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.