Stories From Nineties Northern Gay Clubs
With Linden Archives
While youth culture and expression exploded across Britain in the latter half of the twentieth century, the North has its own version of events and underground stories.
Linden Archives collected many versions of events from dancefloors across the North of England, from Manchester to Leeds, photographing for the Gay Times and writing reviews of the night to accompany the shots. Friends and romances dressed up in leather and wigs paint the story of a newfound freedom and excitement.
Interview by Esta Maffrett | 07.09.23
How did you get into photography?
I grew up in semi rural West Yorkshire, Halifax. I didn’t really get to experience any subcultures until my late teens when I discovered the gay scene. That was my first subculture if you like, I was about 18, before that I had been in scouts and at school. I got into photography in my mid teens at school, it was one of the clubs you could join and I enjoyed taking photographs. I was the one who always had the camera when we went away, long before I photographed the gay scene, there are photos from my youth that fill albums but have not been scanned. I came from a family without a lot of money, certainly we didn’t have any to buy expensive cameras, so all the equipment I had was either secondhand or found cheap. It wasn’t until I started photographing for the gay press that I had money to invest in good quality cameras.
How did you get into photographing for the Gay Press?
There’s a chap called Terry George who owned three or four different gay outlets. He knew that I liked photography and to my recollection he’d got fed up of paying extortionate rates for advertising so he decided to start his own magazine and get a slice of the revenue. He asked if I would like to be a scene reviewer and I thought why not? It was pocket money, expenses covered and a free night out - that was the main attraction. That was a magazine called All Points North, based in the North of England, a few copies would find their way down to Brighton and London but basically Birmingham up to Newcastle was its remit.
I kept bumping into the same photographer for Gay Times who lived in Brighton at events and in the end they offered me a gig as the Northern correspondent for Gay Times. Well that was proper money! I was doing both All Points North and Gay Times, the string to my bow was I could write the reviews as well as take pictures, it was all in one so they didn’t need to pay somebody else for the review. I enjoyed it and done if for the best part of a decade.
And after that decade of work your archive sat quietly until you began to re-scan it in lockdown?
Yes. It was all on 35mm film and I kept the majority of the negatives because I had seen some of them get chucked in the bin after the magazines used them. I thought that’s my photography! So I started snatching them up and keeping them from then on, filing them away while writing what they were and when they were taken but as with all archives it’s not faultless, Instagram is very good at putting me right when I make a mistake. So it sat there all the way from the way from the nineties to lockdown and like everybody I was going insane with boredom. I had already bought the scanner a few years previous so it was on the back of my mind but it was out of sheer boredom that I spent the best part of 12 months scanning all the negatives. And then I thought what should I do with them now, so I started an Instagram account and just started putting a couple of photos a day up. It took off. It’s gone crazy.
One of the things that amazes me is the number of people who comment on photographs knowing when and where it was taken, they know the people in the picture. There are funny ones where people are laughing at a hairstyle and then you get sad comments where people or loved ones have passed away. It shows you the impact that old photographs have.
I think we’re in a society where people look back. We’re all obsessed with ancestry.co.uk and Who Do You Think You Are on TV, things like that. So we are, as a society, at the moment obsessed with where we’ve come from rather than where we’re going. I think the archive has benefited from that. The other thing is that I was just about the only Northern based gay scene review photographer. There were plenty down in London but it was only me really covering the North in that decade and being published. The photo negatives I took for Gay Times went down to London, I heard when they moved offices they had to downsize and threw everything away.
I always say it was like the gay scene came out of the closet, suddenly we came out onto the streets and let everybody know we were here. The Gay Village organically grew around Canal Street - looking back it was an incredible thing to witness.
Did you have a favourite place to party?
My favourite city to party in was definitely Manchester. It’s difficult to explain to younger people what it meant watching that place grow in the nineties, I’ve had conversations where they can’t quite grasp that Canal Street was not always the GAy Village. Back in the late eighties and early nineties there were two or three bars, The Rembrandt and The Grey Goose, but in the nineties it started to boom. It was the arrival of super clubs from the South, monthly one nighters that held thousands of people, there was Flesh at the Haçienda and then came Paradise Factory. These were huge huge venues. I always say it was like the gay scene came out of the closet, suddenly we came out onto the streets and let everybody know we were here. The Gay Village organically grew around Canal Street - looking back it was an incredible thing to witness.
For a night out you couldn’t beat Vague in Leeds. That was the best for me, I loved Vague, it was a brilliant venue and it was on my doorstep. The atmosphere was so relaxed and the music was great, you couldn’t fault a thing about it. It was just like ‘Vague night tonight, we’re off’. It took place at a club in Leeds called The Warehouse, they ran their own nights but anybody could run a club there. You had people like Trannies With Attitude who were a great Disco duo at the time.
I did a little exhibition in Blackpool at the Grundy Gallery and one of the guys who’s in the photographs from Vague turned up. It was really nice to talk to him and he told me everybody at the time saw this guy in the corner with the camera taking pictures and were aware that I was shooting for the Gay Press but eventually people stopped seeing me and didn’t think twice about it. That was great because it enabled me to get up and close to capture some great photographs. My favourite photographs are the unposed and capturing the moment photographs of people on the dance floor. Posed pictures have their place but my favourites are the ones where people are justly full of complete gay abandon on the dance floor, no idea that they’re having a picture taken until I tell them.
Today we’re seeing new queer and gay nights appear but often in spaces that are initially straight spaces. Do you think back in the nineties there were more established places that were queer or gay and we’ve lost some of that?
In the late eighties and early nineties before the gay scene came out of the closet you had a closeted scene particularly in the North. We were much slower than the South, more resistant to an open gay scene at that point. So the venues were smaller, often small pubs and small clubs with maybe 100 or 200 people in. And then you saw the boom. You’ve got club nights like Flesh that were hosting 1000 people and coach loads coming down from Newcastle, Birmingham, Liverpool - people realised they could open a permanent club so along came the likes of Paradise Factory which was massive, two floors and an amazing space to dance.
I went to do a review for the Gay Times in Copenhagen and found that they were lightyears ahead of the UK in equality. Homosexuals were not as criminalised and it reflected in the nightlife in that most of the nights were mixed. At the time, it’s a clumsy reference, but I said that the price of equality is anonymity. You’re seeing the youth need exclusively gay venues less and less because they’re going out in friendship groups where sexual orientation is not an issue like it was for my generation. I ran to gay bars and clubs because it was the only place I felt safe. There will always be, I think, a need for gay bars and clubs but not to the scale we saw in the nineties.
How were gay spaces able to serve the community specifically?
There was safety in numbers, all of us coming together in one venue. You could go out to chat somebody up and the worst that would happen was not being somebody’s type. I’ve heard from younger people that now if they chat a straight person up they see it as a compliment which they didn’t do in my day, it was a very different world.
In clubs you had entertainment on stage, the fabulous Lily Savage, who would stop the routine and bring out the buckets, a little speech for what the money was for and people would applaud and put money in the buckets. There was a political element to going out.
There is a lot of friendship and tenderness in your photos through hugs, smiles and closeness. Did you find it easy to make connections and integrate yourself in the different cities through seeing the same faces on different nights?
Yes, you’d see the same faces in the locals. So if you were in Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Blackpool, you’d see the same faces. But if I went down to Wolverhampton, Birmingham or Nottingham it was a completely different crowd. I’m not really in touch with many people from it. Because I had a camera round my neck, everyone wanted to be my friend and get a picture. It was a great ice breaker to speak to people whereas otherwise I was a stranger at the bar.
If you could put one object into the Museum of Youth Culture what would it be and why?
It would be the gay magazines of the day, particularly the regional ones like All Points North. Because it covers not just the reviews of the gay scene but some of the adverts of the venues and the interviews and articles, sometimes you think ‘did I really live through that?’ It’s like picking up a newspaper from 1920 and you see what was really happening. Every part of the gay scene in the 1990s in the North of England can be found in All Points North magazines, every aspect of what people were doing and what was relevant. You could pick one up and go on a walking tour of the venues to see what remains and what’s been demolished.
You can see more photos by following @linden_archives on Instagram or buying a copy of the book Out & About With Linden: A Queer Archive of the North
