Nostalgia, bulldozers, and Humberto Velez’s ‘The Storming’

Early next year, Cornerhouse relocates and is reborn as HOME on First Street. As I sat down to continue my research for Humberto Velez’s project ‘The Storming’ – the immersive large-scale installation that will be the final staged event at Cornerhouse in April –­ I saw a story tweeted from the Manchester Evening News revealing that the two Cornerhouse buildings (the main building and Screen 1 over the road) are likely to be torn down by the Council at some point in the future when the site is ‘redeveloped’. I’d already heard a rumour two years ago that Oxford Road station would one day be expanded to encompass this entire site, but my hopes of a reprieve had been quietly raised by the lovely Scandinavian-style bike park that’s since been erected outside Java coffee shop. I don’t want to lose that lovely bike park. I don’t want to lose Java either, or the magnificently squalid ‘Exorcist’ steps that barrel down towards Caley Street. And while it would be impossible to justify the existence of a stand-alone cinema screen with no managing body, it will be sad to see Screen 1 vanish too (there’s been a cinema there in one form or another for 103 years), but why the ‘corner house’ building itself, the old Shaw’s furniture store which has become so iconic?

From my frustrated doldrums I tweeted this:

Gutted. 'Cornerhouse set for redevelopment as flats, offices, shops, leisure and a hotel.' YEAH MORE HOTELS PLEASE. http://t.co/0iZf8IrCuJ
— Greg Thorpe (@TheGregling) August 7, 2014

…and this:

I'm in a lot pain this morning so I am very opinionated and I love Manchester and I hate seeing it carved into ugly money-shaped pieces.
— Greg Thorpe (@TheGregling) August 7, 2014

The ‘pain’ in question actually referred to my clavicle surgery, but fellow tweeters seemed to sense something like the pain of alienation, and a hearty discussion ensued. Investigations were made into the mysteriously disappeared Grade II listed status of the two Cornerhouse buildings (I know I didn’t dream it, they were listed) and passionate back-and-forths were had about City Council building projects and neglected bits of Manchester architecture. A few hours later one of the tweeters started a petition which at the time of writing has 700 signatures.

Reading back over the original Evening News story it was the word ‘hotel’ that was my main trigger. It’s safe to say that word is my red rag. I lived on Whitworth Street for six years and every day I would pass the abandoned development at the corner of Whitworth and Princess Streets with its contrived yuppie imagery and condescending tone of entitlement and its empty useless scar across the only gay neighbourhood in the city. The hotel and apartments intended to go there have never materialised. Why not build something on it? Legends, the place I partied endlessly in my Whitworth Street years, was bulldozed with meagre resistance in order to build a hotel that has yet to appear (as if its presence could salve the wound anyway). Clubbing in the city hasn’t recovered. London Road Fire Station continues to frustrate and upset anyone who passes by and gives a damn about architecture. Why not do something with that? The old BBC site is a permanent open car park and an uglier space than even the reviled Piccadilly Gardens. Why not build your office/h*t*l complex there?

Let’s be clear. This is not about nostalgia for times past; it’s about demanding an interesting and beautiful future without the need for a scorched earth policy. Nostalgia is a pejorative if it consists only of the endless romanticisation of a thing. When Legends was set for demolition I published a zine named after my clubnight ‘Drunk At Vogue’, featuring articles and artwork protesting the closure. I took a classic Mancunian Situationist approach and wrote, somewhat hysterically:

‘LEGENDS is the mental labyrinth of your DESIRE….!

LEGENDS is one of the ONLY gay/queer spaces that survives outside the GATED COMMUNITY OF GAY PRIDE….!

Mainstream media vouch for the Twisted Wheel as A HISTORICAL MONUMENT and we DOFF OUR CAPS to the dance floor pioneers and the faithful who still believe… But what about ME AND YOU…!

WE ARE NOT ARCHIVES…! WE ARE NOT HISTORY…! WE ARE NOT CRUMBS…!

Every inch of queer Mancunian dance floor is a monument to NOW…!

WE WANT OUR HERITAGE TODAY…!

NOSTALGIA DID NOT SAVE THE HACIENDA…!

HOMOELECTRIC, NOT HOTELS…!

SAVE LEGENDS….!

This is what ‘nostalgia’ ought to be; a kind of anger, and an insistence in a future worth living in. Be ‘nostalgic’ for what you did yesterday, last week, this morning, so that you can keep on living and improving.

You may have heard about ‘The Storming’ already, again in the Manchester Evening News, where it was loosely conceived of as a ‘rave’ style event. This is only one part of the final picture. As we piece together the myriad components of ‘The Storming’, we actively draw on Manchester’s numerous identities, the complexity and diversity of its cultural past and present – clubs and music venues included – in order to celebrate, pay homage and energise the future; and yes, to party hard like Mancunians. As Sarah Perks from Cornerhouse says in the Evening News article:

‘Of course we all feel nostalgic about Cornerhouse closing its doors, but nostalgia only deals with the past and never with the future.’

‘The Storming’ will do things differently. The inspiration point for Humberto’s piece is ‘The Storming Of The Winter Palace’, a choreographed mass action that was staged in Petrograd in 1920 as a piece of ritual theatre which re-played the 1917 revolution in order to sanctify and celebrate its achievements. It wasn’t nostalgia, but a celebratory re-enactment of the recent victorious past that would invigorate a brilliant future for Russia; and the Council didn’t bulldoze the Winter Palace afterwards.

Dave Haslam, the 1970s, and me

I have long been of the opinion that the 1970s is the best decade in music, and I reckon I have at least some objectivity since I’m a 90s kid whose favourite band are from the 80s. Six years ago, in my first earnest and naive year of blogging, before Dave Haslam and I became friends, I heard about his book Not Abba. Newly enamoured of Abba’s The Visitors LP and of Taylor Parkes’ magnificent 1995 essay on the band, I felt it was unfair to peg the whitewashing exercise of the 70s nostalgia industry onto poor Abba. It wasn’t their fault, after all, that the egregious I Heart The 70s­ spectacle – in which professional no-names pretend to spontaneously recall loon pants and ‘Night Fever’ as if they hadn’t been prompted to death by BBC researchers who couldn’t be bothered to delve beyond the Top Of The Pops archives – had sieved an entire decade of musical culture down to their five worst singles and outfits. I dashed off a hurried defence of Abba and musical escapism and thought no more of it.

Being a writer, Dave can’t leave an argument unargued and I returned to the blog some time later to find that he had not only read the piece but had responded with a characteristically cheerful and carefully considered comeback which even now I blush to read. The blog entry has since been visited thirteen hundred times (my eighth most popular piece in six years of blogging, stats fans). Some time after this fateful blog incident I was introduced to Dave at a party to celebrate The Art Of Tea in Didsbury getting an alcohol license. ‘You haven’t made your mind up about me yet, have you?’ was his opening gambit.

If you want an idea of how long the backlog of my reading list is, I have just gotten around to reading Dave’s book now. I finished it an hour ago in fact. I haven’t been able to put it down. I wish dearly I had read it six years ago. Now re-christened Young Hearts Run Free (the new title is nothing to do with me, I'm sure), the book has an Intro, an Outro, and a chapter dedicated to each year of the 1970s. Forget about Abba and I Heart The 70s, forget about my blog entry (every point of which was already covered and expounded in the book), forget revivalism and all the rest of it. The book is about life as it was lived in the 1970s, the soundtrack to that life, how magnificently varied that soundtrack was, and how all of it was connected and entwined together. It’s also about the slippery, emotive nature of memory, and of nostalgia itself. ‘We’ve all forgotten a lot,’ Dave writes. Whether it’s the wilful erasure of hard fact, as exemplified by the Watergate scandal of 1972, or the simple fact Led Zeppelin don’t figure on nostalgia shows because they didn’t put out singles and didn’t appear on TOTP, the effect is the same.

The musical insight is exhaustive and a real education, but as always it’s the (extra)ordinary folk that people the story who are the real heart and soul of a history like this. Jayne Casey, a displaced, misplaced youngster, waif of Merseyside social services, is dreaming of like-minded souls, preferably boys in mascara. These arrive in the shape of Pete Burns and Holly Johnson and the musical scene at the legendary Eric’s which eventually spawned some of the best records of the 80s. Gay punk turned disco devotee, Alan Jones adds welts and fake blood to his Vivienne Westwood shirts and dances to ‘Paranoid’ in gay bars. Clover from Withington falls in and out of the burgeoning Rastafari culture, in and out of love, in and out of her parents’ favour. There are moments that, for better or worse, can choke you with pure evocative impact, whether it’s the BNP’s Kingsley Read responding to the murder of a young Sikh lad, Gurdip Singh Chaggar, saying, ‘One down, one million to go’, or John Lydon spinning ‘Born For A Purpose’ by Dr Alimontado on Capital Radio. Underneath all of this, the power goes on and off, bombs erratically tear apart life and limb in the pubs of Birmingham, an increasingly diabolical Met attempt to turn Notting Hill into a police state, and the unnerving voice of Wearside Jack murmurs and hisses from magnetic tape while the real Yorkshire Ripper continues killing women in allotments and car parks.

It’s also about England as it is now, or at least an England I just about recognise; tribal, energetic, indifferent, violent. Just last night I saw a very drunken and shabby guy harassing a girl at Piccadilly bus station, urging her to vote for the racist UKIP party, complaining about how many children the foreigners were having. The girl was too young to vote, too bored to care. As the bus wove its way through South Manchester, the same drunk guy rolled his eyes and tutted and sighed aggressively as a South Asian woman took a call on her mobile phone in her native language, a very ordinary Mancunian scene, but one that caused him bemusement, anger and discomfort. If only somebody could explain to him that it isn’t Asian women on their phones on the bus who have put him where he is – broke, drunk, hating – it’s other white guys, ones with lots of money. What’s changed in thirty-odd years I wonder?

At the end of the book we peer momentarily beyond the end of the 70s, through the dark door of the 1980s to March 1984 when the miners have just begun their epic doomed struggle. By a pure fluke the majestic nine and a half minute version of ‘The Power Of Love’ byFrankie Goes To Hollywood comes on my stereo, a Number One single in December 1984, the year I started school, the year ‘the miners fought the law, and the law won.' As I read and ponder the strike, the heartache, capitulations and police beatings, Holly Johnson sings, ‘When the chips are down I’ll be around,’ and for a minute it’s all a bit much and I have to stop reading.

I’d still fight for Abba, of course I would (okay, maybe not ‘Bang-A-Boomerang’) but only in the knowledge that there’s never just one story worth telling, and there are no happy endings either, not least because it’s not over yet. That’s what this remarkable book is about.



Coda: I have, of course, made a playlist to go with this blog entry which you can listen to on Spotify by clicking here. It’s not chronological or exhaustive, but all the songs are name-checked in Dave’s book and so it is at least wildly or widely representative of an astonishing ten years of music.