The ambitious, or the dissatisfied growing-up in the narrow confines of an industrial city, with prospects as bleak as their environment, have always been haunted by dreams of escape. Throughout, and well beyond his adolescence Morrissey was immersed in pop music, writing, and dreaming. For previous generations, the cinema served as a conduit for flights of the imagination, and for older generations still, the world of the music hall and, specifically, the promise of a life on the stage, was a lifelong dream. That great star of the Edwardian stage, Phyllis Dare, reports in her autobiography that she once received a letter from an aspiring young girl in Manchester. Writing some time around 1906, her correspondent hits an authentic Morrissey-esque note; “At present I am engaged in a dressmaker’s shop, and earn ten shillings a week, working eleven hours a day. Oh, Miss Dare, do help me get an engagement, for I am so miserable that life does not seem worth living.”
From the pub to the cinema, from the rollercoaster to the discotheque, from Victorian Manchester to Manchester in the Sixties, the urge to fly free of work, poverty, Manchester, or domestic disaster, has underpinned popular culture in the city. The city centre, especially has always been the site of uncontrollable mania. In parts of Manchester in the 1840s the average life expectancy was 17 years; there didn’t seem much reason to hold back, so why not go for it? The widespread drug use in Manchester, England, Scotland, and elsewhere is down to the poor quality of straight life. When explaining the background to Trainspotting ,Irvine Welsh said; “The main issue for me is that so many people are using drugs negatively, to get as far away from the horror and dullness of straight, mainstream life as possible, rather than positively, as life enhancers.”
The explosion of creativity in pop culture in Manchester is partly because of this impulse to escape and also partly the result of so few other choices, generally, for the young in this part of England. As Noel Gallagher recalls; “When my generation left school, they had only three choices offered them; football, music or the dole. That’s why there are so many big rock groups from the North.” Partly we’re also benefiting from the long tradition that in Manchester you make your own entertainment. This is perhaps down to the circumstances in which the city was born; no facilities were laid on, and London was a four-and-a half-day carriage-ride away, so self-sufficiency was a necessity. The do-it-yourself spirit in the city, redefined for the modern age in the punk years, is now the most important driving force Manchester possesses.
What gives further flavour to pop music in Manchester is perhaps because it’s a hybrid town, specialising in hybrid music (M-People’s mash of house and supper-club soul, Black Grape’s mix of black street wise-crackery and white indie shuffle, Audioweb’s dub and rock collision, the jungle-meets-Joni Mitchell sound of Lamb). Perhaps it’s the size; Manchester is too small to be unwieldy and impersonal, but too big to be weedy and insignificant. Perhaps it’s to do with the city’s entrepreneurial spirit; it’s not a question of making things, it’s also one of marketing them, selling them. There’s an attitude too; defiant, determined, cocky, canny.
The city’s historical links with other countries and cultures, via migration and trade has left Manchester with open-minded attitudes. It’s one of the least insular music cities in the world; it can love its local bands without being deaf to the charms of others. Pop music at its most vital talks person to person, ghetto to ghetto, flying free of geography, making links, and connecting experiences, and just as people in Utrecht, Wyoming, or wherever, can connect with music made in Manchester, so people here thrive on what they hear from elsewhere; from Chicago blues and Detroit soul in the Sixties, to New York disco in the 1980’s, and Nirvana, and R.E.M. in the 1990’s (walk through the park behind Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport and you won’t miss graffiti memorialising R.E.M. painted in yard high white paint on the wall of the brick-built bowls pavilion; MICHAEL STIPE IS GOD it reads). Just as Manchester music fans get into these sounds from out of town, Manchester musicians – and you can trace this back decades – have a well developed consciousness of what’s going on elsewhere, and a inclination to bring these outside influences to bear on their music. Music making follows a pattern, in this sense; just as the city used to import raw material – cotton – and turn it into something else, so modern Manchester finds itself importing, refashioning, and exporting pop music.
Wherever the music business moguls may all be sat (in all probability, behind desks in London, answerable to more senior executives in Japan or New York), Manchester has been at the heart of English pop music creativity for at least three decades. Where once the Manchester mill-owners and merchants, mill-hands and factory operatives created the wealth that financed the Empire, now the city dominates English pop culture, trading in music, the sounds from the city’s streets resonating round the globe.
Away from the centres of political power – and you can’t get much further away than a bedroom in Burnage, or a dancefloor in Ancoats – Manchester’s mavericks and misfits have created a magnificent unofficial, underground culture. Even in a society where school-leavers with a handful of qualifications, or – even more tragically – a host of great ideas (poems, maybe, or songs, or designs, or drawing skills) – still end up listless, penniless; even in that uncaring, crabbed, and confined society, and even amidst several ongoing, relentless recessions, young Manchester has expressed itself; in 1958 Shelagh Delaney a teenage playwrighting prodigy from Salford stormed theatreland with A Taste of Honey ; in 1965 three Manchester bands had top five hits in America; between 1977 and 1985 three Manchester songwriters – Ian Curtis, Mark E Smith, and Steven Patrick Morrissey – revolutionised the vocabulary and scope of pop music; in 1990 the Hacienda was the most famous nightclub in the world; in 1996 Oasis were so successful there was no indoor arena in England big enough for them to play in; in December 1998 Longsight-born Chris Ofili became the first black artist to collect the £20,000 Turner Prize.
Shelagh Delaney was eighteen when A Taste of Honey was first produced, in May 1958, the story of an illegitimate teenage mother (Jo), a ‘semi-whore’ (Helen, her mother), a homosexual art student (Geof) and a black National Serviceman, is still a moving, exuberant play. The local media greeted the news that it was to be staged in London gushingly, but as the play’s content became clear reaction locally changed. The Salford City Reporter letters page was filled with denunciations of the play; it was a side of Salford no-one wanted the rest of the world to see. The play and its author were both attacked in a bitter front page comment column on June 20th 1958.
Delaney was telling truths, not telling lies, her work was unfaked and not sanitised. And that remains a conundrum for the authorities; the music scene in Manchester is high profile, successful, resourceful, but fronted by the likes of Morrissey, Mark E Smith, Shaun Ryder, or the Gallaghers – all a law unto themselves – it’s a scene they can’t control. Pop musicians aren’t the most natural ambassadors of a city. In 1996 the Black Grape singer, Shaun Ryder, wasn’t doing the City Council’s marketing department’s bidding when he told Q magazine “Manchester is a Disneyland for drugs.” I remember Martin Moscrop from A Certain Ratio telling me the band were often asked about Manchester on their travels abroad. And what did he tell them? “I tell them it’s a shit-hole”.
Drowning in urban anonymity, alienated from the centres of political and cultural power, the urge to prove that you can do it, you are somebody, is a major driving force for survival in a city like Manchester. In the late Sixties the social critic Andrew Kopkind observed the basic political statement in the riot-torn cities of North America; ‘Take me seriously. LISTEN!’. In Manchester a history of self-assertion goes back over a century and a half, from the earliest days of trade unionism in England, to the Chartist crusades, and the city’s leading role in the Suffragette campaign for votes for women. It might be fanciful, or it might not be, to see a connection between the political struggles and the powerful position of Manchester’s pop music, between the Chartists and the chart hits; the shared craving for self-assertion and self-expression.
Creativity occurs against all odds. Out of Hulme came ‘Voodoo Ray’, out of Burnage came ‘Wonderwall’. Creativity takes root in the unlikeliest, scuzziest places, often in the minds of off-the-rails types, the ones who’ve been shunned, mocked, given-up for dead. Novelist Jeff Noon – author of Vurt and Pollen – has recalled the circumstances he found himself growing-up in in North Manchester; “On the streets of Droylsden I was a total loner. Ashton and Droylsden are very difficult places to be creative in; they just think you are a madman or a homosexual.”
Despite all the talk of pop culture glory, in Manchester there are still more drug deals than record deals. The old mass-employing industries are only half replaced by part-time, insecure jobs. The get-up-and-do attitude is not always encouraged. Poverty and unemployment, too much heartache at the DSS, too much queuing at the post office, rents too high, hopes too low, trapped in small lives, daily routines strangling like a ligature; for the many opportunities are few.
And it’s no wonder the urge to be somebody, make your mark, make a few bob, not run with the herd; that this can end up breeding a life of criminality rather than creativity. For every youngster with aspirations to be the next Oasis, there’s another watching the life of the local head, the local gangster, and seeing him seemingly safe, with money, respect, a Frontera, a souped-up Golf GTI, a black, smoked-glass BMW.
The city’s pop music is soaked in the chaos, boredom, and violence of modern Manchester. The Bridgewater Hall, the new home for the Halle, on the other hand, appears untouched by the city around it, detached and uninterested. Such prestigious developments in Manchester deny the bad news; they’re so high profile they cut out a view of the streets. Sanitised, bright, well-lit, and clean, insulated from reality as much as it is from the rumble of traffic, the Bridgewater Hall is the complete opposite of the city it sits in so smugly, so shiningly; a city of unhealthy, tangled discord. It’s a passive experience, as well; it doesn’t empower us, draw us in, define and enlarge our dreams. It’s a shrine to worship at. It shines out a message the culture is something polished and expert, something good for us, a soothing massage.
You can have all the privileges in the world, and nothing to say. Maybe there’s some part of the human imagination that responds better to adversity, insecurity and boredom, then it does to comfort perfection.
Maybe if Manchester was less of a shit-hole then creativity in the city would die, the culture of the city would shrivel, and gone would be the poems of Lemn Sissay, the novels of Jeff Noon, warehouse parties, Oasis albums, Fall singles, the shared world of domino players in Moss Side, the clubs, the pubs, the monkey run, reminiscences of old Harpurhey, DJ-ing, a day at the cricket, shopping on Market Street, meeting outside the library, singing a comic song with a live goose under one arm.
Baudelaire in Paris in the 1850’s understood this paradox; modern city life was just as likely to electrocute as to electrify. Out of the trauma of the city comes energy. The positives and negatives of life in Manchester power the imagination and creativity of the city. Out of the disharmony of Manchester, England comes rock & roll. The disharmony you can’t miss; it’s in the collisions of race and class, the geography of the city, the architecture, the traffic, the pollution. It’s another world to the four seasons, the England of the National Trust, the tranquil gardens of stately homes, or the untouched moors and mountains; for that, try Vivaldi, Elgar. There’s a clashing disharmony in the very life, sight, and sound of cities; certainly, and probably now more than ever, in what one journalist recently called “the rushing, shoving, screaming, shouting, swearing sonata that Manchester city centre has become”.
Charlie Gillett called his definitive book on rock music The Sound of the City , but it’s a title that could subsequently have been claimed for punk, or house, or rap, or jungle (the opening track of Goldie’s definitive 1995 jungle LP Timeless begins with a fiercesome rhapsody to inner city life sung by Manchester singer Diane Charlemagne). Witness, too, the MC5 in Detroit, gabba techno in Berlin, heavy metal in Birmingham, hip hop in New York. Imagine a soundtrack for modern Manchester, international, local; something as thrilling as Nemesis; as beaten-up as Ancoats; something dreaming of escape; something by M-People or the Stone Roses; maybe ‘Live Forever’ by Oasis, or ‘The Reno’ by A Guy Called Gerald. Maybe ‘Atmosphere’ by Joy Division.
