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.

HomoElectric: The final party at Legends

Back when I lived in Chorlton I rode the 86 bus every day, like you do, and there would always be this same handsome guy on the bus and a look would always pass between us. Nothing ever came of it. One day he started riding the bus with his girlfriend. He always sat with his arm wrapped around her and he still gave me a look but this one was sort of proprietorial, almost smug.

Meanwhile, back in the unreal world, I was a clockwork-regular at HomoElectric. It was actually unthinkable to miss one of their parties. We planned holidays and days off around them. It was the crown jewel of a tiny clutch of unmissable nights that also included Club Suicide and Chips With Everything. From there I was eventually taken to Electric Chair and Mr Scruff, and when Scruff played his fantastic set at HomoElectric it was a perfect full-circle of music and good times.

Anyway, I digress... Another regular at HomoElectric at the time was a young, spindly Black queen; he was camp as anything, exceptionally mouthy and brilliant. You could usually hear him coming a mile off, except for this one night when I was just getting into the zone and I backed into someone on the dancefloor. I turned round to say my apologies and there was the queen, full on face-pashing with the hot guy from the number 86 bus. Bus guy looked at me with a mixture of guilt and discomfort, but I just smiled and waved and kept on dancing. It was no big deal, it was a total HomoElectric moment, and there were loads of them.

It was all electroclash round here in them days. We saw My Robot Friend, WIT, Readers Wifes, plus a so-bad-it-was-actually-kinda-fun PA from Siobhan of Bananarama/Shakespears Sister. She did her version of ‘White Rabbit’ by Jefferson Airplane. Surreal. I might’ve worn a Blondie T shirt the first time I went there. One night I wore a bottle of poppers round my neck on a shoelace. I think I’ve kept most of the amazing atrocities I showed up in. There was a brief sweatband and rubber bracelet fetish. Then home-made graffiti tops. Things went a bit Nu-Rave for a while too. There was lots of asymmetric hair at one point and that amazing blonde lesbian who always danced in a sports bra. Some guy did full face make-up in the toilets for me one time. It lasted about twenty minutes out on the dancefloor.

I cringed at the name ‘HomoElectric’ at first. I was only just out and I hated the word ‘Homo’. Now I only ever call it ‘Homo’. No cringe. I’ve been out ten years and I’ve been dancing at HomoElectric for all of them. For a time, HomoElectric was the best kept wide-open secret in town. One morning – post-Homo at a late night gentlemen’s establishment – I met up with a DJ from Essential who asked where I’d been for the night. I couldn’t believe he’d never heard of HomoElectric. Sometimes you’d be shocked at who did know about the place, even though it was always rammed. (‘Oh my god, you’re here...?’) I met my first boyfriend and my new boyfriend in Legends. I still can’t believe they’re letting it close.

There were so many good HomoElectric stories. One night my then boyfriend leaned on a spotlight in a mesh shirt and had grill-shaped burns on his back for weeks. It once took me five minutes to walk the four steps down to the dancefloor because I thought the shadows were holes in the ground. I think Davey Dobson got me to safety in the end. Thanks Dave. When I moved into a flat just up the road from Legends, I jogged home in the middle of the night more than once to get changed, or take a shower, or replace a shirt that I’d lost. Seemed like a good idea at the time I guess. More than once I got home without any shoes on, one time even in the snow. Somebody piggybacked me. I’ve no idea who. I remember the night everybody must have done their shopping at the same place. Everyone came up like billy-oh, they were queuing up to explosive-puke on a pile of plastic chairs down one of the corridors. We sat on the stairs laughing like goons and then we danced for five hours without a rest. A couple of times on a Sunday you’d spot a familiar shirt or dress out on the streets of the city centre. It would be somebody still pin-balling to or from another party that was actually the tail-end of Friday’s HomoElectric.

There was so much good music. It was an education. Erol Alkan stripping everything down to brass tacks, including us. Ivan Smagghe doing crunchy monochrome death-music in near-darkness. The majestic Mark Moore, who I’m pretty sure shoe-horned ‘Song 2’ into some unbelievable mix or other. Fischerspooner, Gwen Guthrie, Sebastien Tellier, Chaka Khan. The residents themselves were and are solid gold.

The rules of the rest of the city seemed to perceptibly lift when you walked down the steps into Legends for HomoElectric. The placed heaved with the ghosts of parties, from the Twisted Wheel up to the leather bears down-and-dirty get-togethers. You could often kiss your mates goodbye at the door, it was possible you might not see them again that night but there were always new friends to be made. ‘You can learn a lot more than you think about somebody on the dancefloor,’ a clever woman once said.

All good things must come to an end though, and they did. I remember dancing with Matt Rothery at the last closing party. ‘They’ll be talking about this for years to come,’ we said. ‘And we were there...!’ 

HomoElectric will live on, in Manchester some place, and London too, but nowhere in the world will match HomoElectric the way Legends did, the way Morecambe matches Wise, the way Fischer matches Spooner; not for spirit, not for love, not for all those party ghosts... It’s all over now, baby blue. Play a song for me, would you ...?

HomoElectric: The final party at Legends ...

Drunk At Vogue: we are unified, we are together, we are One...

A few years ago I was resident at an 80s night at the now defunct Purple Pussycat. The venue was kind of raucous and fun. I’d gotten used to playing there and I wondered if I could pitch a night. I’d decided ‘Drunk At Vogue’ was the perfect name for a night the second I heard Carrie Bradshaw say it in Season 4 of ‘Sex and the City’. Also because of that show, and because it was one of my favourite songs as a kid, the now ubiquitous ‘Got To Be Real’ by Cheryl Lynn was the first song I put on the playlist. At the time, Horse Meat Disco threw intermittent parties at the Pussycat so I couldn’t pitch them a straight-up disco night. Instead I went for a ‘not dance music, just music for dancing’ vibe. The playlist was disco, 80s synth, vintage pop, electro, Italo. The idea was to treat dance tunes just like pop songs. Ronnie Dyson, Little Boots, Kid Creole, Chic, Eurythmics, Cristina… But the venue wasn’t into it, and the 80s night finished, and the venue closed down. Such is nightlife.

Soon after that I became resident at Off The Hook. After that night took a hiatus I decided to help resurrect it in a new venue, with a new vibe. It worked really well and we’re still going strong. Bolstered by that success I started yapping about Drunk At Vogue again. When I mentioned it to my friends Gary, Thom and James, they saw potential in it from the off. And not just musical potential either: videos, outfits, performance art, and a whole host of New York and Manchester references to play with. Suddenly there were four of us and the venue was obvious, Kraak; new home to Off The Hook, blank canvas, backstreet, away from the Village – but not too far – hard to find, sweaty.

You can spout all you like about what you want your night to be, but it doesn’t mean a thing until the place starts to fill. If it fills. What the punters play in their rooms before they show up, what they decide to wear, or not wear, the videos they post on your page the day before the party; these are all out of your hands, and they matter. Drunk At Vogue Party Number 1 filled up within the hour. The outfits were some of the best I’ve ever seen on a night out. Shoestring glamour and genderfuckery and fun and hot and funny. Larry Levan and Mai Tai and ‘The Boss’ and avante garde drag and Chris on the door in his underwear.

We threw a boat party on the Irwell this year. It was magic. Our ‘Gay Sex In The 70s Party’ for Pride weekend was our best night to date, and actually really emotional. We’ve set the bar pretty high for our first birthday. It’s on October 5th. Everyone is welcome. You might be surprised that something like this is happening here in Manchester. So come and see us. I’m never sure where all the amazing punters come from. But there they are. 

Legends is going to shut soon. We didn’t win that one. We have to invest elsewhere in the city. Manchester is changing faster than ever and it sometimes feels they like don’t want you to keep dancing, but you have to keep moving…

Manchester: In Residents … #15: Andy

‘I remember the punks that used to hang around the entrance to the underground Arndale Market, and I remember the Northern Quarter when it was just fabric shops and disused buildings…’

What’s your name?

Andy Speak

What do you do?

I’m a PhD student, studying how green roofs influence Manchester’s urban microclimate.

Where do you live?

Whalley Range / Old Trafford, just around the corner from Jam Street Cafe who save me from many a hangover with their veggie breakfasts. It’s nice and quiet and green, and the rent’s cheaper than Chorlton!

Tell us the story of how you ended up in Manchester.

I’m from Greater Manchester originally, albeit a small village called Blackrod, out on the outer edge of the county on the border with Lancashire. I used to come to Manchester shopping with me mum in the ‘80s and I have some memories of what it was like then. I remember the punks that used to hang around the entrance to the underground Arndale Market, and I remember the Northern Quarter when it was just fabric shops and disused buildings. Then ‘Madchester’ hit and I was 16 so of course I had the whole bowl haircut, DMs and Stone Roses/Inspirals/James t-shirts and would wander around Afflecks on a Saturday. It was a very exciting place then and that excitement about the music scene has always stuck with me. I moved away to other parts of the country a couple of times but I always gravitate back. I have been living in the city proper for about ten years now.

What’s great about this city?

I’ve experienced a few UK cities but Manchester is always my favourite. There’s something really independent about the city that comes out through the music and the culture. A kind of ‘two fingers up’ to London. Plus it has an amazing history. I only recently learned about the whole Marx/Engels connection, and how it was the first industrial city, and how the new urban conditions created the first ever gang culture in the form of the Scuttlers. There’s always something new to discover…

 What’s not so great?

Manchester is losing its identity under a wave of neo-liberal corporate pressure. I mean all the identikit city centre flats and wanky bars and using nostalgia about Madchester as a marketing tool, and the whole tacky ‘I Y MCR’ campaign and letting market forces determine how the cityscape develops. Losing Legends to a German hotel chain is a case in point. If we’re not careful Manchester could end up like Birmingham! I guess this is just how a lot of urban development is happening in the UK in general, but it would be nice if Manchester could resist it.

If I’m honest I am getting a little bored of Manchester and after my PhD is finished I’m probably going to move abroad. It’s really only my friends and my allotment that are keeping me here! I think that’s more a subjective experience rather than anything wrong with Manchester though. I’ll probably be back in a few years when I realise the grass was greener here all along …

Do you have a favourite Manchester building?

It’s more of a favourite wall. It’s the wall next to the abandoned bit of land next to Company Bar and Molly House in the gay village. It’s a huge Victorian thing with the outlines of two houses that used to be there etched onto it in grime. A palimpsest of our smoggy industrial past. The number of bricks in the wall always boggles my mind, especially if I’m looking at it at 4am after numerous pints! My least favourite would be the ivory tower that is the Beetham Tower, howling its disapproval over lesser Mancunia every time a strong wind blows.

Do you have a favourite Mancunian?

I guess it has to be Morrissey. He’s a bit of a prat these days but in the ‘80s and ‘90s he was incredible, and really summed up what life was like in a post-industrial town.

What’s your favourite pub/bar/club/restaurant/park/venue?

The Molly House is my new ‘local’. Finally an actual decent pub for the gays! Bar Fringe on the edge of the Northern Quarter is also a bit of a gem. I love the huge ivy-covered hand statue in the beer garden, and anywhere that has both a life-size Buffy cut-out and a huge green man face is good with me. The Britons Protection is a great pub for cold winter nights – a few mates around a table in one of the warmly lit snugs and you can happily stay put all night getting wing-wang-wooed on ale. I also always love checking out the Okasional Kafe whenever and wherever that pops up …

What do you think is missing from Manchester?

Long, hot summers. But hey, with climate change you never know….

If I was Mayor for a day I would …

Get rid of the stranglehold of the corporates and the public-private Manchester City Centre Management Company who use public money to promote the interests of retailers and developers, and who just want Mancunians to be ‘users’ of the city who do nothing consume. The riots last year were a sign of how much this model isn’t working. Try and get Manchester back to its radical socialist roots. Not an easy job I admit. I’m actually not even that political a person but unbridled corporations make me mad!

Who else would you like to nominate to answer this questionnaire?

Zsa Zsa Noir

Here’s a short film about Andy’s fascinating PhD research.

Will the real Niallist please step forward ...?

The Nialiist is one of those enviously hyper-productive modernists: a musician, blogger, party organiser, remixer etc etc... But just who IS the real Niallist, or better yet, who the hell does he THINK he is? Let's get him...!

Photo by Nickie

How did you get into music and parties and what motivates you to bring new things to the scene?

I've been into music since I was a child but I've been DJing and putting on nights since the late 90s when I lived in Glasgow. The music scene there is very healthy and it taught me a lot - people there take the music very seriously and can be pretty harsh, but it forces you to up your game all the time.

I'm part of a night in Glasgow called Menergy, which is a drag-and-disco party, and when I moved to Manchester a few years ago I knew immediately that this was the perfect city to do something similar. We had put on a vogue ball in Glasgow and when I met Joe Spencer we decided to put one on here too. That was our first party, Vogue Brawl at Legends in January of 2011, which was a big success and that basically was the birth of Tranarchy, our art/music/parties collective.

Tranarchy is all about creating a safe space for all the freaks and weirdos to come together and have a good time to some great music. As the name suggests, it's very drag and queer-oriented, and we're also into putting on parties in unusual locations, like our recent outlaw tram party Tramarchy:

Tell us three singles/albums/videos/artists that inspire you to do what you do.

1)...Daft Punk, Homework

This was the record that made me think I could make music myself without having to rely on a band, I just needed to get some boxes and pump them up! Homework also acted as an amazing crash course in Chicago house, Detroit techno and New York disco. I think this album changed an entire generation's musical lives, and you can still hear its influence fifteen years later.

2)... anything at all by Missy Elliot

Missy is such an inspiration – she's always pushing the envelope in visual and musical terms, while remaining accessible and unpretentious. To me Missy is the artist who represents that golden age a few years back when chart-topping pop music was genuinely bizarre. She's also representing for all the big peeps who consider themselves to be ‘freaks’!

3)... Azealia Banks, ‘Liquorice’

I think I'm falling in love with Azealia Banks. ‘Liquorice’ is the follow up to last year's dance floor smash ‘212’ and is basically just her rapping over a track by the house producer Lone. I'm impressed that she picked this track to rap over, and her flow is fresh and unique. It's the return of hip-house! I'm hoping her album is this good…

Share three of your own musical creations with us that you're most proud of, or that say most about you.

1) My current album AKA is available now as a free download at akamixtape.com – everyone should go grab a copy! There are loads of guests on there, including Cherie Lily, Yo Majesty, Scream Club, Beth Ditto, Andrew WK and rappers from the ‘homo-hop’ scene. Musically it's got quite a hip-hop vibe, but crossed with my usual electro-funk and Chicago house influences.

2) I've put together a mix for my new club night starting on Friday at Night & Day on Oldham St. The night is called Bang The Box and is all about the 808, the 909 and the 303! There's 44 tracks in 52 minutes on this, covering old skool rap, freestyle electro, Chicago house and newer things like New Orleans sissy bounce and the modern vogue/’cunty beats’ scene.

3) And here's an oldie but goodie - this is my single ‘The Hots’ which was released on the respected techno/electro label Dissident about three years ago. It's heavily influenced by hi-nrg producer Bobby O, and also a bit of the Human League, but slowed down and with way more sleaze:

Tell us three events we should be excited about and WHY, damnit!

Well, firstly my new night Bang The Box which is Friday 6^th April at Night and Day. I'll be DJing all night long playing my favourite tunes (booty-bass meets acid house meets disco) and mixing things up on Ableton with a few added drum machines for extra funkiness. Those boxes will get banged!

The following Friday it's the UK live debut of New York's vogue queen Cherie Lily, at Kraak Gallery in the Northern Quarter, presented by Tranarchy. We've been hammering Cherie's single ‘Werk’ at all our events because it's a floor-filling modern classic (‘i-i-i-i-icon!’) so to have her over to perform it live is gonna be very special! Also Cherie's husband Andrew WK might put in a wee appearance…

April 27th sees Trouble At T'Mill at Islington Mill, event curated by Trash-O-Rama, where I will be playing alongside the Drunk At Vogue posse, which will be a lot of fun and which I am looking forward to.

And if I can just squeeze one more event in, I wanna plug Hunx And His Punx performing live at Islington Mill on Sunday May 13^th. Myself and Kurt Dirt are preparing a very special Tranarchy live show in support that will feature drag queens, leather priests, motorbikes and more...

Manchester: In Residents ... #7: Andrew

‘This city’s greatest contribution to world happiness came in the squat and lugubrious shape of a comedian, decades ahead of his time...’

What’s your name?

Andrew Moor

What do you do?

I ‘facilitate learning’ in Film Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. I’m there because I ran away from reality and went to university in 1991 when I was 27. The ‘90s was a decade when absolutely nothing of note happened so I ended up staying at university until 1999 by which time I’d accidentally specialised myself out of all usefulness. My job is almost entirely teaching and admin-driven lunacy but I’d rather be working here at Oxford Road Comp. than down the road at the Chorlton-on-Medlock Finishing School for Daintie Gentel-folke. Every now and again I accidentally stumble into a meaningful teaching-related encounter.

Where do you live?

In a small off-white box in the dormitory-‘burb of Hulme. Newsflash: Hulme lacks charm. It is reassuringly bland, aside from the bile-green luminescence of Asda. After ten years I still can’t find my way around but I don’t think I’ve missed anything. I’m being mean: it’s handy for town, I sometimes see the sparrow hawk whooshing over the university, and last month I belatedly discovered ‘Kim by the Sea’. The pizza was good, the drinks were good, the décor was good, the clientele looked ‘characterful’. It’s a fab place: check it out.

Tell us the story of how you ended up in Manchester.

I finally left Newcastle in 1999 when I got a lecturing job in Bangor. I thought I liked the countryside. I still miss a lot about North Wales and I go back there all the time, but the ‘Bangorness’ of Bangor caused me to seek out Manchester, it being the nearest place with anything worthy of the name ‘shop’. A gradual relocation happened – just weekends at first – and I’ve been based here for about a decade now.

What’s great about this city?

When I settled in Manchester I thought I’d found the area I wanted to live my life in. I loved the splurging Gothic buildings, the wide streets, the mess (Newcastle is a more classically-restrained gem). I loved the size of Manchester, it seemed manageable: small enough to get about on foot but big enough not to be able to do everything in. I used to have a theory that since London is a city-state unto itself and since it is easily the least English place in England, that Manchester exists as the greatest English city. I love its Northernness too. When you come from Newcastle you are taught that Geordies are (a) everywhere, (b) special and (c) the friendliest people on earth. All I can say is that I lived there for thirty five years, during which time not a single stranger enjoined me in civil conversation. When I moved to Manchester and used to do Saturday morning grocery shopping in Stretford Arndale I had to factor in an extra thirty per cent of time for chatting to women about frozen peas.

What Manchester does best is probably music. For gigs of all sorts, in so many diverse venues, it’s hard to beat. Even at the posh end it has two full symphony orchestras, and when Mark Elder is conducting the Hallé you won’t find a finer orchestra on the planet. There’s been a cluster of club nights over the last ten years which have meant quite a bit to me. I loved being in dank smoky cellars dancing forever while second-hand sweat dripped off overhead pipes. I loved not being able to find my way about at HomoElectric in Legends. I loved it when Club Suicide ran out of beer. Recently I’ve loved nights at Kraak. None of these places were ever my natural habitat though. I don’t go to gigs as often as I used to and I tired of damp cellars – without the smoke you can only smell the mould and the toilets. It’s nice to know these places are there though, and I still get excited for other people when I see them wandering, vaguely lost, down Oxford Road, looking for the Academy.

Most of these feelings hold firm but I sometimes find Manchester a bit limited. I’m often scuttling around the city at a loose end, pining for London (which I find more relaxed, more playful, less psychotic). Conversely, I sometimes find Manchester a little too big and crave somewhere rustic with sky, trees, birdsong…

What’s not so great?

Dear Manchester, your theatre’s rubbish. I’m not sure I’m allowed to say this, perhaps native Mancunians have a reverence for it knitted into their genes ab initio, but (and it pains me to say) The Royal Exchange is fingernail-pullingly rubbish –or to be more precise, dutifully mediocre. The space is awful; it’s almost invariably badly used; the programming couldn’t be duller; and in ten years of patience I’ve seen only two worthwhile (i.e. memorable) productions there (Twelfth Night and the damn-good Matthew Dunster’s Macbeth). It was after an arduous production of Dr Faustus a few years ago that I pledged to never set foot in the place again. A fit of pique perhaps, but my god it was awful. Go to the Liverpool Playhouse/Everyman instead, one of the most exciting regional theatres in the country. Or if you’ve got about twelve hours to spare, engage with the eastward evening traffic and head over the hills to Sheffield. Go to Leeds even, the ‘South of the North’, and try the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Even Stratford is do-able. Let’s hope the revamped Library Theatre will kick-start something. Remember, this city was once home to Annie Horniman and Joan Littlewood!

Piccadilly Gardens. Okay, maybe Manchester isn’t meant to be attractive as a whole; individual buildings are breathtaking but it’s flatly featureless – a City on the Plains – and it’s the dirtiest, most litter-strewn place I can think of, where men piss in the streets with neither anxiety nor regret. But seriously, what collective mental meltdown happened at the Town Hall the day they signed off Piccadilly Gardens? Concrete over most of the only patch of grass in the city: saves on mowers, bulb-planers, pruners... Build a drab office on part of it: it’s a way of grabbing cash and Kro needed to go somewhere, so appealing is Danish cuisine. Stick what I think is a fountain there: it might be the only wash that some of those feral spawnings ever get. But I can’t imagine anywhere in the world, from Albania to North Korea, has anything as unremittingly bleak as that concrete wall. Palestine, maybe? The pissoirs say it all: are they for weeping into? If I ever had a soul, Piccadilly Gardens has destroyed it. Did any of you see Victoria Wood’s That Day We Sang at the Manchester International Festival? Did you hear the collective tear-inducing, bosom-clenching gasp of nostalgia from ladies of a certain age when they screened Kodak slides of Piccadilly Gardens in the 1950s? Those flowers survived the Luftwaffe but like foot-soldiers they fell under the lumpen philistine boots of Manchester’s governors. Shame on them.

Do you have a favourite Manchester building?

I paused a week before answering this, and it needed a walk around the city before the reply towered before me. It’s The Town Hall. It’s vulgar, it screams, it’s obvious, it’s magnificent, and life’s too short for anything other than magnificent, screaming, obvious vulgarity.

Do you have a favourite Mancunian?

This is a tricky question now the Market Street Mincer has minced away, and obviously I never actually spoke to him. An acid-spangled madman with thinning hair and a baggy vest used to turn up on his own and dance ‘uniquely’ everywhere I seemed to be. He was another sight for glad eyes but I don’t know who he was. Google turned up a few good folk, namely Thomas Beecham, John Dee and Alan Turing. Alfred Wainwright gave me the Lake District. Tony Wilson only ever made my spirits rise. I miss hearing his voice. I chatted to him once about biscuits. That said, long-cloistered consideration leads me to the conclusion that this city’s greatest contribution to world happiness came in the squat and lugubrious shape of a comedian, decades ahead of his time; a poet, a craftsman, and a joy: Mr Les Dawson.

What’s your favourite pub/bar/club/restaurant/park/venue?

This is the hardest question. I’ll name-check Chorlton and Sale Water Parks, they make my heart skidaddle nicely. None of the venues or restaurants I can think of tick every box, though if Greens was around the corner I’d be there weekly. Port Street Beer House and the Molly House are the places I’d take a visitor. Because it’s topical and because it’s the place I’ve been most often I have to mention Legends. It would be sad if it left us but I really do believe that a building is just a building, that there’s always another building, and that people maketh the venue.

What do you think is missing from Manchester?

Manchester is the world’s only arctic monsoon district so it would be fantastical to suggest ‘relaxing beer gardens serving gastro-food’. For my money what Manchester needs most is a nice park in the city centre. We only have about four trees. It’s also missing a sensible transport policy (why people voted against the congestion charge is beyond me). Can we please have no private traffic on Oxford Road and an integrated bus service?

If I was Mayor for a day I would...

I wouldn’t seek this position out, but were civic puissance thrust upon me I’d give generous grants to Nick’s Fruit and Veg Stall on Oxford Road and to any outlets selling only vegetarian food and/or second hand clothes and to anywhere screening films made for grown-ups. I’d give Manchester a permanent weekly open-air market-place and double the rates on every litter-producing fast-food shit-hole. And I’d sort out the Old Fire Station travesty on London Road, at gunpoint if necessary.

Who else would you like to nominate to answer this questionnaire?

Bren O’Callaghan at the Cornerhouse.

Andrew’s book Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces is published with I.B. Tauris. He is also co-editor of Michael Powell: International Perspectives on an English Film-maker (BFI). He is currently writing a book on gay cinema.