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This article explores the emergence and development of alternative nightclub culture in Manchester, England, during the 1970s and early 1980s. It takes as its main point of reference the Roxy Room at Pips Disco, the hitherto neglected foundation of Manchester's alternative music club network. The article aims to identify and evaluate a particular sense of connection between the ever-evolving dynamic of the city's punk-imbued club space and the bricks and concrete of its environment. If, as its on-going influence on aspects of both Mancunian culture and urban milieu would suggest, the Haçienda club at first stabilized and then re-defined the parameters of this relationship, then the Roxy Room at Pips Disco instigated what might be termed the initial negotiation. It is this pre-history, then - a root of particular working at leisure patterns and cultural industries development so firmly associated with the Haçienda - that the article seeks to uncover. Utilizing a variety of new interviews with Pips habitués and a number of key figures in the music and cultural industries (all of which were conducted by the author), the article generates new knowledge in its reconsideration of what has remained a marginalized and yet influential presence within Manchester's popular culture history.

This article will explore The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (Julien Temple) and Rude Boy (Jack Hazan and David Mingay) (both 1980), the two highest-profile films to emerge from and treat cinematically Britain’s first wave of punk rock. Featuring the Sex Pistols and the Clash, respectively, each film attempts to tell its tale in an oppositional manner. Both do so, however, from within dominant industrial and discursive modes of practice. Taking as its keynote Stacy Thompson’s dialectical approach to punk cinema, the article considers these seemingly irreconcilable positions by tracing implied cinematic traditions and questioning the role of the protagonist. It goes on to centre its attention on Rude Boy specifically, analysing the position of the fan as a key figure within the narrative. An in-depth interview with Ray Gange, the novice actor/fan at the heart of the film, concludes the piece.

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This article considers links between 1970s British television and male-oriented detective fiction. It takes as its focus the eponymous protagonist of Thames Television’s Hazell (1978–80), whose first incarnation, in the ‘P. B. Yuill’ novel Hazell Plays Solomon, dates back to 1974. During the 1970s the investigator figure was to British television what the espionage adventurer had been in the 1960s – all but ubiquitous. Contemporaneous genre literature, often influenced by the US ‘hard-boiled’ tradition, played a pivotal role in establishing such a presence. Yet its relationship with television remains obscure. Why should this be the case? And what might be gained from looking at the changing world of the 1970s through the eyes of an obsolete archetype? In response to these questions, the article retrieves one cultural history (literature) on the back of, and while augmenting, another (television). Hazell, with its distinct ‘meta’ quality and end-of-era proximity, proves useful to this exercise.