Mike Pickering interview

What did you do for a job at this time?
Er well I spent quite a long time out of work as lots of people did then, and I got sent on a Tops course, it was re-training but they trained me to be a chef

Really?
Yeah it was great, in the CIS building in Manchester, but I was just so into music at the time, I was lead singer and manager of this kind of new wave punk band called Fireplace

Did you release any records?
Here's a thing, we released one record on Band On The Wall Manchester Musicians Collective album but I weren't on it! I'd fallen out with them already, about two days before... over a girl as well! So I told them to go fuck themselves and didn't do it! Actually I'm glad I didn't because it's not stood the test of time.

It must have been around this time you met Rob Gretton?
Well I just hung out everywhere, but years before I'd met Rob through City, we actually got chased by a load of Forest skinheads at Forest away and it was a long journey through the back of a pub, with snarling alsations, over a wall, we ended up laying in a garden and you could see the doc martin boots really near us, and he went, "I'm Rob Gretton from Wythenshawe" and I went "I'm Mike Pickering from Stockport" and so we always used to go away on the football special together and got really friendly with him, and then he started managing Warsaw so I was kind of there from the beginning really.

What was your role?
Well I was just Rob's mate. No-one had specific jobs, you know what I mean, if the van needed loading, it needed loading... but then what happened was I went to live in Holland, I think in 1979, I got fed up with everything and just went, you know. In Rotterdam I met these guys who squatted in an old waterworks like a big tower, and there was a big hall attached. They went, "if you lads want you can open this hall and do what you want" so we cleared it all out, someone built a stage, got a generator and we started putting on nights where I was DJ'ing. It was kind of very much against the trend, because everything was punk and rock in those days and I was playing Chic and lots of US disco, you know, Crown Heights Affair and that.
I was also using my connections in England to put gigs on, so I had like Human League, the first gig after they split with Heaven 17, Factory nights, A Certain Ratio, Dirty Column and Section 25, but I also put on the second New Order gig after Ian died, because Rob said I want to do some gigs out of England, and when he saw what we'd done, he said, I'm opening a club at home. I want you to come home.