30 Days of FIN: my Cornerhouse closing project

#30DaysofFIN

FIN.

A simple enough word seen in the darkness of the cinema that means a special journey has come to an end.

During my work as researcher and music producer of ‘The Storming’ – the final installation that takes place at Cornerhouse on April 4^th – I have, like an accidental snowball, been gathering up stories, memories and assorted ephemera relating to our unique Manchester arts institution.

As we count down the days to the closing of Cornerhouse – towards the FIN of the film of Cornerhouse’s life – I will be using the Cornerhouse Twitter account to send into the world a selection of images, historical detail, videos, anecdotes and memories relating to Cornerhouse.

Mimicking human memory, my timeline will be un-chronological, the posts gleefully abstract and enticing, but the stories and feelings they communicate will all be genuine. They will hopefully reach out to all those who have loved Cornerhouse.

My previous Twitter intervention for Manchester Central Library can be seen here.

Watch out for the hashtag #30DaysofFIN from the Cornerhouse Twitter account, every day until April 4^th when my final Tweets will be sent live from The Storming.

FIN.

#30DaysofFIN Tweets

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.

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.