“I stopped saying yes to documentaries about the Haçienda, because they just wanted to talk about acid house. There was so much more to the place than that,” says Mike Pickering.
As it happens, there is much more to Pickering than just the Haçienda. At 72, the legendary DJ has finally written a memoir, Manchester Must Dance. It centres around his 1980s glory years as one of the superclub’s most important figures, but it also chronicles his entire life in music, beginning with him seeing The Beatles as an eight-year-old in 1963 and ending, decades later, with him working as an A&R man for Sony, dashing across London to gazump another label and sign an electronic musician called Adam, from Dumfries.
By that point, we have already learned who Adam would go on to become, because he is one of four musicians to have penned a foreword for the book, under his stage name – Calvin Harris. Noel Gallagher, Johnny Marr and Martin Fry of ABC are the other three, and it says something about Pickering that their relationships have their roots outside of the music business. Gallagher first met him at the back of the Kippax at Maine Road, erstwhile home of their beloved Manchester City. Marr is a City fan, too, but his first bond with Pickering was over fashion, when Marr worked at X Clothes in the city centre, and Pickering was a regular. His friendship with Fry goes back to their teenage years, when they worked on a punk fanzine together.
