The Lapsed Clubber Project

Manchester has long been synonymous with music culture. Global superstars from Morrissey and Joy Division to Take That and Aitch have ensured that the city is known to music fans around the world. And, as the DJ turned author Dave Haslam explored in his cultural history, Manchester, England, the city’s association with hedonistic nightlife and creativity goes back beyond the era of popular music to Victorian times, when the workers of ‘Cottonopolis’ would throng to the music halls of Ancoats and the bars of Oldham Street. But while music culture and nightlife has helped to shape the identity of the city, what impact has it had on the lives of the people who are part of it?

Dr Beate Peter’s project, The Lapsed Clubber, gathered oral histories from people involved in Manchester’s acid house and rave scene between 1985 and 1995, creating an interactive map of the city’s clubs, shops and hang-outs. Users can explore the city, clicking on venues or locations to access memories associated with them.

Spending time with the map is an immersive experience. A diverse chorus of voices discuss everything from clothes to politics, the anticipation of the party to the morning after, communal euphoria to fights on the dancefloor. Sometimes participants back each other up, others directly contradict one another.

Beate began the project with the aim of discovering how people’s experiences of rave culture had shaped their identity, and the community that formed around it. Along the way, she could also challenge popular assumptions about the acid house scene.

“I think the general public have a particular image of rave culture”, Beate argues. “Rave culture isn’t just drugs and music, it’s had an impact on how communities are built, and how people feel in their communities.” Likewise, raves “are so much more than just an opportunity to dance. I would argue that they really add to the mental wellbeing of people.”

The project was initially conceived as part of The ESRC Festival of Social Science in 2015. An online survey of people who had been involved with the rave scene was followed by a series of public engagement events. From these workshops, Beate learned that many people continued to engage with dance music culture as they grow older because of the wider role raves played in their sense of community, culture and lifestyle choices – a finding that challenged mainstream notions of rave culture as a transient, hedonistic youth movement.

Building on what was learned in the workshops, Beate worked with the Manchester Digital Music Archive (MDMA), with backing from the Heritage Lottery Fund, to create an online, open-access interactive map, where lapsed clubbers can add their memories of people, places and events. The rules for contributors are simple: keep the memories short, no fibbing, and no indie music!

Although Beate teaches in the languages department at Manchester Met, her background is in popular music, with her PhD exploring the psychology and sensory experience of clubbing, and this remains the main focus of her research. She acknowledges the complexities of studying events such as raves, which were generally not recorded or documented. This lack of primary sources means that academics have often been forced to rely on written reports, from critics and journalists. Beate argues that this can have a distorting effect: “We reproduce known, dominant discourses.” By recording the experiences of participants, the Lapsed Clubber map accesses the voices of groups who are rarely featured in academic studies. “It was not about an outsider’s perception of what happened – we were trying to find out how these ‘ephemeral’ events have an impact on people’s lives. What bonds were created? It goes beyond the event of the rave itself.”

By providing a platform for ordinary ravers, the project had an important benefit. “People felt listened to, that their experiences were valuable. It made them feel that their youth wasn’t wasted – the movement that they were part of does mean something, and it does have a legacy.”

This is reinforced by Abigail Ward of MDMA, who says that the early Lapsed Clubber events “really allowed people to feed off each other’s memories and remember things they had forgotten. There was a tremendous amount of community spirit and camaraderie. This led to a re-assessment in the participants of what that time had meant, it allowed people to look back and realise that some of the friendships that were formed at that time were life-long and some of the confidence that it brought them was a crucial turning point in their lives”

In fact, the project captured the minds of former ravers so much that its initial scope had to be extended, and it began to take on a life of its own. As news of the project began to spread, Beate found she was able to speak with members of Manchester’s Black and LGBTQI communities, whose experiences had not always been reflected in mainstream accounts of the city’s rave scene. Their accounts opened up new locations, while also giving an insight into race relations and subcultures in the city during the decade from 1985.

One of the elements of the project that Beate is most proud of is having created a platform in which academics are not the dominant voice: “I had to give up control. My job wasn’t to make connections or correct misconceptions”. Participants have shaped the development of the Lapsed Clubber project. While the design and technical specifications of the map had been envisaged from the beginning, initial workshops helped the project to evolve. The original plan was simply for a map with locations pinned, but attendees at the workshop were much more interested in giving their memories than simply listing addresses. This memory archive, and the sense of community it has engendered, has been one of the primary benefits of the project. “There are so many intangible outcomes I couldn’t possibly have foreseen,’ Beate says, ‘and this is what gives the project its legacy and its afterlife.”

So will we see the world of academia opening up to rave culture? Beate acknowledges that there is a growing interest in Electronic Dance Music within popular music studies, but also feels that the nature of the project, particularly its strong community aspect, places it outside of ‘authorised’ histories. “This is why it helped to be at Manchester Met, which is proud of being a university of, and for, the city. They were able to see the community benefit of what I wanted to do. It allows for research into areas which haven’t historically been valued so highly.”

Now in its fifth year, the Lapsed Clubber project continues to gather new memories. There are now over 340 individual recordings, while over 700 people attended workshops and ‘pinning parties’. The project has featured in the mainstream media, while a documentary based on the project has been viewed more than 950 times on YouTube. It has also inspired other community and heritage organisations to explore ‘self-authored’ history projects.

Abigal Ward of MDMA argues that this may be the longest lasting legacy of the Lapsed Clubber: “The area that was completely new and innovative for the archive was the idea of getting more nuanced and emotional memories. We really believe that there isn’t one version of history and want to present as many multiple versions of history as possible. The Lapsed Clubber map is all collected under one subject heading, under which there are 330+ short memories, some of which completely contradict each other. For me, this is how the collection is innovative. That discrepancy in how people remember is what we, at MDMA, think history is.”

A multitude of voices, mainly joyous, often contradictory, looking back to the past but also to the future – in many ways, the Lapsed Clubber project is a microcosm of Manchester itself.