Carol Morley set out to capture her lost years, instead she captured Manchester’s

One night in a restaurant in 1998, over the clinking of wine glasses, and the chatter of the room, Carol Morley found out just how much her reputation preceded her. She’d been living in London for a while by this point, having relocated from Manchester in around 1987. She was at dinner with the filmmaker Clio Barnard, who brought a partner along who had spent a bit of time in Manchester. “He said, ‘oh, I know you’,” Morley recalls. “I didn’t know him whatsoever. He was like, ‘I remember loads of stories about you’ and he started to tell them. I didn’t recognise them and didn’t know if they were true or myth. That is where it all began.”

There were a lot of stories, it would turn out, that people back home told about Morley. From playing with train sets under the table in The Hacienda to picking up old blokes off the street for a bet. It was a period in which she drank heavily, partied hard and had lots of casual entanglements. It was also a time that came just five years after the death of her father who, when Morley was just 11, had taken his own life.

An obvious timeline of action followed by consequence, perhaps, but whether you can actually draw this neat connection is something Morley seems less sure of — more on this later. But the obvious action, and then consequence, that did issue from this time is that Morley’s years partying harder, and behaving wilder, than those around her, made her notorious. However, where some people would have blanched at such notoriety, and buried it, Morley decided to dig deeper. “It was like going back to excavate,” she says. 

“Carol Morley. Film project. Please contact me if you knew me between 1982-1987”.

This was an advert she posted in City Life magazine in 1998. “There were some quite hostile reactions,” she recalls. “People said it was self-aggrandising and one person said: ‘what I have to say about you I wouldn’t want my wife and children hearing’.”

The result of these interviews was the documentary, The Alcohol Years, released 25 years ago in 2000. In the end, Morley got enough people to speak. And speak they did. They shared stories and spoke candidly about sexual encounters, both experienced and rumoured, they laughed, scowled, hurled insults, offered psychological analysis and expressed concern, as they revealed the backstory of a woman who was so well known in Manchester that she came loaded with her own mythology. Throughout the film she is labelled by contributors as “the original party girl”, “a role model for promiscuity,” “sexually ill” and Morley’s own favourite: “a second-division star fucker.”

The film is a deeply unique piece of work. While ostensibly about Morley, and her attempt to fill the alcohol-induced memory gaps of her wild younger years, it doesn’t feature her on-screen or as a voiceover. Instead, she places her life, and story, in the hands of others’ retelling while being told in the process that she’s manipulative or would be better off going to therapy. 

Nor does it ever introduce who is on screen. For those who know their Manchester culture and music history, it’s littered with faces, including the likes of Tony Wilson, Alan Wise, Liz Naylor, Pete Shelley, Dave Haslam, Stella Grundy, Dick Witts, Vini Reilly and numerous others. But for those who don’t, they become interchangeable with lesser-known people like Morley’s pals. There is no hierarchy in place, no sense of celebrity or status, and the end result is watching something that feels akin to multiple nights out all loosely stitched together via a blur of faces and half-remembered names.

The fact that the stories told are not substantiated, denied, or even engaged with by the subject, all gives it the texture of a hazy memory from years ago that you can’t quite recall the details and specifics of. “I knew from the beginning that there wouldn’t be a voiceover or that I would include people’s names and occupations,” explains Morley. “I wanted to create a piece where there were conflicting voices and ideas. If you do a voiceover, or any kind of narration, then you iron out those contradictions and I really didn’t want that.”

The film, which is available to watch via the BFI, remains as compelling today as it was to local audiences around the time it came out. On one hand it’s a fascinating character study, as well as an insight into changing attitudes and languages around young women’s sexuality that feels ahead of its time – the kind of thing you could envision sprouting from the contemporary sex positivity movement. But it’s also a brilliant, subtle documentation of time and place. Not only of the ’80s era that Morley is reflecting on but also the period of reflection taking place in the late ’90s, when the film was shot. For some, time has passed and the version of Morley they speak about feels like a shadowy figure from the past. “We used to guess how many shags you’d had a week,” recalls one contributor with a sheepish face, while another laughs at how Morley managed to become a magnet for all the freaks of Manchester to fall in love with.

But different wounds heal at different speeds and for some there is a palpable sense of resentment, anger and hostility that clearly still lingers. “Fuck you” spits one guy at one point, no longer able to contain his disdain for a project that he clearly views as a narcissistic extension of the Carol Morley Show – a channel he had gladly switched off years earlier. “He really didn’t want to be in the film,” Morley reflects on the person in question. “I had to keep asking him. I was quite terrified with that interview but it was an important one. Because he would talk about how it’s [the film] so manipulative and I think that’s really crucial. Every film, every documentary, is a manipulation.” By dint of what it is, she explains, a documentary has to be a manipulation because you can’t just show raw footage. “I love that he was questioning what I was doing,” she continues. “I think he was the voice of the audience who might find what I was doing problematic.”

But what was it like to give a huge range of people she hadn’t seen in years carte blanche to say anything they liked about her, on camera, while she stood there silently? Morley tells me she knew she had to be present but neutral: “They could say anything and I wanted everyone to have complete freedom and the feeling that they weren’t being hampered or going to be attacked or disagreed with.” Although it could have a delayed bruising effect, she admits. “I definitely would get upset sometimes later in the day or week. Like the accumulation of it all. It wasn’t like someone would say something and I would think, fuck you, but there was a sort of shaking things up and a stirring of feelings.” 

In many ways, The Alcohol Years is the perfect film about Manchester because it’s not really about Manchester. There’s almost no archive footage, no talk about the glory days, or tales from the tour bus, and no PR-like positioning of Manchester as a global force for culture. By having a group of people all focused on one subject, it bypasses the same tired stories and cliches. Instead, you have a very intimate, open, honest, and often quite vulnerable, series of conversations with many of the city’s musical greats who almost never talk about music and it’s all the better for it.

Watching the Buzzcocks’ Pete Shelley softly, tenderly, perhaps slightly painfully, recall his past failed relationship with Morley offers up more of an insight into the man than any music documentary might. “It’s a portrait of a city and some of the people in it,” reflects Morley. “I realised that when you interview someone not about themselves, or necessarily their first-hand experience of the scene, that they end up revealing so much about themselves. It became quite an interesting and odd route to revealing attitudes and people, rather than just going: ‘what do you remember about the Hacienda?’”

For Morley, she simply says that she was not nostalgic and so the film would naturally produce something different in tone. “It was more about capturing feelings, attitudes, and times but without imbuing them in a certain way,” she says. “A good bit of nostalgia is all right but I think it can get a bit landlocked. It can get a bit stifling for other people to see someone else’s nostalgia.” It’s also a refreshing alternative to the narrative around Manchester in the ’80s being one big party and a centre for bustling metropolitan cool. In the early part of that decade, Morley paints the city as dark, dead and kind of conservative. “There was no real future then in Manchester,” she recalls. “Everything was shut down. It was this very odd time where everything was amazingly possible because you’d see Hooky [then a member of New Order] on Top of the Pops on Thursday but at the same time you’re all on the dole. It was weird.”

Two years after Morley’s film, Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People would be released. The parallels between the two films make the differences between them even more striking: Winterbottom’s movie covered the same era as Morley’s film, complete with a full rebuild of the Hacienda as part of the set. But in Morley’s film there’s no bug-eyed ravers lost in the moment. What you have instead is a tour around the empty club before it was demolished. Rather than presenting a ‘if you build it, they will come’ story around the club, Morley offers up an eerie snapshot of broken dreams, faded memories, and crumbling brickwork. With glasses and ashtrays still littering the bars and tables, the mood feels like returning to the scene of a crime. 

“It took us a year to get in the Hacienda,” she recalls. “Eventually they let us and we just went in there with a torch.” She remembers it being as haunting an experience as it was an exciting one. After all, Morley’s alcohol years had started in that very building. “I started going when I was 16,” she says. “Once the Hacienda was open that was pretty much that, I was going every night.” The haunting aspect that the Hacienda had for her wasn’t an anomaly – for Morley, the city as a whole was riddled with ghosts. 

“I definitely remember thinking, and I still feel to this day, that I couldn’t have gone back without a camera,” she says. “But it also just felt weirdly inevitable. I remember feeling, and this sounds a bit odd, that I’d lived that life in order to make the film. I mean, obviously that’s not true, but it was a way of approaching it.”

On watching the film, it’s easy to jump to conclusions, like how traumatic making it might have been — standing and listening to a load of people who were, at best, neutral on you, and at worst, actively hostile, airing their grievances about you before a camera. But when Morley talks about piecing the film together, it sounds therapeutic. She describes a feeling of command she experienced making it: “I was able to control something that I’d had no control of at the time. It felt really good to be able to shape something out of something that was quite messy.” She felt that Manchester and those years owed her something. But she was still full of empathy for her younger self. In the ’80s, she hadn’t known what she was doing. “I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t know what was going on.”

There’s a conclusion drawn in the film, by some, that Morley’s drunken, promiscuous, occasionally dangerous, behaviour can be linked to the way she lost her dad. A valid point but not cut and dry, she feels now. “There’s a bit in the film with my friend Debby when she says something like, ‘what with your dad dying and me being adopted that’s why we had problems’,” recalls Morley. “But then she also says: ‘but maybe we were just being juvenile delinquents’.” Morley thinks it’s both. At that age, she says, it’s brilliant to be extreme and to act how you feel and experience the world. She was very aware that her father’s suicide had impacted her, but was resistant to that analysis at the time she was living out her alcohol years. “But then when I made the film, I wasn’t so resistant to the idea that some of it stemmed from that trauma.”

 While Morley’s film is undeniably bold in both idea and execution – it won multiple awards and was also nominated for a BAFTA – it was not universally seen as such. When the film aired on Channel 4, some reactions made Morley laugh. “You used to be able to phone up TV channels and log a complaint or leave a comment,” she recalls. “One for ours was: ‘why would you make a film about this slag Carol Morley?’ That was really funny.” It also had split reactions in her own family. “Somebody in my family said, ‘I’m so disgusted with you’,” recalls Morley. Whereas the biggest problem Morley’s mum had with the film was that someone in it had called her disorganised because she never kept enough 50p pieces in the house for the meter in the Morley household to be topped up.

It’s been roughly five years since Morley last watched the film but, a quarter of a century on, it’s one that she remains proud of. “My overwhelming feeling about it is, I’m just really glad I made it,” she says. “I absolutely don’t regret ever making it and looking back on my younger self, it’s a mixture of absolutely brilliant times and absolutely hideous times but I’m really glad I experienced all of that. I really am.”

Nobody could ever accuse Manchester of being short on nostalgia. However, The Alcohol Years represents a different kind of looking back. One that gives a more nuanced look at the city, its people and its stories. “Somebody once said to me that documentaries are about something but in the end, they become all about the director,” Morley says. “But they said, in your film it is about the director but in the end, it becomes all about the other people. And I love that.”