Gangland Rave Wars

Who held the door held the dancefloor.

When acid house hit Manchester, the club door became the most valuable square yard in the city. Whoever stood on it decided who got in, who got hurt, and who sold the pills inside. The fight for it ran from a pump-action shotgun outside the Thunderdome in 1989 to Mr Big’s last night out.

Gangland Rave Wars follows that fight through the Haçienda, Konspiracy, Parliament and Liberty’s, through the Salford and Cheetham Hill firms, the doormen who stood between them and the police who were always a step behind. It goes back to the pills themselves, from a German chemical works to a cellar under an Amsterdam flower shop, and out to the clubs of Bolton, Wigan, Stockport and Rochdale, where the same war was fought on a smaller stage.

It is a book about the men who ran the doors and the ones who never came home, and about a city that came to be called Gunchester.