Manchester; Manchester, England

It's the side details that really sting; how for many last night this was a Christmas gift; children calling their parents during the interval, thanking Mum for letting them go.

Last night would have been the first gig for so many there; the first real gig; the first gig without a parental chaperone. Becoming an adult; becoming grown-up.

Learning to be in a different sort of crowd; in the dark, sharing an experience. Learning to be.

It should have been a story; a throwaway line on a first date ten years hence - "my first gig was Ariana Grande... I know, I know... there were massive pink balloons bouncing off people's heads". It shouldn't have been a horror story.

Ten years hence, it should have been a half-defiant smile at the musical taste of your younger self - because you never really lose that love for the songs that carry you through your teenage years, because there's always a debt there; because those songs, those moments, those gigs are part of you. Your warp. Your weft.

In the dark, in those clubs and arenas, you learn who you are. You learn how you are. You feel your wings spreading. You feel lifted.

And not everyone in those spaces is pure and honest, but alliances are formed. Strangers look out for each other. People you will never speak to, whose names you will never know, will form partnerships with you to push back the bullies and the louts.

You learn who you are. You learn how you are.

There's no shortage of love letters to Manchester in popular culture. Hell, a lot of popular culture is a love letter to Manchester, and its environs. And seeing Manchester rallying in the face of the unimaginable, you're reminded why.

The families of 22 people are waking up to a world changed, unexpectedly, inexorably. Thousands more have many dark and difficult times ahead.

But listening to the radio; reading Facebook and Twitter, you could see Mancunians coming together to help - small acts of kindness; amazing acts of generosity. Caring. Helping.

Alliances with strangers. Partnerships to push back the horror.

In the dark, you learn who you are. You learn how you are.

Turn your roaming on: LoneLady & the LRM have hidden treasures

What could be better than a treasure hunt that doesn't involve you having to fight a pirate to get a map, or spend hours in a field with a metal detector discovering just how many Grolsch bottle tops have been scattered over East Anglia through the years?

And this hunt has treasure worth finding, too:

LoneLady has collaborated with The LRM (Loiterers Resistance Movement) and created a new track called The Street is Your Playground: A Psychogeographical Sat Nav.

Just 23 copies will be printed and 10 are prizes in our treasure hunt. Tokens have been hidden across Manchester and clues posted on The LRMs twitter feed @thelrm facebook page and website. So far only one has been found…

The free music is available until October 14th – coinciding with The LRMs 10th anniversary exhibition Loitering With Intent: The Art and Politics of Walking at People’s History Museum.

If you need any further inducement to get involved, you can listen to the prize over on Soundcloud. But it's LoneLady, so you know it's going to be wonderful.

Twenty-two remain. They're waiting for you. Go look.

Bookmarks: Joy Division

There's a short-but-lovely piece on the Liverpool Echo where Jamie Bowman suggests Joy Division were as comfortable in Liverpool as Manchester:

Warsaw made their debut in the city at Eric's (where else?) on Mathew Street on August 27, 1977, when they supported punk band X-Ray Spex - a gig notable for being drummer Steven Morris's first with the band.

Later that year they were back to play a New Year's Eve party at the Swinging Apple on Wood Street which became the band's last gig as Warsaw.

Venuewatch: The Roadhouse

Manchester Roadhouse, one of those venues which is part toilet, part legend, is closing at the end of May.

It seems that the competition for the bands-on-the-cusp market has got too intense, and the Roadhouse is a casualty of the overcrowded market.

Little Voice, What Now: Horrocks covers Manchester indie classics

If you didn't already love Jane Horrocks, her low-key project covering tracks by Manchester's indie heroes is surely going to win you over.

She told the Lancashire Evening Telegraph about the plan:

“I thought they were so interesting with female voices, and you heard the lyrics in a different way, and I thought I'd like to do that with a couple of my favourite songs — and these are indeed my favourite songs. I’m a massive fan of Joy Division, I love their music — particularly the lyrics.”

She's going to poke them out via iTunes over the coming weeks, and once she's had a crack at Morrissey and Curtis, she's planning to do Hawkwind and Cabaret Voltaire.

Michael Caine is unavailable for comment.

Punkobit: MJ Drone

Michael Howells, once better known as MJ Drone, has died.

The Drones had originally been a pub rock act Rockslide, and seem to be the only Manchester punk band whose foundation isn't directly credited to the appearance of the Sex Pistols in the city. They'd reformated as a punk act shortly after Howells had joined the band.

They landed a spot on a Stranglers tour after Jean Jacques Brunel spotted them; a tour with Slaughter And The Dogs also saw them on the undercard, much to Drone's chagrin. At the time, the Drones had sold thousands of records, and had been led to believe it was going to be a co-headlining tour; the posters, though, made it clear Slaughter were top dogs.

It's fair to say that The Drones weren't drawn to punk by the political strand of the movement; when BBC Two documentary strand Brass Tacks spoke to the band and asked them to do something "punkish" for the camera, bassist Red Arse Whisper took the opportunity to get his arse out and fart.

They'd released a track, Rollercoaster, in their original incarnation; their first Drones release was on their own label. The Temptations Of A White Collar Worker was produced by Paul Morley - then, not-quite-an-NME-writer. It sold well enough to attract the attention of Valer Records, for whom they recorded a further ep and an album.

Here's where it started to fall apart; the band - apparently irked by Morley's interest in early Joy Division incarnation Stiff Kitten, the band and mentor went their separate ways.

The band signed with Fabulous, an Island Records imprint, but split before anything releasable was recorded.

There was a reunion in 1999, which did generate at long last, a second, final album.

Mike Drone continued to play - here's a performance from 2006:



MJ Drone died January 10th; there are no further details.

Half a million quid buys you Alicia Keys

We hear from timemtomtime of Russian oligarchs and potentates of all stripes paying large sums of money to get singers to do a special gig; to the list we can now add, erm, Manchester City Council who MTV somehow managed to persuade to underwrite an Alicia Keys gig. Manchester Confidential has the story:

For one gig in Manchester Cathedral, the ‘City Council contributed £425,000’. 

Why would they do that?

Sara Tomkins, Assistant Chief Executive (Communications Customer and ICT) at Manchester City Council, said: "This event will showcase Manchester around the world. As well as showing the concert itself, MTV are also broadcasting a programme about Manchester's musical heritage and music scene. Taking part in such world-class events strengthens Manchester's position on the world stage as a premier destination for music, entertainment and culture, boosts the local economy and increases the global profile of Manchester as an exciting destination for young adults to visit, work, study and live.   

"Manchester's ability to attract such events is testament to the ambition of the city and we hope to realise further activities in partnership with MTV in the coming years. The show has generated massive coverage across national and international media, including the Washington Post, with an expected media value in excess of £6.6m.”

Let's work backwards, shall we?

The Washington Post website (not the paper) did carry a story about the event, albeit one it just took directly from the AP? Here it is, all four short paragraphs of it.
It does mention Manchester, albeit only twice: once in the byline and once in the name of the MTV programme.

You can't put a price on that sort of coverage.

Really, you can't. It's too slight to measure; it'd come in at the sort of money you get if one of your songs is played on Spotify.

It'd be a struggle to build that sort of coverage up into a package worth £6.6million. You'd be struggling to justify spending the half million for that.

But obviously, there's more. MTV making a show about "Manchester's musical heritage". A thirty minute clip show of Smiths, Joy Division and Oasis. You might wonder if you have such a rich musical heritage, why you need to bribe a music channel to make a programme about it.

But that's where we get to the big problem. I think Manchester might have paid for this gig thinking MTV is synonymous with musical cool. That having a live gig on MTV is a bit like playing football at Wembley, or golf at The Belfrey. It's the centre of the music universe, right?

Not really.

MTV audiences have been declining for years, and even the grand feather in its cap, the VMAs, saw almost a six million drop in audience between 2011 and 2012.

But even when people do find their way to MTV, they're not watching music - remember, a short while ago they officially dropped "music" from their brand to reflect that the channel is now about pregnant teenagers, Snooki, and spoiled children being spoiled further on their sixteenth birthdays.

You know the cartoon in the Guardian Guide this weekend where people turn up at a house converted from a pub asking if they could have a drink there for old time's sake? That's exactly the same as creating music programming for MTV.

Manchester paid for the gig from a ring-fenced cultural budget, so it's not quite turning social work positions into an unwatchable TV show, but you wonder if a city which has had to close the homework clubs at the libraries it hasn't shut couldn't think of a better use for the money.

And even if it did have to burn the cash on getting an event which got a brief mention on the AP newswires, why this gig for this network? The suspicion is that Manchester have bought a very expensive lemon.

[thanks to Morag]

Noel Gallagher: People always drift to the right as they become richer. Sorry, older.

Noel Gallagher pops up in the Mail On Sunday today, giving an interview that will probably excite Mail On Sunday readers:

'It was all better under Thatcher': Noel Gallagher on Britain's glory days, turning his back on drugs and the end of Oasis

Mail readers - who probably believe that Gallagher is some sort of role model to young people - will dance with delight; they might even see this as some sort of rock capitulation. Instead, it's a very rich man sounding like a very rich man.

There was a slim hope that he was just making a misguided claim that rotten government is good for culture, and there is a bit of that:

‘Under Thatcher, who ruled us with an iron rod,’ he says, ‘great art was made. Amazing designers and musicians. Acid house was born. Very colourful and progressive.’

I can't quite remember which member of the Tory cabinet it was who represented the birthplace of acid house - was it David Waddington or Douglas Hurd who had the Chicago seat?

Now, it's inarguable that great art was made during the Thatcher era, but to suggest that that makes the Thatcher era great is just stupid. Everyone can agree that For The Good Of The Cause is a damn-near perfect short story, but it doesn't really make the Stalin era look good from a distance.

And Gallagher isn't just going for the 'it might have been shit, but Ghost Town was a tune' nostalgia. Oh, no; he's going for full-on blue rinse:

'We were brought up under Thatcher,’ Noel Gallagher is saying.
‘There was a work ethic – if you were unemployed, the obsession was to find work.'

No, I've double-checked; this hasn't fallen into the page due to a mix-up with Jeremy Clarkson's copy.

Where do you start? Do you start with the obvious fact that the "work ethic" was a employer/ruling class construct that attempted to use religious imagery in order to impose a rigid pattern on the workforce?

Or that while people want to work, any inherent desire to find labour tends to get crushed out of you when the places your family have relied on for work for generations are closed down as the political class undermines the nation's manufacturing base?

And if there was "the obsession to find work" why was there all the compulsion to take any job that was introduced under Thatcher?

Indeed, the idea that 'back in my day, people would go out and hunt down work' sounds almost exactly like Tebbit's 'on his bike' speech, which supposedly was aimed at the working class during the Thatcher era for not doing that.

But remind us, Noel, what were you doing when you were unemployed in Manchester during the Thatcher years?

"I used to play arcade games when I was on the dole in Manchester," Gallagher continued. "Playing Defender."

Presumably he thought that if you got to level 4 of Asteroids there was a guaranteed job in it?

And on his own blog, Noel paints a picture of his life in 1980s Manchester that doesn't quite sound like a man obsessed with finding work:

Woke up yesterday with a naughty hangover. Felt like a dead shit. It was still raining. What the fuck? Didn't do much. Stared out the window watching the rain. Reminded me of being on the dole back home in Manchester in the '80s.

Well, yes, apart from that obsession with finding work, eh, Noel?

Perhaps Noel should read what this chap has to say, for a slightly-less rose-tinted view of what Thatcher really meant for the working class:

"I remember the 70s constantly being winter in Manchester and the Irish community in Manchester closing ranks because of the IRA bombings in Birmingham and Manchester, and you know the bin-workers' strike, all wrapped up in it... They were violent times. Violence at home and violence at football matches."
[...]
One of his strongest memories is collecting the dole every week with his dad and seeing his friends there, too. "That was the Maggie Thatcher age - everyone was there with their dad."

That was Noel Gallagher talking to the Guardian in 2008.

To be fair, most of Noel's blether is fuelled by a clear total ignorance of what the world is like beyond his cocktail circuit. He defends sending his kids to private school by pointing to the local education system's problems:

There were riot police outside our local school the other morning. Turns out there’d been a stabbing. Rival gangs. We shouldn’t need riot police at schools. This is Maida Vale. This isn’t Handsworth or Tottenham, do you know what I mean?

Noel, sweetheart, have you heard of Philip Lawrence? Do you know where his school, the school he was stabbed outside, was? You moved to the site of one of the most horrible school stabbing incidents in recent British history, and are surprised that there is violence in local schools?

Gallagher's other defence for taking his children out the state system is also a bit alarming:

‘I don’t want them coming home speaking like Ali G.'

I'm not sure Noel is clever enough to come up with a coded way of saying 'I don't want my kids to come home speaking like they're black children', which means we could be generous and assume that he's really, really worried about correct grammar and received pronunciation. That would be it, right?

If one good thing can come out of this, perhaps it will be that the NME will finally stop pretending that Gallagher is any more relevant or interesting than Jagger, Collins or Lydon. Or any different to them.

Mindless event reported in Manchester

Seriously, the Manchester looters? You looted Pretty Green last night? It really is thieving without discrimination.

Gordon in the morning: A load of old Cobbles

It looks like senior News Corp management have been in town for a meeting with Sun staff:

Actually, this was Gordon's visit to a 50th Anniversary thing for Coronation Street, which sounds like it was pulled together by Peter Barlow after a night on the sauce:

Adidas Originals threw a street party with the cast of Corrie - including ANTONY COTTON and CRAIG CHARLES - to mark the milestone anniversary.

NEW ORDER and JOY DIVISION legend BERNARD SUMNER played a gig with his new band BAD LIEUTENANT on a stage at the end of the most famous street in soapland.

There was even, for no good reason, a videotaped greeting from Snoop Dogg:

"What up dog. It's your boy big Snoop Dogg saying happy 50th anniversary to Coronation Street and all my peoples in Manchester UK gettin' in there doin' it big.

"You know how we do it - Adidas, big Snoop Dogg, we're coming together. Wish I could be there with y'all but you know I gotta bounce ball and get in there real quick like, so I just wanna congratulate y'all for all the success of the many years of doin' what y'all do.

"Snoop Dogg is on the Adidas team. Coronation Street, happy 50th anniversary, big Snoop Dogg live and direct."

Clearly, Snoop's 'will record any old shit for training shoes' program is still in full swing. You'd have thought that someone might have given him something to say that might have created the impression he had half a clue what he was talking about - "I'd like to be with you but I'm at a funeral do at the Flying Horse", perhaps?

Maybe he was too busy recording a greeting for whoever else the nice woman from Adidas told him to.

Venuewatch: Jillys And Music Box

Grim news from Manchester, where long-running twin venues Jillys Rockworld And The Music Box have gone into liquidation and are closing. Their farewell statement:

AS OF TUESDAY 13th APRIL 2010 JILLY'S ROCKWORLD HAS CLOSED.

THE CLUB THAT HAS BROUGHT MANCHESTER THE BEST ROCK NIGHTS EVER FINALLY CLOSED ITS DOORS FOR THE LAST NIGHT ON SATURDAY 10th APRIL 2010.

WE THANK ALL OUR CUSTOMERS AND SUPPORTERS FOR THE GOOD TIMES THAT WERE HAD OVER MANY MANY YEARS.

WE KNOW WE WILL BE SORELY MISSED.

TODAY THE ROCK DIED AND MANCHESTER'S ALTERNATIVE COMMUNITY MOURNS

JILLY'S WE LOVED YA!!!

R.I.P.

The club had a run of nearly forty years, first under the names Fagans and Rafters, and has offered a home to any number of awkward, developing and downright weird clubnights and performers. There can't be many places which gave a stage to both Tommy Cooper and Mr Scruff. Music historians will know this as the place where Tony Wilson discovered Joy Division, but they provided countless smaller discoveries for thousands of people down the years.

Rumours on Twitter suggest the places are going to be turned into a Tesco; the buildings surely deserve better than that.

[Thanks to Morag for the alert]

Downloadable: Popular Damage

What's your damage, Heather? Well, in this case, it's Popular Damage. Mancunian-Berliner pop dance made by XX reshaping duo Nadine Raihani and Stephan Hengst. They sound like this:

Exclusive [Original Mix]

Befriend them on MySpace and damage yourself further.

Factory offices reopend

Because there's no end to the ways to lose money in Manchester, the old Factory offices are being reopened as a nightclub.

The club is being named FAC251 - or renamed - and has Factory-related backers including Ben Kelly and Peter Hook. Hopefully one tradition of the old company - that of spunking cash up the wall - won't be getting carried forward into the new one.

Arrests in Noah And Whale case theft case

Apparently, a lot of the kit is still missing, but Greater Manchester Police have made arrests following the theft of Noah And The Whale's stuff.

Griffin done... Manchester

Zoe Griffin returns to (or, rather, gets some photos taken in) Manchester, and returns to her theme about how Manchester is where it's at:

Earlier this week, I argued Manchester was giving London competition for nightclubs and partying and I stick by that. Forget about Oasis splitting up - the Gallagher brothers have lived down South in posh Hampstead and Surrey for years.

So it's a place so cool that it's most famous sons, erm, went to live somewhere else? You make a compelling case, Zoe.

But she does have a photo of Katie Price in Manchester, so it's not like she can't back up her claims.

Check out how drunk she is!

Ha ha ha, she can't stand up. Hilariously liver-killing. Check it out indeed.

Griffin done... going north

With the Oasis era coming to an end, what better time for Zoe Griffin to suddenly declare Manchester 'cool'?

It would seem that if you want to celeb spot then forget going to London, Manchester is the new place to go!

It's only taken, what, twenty years for news of The Happy Mondays to filter through to Zoe Griffin's newsbucket. That almost qualifies as breaking news round those parts.

Manchester was the place to be with Corrie Stars and page three models watching a charity concert at Salford’s Lowry Theatre by Blazin Squad and X Factor star Andy Abrahams.

Whoever thought you'd see actors who work on a series set and made in Manchester actually in Manchester? Or, indeed, Blazin' Squad at a Blazin' Squad gig? (If Blazin Squad actually counts as "celeb" spotting in 2009.)

Later today, I'm expecting Zoe to discover that you might spot The Kings Of Leon in Leeds.

Gordon in the morning: Cheque-mate

It's one of those mornings when Gordon has a good story. Faced with the potential loss of thousands of pounds in refunds from the bollocksed-up Heaton Park gig, Oasis have a plan:

Now Oasis are issuing refunds on cheques signed by LIAM and NOEL GALLAGHER and bearing a “Bank of Burnage” stamp, after the Manchester area where the brothers grew up.

This is reminiscent of that urban myth about the company which took payments for dildos, and instead of sending the product, sent out cheques for marked "Dildo refund". The hope being that people would be too ashamed to pay such a cheque into their banks.

I'm not saying that an Oasis gig is like a dildo, of course. A dildo can bring great pleasure, for a start, and can offer a number of surprising experiences.

The only problem with the plan, though, is that clearly Noel and Liam haven't actually signed 20,000 cheques. So they're hoping that people cheeky enough to demand a refund are going to want to keep a facsimile signature forever.

Noel Gallagher discovers no kind deed goes unpunished

It was actually quite a sweet gesture for Noel Gallagher to offer people who saw the first Oasis Heaton Park gig their money back if the power cut had spoiled their evening.

Unfortunately, he forgot what Oasis fans are like.

20,000 of the 70,000 have decided to take him up on the offer. Noel is disappointed:

The guitarist said: "It seems that around 20,000 of you have asked for a refund from that night at Heaton Park!! 20,000!! So you were genuinely disappointed?

"I don't recall seeing a 20,000 gap in the crowd. Cheeky -----. Tsk ... some people," he wrote on his online blog.

[The quote comes from the Telegraph - nice of them to differentiate between Gallagher's 'online blog' and, presumably, an offline one?]

Isn't there something rather Gallagheresque about taking up the offer of cash back whether you really feel you deserve it or not?
>And... you know... making offers that you don't want people to take you up on... it's like... teasing or something...

Oasis versus the local press

It's probably quite heartening for the Manchester Evening News to discover that Oasis care quite so much about their columnists.

Not even the music columnists. Oh, no. Oasis are obsessed with Angela Epstein, who suggested that Heaton Park might not be the best place for 70,000 music fans. Liam responded by dedicating a song to her.

And the only people who like a bit of attention more than rock stars are local paper journalists, so Epstein used her column to mention the tribute.

And the only person who likes attention more than local paper journalism are the Gallaghers, so of course, Noel couldn't let it lie:

I feel though that I must just give one final little bit of "kudos" (her word, not mine) to Angela Bernstein (sic) – a ginger whinger from the MEN who has written a couple of sh***y little pieces over the last few days.

"In them she claimed that we – and by that I mean YOU – had no 'right' to 'come up here' from London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Tokyo, LA, Milan, all over the world in fact, to 'her' wonderful piece of England and enjoy ourselves and leave a little bit of mud.

"What a joyless old husk!!"

A joyless old husk? I suppose it does raise the question of why Oasis do their homecoming gigs so far from where they've made their home, but the big question is will Epstein respond? Will there be more about this in the papers? Must check the papers... read the papers...

 

[via @bridetorr]

Northern Blur

NME are reporting that Blur are adding a date at the Manchester Evening News Arena, in Manchester, in Greater Manchester. The date is June 26th; unseemly scrambling for tickets starts on Friday.