The Man From the Haçienda
Mike Pickering was born in Manchester. In the early 1980s he was A&R at Factory Records, the label that gave Manchester Joy Division, New Order and the Haçienda. He signed Happy Mondays and James. He co-founded Quando Quango with Hillegonda Rietveld in Rotterdam, and the band moved to Manchester in 1982. Bernard Sumner co-produced the early records and Johnny Marr played on the album. Their track "Love Tempo" became an underground dance hit in America. Then came T-Coy with Simon Topping in 1987, whose single "Carino" is cited as one of the first British house records.
But it was behind the decks that Pickering changed the city. He ran the Nude night at the Haçienda on Fridays with Little Martin, later with Graeme Park, mixing Chicago house, Detroit techno and New York garage. By early 1987 the club had gone from half-empty to full every week. In July 1988 he co-launched Hot with Jon Dasilva, an Ibiza-inspired acid house night widely cited as the moment UK acid house found its permanent northern home. The Haçienda became the most important club in the country, and Pickering was the man who had put the records on. He knew what a dance floor wanted. He also knew he had not yet made his own record that belonged on one.
M for Mike
The original idea was a collective. Pickering wanted a project with no fixed singer, a different voice on every track, built around the dance music he had been playing and producing for a decade. He teamed up with Paul Heard, a London-born bassist and programmer who had played with Orange Juice, Working Week and Strawberry Switchblade. They started writing together in 1990.
Then they found the voice that made the collective idea pointless. Heather Small had grown up on a council estate in Ladbroke Grove, West London, the daughter of Barbadian parents. She was the singer in Hot House, a soul trio on Deconstruction Records, who had a minor hit with "Don't Come to Stay" in 1987. While she was still in the band, in 1989, she got a session that should have made her famous four years earlier than M People did: when Black Box needed to re-record the vocal on "Ride on Time" after a legal dispute over an unlicensed Loleatta Holloway sample, it was Heather Small who walked into the studio and sang the replacement in under an hour. She was paid a flat fee and not told what it was for. "Ride on Time" was the biggest-selling single of 1989, number 1 for six weeks, and nobody told the public whose voice was on it. Deconstruction released "Ride on Time" in the UK. It was also Hot House's label, and it would be M People's. It is not hard to see how they came to hear her.
She had one of the most distinctive voices in British pop: deep, rich, with a grain to it that no amount of studio polish could smooth out. You heard her once and you knew it was her. The idea of rotating singers died on the spot. They recorded Northern Soul through the spring and summer of 1991 and released it in March 1992. It peaked at number 53. The singles "Colour My Life" and "How Can I Love You More?" charted modestly. Then "How Can I Love You More?" was remixed, re-released in January 1993, and went to number 8. The second time, people were listening.
Elegant Slumming
In February 1994 M People won the BRIT Award for Best British Dance Act. The second album was four months old. Elegant Slumming had been released on 4 October 1993, reached number 2 and spent 87 weeks in the top 75. "One Night in Heaven" made number 6. "Moving On Up" went to number 2, kept off the top only by "Boom! Shake the Room", and reached number 1 on the US Billboard Dance Club chart. It became the song that followed them everywhere, the one that soundtracked the mid-nineties before anybody had given the era a name. It appeared in The Full Monty. In October 2022 Liz Truss walked on to it at the Conservative Party conference. Pickering said the band were livid, and pointed out that Labour had asked permission in the 1990s. The song, he noted, is about telling someone to leave.
In September 1994 Elegant Slumming won the Mercury Music Prize. The shortlist included Blur's Parklife, The Prodigy's Music for the Jilted Generation, Pulp's His 'n' Hers, Take That's Everything Changes and Paul Weller's Wild Wood. The panel reportedly split between M People and Pulp. M People gave the £25,000 prize money to charity. In February 1995 they won the BRIT for Best British Dance Act again.
Andrew Lovell, known as Shovell, was a percussionist from South East London who became a full member of the band by the time of Bizarre Fruit. He brought movement and energy to the live show and stayed for the rest, going on to play with Nightmares on Wax among others.
"You heard her once and you knew it was her."
Search for the Hero
Bizarre Fruit followed in 1994 and reached number 3. It carried "Sight for Sore Eyes" at number 6, "Open Your Heart" at number 9, and "Search for the Hero" at number 9. "Search for the Hero" was the one that lasted longest. In 1996 Peugeot used it for the 406 television campaign, debuting by filling an entire three-minute advertising break during News at Ten. The song attached itself to every self-improvement montage and motivational compilation for the next decade.
On 29 June 1996, two weeks after the IRA bomb tore through Manchester city centre, M People played the Euro '96 Extravaganza at Old Trafford, on a bill with Simply Red, Madness and Dodgy.
Fresco came in 1997 on their own label, M People Records, after Deconstruction closed. It reached number 2. "Just for You" made number 8, "Angel St" made number 8. Then came The Best of M People in 1998, which carried three new tracks: "Testify" at number 12, "Dreaming" at number 13, and a cover of "What a Fool Believes". "Dreaming" came out in February 1999. It was their last single. No dramatic split. No public falling out. Eleven million records worldwide, and the dance floors had moved on, as dance floors always do.
Proud
Heather Small asked her question in 2000. "Proud" was her debut solo single, co-written with Peter-John Vettese. It reached number 16 in the UK, which does not begin to describe what happened to it afterwards. The BBC used it in the closing montage of their coverage of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. The American remake of Queer as Folk, Russell T Davies's Canal Street drama, closed its final episode with it in 2005. It became the theme song for The Oprah Winfrey Show. When London bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games, "Proud" was adopted as the official bid theme. The song outlived the chart position by years and kept going.
M People reunited for shows in 2005 and 2007. In October 2013 they played a 14-date 20th anniversary tour celebrating Elegant Slumming, though Pickering did not take part. Small appeared on Strictly Come Dancing in 2008, released a third solo album, Colour My Life, in 2022, and was awarded an MBE in 2024. Her son James's father is the Wigan rugby league great Shaun Edwards. Pickering, a City fan, spent twenty years in A&R at Columbia, working with Calvin Harris, Kasabian and the Ting Tings.
M People came out of the Haçienda, and that matters. Pickering had spent a decade building Manchester's dance floors before he made a record for them. He had signed the Happy Mondays, run the nights that turned a half-empty club in an old yacht showroom into the most important venue in Britain, and watched the whole Madchester wave rise and fall from behind the DJ booth. M People were what happened next: the moment Manchester's dance music stopped being underground and went to number 2. They sold eleven million records, won the Mercury Prize over Parklife, picked up two BRITs, and put a voice from Ladbroke Grove over beats from a city she had never lived in. Not bad for a project named after a bloke from Manchester who just wanted to make a decent dance record.