90S NORTHERN CLUB SCENE
NIGHTS TO REMEMBER
Thirty years ago, gay nightlife in the north of England finally began to rival that of the south. Photographer Stuart Linden Rhodes visited most of these pubs and clubs, his camera in hand. But his pictures lay gathering dust for two decades until he rediscovered them in 2020. Now his new book takes us back to the early days of the northern scene
Words David McGillivray
DON’T HOLD BACK: Revellers -including a young Louie Spence — (second from the right) at Flesh, in the Hacienda, Manchester, 1993
Photography Stuart Linden Rhodes
For a number of reasons, it was only in the 90s that gay pride really began to live up to its name. Venues got rid of their blacked-out windows, and not only were clubbers proud to be seen inside, but they were proud to be photographed there, too Gay magazines thrived on page after page of snaps of party animals. The first thing many readers did when they picked up the mostly free ‘scene’ magazines was check out how they looked.
Most of the major clubs and magazines were in London, where there were several large, long-established LGBTQ+ communities. But around the turn of the 90s, something happened on the queer scene in the north of England, particularly in Manchester, where a gay village sprang up in a former red-light district next to the run-down canal. “The doors were suddenly wide open,” says photographer Stuart Linden Rhodes. “The closet doors had come off!”
Linden, as he’s known, spent ten years as a self-taught, part-time photo-journalist for a now-defunct gay paper called All Points North. He travelled the length and breadth of the UK, but his main patch was Birmingham to Newcastle. He took thousands of photos for his column, Out & About with Linden, which became a unique record of gay clubbing in the north at a time that has since become, mainly because of the ground-breaking TV series Queer as Folk, the stuff of legend.