Nightclubs and music venues are often the source of a lifetime's music taste, best friends and vivid memories. They can define a town, a city or a generation, and breed scenes and bands that change music history. In Life After Dark Dave Haslam reveals and celebrates a definitive history of significant venues and great nights out. Writing with passion and authority, he takes us from vice-ridden Victorian dance halls to acid house and beyond; through the jazz decades of luxurious ballrooms to mods in basement dives and the venues that nurtured the Beatles, the Stones, Northern Soul and the Sex Pistols; from psychedelic light shows to high street discos; from the Roxy to the Hacienda; from the Krays to the Slits; and from reggae sound systems to rave nights in Stoke. In a journey to dozens of towns and cities, taking in hundreds of unforgettable stories on the way, Haslam explores the sleaziness, the changing fashions, the moral panics and the cultural and commercial history of nightlife. He interviews clubbers and venue owners, as well as DJs and musicians; he meets one of the gangsters who nearly destroyed Manchester's nightlife and discusses Goth clubs in Leeds with David Peace.

The definitive account of the pop cult capital of the UK by Dave Haslam, one of Manchester's top DJs and journalists. Manchester, a predominantly working-class city, away from the nation's capital, has been at the margins of English culture for centuries. The explosion of music and creativity in Manchester can be traced back from Victorian music hall and the jazz age, to Northern Soul and rock and roll, through to acid house and Oasis. But its roots are in Manchester's history as a melting pot of popular idealism and dissent, from the industrial revolution on, via film, theatre, comedy and TV. And for Manchester, read England and the world. Dave Haslam is uniquely placed to tell this story - Manchester, England is as witty, erudite and passionate as you would expect from a man who can say, again and again, "I was there". Like Jon Savage's England's Dreaming, this is the last word on the abiding centre of 40 years of UK pop culture.

'Young Hearts Run Free' is an antidote to 'I Love the 1970s'; it is the real story of the 1970s from the critically acclaimed author of 'Manchester, England'. The 1970s is a decade frequently miscast; a parade of fashion disasters backed by a soundtrack of glam rock or frothy, mainstream disco. The generation who grew up in the 1970s remember the decade differently: inflation, strikes, and power cuts; the rise of the National Front; IRA terror campaigns on the British mainland; women's liberation; 'Mean Streets'; 'Taxi Driver' and 'Apocalypse Now'. 'Young Hearts Run Free' tells the story of the 1970s, celebrating the musicians and songs that illuminated the ideas, fashions and sexual revolutions of the decade including: the politicised soul and funk of Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye, the Punk explosion, New Wave, David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust, gay disco, the Stooges, Patti Smith, the Raincoats, Cabaret Voltaire, the Specials, and black British reggae. 'Young Hearts Run Free' uses in-depth research, drawing not only on interviews with musicians, writers, and artists but also a wide range of representatives of the 70s generation. They introduce us to life and music away from the mainstream: nothing bland, nothing obvious, definitely not Abba. CHAPTERS Intro: Boogie Wonderland (Earth, Wind & Fire, 1979) One: Lolo (The Kinks, 1970) Two: Riders on the Storm (The Doors, 1971) Three: Freddie's Dead (Curtis Mayfield, 1972) Four: All the Young Dudes (Mott the Hoople, 1972) Five: Raw Power (The Stooges, 1973) Six: Sad Sweet Dreamer (Sweet Sensation, 1974) Seven: Turn the Beat Around (Vicki Sue Robinson, 1976) Eight: God Save the Queen (Sex Pistols, 1977) Nine: Handsome Revolution (Steel Pulse, 1978) Outro: Everyone's Happy Nowadays (Buzzcocks, 1979)

In this work, Dave Haslam travels Britain to meet clubbers and promoters: he hangs out with Sasha in Glasgow, Fatboy Slim in Nottingham, Paul van Dyk in Cardiff, Norman Jay at the Southport Soul Weekender, and Lottie in Newcastle. He meets influential DJs like Pete Tong, pioneers including Jimmy Saville, younger DJs, and unknowns. He interviews mod DJs from the 60s, Northern Soul DJs from the 70s and rare groove DJs from the 80s. He follows aspiring turntablists in the DMC mixing championship, from the heats in Birmingham to the world final. Among the exclusive stories and tall tales, we hear about the millionaire DJ who went to a friend's wedding dressed as a bee, the Radio One DJ who emptied a dancefloor in Ibiza, and the DJ who set a girl's hair on fire. A sweeping history of the rise of the DJ industry - from the amateur DJ in the local village hall, through the pioneering DJ's of the 60s and 70s, to the superclub DJ's of the late 1990s.

'Beautifully judged account of the Manchester scene . . . There is something of the fairy tale about Dave Haslam's sage joyful testament to the kind of life that nobody could ever plan, a happy aligning of a cultural moment and a young man who instinctively knew that it was his once upon a time' Victoria Segal, Sunday Times 'Witty, sometimes dark, revealing, insightful, everything one could hope for from one of those folk without whom independent music simply wouldn't exist' Classic Rock Sonic Youth Slept on My Floor is writer and DJ Dave Haslam's wonderfully evocative memoir. It is a masterful insider account of the Hacienda, the rise of Madchester and birth of the rave era, and how music has sound-tracked a life and a generation. In the late 1970s Dave Haslam was a teenage John Peel listener and Joy Division fan, his face pressed against a 'window', looking in at a world of music, books and ideas. Four decades later, he finds himself in the middle of that world, collaborating with New Order on a series of five shows in Manchester. Into the story of those intervening decades, Haslam weaves a definitive portrait of Manchester as a music city and the impact of a number of life-changing events, such as the nightmare of the Yorkshire Ripper to the shock of the Manchester Arena terror attack. The cast of Haslam's life reads like a who's who of '70s, '80s and '90s popular culture: Tony Wilson, Nile Rodgers, Terry Hall, Neneh Cherry, Tracey Thorn, John Lydon, Johnny Marr, Ian Brown, Laurent Garnier and David Byrne. From having Morrissey to tea and meeting writers such as Raymond Carver and Jonathan Franzen to discussing masturbation with Viv Albertine and ecstasy with Roisin Murphy, via having a gun pulled on him at the Hacienda and a drug dealer threatening to slit his throat, this is not your usual memoir.