“I’ll make a very big statement now and it’s based entirely on personal experience,” says Mark Rae. He’s reminiscing about his time as a DJ, club promoter, record shop owner, one half of the duo Rae & Christian, and head honcho of the Manchester-based label, Grand Central Records. But, perhaps more importantly, he is also redefining the grand and well-studied books of Mancunian cultural history.
“As far as I’m concerned, inner city Manchester had nothing to do with what was happening at the Hacienda. The Madchester stuff was a story being sold to the outside world. In Moss Side, Cheetham Hill, Whalley Range, and the rest of the inner city, it was all black music. All the heads that had the record stores in Manchester were selling jazz, funk, soul and hip-hop.”
Videos by VICE
The amusing, talkative Northumbrian, now in his late-forties, has just released Northern Sulphuric Soulboy – a book and 10″ record that tells the story, in words and music, of Rae’s extraordinary life so far. At the heart of it is an attempt to right a wrong: Manchester – the city Rae moved to as a gawky white teenager obsessed with black music – is revered the world over as the hallowed home of rave and the rain-soaked birthplace of The Smiths. But the city he lived and worked in for nearly two decades was defined by a different kind of music.
In Rae’s vision of Manchester, and likely those of countless others, the image and sound of the city through the 80s and 90s was brightened up with hip-hop, reggae and street soul – a soulful, bass-heavy, British iteration of the Jamaican “lovers rock” genre, made by the black communities in Harlesden, Birmingham and Manchester. “The Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays flew the flag for the city to the outsider, but from the inside their music couldn’t have been further from what was going on in the clubs,” says Rae. “People want to keep telling the same popular story. It’s become so predominant that it’s become a truth that never was.”
Like garage and London in the 2000s, street soul was the sound of inner city clubs and pirate radio stations. It was a mix of “drum machines, breaks, cheap synths, massive bass lines and dodgy heartfelt singing,” broadcast on the likes of Frontline Radio and Buzz FM, transmitting from the top of tower blocks on the way to Old Trafford. Loose Ends were the most commercially successful band connected to the scene, but Rae also mentions Gold in the Shade, Fifth of Heaven, Denise Johnson, Lalah Hathaway, Roberta Gilliam, Soul Family Sensation and Projection.
Unlike the archetypical uniform of the Hacienda – bucket hat, gurning, the white male – the street soul scene was born from a cultural melting pot. One of the more popular venues was the PSV Club, once the birthplace of Factory Records. The PSV was located in The Crescents – a massive housing project built in 1972 – which had been abandoned by the council in the mid-1980s, making it both a breeding ground for artists willing to live in a squat without heating or water and a plethora of street gangs.
“Moss Side gangsters, wannabes and their molls alongside posh students from the Home Counties,” says Rae, remembering the topography of the scene. “It was a bizarre combination but it worked perfectly… Sometimes it’d take an hour to get in, particularly if the bouncers had been attacked by the machete-wielding gangs who always seemed to be coming up from Birmingham.”
The decaying modernist jungle of The Crescents was also home to another venue: The Kitchen, which held illegal blues parties. This one had been created by knocking three flats together, and setting up a sound system inside. “I saw Bez there, so I can vouch for him,” Rae laughs. “He was sliding up the walls in the semi-darkness to some early techno.” Yet, Bez and Home Counties attendees aside, the street-soul scene was intrinsically tied up in the gang culture of the time. If the white gangsters were at the Hacienda selling pills to punters from Cheshire and the Wirral, the black gangsters were listening to street soul in the clubs of the inner city – in The Crescents venues and places like The States and Precinct 13 – with the tempo barely poking over 95 BPM some nights.
“When we used to play street soul in Precinct 13. The place would be full of the gangs and we’d be playing this slow music with massive bass lines and they’d climb on the tables, get their bottles and smack the ceiling with them because they were taken away by the music,” remembers Rae, before going on to self-aggrandise his talent as one of the more popular DJs of the time. “There was no way that dancefloor was going to respond to a skinny white boy with dodgy glasses, a combined psychology degree, and a continued interest in Fila, unless he knew what he was doing.”
On some nights, Rae, Ross Clarke and their comrade Andy Madhatter would be the only non-gang members in Precinct 13. “Before we knew it, we’re involved with the gangs – guns being put under our coats, bullets with the bouncer’s name etched on them being given to him.” One night, a fight broke out in the club and Madhatter got on the mic and said, “We’ve got some dickheads in here.” Before they knew it, the DJ booth was rushed from all corners of the room, the decks turned upside down and one of Rae’s pals had been bottled while he pretended to search for a record. Sometimes the police would come looking for people to arrest, standing in full uniform, helmets and all, on the middle of the dance floor.
On another occasion, an MC tried to shoot the bouncer. He missed both times and the bouncer, who was from Jamaica, took his gun off him and bucked every single one of the MC’s teeth out. Mark found the would-be badman lying upside down in a stairwell, spitting his teeth into the air, blood pouring out of his mouth. The story was on the local news the following night.
In 1993, Rae and Ed Pitt opened Fat City, a record store in Affleck’s Palace, in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. In 1995, he started Grand Central Records. At a time when black British music was still woefully under-represented on mainstream channels, they sought to bring the sound to an audience it deserved. “There was a challenge to represent the music I was hearing and playing in Manchester because it wasn’t being represented,” Rae says. “I felt there was a completely untold story that needed wider exposure. It was a grand mission statement: I am here to expose this music that is being ignored.”
Rae had been obsessed with black music ever since he was a kid growing up on Tyneside. His parents were working-class bohemians. “They were quite cool cats, in a way,” he says. “My mum and dad danced every night. They’d put on disco and reggae tracks and dance… They didn’t go to the pub and my dad hated football, but they were really into having parties and dancing.” But it was after a trip to New York City, at ten years old, that he became enraptured to the sound of hip-hop, which was just beginning. “As a little freckled Geordie boy from the green fields of Northumberland, it was like going to another planet.”
As part of the duo Rae & Christian, Rae later expanded the specifics of the Manchester street soul scene and started to work with The Pharcyde, Tony D, The Jungle Brothers, Jeru the Damaja and many more. The duo’s sound was, says Rae, “a mixture of street soul, hip-hop principles, Christian’s classical training and great engineering and production. But one of the problems was that we didn’t know what to call it.” Their albums were critically acclaimed but never really broke through. Still, they carved out a lucrative side-line as remixers of choice for commercial acts like Texas, Simply Red and Natalie Imbruglia, as well as all the hip-hop and dance heads they saw as kindred spirits. They even recorded an early remix for Jay-Z and made a handful of tracks with Bobby Womack.
“I never met [Bobby] and I didn’t want to, in a way, because he was so crazy on the phone and I thought it might damage what we trying to achieve if I did,” says Rae, who had endeared himself to the soul legend by asking if he ever got compensation from Rod Stewart, who had ripped off Womack’s “If You Want My Love Put Something Down On It” on “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy”? “Yeah, I ain’t done nothing about that,” Womack told Rae, who would later go on to describe Rae & Christian as “unorthodox” and “looking like astrologers.”
Still, Rae & Christian’s career wasn’t to last. In the middle of recording their second album, 2001’s Sleepwalking, Rae witnessed the shooting of a father and son opposite the Grand Central offices. He ran over to find the father lying motionless and the son writhing in agony. The two men survived but Rae was left traumatised by what he’d seen.
He went down to London in December, 2000, for what should have been a high point in his career: DJ’ing with Texas at Brixton Academy, as part of the support acts for Madonna’s big comeback show. “The VIP area was a collection of the most famous people in the world,” Rae remembers. “Mick Jagger, Sting, Kylie Minogue – every single famous person in Britain was in the VIP room and every single one of them looked at me, and then looked away quickly.” This moment was to prove to be a “massive blow” to Rae psychologically.
“I had a pit-in-my-stomach moment where I realised every single person in this room was a cunt and that their egos were like an aftershave of horror; that the whole thing was a bubble of shite. There was no love in the room and no actual music in the room, only self-importance. And from that experience onwards I’ve never wanted to do the same thing again.”
Grand Central Records stopped operating in 2006, and Rae, exhausted and disillusioned, moved to Los Angeles to find a fresh start. He returned years later with his wife to find Manchester changed, a city now dominated by private redevelopment. All that remains of the shop Rae used to run is the iron Fat City logo, “frozen in time amongst the paving slabs of Oldham Street.”
When people talk about the old days, they invariably talk about the Hacienda. But beneath its serotonin-soaked memory, there is another story: the one Rae charts in Northern Sulphuric Soulboy, which tells the story of the street soul scene in the Manchester of the 80s and 90s. One that is just as important, even if it’s fallen through the cracks of history.
On my way out of Rae’s flat, I pass a deliveryman on his way in. A few minutes later, I get a text. It’s him: “Those deliveries were street soul 12″s ha ha”. Still reppin’, after all these years.
You can follow Oscar Rickett on Twitter.
Northern Sulphuric Soulboy is available now. All photos supplied by Mark Rae.
