1. Wilderness

Manchester in the late 1970s is a city in retreat. Industry is collapsing and jobs are disappearing. Whole neighbourhoods feel abandoned. Out of that stillness comes a stark, unsettling new sound. Joy Division capture the mood of a city that has lost its rhythm. Their music is tense, mechanical and unflinching. When Ian Curtis dies in May 1980, just as the band stand on the brink of America, it feels like the end of something fragile and important. A month later, Love Will Tear Us Apart is released. But this story does not end there.

Tony Wilson, television presenter and cultural instigator, has already opened a club night called The Factory. Within two years, the surviving members of Joy Division return as New Order and take a huge gamble to open a cavernous nightclub by the canal. On opening night at The Haçienda, a white grand piano sits in the middle of a vast, echoing room. Almost nobody dances.

Episode 1 of The Rise and Fall of Madchester tells the story of how a broken industrial city began to rebuild itself through sound. From the Russell Club in Hulme to the birth of Factory Records, from the stark poetry of Joy Division to the uncertain promise of the Haçienda, this is where Manchester finds a room… and the faintest hint of a new pulse.

Featuring archive interviews from Tony Wilson, Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner, Ian Curtis and Stephen Morris and a new interview with Mike Pickering.

A BBC Audio Production.

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Episoder(43)

Trailer

There are bands who split and reunite so often it stops meaning anything. And then there's The Smiths. Five years. Four albums. A string of hits that still sound like nothing else. And a break-up, in ...

23 Jul 51s

8. What the World is Waiting For

As Tony Wilson once told Newsweek Magazine in 1990 - "If there is any idea at all, it is about community and collective strength. There is power in people being lovely to each other."It might be more...

16 Mar 22min

7. Regret

In 1995, after five years of court cases, silence and mounting expectation, The Stone Roses are finally back. The Second Coming has been released, and a Glastonbury headline slot awaits. Then on a rar...

16 Mar 18min

6. Shoot You Down

Barbados was supposed to save them. In early 1992, The Happy Mondays are flown to the Caribbean to record their next album. Fresh from the success of Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches, this should be c...

16 Mar 23min

5. World in Motion

1990 does not begin quietly. London burns during the Poll Tax riots. Strangeways prison erupts in Manchester. Margaret Thatcher stands outside Downing Street for the last time. Britain is shifting pol...

16 Mar 18min

4. Loose Fit

By 1989, Manchester is no longer underground, it is now unavoidable. Baggy jeans, bucket hats and loose jumpers become a uniform. Market stalls and record shops replace boutiques and fashion houses. T...

16 Mar 25min

3. Twenty Four Hour Party People

In 1985 two Manchester bands release their first records on the very same day. The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays barely register beyond the city. They are promising, scruffy… and largely ignored. ...

16 Mar 20min

2. Movement

March 1983. New Order take to the stage on Top of the Pops to perform their new single, Blue Monday. The machines misfire, the sequencer slips and Bernard Sumner glances upwards as if waiting for help...

16 Mar 21min