Madchester
noun · first attested 1989
Two video directors invented the word to avoid naming the real city in a film script.
The Manchester music scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s, mixing indie guitar bands with dance rhythms.
53.4794°N -2.2453°W · Q18125
Record
- Relationship
- Indirect, via a person or title
- Confidence
- Well attestedThe place link is the standard scholarly account.
- Attested
- 1989
- Part of speech
- noun
Explanations here are written for this atlas. Dictionary text is not copied; the sources are linked so the claim can be checked.
- Step 1
Manchester
- In English
Madchester
Philip Shotton and Keith Jobling, the Factory Records video directors known as the Bailey Brothers, coined Madchester while writing a film about car thieves, using it to sidestep any legal trouble over the city's real name. Tony Wilson then had the Happy Mondays retitle their November 1989 EP Madchester Rave On, and the press applied the word to the whole scene around the Hacienda club.