing, at all. So although there’s a parallel , the reality was very different.
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