Mancky

My Accidental Musical Education @ Manchester Polytechnic

Sivuca - Ain’t No Sunshine

I first heard this cool tune on a Wednesday night in 1986/87, at the Black Rhythms night at Manchester Poly Student Union. A few people there could do jazz dance but most of us were just guessing:

I eventually bagged my own copy of Ain’t No Sunshine on 7″, after hours spent trawling through second-hand record shops, surrounded by sneering men in anoraks. Before YouTube came along, finding rare music could be a tedious business.

Another song we heard each week, which I eventually found a copy of, was:

Earl Grant - House of Bamboo

The music at Black Rhythms was a real education for me because my own non-chart, non-indie music knowledge was so limited in those days. The best source of alternative music knowledge that I knew of was John Peel’s late night show on Radio 1 but he wasn’t particularly interested in soul music and rarely played it. Fanzines and the NME were great for indie music, but background information about jazz and soul seemed hard to come by in those days, unless you had a family member with a great record collection.

The Black Rhythms DJ Hewan Clarke played a vast range of music, from House Sound of Chicago and hip-hop on U.S. import, to rare jazz-dance and jazz-latin tunes which were later re-released on compilation by the UK label Streetsounds.

I first heard Gil Scott Heron’s ‘The Bottle’ and Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Move On Up’ at Black Rhythms; for years I didn’t know they were often considered to be ‘northern soul’ tracks… although definitions of what constitutes ‘northern soul’ can be very confusing!

Gil Scott Heron - The Bottle

Curtis Mayfield - Move On Up

After hearing these tunes at the Poly, I went to see both artists play live at the International, Anson/Dickenson Road, around 1988. Months later, Curtis Mayfield’s career was ended by a tragic accident and the next time I tried to see Gil Scott Heron, he was arrested at the airport for possessing drugs; this was the Womad festival in summer 1990. I was so grateful that I’d seen them both while I had the chance!

The Black Rhythms Night was held at Manchester Polytechnic Student Union, Mandela Building, 99 Oxford Road, All Saints M1 7EL. Hewan Clarke took over when Mick Hucknall stopped DJing the night, as far as I know. This is the building as it looks now; from this angle it looks the same as it did in the mid-eighties.