Lobotomies and London

Cocktails, dressing up, haemorrhaging from your mouth on the dance floor … why can’t every Friday be like this? Come to think of it, I think it is in certain establishments. The best Halloween, nay the best NIGHT, for ages. Outfit courtesy Primarni and kitchen knives, make up courtesy Paul Mayers and the make up of make up artists purchased at Spar. Cheap and chilling. The highlight was my very own lobotomy scar, pictured. Spookily real, in fact two punters in Via Fossa thought it was real and flinched when I made them stroke it. Mwahahaha. The Zombie Pride party at Legends was so much fun, great music, strip show and the swapping of undead beauty tips (‘But black lips make my teeth look yellow!’ ‘Just bloody them up then!’) … Amaze.

Last weekend I went to London for the first time in, God, three years? My little sis Clare is living in Kentish Town and my half-planned idea of a bit of art, bit of theatre, bit of culture went right on the train to Titsville. Instead we went on a bender round Kentish and Camden Towns on the Friday night: Abbey, World’s End, Black Cap, Dublin Castle … lager lager lager. We were so drunk in the Dublin Castle we were sitting next to the discarded glass spot at the bar and drinking other people’s skanky half-finished pints without even realising. We’ll probably all catch gingivitis and it’ll serve us right. Also met lovely Kev, an internet friend who it turns out is actually a real person, and really lovely to boot.

Saturday I managed to buy FOUR items of clothing. FOUR! This would normally represent a successful year of clothes shopping for me, never mind a single day. Very chuffed indeed so got dressed up on the Saturday night and me and Clare ate Japanese food by the river then ran across the bridge in the pouring rain and howling wind with a three quid inside-out umbrella, screaming. Halfway across we simply gave up, tossed a quid to the guy playing steel drums there and danced with the fuzzy lights of London at our feet.



Passion fruit cocktails at Lab, go-go boys at Village Soho then utterly trashed at Trash Palace where Boogaloo Stu presided over an hysterical multiple choice celebrity question cake-eating competition and uttered the immortal line: ‘Take your knickers off and eat two cakes’. Stupid queue at Ghetto so last Southern Comforts for the road in 12 Bar then a series of wobbly night buses and falafels home to NW5. Such fun.


Miserable trip home in the rain and traffic next day, punctuated by an evil meal at Burger King where I had a bean burger and fries and felt riddled with shame even as the carbo-high kicked in. Home to a weirdly dry Manchester and a forlorn feeling in the flat. As ever after a trip to London I return full of excitement and what-ifs . . . ? What if I moved there? What if I hated it? What if I missed everyone too much? What if I can never ever buy my own place? What if I go for just a year? What if there’s no job for me in Manchester when I come back? What if I grow a backbone and just DO IT? Answers on a postcard please …

New favourite band

Hello? Anybody home?


I know, it’s been a while hasn’t it? I’ve had important reasons for staying away though, and important ones for returning too. Here they are:

A while ago I was recommended to listen to a track called ‘Suffragette Suffragette’ by Manchester-based band Everything Everything. Yes, things do seem to happen twice in their world. The song kinda washed over me at first, then as I was dusting my knick-knacks later in the week it came back into my head and so I re-played it, video and all. Thank goodness I did. Listen to it at once and be glad:

The hilarious yet somehow touching closing refrain notwithstanding I think this band represent a ‘bright new talent’ ™. Some sparky journo has written that ‘This band incorporate the best bits of Foals and British Sea Power but possibly with Peter Gabriel somewhere at the helm forcing them into weirder territory than either plain old indie or math rock will allow.’ I’d say amen to that.

Went to see them live at Deaf Institute, where I now live it would seem, to see if they are worth their salt. They manage to pull the whole thing off live with magnificent panache, acute harmonies and the best drumming I’ve seen since the Wire gig . . . and it’s only a year since they first played together. I’m pinning great hopes on the album when it arrives. ‘Suffragette …’ (sorry I simply haven’t time) is their first single, out December 1st. A couple of the lads are working in caffs and pizza restaurants at the minute and it's no place for them. Listen to the last minute of 'Weights' (on their myspace) and tell me that something sublime isn't happening. This stuff should be Arts Council funded. More please.

Manchester Blog Awards

There’s probably a difference between a supportive community of writers and a clique, but at last night’s Manchester Blog Awards, as we watched people from the same table get up to collect all the awards, laugh in just the right places, and reward what were on the whole mediocre offerings, I wasn’t sure which was which.

There are some really good blogs written in and about Manchester but any verve and talent in the actual writing was killed in mumbled, self-conscious or self-congratulatory delivery. For a medium which is ungoverned, unedited and free, is there any point criticising? Probably not, but when you start giving awards for the thing, you invite a critique. They chose the wrong winners for a start, evidenced in part by the reaction of the crowd and the vox pops of the people I interrogated. The few that is who had actually heard of or read any of the blogs. Do your homework people!

With the exception of this person

http://chickenandpies.blogspot.com/

who is a fucking genius, the readings, in my humble opinion, were flat, ill-chosen and uninteresting. Other adjectives loaned to me were ‘whimsical’, ‘trite’ and ‘woefully middle-class’. They didn’t hold the attention of the audience who got increasingly rowdy, impatient and talkative while the readers mumbled about coffee and home appliances. Nobody had the good sense to ask the noisy bastards, not even via the conveniently-placed microphone, to please shut the fuck up while people were reading. I love DIY culture, but shambolic and homemade doesn’t have to mean a shambles, does it?

Praise for the event has started to appear, I’m sure it will continue, no doubt including from people I spoke to last night who were much more honest after a few pints but freely admitted they probably couldn’t say what they really thought. Therein lies the trap of a supportive community of writers; you can’t say what you really think. What the hell are blogs for, if not that?

After the astonishingly good writing I witnessed at the Manchester Writer's evening at the Deaf Institute on Sunday it was a shame that even the published work, I mean really proper published-in-books published stuff, was weaker than the online material that was read out. Was it all just poorly chosen? What a disappointment. Still, we had a fucking fantastic time. Coco, I love you, you were robbed.

Before the criticisms roll in (as if anyone reads this!) yeah I did nominate myself in every single category, partly to prove how elastic they were, and no I didn’t win anything. Turns out someone else nominated me too though, so thankyou. This isn’t sour grapes though, I promise.

On Dave Haslam and Abba

There seem to be two trains of thought regarding Dave Haslam in Manchester. One is that he was a key player in the city’s astonishing musical renaissance, the other is that he was something of a warm-up man for the real acts, that his forte was the student disco and perhaps time has been kinder to him than it should. I’ve met him briefly and heard him read and he’s a sound and very lovely bloke. I’ve yet to read his Manchester, England book. In fact I was about to buy it when I noticed that he’s written another, called Not Abba. Here’s what he says about it:

"I grew up in Birmingham in the 1970s, and I honestly never met anyone who liked Abba. My big sister and her friends were into the Faces, and Neil Young, and Fairport Convention, and my little brother had a thing for Led Zeppelin (he had all their bootlegs). The thing about Abba then was that I [had] trouble relating to all that 'Mamma Mia' and "I could dance with you honey, If you think it's funny" stuff to what was happening in the streets of our towns and cities; high rise tower blocks collapsing, trade union strikes, widespread racism, rising unemployment, gay liberation, and football hooliganism. And the thing about Abba dominating histories of the 1970s now is that not only is it a distortion of the past, but it's also symbolic, I suppose; symbolic of the way our society can only be comfortable with a sentimental view of our history, that conflict and struggle are best forgotten. Not Abba is about everything TV programmes like 'I Love the Seventies' don't understand or don't want to acknowledge."

There’s a phrase in here which troubles me:

"I [had] trouble relating to all that 'Mamma Mia' and "I could dance with you honey, If you think it's funny" stuff to what was happening in the streets of our towns and cities; high rise tower blocks collapsing, trade union strikes, widespread racism, rising unemployment, gay liberation, and football hooliganism …"

Well is that how people listen to music? Relating what’s happening in the world to the records on your turntable? Is Dave still doing that today? I wonder if the sets he plays address recession, Iraq, the two-party system? I’m being facetious I know, but it’s to make a point. I think his sentiment misses something quite fundamental about the way people actually use art, and perhaps significantly for Haslam, it back-writes some cool into his own story.


When I was young and miserable I played my Smiths albums endlessly, in part for the delicious wallowing but also for the comfort that someone older and wiser felt as I did and had made something beautiful, a life in fact, out of it. When I was older and actually depressed and having counselling I couldn’t play that music. I can’t play it now as it happens because The Smiths were something my boyfriend and I shared and it will be a long time before I can play ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ without crying. Instead I get ready to go out playing ‘Got To Be Real’ by Cheryl Lynn, ‘I’m Coming Out’ by Diana Ross ('don’t let it show on your face', girlfriend). Back in the dark days I would play ‘Hush The Warmth’ by Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci over and over again and it covered me like a duvet,. When I went out I danced around to indie pop and I got away from it all.

So there are two things to say about Dave's premise. First, what about escapism? What about ‘only when I’m dancing do I feel this free’? It’s interesting that he mentions gay lib, it was in the seventies that gay people won unprecedented freedom and it began, and expressed itself best, on the dance floor. Those kids weren’t dancing to Led Zep or Ziggy or The Clash though, it was D.I.S.C.O. all the way. Escape from the grime and the name-calling and the lying and the shrinks and the furtive loveless sex and dancing into a new life. Escape! Imagine you’re a gay, black, fifteen-year-old lad living penniless in a tower block in a crumbling British city in the 70s. How could the power of ‘Dancing Queen’ not lift you towards something, somewhere else you’d rather be? Taylor Parkes wrote:

“You can dance, you can jive / Having the time of your life ..” Outrageously poignant chords clash, collapse .. THIS is the time of your life, it will get no better than THIS, this transient transcendence, this petit mort … “Dancing queen, feel the beat of the tambourine …” - rarely (never?) in the history of popular song, has one word, any word, been loaded with more gut-wrenching emotional violence than that massive brimming “tambourine” in the second chorus of ‘Dancing Queen’. It spills over with poignancy, chased by a blaze of helpess, skyscraping cries …"

Now there’s someone who understands pop music. I realise that Abba, as Haslam indicates, are being used symbolically to represent the sheen which the nostalgia industry has put on the 70s. It’s worth pointing out the obvious though, that during this decade of poverty, social unrest, strikes, depression, violence, Abba were the biggest pop group on the planet and by a long way. The nostalgia industry didn’t manufacture that fact. Makes you wonder why? When there’s a war on you don’t get every book you can from the library about war and play sad songs all day long. At least that’s not all you do. You dance and drink and screw, get ratted, gather round the joanna and have a bloody good sing-song and a knees-up, don’t you?


Of course you need art you can relate to, always, but I don’t buy the premise that art which addresses the conditions of its own production is superior to art which 'makes another thing possible', to quote Toni Morrison. In other words I don’t see an essential difference between ‘You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life …’ and ‘This town, is coming like a ghost town, all the clubs have been closed down, this place, is coming like a ghost town, bands won't play no more, too much fighting on the dance floor …’ Each serves its purpose in its own unique and beautiful way. Are The Specials a more important band than Abba? I’d like to hear you argue that one. Go and play ‘Slipping Through My Fingers’ now, before you decide. It could be argued the 80s were as bleak a decade in their own way as the 70s had been. I recommend Dave digs out The Visitors (1981) for a beautifully executed exercise in tenderness, anxiety, sadness and alienation. It’s that good a record. They don’t mention this album on 'I Love The Seventies' either. In fact they do Abba as much a disservice as Dave has.

Music, Vermouth, Sex and Poetry

Speaking of music, a fine gig was thrown by Coraline in the sumptuous upstairs room at Deaf Institute to celebrate the release of their fantastic first EP. I am determined to throw a party in that room, it is officially my favourite space in Manchester. Gutted I couldn’t stretch to the Holy Fuck show there following their stint supporting Foals at the Academy. Seeing them twice in one night on a Wednesday though, even I have limits. Foals themselves were quite quite brilliant. Very exciting prolonged intro with massive shadows of the band cast the full length of the venue walls. Spine tingling. The songs are just something else entirely played live, fuelled I suspect by the power emitted from Yannis’ now enormous hairdo. The kids loved ‘em, I’ve never seen so many stylish and mashed children on a week night. They knew all the moves. Better than a cup a soup in front of Desperate Housewives. Don’t like the new Academy bar though, yuck. The bouncers were monsters too, sniffing people’s drinks and ID-ing all and sundry. Mind your own business and watch the band.



Forgot to mention my transplendently splendiferous Sex and The City party. I had a grand screening of the movie at my gaff and a right old knees-up it was. No attention to detail was spared. I had a playlist assembled featuring songs from the series (Cheryl Lynn, The Source feat. Candi Staton, ‘Moonriver’, ‘Are You Gonna Go My Way?’) culminating in the series and movie theme tunes for added excitement. God what an anorak I am. I screened two carefully selected episodes as pre-movie trailers (the one where she breaks up with Aidan by the fountain, the one where Big leaves for California and Miranda has the baby) to an even more carefully-selected audience of appreciative girls and gay boys. Dear Paul even dragged himself out of his sick bed to attend and proved himself a sterling mixologist making Martinis, clean and dirty, and Cosmopolitans till his perfectly-toned arms ached. Fun fun fun.



In other news I recently got myself a nice eight quid, austere, to-the-bone haircut as a kind of baptism into my new life and to celebrate our current wartime penury. My god I was freezing. Check out my skull.


After the partying described passim, the madness came to a crashing halt, as these things do. I went to the Warehouse Party’s Eat Your Own Ears shindig and could only withstand three songs from Late Of The Pier before I had to retreat home trembling. The night before had been unbelievably sticky, finishing at 8 am with bruises, Noilly Prat all over the carpet and a trashed flat. Honestly, at my age. Lesson learnt.

More cerebral and low-key adventures are now in order. To that end I did this. And I am also reviewing the Manchester Poetry Prize Gala on Thursday night. Exciting stuff. Looking forward to seeing Carol Ann Duffy again, whom I adore, especially since the drunken night when she held my head in her hands and said, ‘You look like a poet. Are you? You look like David’s Michelangelo.’ A memory I will take with me to the grave.

Lastly, and most importantly of all, I sat down and worked on The Novel for the first time in weeks, rattling off an entire chapter in one evening. This means I have three chapters to go and the writing is DONE. Then comes the edit. I am geared up for it now more than ever. Watch this space.

'Lived in bars …'

I hear ya sister. Most of my time of late has been spent in drinking dens the length of Oxford Road and its surrounds, my second homes being Kro, Kro 2, Odder, Deaf Institute, Cornerhouse, Temple, Rain Bar, Peveril, Via Fossa, Taurus … It’s sinfully indulgent considering my appalling financial state and the wider economic crises but I have needed to be numb of late and, you know, I do love the night life.



Fun things have included the free comedy night at the Ape & Apple where, unintentionally, the most amusing thing was an inebriated loudmouth from Gorton attempting to tell me his life story by shouting over each and every act. There was some excellent material from the real acts though, lots of pony-tailed men for some reason, and some that just made you want to curl up and die.

In related news, my hobs are the cleanest they’ve been since I moved in because I have been eating out at every given opportunity: Pi, Lead Station, Panama Hatty’s, Try Thai, Great Wall, Croma … Honestly, I feel like Marie Antoinette. It’s going to be a lean Christmas I tell ya. Somehow I’ve also managed to lose weight at the same time. Je ne comprends pas but I love it.


Dear Oscar said, ‘Anyone who lives within their mean suffers from a lack of imagination.’ We would have got along so very well. I have flown in the face of the so-called recession these last few weeks by simply flinging fistfuls of my hard-earned in the face of ennui, misery and my general disbelief at the state of things. I have to say it’s been marvellous. I even indulged in retail therapy, which I never do. I am quite incapable of buying clothes which is why I always look like a pile of someone else’s dry-cleaning. I am able to purchase one or two nice items every couple of months by going to Oxfam or Ryan Vintage, anything more than this and I fail. I know exactly what I want to look like but nobody sells the clothes required, at least not in my humble price range. I did however manage to successfully procure a shirt three sizes too small for me in Top Man in order to make my arms look just-so buff. Basically I look like trade in it … perfect.


Musically I fared slightly better, eventually getting myself a decent Roxy compilation AND Marianne Faithful’s Broken English at long last (£3 from Fopp!). My pride and joy at the moment though is a rediscovered Among My Swan by Mazzy Star (also £3 from Fopp!) which sounds as ethereal and crystal-like as it did when I first heard it ten years ago. Must get ‘Fade Into You’ too, Hope Sandoval, I salute you. That, plus my gorgeous vinyl of Elbow’s The Seldom-Seen Kid, Magnetic Fields’ Distortion and Set Yourself On Fire by Stars, are all helping me to steel myself against an unkind world. Music was my first and it shall be my last love.