SEXIS WRONG

In order for a shop to avoid being branded a sex shop, it had
to carry a proportionally larger stock of non-sex material. The
ratio works out at around 10% of smut to the banks of dusty
old novels, racks of discarded hobbyist magazines, and boxes
of long-playing vinyl at the front of the shop.
The porn on sale in unlicensed sex shops was, and remains,
the real deal: uncut, unrated, and unlawful. That’s where their
appeal lay. Unlicensed sex shops didn’t have to conform, and
the promise of hardcore and a diversity of it is what drew the
customers.
This is where I come in.
Sometime around the mid-1990s, I was asked if I wanted
to earn some easy money in the run-up to Christmas. The
job on offer consisted of working only one and a half days a
week—Friday afternoon and all day Saturday—but the pay
was exceptionally good. It had to be.
Bookchain—along with other center premises, House on
the Borderland and Orbis Books—was owned by Savoy, the
Manchester-based publishing house responsible for the controversial
“Meng & Ecker” comics (issue number one was
found obscene and is now banned in Britain), with a long and
cool history of fighting the Man. Their books range from an
early volume on James Dean by a young Morrissey to, more
recently, an unexpurgated edition of Colin Wilson’s novel The
Killer and Fuck Off and Die, a new volume of “Meng & Ecker”
strips. Their book Lord Horror, written by Savoy cofounder
David Britton, ended up in court on charges of anti-Semitism
but was acquitted. Author Jon Farmer has described Savoy
as almost single-handedly inventing alternative culture.
I accepted the job of working in Bookchain. It was common
knowledge that the place was owned by Savoy, but no paperwork
bound them to the premises. There was nothing to link
them. The paper trail stopped dead with the guy who offered
me the job—a young man whom, for the sake of argument,
we will call “Bob.”
Hardcore pornography was illegal in the UK, but in the center
of Manchester, on a busy intersection next to a takeaway
café on the one side and a flash car showroom on the other,
stood an unassuming bookshop.
Once an essential haunt for record collectors, comic collectors,
readers of choice sci-fi, cosmic literature,
and perusers of a broad assortment of zines,
Bookchain was situated on Peter Street just
off Deansgate, one of the main thoroughfares
through the city. In its heyday it was a place that pumped loud
rock music into the streets and boasted a clientele that included
Manchester luminaries and misfits, movers and shakers,
such as Mark E. Smith (of the Fall), Pete Shelley (of the
Buzzcocks), TV presenter (and star of 24 Hour Party People)
Tony Wilson, and others.
Densely packed with books on the ground floor, as a regular
visitor in the early 1980s, my own favorite part of the shop
was downstairs with the boxes of comics (predominately
b&w ones published by Warren), film magazines, and more
esoteric fare. As the years rolled by, the stock seemed to
stagnate and, its halcyon days in decline, my field trips became
less frequent. Now its patrons consisted of passersby
and the die-hards who steadfastly trawled a regular route
through the city’s dwindling book emporiums in the hope that
something new and unusual might still be found.
But mostly it was those who came for porn. These people
kept the place going.
For all intents and purposes, the place was now an unlicensed
sex shop: 10% smut, 90% everything else.
There was good reason why Savoy didn’t want a link between
itself and the frontline. Its shops were raided by police
and emptied of stock on a regular basis. At first it was bootleg
records—Savoy was at the center of Operation Moonbeam
in 1979, a sting described in the press as the “smashing of
Unlicensed sex shops were an
altogether different matter—
they operated within a twilight zone.
the biggest bootleg ring in the UK.” This landed Savoy with
a heavy fine that threatened to close it down. Then, when
James Anderton—self-professed “God’s Cop”—became
Chief Constable of Manchester Police, there followed raids
aplenty as Anderton made it his mission to clean up the city.
The Chief Constable held a particular dislike for Savoy, and
material that was readily available elsewhere around the
country was targeted for seizure in Manchester.
All told, Savoy was raided something like 50 times over the
years.
If it was going to be raided for paperback books and relatively
innocuous fetish magazines, Savoy decided it might as well
go the whole hog and stock harder material.
I can mention Savoy and the Bookchain shop now because
the shop is no more, demolished as part of the rejuvenation
scheme that is systematically wiping the heritage from the
city. As David Britton told me: “It’s a different time now, and
the powers that be cannot touch us in the same way.”
David Britton: It was only during the last six years
FIRE, BRICK, SAND, CONCRETE 171