“Hearing that angular electronic funk from the kind of acid house, Detroit thing for the first time in about 86 at the Hacienda and it not being busy there but then just going “Oh My God, everything’s changed. That’s changed now.” It was the beginning of the future.” Kelvin Andrews
“It was amazing. It was like being attached to something when it first started, you felt like it was more exciting than discovering something after a while. It was revolutionary, it was the most exciting thing that I’ve ever seen going on. It was different, overnight something had changed and everything that used to be was irrelevant. It was like “We don’t know what we’re doing but we know it’s better than that” Danny Spencer
“I moved to Manchester from North Wales as we were travelling once a month to go to the Hacienda and I moved to primarily to get closer to the music really and I was just lucky to be there 88 through to 91 / 92, just living and breathing that whole explosion. I moved into a block of flats where Jon Dasilva was living and he got me to do some warm up slots for him, I got some lucky breaks. He really helped me get on and as the rave culture exploded and illegal warehouse parties and Blackburn, The Midlands, I started doing those things. It all spiralled for me from there. At the time I would just do any gig that I could get really.” Sasha
“It gave a focus to my life really, it was what I wanted to do. It made perfect sense to me to become a DJ. I’d been making music myself and though I kind of turned my back on that in a sense and wanted to reinvent myself as a DJ and it hit all the right buttons for me. Although the thing with DJing is you almost don’t need any musicianship, rather than it being cool to be a musician, it became cool to be a non musician.” Jon Dasilva
“I was quite young when I got into it, like 14 or 15 when I first got into the music, way too young to ever get into a club and when I saw it, a couple of years later, that this club existed down the road, it blew my mind, it completely blew my mind. I loved the Hac so much I just went all the time, sometimes I went five nights a week. It was only like a couple of quid to get in there when it wasn’t a big night. It’s fair to say that it blew my mind and while it was blowing my mind, I didn’t realise that it was inspiring me to make music and having this subconscious effect on me.” Suddi Raval
“Ah it was amazing. There were all sorts. The thing that was great about it was the names, everyone all of sudden had all these fantastic names as if they were in a fucking James Ellroy novel or something. Geoff The Chef, Eddie Beef, Bobby Gillette, y’know, Jimmy The Bacon Slicer, these are all true nicknames. There were a lot of characters in there and you’d get people who were bankers being mates with ex-football hooligans and criminals hanging out with doctors. It was fantastic.” Mike Pickering
