Manchester coming of age

Summer 2014.  I’m walking down Burton Road in West Didsbury, the street where I’ve lived for almost a year, and I see Vini Reilly standing in the doorway of one of the bars, wearing sandals and smoking a rollie. It’s Vini that you can hear playing guitar on ‘I Know Very Well How I Got My Name’, probably the most-purchased and least-listened-to Morrissey B-side (it’s on the other side of ‘Suedehead’). I must have played it a thousand times, on vinyl and then on my first guitar. (When I was thirteen years old, I really did dye my hair gold). At the bar on Burton Road, Vini looks like he doesn’t quite know if he’s arriving or leaving. We lock eyes for just a second. It’s eighteen years since the IRA bomb went off in town, and I got my A-level results and a place at Manchester University.

Yesterday. I am sitting in my Auntie Dee and Uncle John’s bedroom in Stretford and I can see the gasworks out the window and I’m struggling through the guitar chords for ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ as I have done for twenty years. Outside, dozens of Man United fans file past the house, fresh from a four–nil victory over QPR. Downstairs I can hear Dee, a Dubliner, chatting away with my other half Oisín, whose story started in Australia and came to Manchester via Ireland. This is at once exactly where I think I’m meant to be, exactly where I most want to be, and exactly where I never thought I would end up. It’s eighteen years since I moved to Manchester, half my life ago. I have lived here longer now than I’ve lived anywhere. I did it.

John drives us past the end of King’s Road on the way home and when we get dropped off in West Didsbury we walk along Burton Road again and the sky is criss-crossed with jet trails. I want to write something to mark my coming of age in Manchester because I feel suddenly emotional about it, so at home I start listening to some songs to try and level out my thoughts a bit. Morrissey’s ‘Lost’ is first – ‘jet trails in the sky leave one thought behind…’ – followed by his epic Raymonde cover, ‘No One Can Hold A Candle To You’, which I always used to pester Dave Cottrill to play at the Star & Garter, and he always did. Billy Bragg doing ‘A New England’ at the Kirsty McColl memorial concert, Eddie Reader doing ‘Dear John’ the same night, and eventually back around to ‘I Know Very Well How I Got My Name’, with Vini on the guitar.

So far, nothing in my life, and by my life I mean Manchester, has gone the way I imagined it, and certainly not the way I planned it, since the plan from childhood was to live in Manhattan, hence the portmanteau of my blog. I thought by now I would have at least two novels published and would live off the proceeds and be an activist. Instead, this month I will pay the rent with my fee from being the theatre writer at the Manchester Evening News and with the money I made from the gay RnB night I run. If I was a character in a novel it would be something by Tama Janowitz and everyone would agree that it was interesting but the characters’ lives seemed a bit contrived. We haven’t starved yet.

How to celebrate my ‘birthday’? The same way you always should: have a party, look back a bit, and count your blessings. The party has been had, at Festival No. 6, aka ‘Manchester by the sea’. I DJ’d there, partied until my screws came loose with some of the best people who live in this town, heard Weatherall play my favourite Frankie Knuckles edit, and saw Pet Shop Boys perform ‘It’s A Sin’ under the night sky. As for looking back, this is my twelfth address in Manchester and I remember something good and bad about them all. I am very happy where I am. I work in this place all day long looking down Burton Road, and I never get tired of it. Oisín comes home and we make food and we make plans for a future that might or might not turn out a certain way.

Some things never seem to change. Manchester is a city in terrible poverty.  Morrissey has no record contract but he’s still out on tour. The Council’s assault on our architecture makes Manchester feel less like itself to me than ever before – and I arrived on a bomb site, remember. It will always be home here, but I’d move to Berlin or Brooklyn in the morning. I’m saving the blessings bit for when I count backwards from fifteen at Trafford General next week. I won’t run out before I get to zero.

Morrissey: Autobiography, the view from Manchester

The Smiths were a major part of the reason I moved to Manchester half my life ago, although I wasn’t expecting to find them still hanging round the Arndale Centre (or maybe I was…) In any case they were done and dusted by the time I arrived in September ‘96. The city centre was in shreds after the Corporation Street bomb in June, the Hacienda was a few months from shutting up shop for good, and even Morrissey’s solo career highlights were largely behind him.

I’ve always enjoyed the unique line Morrissey manages to tread between potential tabloid fodder and pop’s last enigma. The confessionals are there on the records if you want them, but in terms of the life lived behind the songs there was always a certain gravitas that came with not knowing too much. Someday soon we will no doubt be faced with Morrissey: The Movie made by a twenty-four year old Californian newly-besotted with The Smiths, and it will be monstrous, and Morrissey is wise to get his version of events in first. But, as Germaine Greer said of Michael Jackson’s never-to-be comeback tour, I for one was dreading it…

A great lyricist doesn’t necessarily make for a great prose writer of course, and when it emerged that Autobiography would be packaged in advance as a ‘Classic’ – a bit like those two-year old Disney films you’ve never heard of – I feared Morrissey’s literary aspirations might bury his story under pretension and hyperbole. The opening pages threaten to do just that. Where you might expect the standard biographical establishment of family line, or in this case perhaps a grisly flash-forward to the notorious Smiths’ royalties trial, the introduction is at least original and is given over to the city of Manchester itself, as Morrissey finds it and as it finds him, ‘where everything lies wherever it was left over one hundred years ago.’ There is added sentiment for me in his naming lesser-known Mancunian locations that I know well and could cycle to in minutes: Mayfield Road, Longford Park, The Three Legs O’ Man. But the city is hard, and is only the most brutal character in a brutal line up. At home the Dwyer/Morrissey family cossets, but school and the streets are a Darwinian assault course where the girls start the fights and the boys, including our hero, take it on the chin.

Morrissey’s prose style is verbose, riddled with adverbs, often rambling, and, like his later studio albums, you have to take the rough with the smooth. So for instance, while we might have coped with slightly fewer film plot synopses, these are offset by glorious descriptive passages on 1960s television, destined to be quoted in academia. But for the most part, what Morrissey has written is an accomplished, moving and occasionally hilarious present-tense narrative, which, when he can take control of his writing, rings with the bold veracity of a semi-ordinary boyhood and a truly extraordinary adult life. In one scene he is a child, mesmerised, watching David Bowie establish his extra-terrestrial magic on the television – in the very next moment he is back in school witnessing the needless abuse of a classmate for biting his nails. The sensation of yearning for something bigger, more exciting and more civilised is painfully tangible in the contrast.

Morrissey is at his inflamed best when discussing music. The New York Dolls are ‘the slum of all failures, had nothing to lose and could scarcely differentiate between night and day.’ Siouxsie Sioux is ‘a black-eyed shopgirl hidden somewhere in the whistling cathedral towers of Notre Dame’, the music she makes is ‘a strict ice-bath of nightmare and caution.’ Oddly then, when it comes to his own music, Morrissey’s powers run dry. Of that batch of immaculate early Smiths songs that seemed ready to burst, perfectly intact from a Stretford bedroom and drafty rehearsal space, the author is quiet to the point of frustration, and before you know it The Smiths are off on their first US tour. While we learn that the Algonquin Hotel is riddled with cockroaches, or that 80 per cent of global warming is attributable to the meat industry, That joke isn’t funny anymore has been written, and Shakespeare’s sister – described by Morrissey at the time as ‘the song of my life’ – with no mention of how, or why. Now is the time to say! Instead we receive a statistician’s dull smorgasbord of Billboard positions and venue capacities in American cities, and suddenly The Smiths are through.

There is plenty of humour along the way though. At a Roxy Music gig, singer Bryan Ferry ‘shuffles crab-style from stage left to stage right like someone who’s had his food dish removed.’ Of a flamboyant teenaged acquaintance Morrissey writes, ‘I am astounded at his survival in child-eating Collyhurst.’ Russell Mael of Sparks, ‘sings in French italics with the mad urgency of someone tied to a tree.’ These cultural snapshots suit Morrissey well – in his oblique way he suggests it might even have been the words of poets John Betjeman or W. H. Auden that persuade him to be a performer – anything more monumental (Thatcher, Nature, the justice system) and he resorts to histrionics. An uncharacteristically restrained summary of singer Sandie Shaw’s music is later explicated as a grudge held over Shaw visiting Germany with The Smiths and leaving Morrissey at home. Morrissey is the man, let’s recall, who knelt at Shaw’s feet clutching a rosary, and the antennae are thereafter poised for other personally-motivated revisions. Rough Trade Records emerge as a collection of the stupidest people ever to end up in the wrong profession. In particular Morrissey is able to recall verbatim the countless idiot statements that leave the unfortunate mouth of label owner Geoff Travis. Producer Stephen Street he admires, and Mick Ronson, and Angie Marr, and, for a long time, Johnny himself – until the trial.

When the trial arrives, in which Smiths drummer Mike Joyce sues Morrissey and Marr for a quarter of all Smiths royalties (despite there being no contract to that effect), down comes Johnny from his pedestal for the crime of collusion, and in Morrissey’s eyes The Smiths are irrevocably toppled too. It is a convoluted and bizarre miscarriage which you might be forgiven for thinking is happening in real time. Fifty pages are consumed by it (whereas a ground-breaking song like Asleep, for instance, about which whole essays have been written, warrants not a mention). Throughout the trial, the book, and his life, Morrissey is unaccountably unable to find a good manager, a viable lasting record deal, or any decent legal representation (while his penniless ex-drummer romps to victory on the strength of free Legal Aid). What this sad litany of underperforming individuals undeniably have in common is Morrissey himself. The greatest insights in Autobiography might exist between those lines – Morrissey simply cannot deal with other human beings – but then he did tell us that before, once or twice...

As in life, there are no chapters, barely any paragraphs and no index, therefore no skipping ahead to Jake Walters or Alan Bennett or the Finsbury Park debacle. It’s written in US spelling throughout, for whatever reason, and ‘The Smiths’ are apparently ‘the Smiths’.  These things count. As a special mention, the blurb is atrocious, obsessively listing chart positions and sales, name-checking Tel-Aviv and My Chemical Romance (!) but not Johnny Marr. For some reason Morrissey is horribly mean about fat people and occasionally denigrating about women's bodies. If you don’t like it, don’t look at it… And as for Mike Joyce – who was apparently able to galvanise all of the dislike towards Morrissey that had ever existed into crippling monetary fines and a public humiliation – there’s a tiny bar just a few doors down from my flat in South Manchester where Mike DJs every Thursday night. Whether he plays for love or money, I couldn’t say.




Listen: Morrissey: Autobiography, the music.

Leaf grief

I do this every year so just bear with me. I actually didn’t mean for it to become a tradition. But here it is. I hate the autumn. I don’t know what it is. Except maybe I do. It’s because September smells funny. And the light is awkward. And my music sounds … off. Is that it? I think I have synaesthesia when September comes around. It’s the weird moon and the weather that changes minute to minute and the sweat and shiver because your clothes are all wrong. The beloved portholes that are the windows of my flat in HMS Lancaster start to look inwards at this time of year and I refuse to look back. My curtains are drawn until March.

More specifically tonight it’s poverty and fomo and all this recycling that I simply can’t face. And Morrissey.

I went to the launch of a book about Morrissey earlier. I’ve organised and introduced an identical event myself so I know it’s not easy. But this was a bit of an ordeal if I’m honest. A mixture of introverted and possibly unenthused academics saying oblique things to an audience who knew better and whose enthusiasm wained in under forty five minutes such that there were barely any questions and in fact one open and lengthy criticism.

Proceedings were lightened considerably by These Charming Men who bookended the discussion with quite lovely acoustic renditions from The Canon. But I went there alone and my questions sounded confrontational in my head (they weren’t) so I didn’t ask them. The people in front of me sniggered and rolled their eyes and left.

Then again, maybe it was me. I’m starting to think pop music might have ruined my life. I’m pretty sure I would have written more than one unpublished novel if not for pop music. I might have written two unpublished novels. Boom-tish. ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ instigated two enormously pivotal moments in my life and I’m a bit annoyed about it now. Although it will sound just right in the autobiography I suppose.

I left the book launch and turned on my iPod and it went straight to ‘Meat Is Murder’. I skipped. It was Robyn, ‘Dancing On My Own’. I could do without the signs and symbols at the moment. I’m pained by the single unbroken martini glass that survived the party here on Saturday night, a party that was terrific fun but that more or less went completely wrong.

I have quit smoking though. For good this time. The last time I quit was on the roof of the Hawley Arms in the sweltering heat of last summer, with cider, when Amy was alive. I don’t miss cigarettes but it seems the world and his husband have taken it up again. I was definitely ready to let it go though. It’s twenty years since I smoked my first one. It was love at first puff. He hit me and it felt like a kiss. But even a kiss shouldn’t last two decades.

Chin up though. September didn’t break me. I managed to skip it with a healthy degree of denial, plus a trip to Berlin which I am going to do every September from now until forever, just to take the edge off. I shall tell all about the final day and night of my German urlaub anon. It will be heavily edited so that we can remain friends.

Anyway, now that I’m a student again September means the start of term. I’m into the second year of a part time MA in Novel Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. I’m actually doing this, and not just talking about doing this. So it’s back to a novel a week until Christmas. What could be lovelier? The reading list looks like this:

Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

Margaret Drabble, The Millstone

Anthony Burgess, The Malayan Trilogy

V.S. Naipaul, Miguel Street

Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

Benjamin Black, Elegy for April

Nicola Barker, Small Holdings

Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

Beryl Bainbridge, Master Georgie

See? We’re fine.

Coming up shortly: more Berlin, how to stay positive this autumn through retail therapy, and forthcoming exciting cultural events across Manchester.

I think I will buy pyjamas.

This on repeat please.

William, it was really nothing ...

No WAY have I not blogged since February? Really!? Ridiculous. Okay that ends NOW ...

So, The Smiths, like The Beatles if we're honest, and I guess The Prodigy too, are a band that there is just no point in trying to cover. But people still do of course, and the results vary from the ridiculous ...

... to the sublime ...

... and occasionally both.

So what the hell, for those occasional Scott Matthews moments it's worth a shot. Which is why I will be in excitable attendance this week at an evening of Smiths and Morrissey covers. Here's the blurb ...

DESIGNER MAGAZINE PRESENTS........ WILLIAM IT WAS REALLY NOTHING

MANCHESTER ROADHOUSE

THURSDAY APRIL 28TH

DOORS 7PM

Adv tickets £5 from We Got Tickets and See Tickets

We don't care for the Royal Family and we certainly don't have time for a Royal Wedding.

But we're sure as hell going to make the most of an extra day of work and what better way to do so than with a special evening with five of our favourite Manchester bands selecting 1 or 2 of their favourite Smiths / Morrissey songs to cover in their own unique interpretations as well as the highlights of their original material.

Inbetween bands we'll have quality tuneage from the bands that inspired the Smiths and the bands that were inspired by The Smiths so expect everything from Bowie, New York Dolls and T Rex to Gene, Belle & Sebastian, Echobelly

BANDS PERFORMING:

Decade Parade

Optional Wallace

Midnight Mafia

Jom Tones

The Spiels

BE THERE!

“Can you squeeze me into an empty page of your diary …?”

It’s Morrissey and The Smiths season here in Manchester. What fine fare the city has to offer to the discerning apostle over the coming weeks …

First up is the return of ‘Maladjusted’, the Morrissey/Smiths evening to be re-launched with alacrity and panache at that glorious drinking emporium, Gullivers of Oldham Street on Friday 19th of November.

As ever, the playlist will be primarily Morrissey/Smiths, supplemented with other Morrissey-endorsed music including …

The Courteeners - The Strokes - The Libertines - Angelic Upstarts - The Slits - David Bowie - T.Rex - Roxy Music - Siouxsie And The Banshees - Buzzcocks - The Marvelettes - The Crystals - Dusty Springfield - Shangri La's - X-Ray Spex - Sandie Shaw - Lou Reed - James - New York Dolls - Elvis Presley - The Ramones - Sparks - Magazine - Iggy Pop - The Stooges - The Velvet Underground - The Cookies - The Kinks - The Jam - Mott the Hoople - Eddie Cochran – Gene … and more.

That would be something of a dream do even without Steven Patrick.

Entry is an insultingly meagre £2 from 9pm till 2am. Facebook page right here. Come and dance your legs down to the knees ...

Next up it’s only the publishing event of the year. Remember I mentioned that very special book? Well we’re having a launch party and you’re all invited! The event is on Friday 26th of November at Waterstone’s Deansgate, and will be chaired by local DJ, author, musical luminary and all-round good egg Mr Dave Haslam, plus very special guest Simon Goddard, yes he of Songs That Saved Your Life and Mozipedia. And even I will say a little something too. 'Hello and welcome' mainly. (I’ll have it written on little cards, don’t worry …)

The evening will include:

• Drinks from 6.30 pm in Waterstone’s plush newly-refurbished bar

• Panel event to commence from 7 pm

• Readings from contributing authors

• Panel discussion on the book, pop culture, and all things Smiths and Morrissey

• Audience question and answer session

• Opportunity to meet authors and have books signed

• Post-panel drinks in Waterstone’s bar with Smiths-inspired soundtrack

• After party in TV21, basement bar, Thomas St

Entry to the event is a mere £3 + booking fee. Facebook page here. Tickets are essential and are available now right HERE.

Look forward to seeing you all there!

And there’s time for one more fix before Christmas. Viva Morrissey, the world’s only musical tribute to Morrissey as solo artist, will take the stage at Moho Live for one of their trademark emotionally enriching and exhaustive sets. A fantastically tight band with the dextrous and faithful vocal talents of singer Paul up front. The gig will be followed by dancing to Moz/Smiths music and the like till the early hours at no extra cost.

For musical links and fan page, go to Facebook, here.

Get your tickets for this rabble rouser here.

And remember ...

“Nothing is important, so people, realising that, should get on with their lives, go mad, take their clothes off, jump in the canal, jump into one of those supermarket trolleys, race around the supermarket and steal Mars bars and kiss kittens ...”

Why pamper life's complexities? Essays on The Smiths

Okay, sometimes I love my job ...

I'm more excited about this title than anything else (bar, possibly, New York Hustlers) that we've produced in my nine years (ARGH!) of working for Manchester University Press. This book has been my particular pet project, not only because The Smiths are my favourite band in the world and have been for, ooh, about seventeen years, but because I was lucky enough to be at the original symposium way back in 2005 from whence these papers first emerged. But these things take time.

I've seen the title through its copyedit, proofread and eventually got to design the thing too. I'm very proud that its about to be set free into the world *blub*

I'll let the link speak for itself.

Keep your eyes and ears open for news of our very special launch event coming soon ...

The Heartbreaks

This wants watchin' ... Think Orange Juice, Teardrop Explodes, The Smiths, Felt, all your favourite stuff from your imaginary older brother's record collection basically. They're from Morecambe. I know right? The only good thing to have come out of Morecambe is my mate Shaun. Till now. Spot the speeded-up 'Meat Is Murder' riff too.

To walk steadily and rhythmically forward in step with others … March

January, broken resolutions, six weeks without pay. February, money in your pocket but nowhere to go cos it’s so freakin’ cold (even if it is your birthday, it was, I’m 32, I don’t want to talk about it). March is where it’s at, and I think, what am I saying, I know, I’ve just had the best March since records began. Wanna hear?

Kicks off with the Morrissey and Smiths Disco at the Star & Garter, about which I have blogged before. Above all nights that I have loved over the years, Jenks, Indiego, Molotov Pop, Suicide, Poptastic, Homoelectric, Keep It Unreal, Electric Chair, Friends & Family, Bollox, Clique … above all of these, the Smiths Disco is the place I truly belong. I am what I am.

The Friday after that I have my best night in a pub for AGES at the old reliable Briton’s Protection, and it’s a proper treat, it’s all bars and clubs these days, I miss pubs. Especially as I get to spend the evening with some of the finest and funniest people you could ever hope to meet in this or any other city. Fact.



The Friday after that it’s off to Manchester Cathedral to hear Midget Emperor of Glum, Stephin Merritt lead his Magnetic Fields in a superb semi-acoustic trawl through an astonishingly long and eclectic setlist in beautiful surroundings.



After the gig it’s off to Bollox where THINGS OFFICIALLY GO TOO FAR. Late on in the night Stephin Merritt walks through the door and I accost him. The exchange goes thusly:

Me: I know you! (I’m shouting, he has earplugs in, he is very short, I am spitting on the earplugs …)
Stephin: You know me?
Me: Yeah, we came to see you play earlier tonight, I’ve never seen you play before, you were really good, amazing, thanks!
Stephin: But you don’t actually know me?

Needless to say, we haven’t kept in touch.

The next day’s hangover etc. is BLEAK, just right for watching Matthew Dunster’s adaptation of 1984 at the Royal Exchange. I go from thinking it’s the most irritating thing I’ve seen in ages to being somewhat in awe, particularly of the staging which is slick and disorientating and tight, but also of Paul Moriarty and Richard Clews, distressing and inspiring performances both.



At Thomas’ Chop House afterwards, Dee and I neck a medicinal pint and discuss the alienating aspects of late capitalism. I daren’t go home alone so I go to a party in Hulme instead, drink wine and argue about Lady Gaga till two in the morning. (Late capitalism has its comforts too).

The next day not only does my boy come to stay but we go to watch Suede play the warm-up for their Albert Hall gig at The Ritz. Warm up my arse, this is the real deal. It’s one of the best Suede gigs I’ve ever been to and I’ve been to plenty. Is it possible to be happier? They opened with ‘Europe Is Our Playground.’ Just scream why don’t you.




A couple of fleeting and forgettable days at work then it’s off to London for more Suede who blow the roof off the Albert Hall. Brett brings tears to my eyes with a solo rendition of ‘The Living Dead’. The gig is up there with Blur at Hyde Park and Morrissey at the Empress Ballroom. Triumphant. I have what amounts to a wet dream for my sixteen year old self when we go to the after party and meet the band who are as kind and personable as when I first met them fifteen years ago. Then we go to the after-after party and meet them some more. Whatever happened to the teenage dream? It came true, that’s what.



Next evening at the Apollo Shaftesbury with the Geordie and 1984 is knocked into a cocked hat by Mark Rylance in Jerusalem, it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen on stage I reckon, the last great thing I seem to remember being Michael Maloney’s Hamlet six years ago. Blimey. Jerusalem is a three act, two interval, poetic treatise on Englishness that made me cry in front of strangers and has the most moving, funny and gutsy dialogue you’re going to hear in a theatre in your life. Jez Butterworth wrote it and he has a gift and Mark Rylance turns in a performance that should rate with Lear as THE ROLE to prove your worth. Sublime.

The best Bloody Mary I’ve ever tasted follows at Bourne & Hollingsworth at the bottom of Charlotte Street and is required to steady my nerves. I am actually a bit delirious post-theatre. We can’t talk about anything else for hours, we live off the play all night, up to and including our delish veggie feast in Chinatown.




Measure for Measure at The Almeida in Islington the following night is good, interesting, a nice turn from Victoria Lloyd as Isabella, but really Jerusalem can’t be followed so soon, not even by Shakespeare I’m afraid. Fun drinks after amongst the impossibly good looking achievers of the Blair borough.



Next day is Saturday which I spend with my brilliant friend Helen. We troll round Camden Market, stopping for gins at the Proud Gallery, then whizz round the best bits of the National and National Portrait galleries (Vin Gogh! Monet!) before downing lychee bellinis at Amuse Bouche in Soho, devouring pizzas at the Soho Pizzeria then heading out East for drinks at the Ten Bells. Helen heads home so we stick around for beers at the George & Dragon then up to the Joiners’ Arms where the music goes out the other side of ironic into just plain bad. Top top night nonetheless.

At some point I drift home to Manchester and attempt to resume normal service.

Sigh.

April has some serious work to do.

The Smiths and Morrissey Disco @ The Star and Garter, 1/8/08

Can it really be 11 years since I first flung myself around to Morrissey all night long at the Star & Garter? Blimey. I’m old aren’t I? Back in 1997 the not-very-well received Maladjusted album was still brand new (and mildly disappointing), You Are The Quarry and Ringleader still far off in the distant future, and I was 19, sexually confused, impeccably gawky and still going out clubbing in my glasses. How could I not love it? In true How Soon Is Now style I even went alone one night, though the Stressford Poet writes “There is a place for me and my friends, and when we go, we all will go, so I’m never alone …”

I guess when I’m tired of the Smiths night I’ll be tired of Manchester, nay life. The lovely, indefatigable Dave Cotrill still mans the decks, with an assistant this time, and the same friendly faces and arms welcome me like the big dysfunctional family we are. There are two perfect times to visit if you’re so inclined. One is right now while it’s the summer and the crowd is a little older and more discerning and it’s sticky and hot in there which is how things should be. The other time is when Morrissey is on tour and the adoration reaches fever pitch. During his 2006/7 tour I officially went too far. My Diary reads thusly:

APRIL
Fri 5^th Smiths night @ Star & Garter
Sat 6^th Mum’s birthday. Morrissey @ Apollo.
Sun 7^th Morrissey @ Opera House. Morrissey night @ Brickhouse.
Mon 8^th Day off work. Morrissey @ Bridgewater. Smiths night @ Star & Garter.
….

DECEMBER
Fri 22^nd Shave my head! Morrissey @ GMEX. Smiths night @ Star & Garter
Sat 23^rd Morrissey @ GMEX. Smiths night @ Brickhouse

Notice the slight insanity creep in around ‘Shave my head!’. It’s a tough furrow to plough as a Morrissey disciple but plough it we must. I’ve been a frequently infrequent visitor to the S&G over the last decade and have never not had a brilliant time. I’ve been punched in the face, lost my shirt at least once and my dignity several times, sustained hideous popper scabs, fallen off the stage and down the stairs, and fallen out with all and (if she was there aswell) sundry. But oh, the drama and the passion …

Tonight is relatively quiet however, all the better to dance, but the atmosphere is like coming home. Somehow get stinking drunk (how does that keep happening?) and end up chasing Disko Asbo across town because I’m convinced that it’s at Charlie’s and then decide it’s at the Purple Pussycat so we end going to both and I’m still no more clued up as to if we actually make it or not but have hilarious time finding out. Sit up till dawn with my mate Jack eating toast and playing each other brilliant stuff on youtube (Janis Joplin, Stereolab, Ride). Great, great times. Viva the Smiths night I say, it’s the only thing worth missing Homoelectric for.

Soundtrack: Victoria Wood songs. Seems appropriate given she has more in common with Morrissey as a songwriter than anyone else does. Nice to see via youtube I’m not the only person who loves her music. Everyone else seems to fast forward through these when they’re on DVD. Shame! Listen to ‘Andrea’ or ‘Like Any Old Day’ and weep into your chips you scrubbers. When I used to watch The Two Ronnies everyone would go and make tea during Ronnie Corbett’s monologues but I loved ‘em. (Neil’s shorthand for when he’s bored is, to this day, to shout ‘Ronnie Corbett!). So it is with VW songs. Love ‘em. And those Corbett bits were all written by Ronnie Barker you know so sit back down …

Saturday 7th June

Billed as ‘the wedding of the century’ (by me just then) rarely if ever have I been this excited by a do. Unbelievably I’ve been friends with Katy for fourteen years and with Ben for seven. Yikes! At some point in the morning I begin to get terrible nerves and find it almost impossible to mingle with anyone I don’t already know. Worried I’ve come across as aloof I make amends later by getting drunk on two glasses of champagne and startling complete strangers by grilling them with unprompted questions about who they are and how they know Ben and Katy. Everyone is absolutely lovely in the face of my pink-cheeked interrogations. Having spent the weekend boasting that it was I who introduced the bride and groom , when Ben gives me a special thankyou in his speech, which of course makes me cry, I only wish I’d been a bit more humble …

Everything goes beautifully, it’s like a model in how to throw the perfect wedding, so much work and planning makes the whole thing seem effortless. The weather is summertime at its best, the church is quaint and charming, the dress is beautiful, as is Katy’s hair and long tanned back beneath it, I audibly sob during the service, the bridesmaids are adorable, Katy’s brother Pete sings ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ accompanied by his wife Claire on the piano, which sets the last hard-faced bitches off sobbing aswell. The speeches are spot-on, always the scariest bit for me, but they are all done with genuine love and humour and good old belly-laughing throughout. The meal is divine and we dance like utter maniacs afterwards. If the tape of us punk-Morris-jiving to ’Don’t Stop Me Now’ ever comes to light I want it burned. A highpoint comes when almost every single person on the dancefloor seems to know all the words to ‘Ask’ by The Smiths and those who don’t look on visibly mystified by the drunken horde hugging one another and wailing ‘If it‘s not love then it‘s the Bomb that will bring us together!’ Brilliant. Gotta love a wedding and this was the best.

Manhattanchester

I’ve always been excited by even the idea of New York, right from seeing Ghostbusters at aged eight, watching Cagney and Lacey with my Mum, and reading about Gotham City and Metropolis in my comics. My real obsession began at 16 and grew from a number of things that had either accumulated in my life to that point or that I was just discovering; Woody Allen, Warhol’s Factory, architecture, CBGBs, the Algonquin Round Table, Studio 54, Max’s Kansas City, hip hop, the Beat poets …

I still have the 1996 Time Out New York guide, bought and inscribed for me on my 18th birthday by my then best friend Claire, in which I read the listings cover to cover as though the whole thing was a novel. A café staffed entirely by identical twins! A Chinese restaurant housed in an old gay sauna where the waitresses were all Asian drag queens and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ whether it was your birthday or not! These places are no doubt long gone but the idea of them will always excite me beyond measure. I even had a clock in my room set to New York time. I meant it, man.

One of the endless summers I spent looking after my little brother and sister was in fact spent in my room reading my Time Out and wondering how to make it there. Because, in case you haven’t heard, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Of course I couldn’t make it there. Crippled with shyness and not a penny to my name, it was hard enough to make the leap from Blackpool, where I grew up, to Manchester, where I really grew up. Geographically small the leap may be, socially and culturally, to me, it was vast.

Fortunately my affair with Manchester was also long-running and passionate. I first came here aged 13, ostensibly to find John Squire, telling my Mum I was only going as far as Preston. Preston was home to the nearest independent record shop where I was forced to go at even that tender age when I couldn’t find the records I wanted in ordinary record shops. In love with The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Madchester, baggy, and above and beyond all, The Smiths and Morrissey, I was duty bound to love Manchester too, and I did.

The city to me consisted solely of Piccadilly, Oldham Street and the wonderful Corn Exchange, but that was more than enough when I could effortlessly make a tenner, ten Regal and the will to be here last all day. I recall a slight sinking feeling as the train arrived back home. I still get it now, mildly, but it’s tempered with the fact I’m excited to see my folks. These days when I leave Manchester, that’s when I’m leaving home behind. So, it became my surrogate New York, though in truth it’s not a surrogate for anything. I think Manchester holds its own as one of the great cities. I am still excited, sitting here, writing this, to be in the middle of it all. In my own teeny tiny way, I have made it here.


Note: I’ve been itching to hear Arcade Fire’s No Cars Go all day so I whacked it on youtube as soon as I got home. I never noticed before how much it sounds like Prefab Sprout. Oh my oh my.

Soundtrack: New Order ‘Everything’s Gone Green’, Arcade Fire, Prefab Sprout