What Happened Again?

In part 3, Stuart Maconie recalls the swift rise of the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses from the dormant indie scene of the late 80s.\nThe Happy Mondays had their club mixes and extreme lifestyle, the Stone Roses had their Smiths-influenced dreamy pop and their best-band-in-the-world attitude. Both brought the Madchester sound to the mainstream, taking pop back from corporate America to return it to the british youth, inspiring many bands to come.

Madchester wasn’t only about music: loose trousers, bowl haircuts, anoraks… relaxed and deliberately uncool, the “baggy” style was a fashion statement that was quickly adopted by the music obsessed youth.\nBut music and clothes weren’t enough to bring together a city notorious for its fights and rough laddish culture. Indeed, summer-of-love type nights at the Hacienda had a magical ingredient that made it all work: ecstasy.

This BBC documentary goes deeper into exploring an era of music that has already been mentioned in The Mancunian Way and The Great Bleep Forward: Madchester, or how in the late 80s, Manchester became the world capital of pop. Who could have predicted that such an industrial city, characterised by massive unemployment and bad weather, would give birth to such a vibrant and hedonistic scene?\nIn part 1, Stuart Maconie tells the story of how Manchester’s effervescent post punk scene inspired New Order members and head of Factory Records’ Tony Wilson to create the Hacienda, a place that quickly went from being an art space to an eclectic club venue. Its cheap drinks and no door policy allowed bohemian working class Mancunians to escape their hard lives and enjoy Chicago’s and Detroit’s all new techno and acid house rhythms. A mix of two cultures that established Manchester as the coolest place on earth and inspired The Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses, and many more.

As it offen happens when chemicals are involved, at some point the drugs stopped working. In a few years, Madchester had become a mockery of itself. The Hacienda was plagued by drug-related violence and criminality, the bands were repeatedly pointed at for their excessive laddishness and their follow up albums were often very disappointing. To finish it all off, a new phenomenon from America was quickly becoming the new love of the British music press: Grunge.\nStill, Madchester had planted seeds that would flourish a few years later with Britpop.

Although music critics are unimpressed since 1983′s Let’s Dance, David Bowie keeps meeting commercial success. To support his latest album Never Let Me Down, he plans the “Glass Spider Tour”, a spectacular and very ambitious show which became a template for mainstream pop stars tours such as Madonna’s or Prince’s.\nBut in 1989, leaving his more recently acquired fan base, he teams with other musicians to form a hard rock band: Tin Machine. The band dissolves after 3 years and Bowie confirms his reputation as a musical chameleon by returning to his solo career with a soul album: Black Tie White Noise.

Bowie is now more confident and with the 1980 album Scary Monsters, partly recorded at Keith Richard’s house in Jamaica, he finds a new balance. He now wears suits on stage and reaches a new peak in popularity with Let’s Dance, his best selling album to date and – ironically – also his most criticized.

With the release of Station to Station in 1976, Bowie introduces yet another persona: the Thin White Duke. But things aren’t going well to say the least. Drugs are taking him over the edge and he is starting to worry for his life. He and his friend Iggy Pop – who’s not doing great either – thus decide to leave Hollywood’s insanity and clean up their act in Berlin.\nAfter producing an album for Iggy, he encounters producer Brian Eno. Eno takes Bowie to new ground and their collaboration will end up producing one of Bowie’s most acclaimed and influential pieces: Low, the first album of the so-called “Berlin Trilogy”. He finally sees the end of the tunnel.

Part 3 of the David Bowie Story focuses on Bowie’s fascination for America, an “alternative world” that catches his imagination. But it was getting harder and harder for him to get out of the Ziggy Stardust persona, which had became an easy way to escape from reality. He ends up retiring Ziggy and goes to find other sources of inspiration, especially from american musicians. But the heavy use of drugs starts to really affect his personality.

Part 2 of The David Bowie Story explores Bowie’s fantastic rise to stardom in the early 70s. Despite his irresponsible nature creating tensions with his producers, his quirky personality, his sexual ambiguity and his sense of drama was making his music really unique. He pushed things so far that he ended up creating for himself an entirely new persona: the hugely successful Ziggy Stardust.

Today we introduce the first part of a detailed and very well documented 6-part BBC documentary series about the life and times of one of the greatest and most influential artist in popular music: David Bowie.Part 1 starts in the 60s and tells the story of the early days of David’s career as he was still a teenager: his first rhythm and blues band, his passion for theatre and fashion, his bohemian life, his first encounters with Marc Bolan and producer Tony Visconti, and his first commercial breakthrough: Space Oddity.

With Nevermind’s huge commercial success, Nirvana had shattered the glass ceiling: it was finally possible for alternative bands to be successful and make a living out of their music. Without it, most of us would have never heard of bands like The White Stripes or The Foo Fighters.\nBut after Kurt Cobain’s death, grunge fans could only sit and watch in horror at what “alternative” american music was becoming. Greedy and impatient record labels were pushing unimaginative bands to replicate Nirvana’s success. Even metal hair bands – grunge’s nemesis – were dropping glitter for flanel shirts in order to join the bandwagon. Nickelback, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park… Were they all Nirvana’s fault?

As the drugged up Seattle grunge scene was growing bigger, it started to gather interest on a national level. Gigs were now attracting clean and normal kids who were turning their backs on heavy metal, the press was becoming hysterical and record labels were fighting to find out who was going to be the next big thing: Soundgarden? Mudhoney? Alice in Chains?\nThe answer became obvious at the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind and their Generation X anthem Smells Like Teen Spirit. They became the first ever alternative american band to become massively successful, quickly becoming triple platinium and even beating Mickael Jackson in the charts.

America, mid-80s. College rock bands are budding all around the country. But something different seems to emerge from the northern city of Seattle. Plagued by hard drugs, high suicide rates, dirty hair and plaid shirts, its a dismal place to form a band. But it’ll soon become the home of one of the biggest rock’n roll movement ever.\nLocal bands Green River and Screaming Trees are among the first to define that mix of punk and heavy metal that will form the characteristic sound of grunge. They’re soon followed by others, like Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Mudhoney. The newly created Sub Pop record label promotes the city’s very active scene. But it’s a bunch of guys from the small town of Aberdeen who’ll be the first to really make it and achieve world domination: Nirvana, and their charismatic singer Kurt Cobain.

As you might have guessed, this new documentary is about Nirvana. Well, not so much about them than about what lead to them. The Road to Nirvana explores the succession of events that reinvented alternative american rock throughout the 80s, paving the way for a group of charismatic Seattle junkies to become the biggest band in the world and change the face of music, for better and for worse.\nIn the first part of The Road to Nirvana, Mark Sutherland tells the story of how, in the early 80s, British Punk’s freshness and desire to strip down music to its most basic and minimal form inspired many local bands in America. Though punk never made it to the US mainstream as it did in the UK, local scenes tousands of miles away from each other became more and more vibrant: Minneapolis had Hüsker Dü, Boston had the Pixies and Dinosaur Jr., NYC had Sonic Youth… Though being played on conventional media was unthinkable, these bands were in heavy rotation on college radios, creating the College Rock movement. But one band managed to break into the mainstream: REM.

Throughout the last quarter of the 20th century, technology kept making it easier for bands to make music. But it was the home computer that finally gave artists the ability to fully write, play, record and even distribute music entirely from their bedroom.\nIn this final part, Andrew Collins talks to the bands, including Air, Radiohead and The Chemical Brothers, who used the computer’s power to go beyond human capabilities and free themselves from the pression of the studio and the record labels. They discuss what technology changed in the bands’ relationship with their audience, the return to low-fi analog and the synthpop revival.