End Of Year Review: 2011

2011: I turned 33. It looks like I will outlive Jesus after all (touch wood). This little blog turned 3 years old. Look what I was doing back then; not much eh? This year I had my tenth anniversary working for Manchester University Press and my fifteenth anniversary of living in Manchester. I moved here in September 1996, three months after the IRA bomb. Mum wasn’t happy. Also this year I showed up in the Manchester Evening News and Attitude magazine with a load of Manchester chums. Click click flash flash darling.

I quit smoking in September, this time for good. I’m doing really well and enjoying life without cigarettes. *clicks heels* It was the right time. You should all try and quit this year. Apart from anything else it does wonders for your hangovers.

Our amazing dog Sam died this year. ‘Sammy Lammy Lambkin’ to those who loved him, and we really did love him. We had him from a puppy and he was ours for seventeen years. When I would pack up my bags to go back to University at the start of term he would sit on them to try and make me stay. He was a big dumb sweet thing and our family isn’t the same without him. Good bye Sammy…

In capital ‘P’ Politics, ‘Occupy’ and the ‘99%’ movement may have deftly solved a problem that Socialists have been mulling over for decades: how to make the middle class realise they are part of the working class, and how to make the working class feel enfranchised by middle class dissent. More power to it. The 1% can be dismantled, I feel sure of it. They got the guns but we got the numbers.

In music, Morrissey ends the year without a record deal and I wonder/worry that we might have heard the last of him once again. In related news, Bon Iver overtook not just Elliott Smith but Morrissey himself as my most played artist this year. Times they are a-changin’…

Amy Winehouse died in July. Not long afterwards we went to Camden Square bearing gifts to say goodbye in the slightly flimsy but well-intentioned way that you might when somebody’s music has been in your heart through some important things. I’m so sad about it still. ‘Love Is A Losing Game’ always stopped me in my tracks but these days it sounds too sad to bear. It was a hot day in Camden and I’ll always remember the shadows on the High Street and the lovely friends I was with, and writing out lyrics with a silver pen on the train down to London like a teenager.

Here’s what the rest of 2011 looked like from here. This write-up has been brought to you by THESE SONGS RIGHT HERE…

The family…

I became an uncle this year, not once but twice. After a somewhat agonising pregnancy for my poor little sister Clare, baby Jack arrived in January, complete with personality and appetite and sass from the off. He is the spit of Clare, ergo beautiful, but I sense a degree of forthcoming naughtiness previously pioneered by my brother Sean. Fun times ahead! Then in June little Stanley James followed for my big sister Emma and to start with he was just the opposite of Jack. He arrived a bit early and we had to worry and fuss over his weight, there was barely anything of him, he was like a little Victorian baby, all swaddled and passive. Then he just bloomed. I heard him giggle for the first time last week and, well, it’s just the reason you get out of bed in the morning isn’t it? Our two beautiful boys. There’s so much to show them, I can’t wait… *makes pile of books, records and travel guides*

The trips...

New York in March. Glastonbury in June. Berlin in September. Festival in Murcia. Loads of London and Stratford and Liverpool and Sheffield. And Salford...

The parties...

In the summer I DJ’d to help raise money for my friend Amber’s boob-job. In Liverpool I played at the Alternative Miss Liverpool pageant for a gorgeous crowd of gender terrorists in taffeta. Off The Hook had its first birthday party. Our new wayward disco baby Drunk At Vogue had her first outing after two years of daydreaming about it and several months of me and my friends working like disco dogs to make it happen. (Eyes peeled for more parties in the New Year). I’ve played at a gay wedding, a photography exhibition, on a boat on the Irwell, in a warehouse, a disused office, at Dalston Boys Club, Clique, Bollox, the Contact Theatre, the Northern Quarter Loves U Festival (before Mr Scruff!), in full Halloween make up and in my underwear at a fetish party. Good year.

The starfucking...

This year I met Jarvis Cocker backstage at the Town Hall after his wonderful interview with Dave Haslam. I ate some of his Pringles. I chatted to Victoria Wood at the International Festival. I slept in Elbow’s tipi at Glastonbury with Radiohead and The Chemical Brothers drinking on the grass outside. I saw the lovely Kirsten Dunst and the awful Lily Allen backstage. I drank and DJ’d with Joel Gibb in Berlin, swapped messages with John Grant about his Glastonbury appearance and the Weekend movie (more of which later), got invited to Spain by Jonsi, met Tim Burgess on Halloween, and had a full drunken body hug with Alan Hollinghurst. I think I’m done…

The movies...

‘I’ve been a lot to the movies lately; the last one ruined my heart...’ sang Jonas Alaska on one of my favourite songs of the year. He wasn’t wrong; a couple of real heartbreakers left their mark on me this year.

‘There was a mother who came to the [AIDS ward] and one... two... three times she lost her boys there...’

‘We really had a great time. We would go out dancing and then I would come home and sleep. Unfortunately none of those men are alive today...’

‘All of the guys in that office got infected. And they all died except one...’

‘Everybody in that study died but me...’

We Were Here was the documentary we were all waiting for. A handful of articulate and erudite voices talk us through their personal accounts of life in San Francisco at the time the AIDS epidemic hit the city. It was a time of weekly funerals and young gay men walking around ‘like concentration camp victims’ and of scarcely believable quantities of fortitude and love. Make it a duty to watch this film and pay your respects.

Like We Were Here, Weekend managed to be both life-affirming and terribly painful. Understated performances, incredibly sexy, and shot with the cinematic quality (and guidance) of a Quinnford and Scout photograph, this got under my skin in a way I hadn’t expected. As an almost-love-story it made a few people take a good hard look at themselves, myself included. I was supposed to go for post-movie drinks the night I watched it but I couldn’t; instead I walked around the city by myself for an hour in a cinematic and dreadfully upsetting fashion listening to ‘What’s In It For Me?’ by Avi Buffalo on endless repeat. But really, what’s in it for me? Maybe I should find out…

The boys…

Come off it, I’ve got to save something for the autobiography haven’t I?

The future...

Next year it will be ten years since I came out of the closet at the tender age of 24 (on my Mum’s birthday). To coin a 2011 phrase, It Gets Better. I’m making a list of resolutions as always; let’s see how life intervenes. I’m working on Novel Number 2 and maybe re-hashing Novel Number 1, or maybe not. DJing as much as I can, trying to make the world a better place, having a spring clean, the usual. As for the blog, I have an exciting project beginning in January. It’s called ‘Manchester: In Residents’ and every week or so I will hand the reins of Manhattanchester to a different fascinating individual to let them tell their own particular Manchester story; how they got here and where they’re at. Let’s see the city from the inside. I’ve already had some brilliant responses. Tune in…

To follow: 2011 in pictures …

My 50 Favourite Songs Of 2011

Is there ever a bad year for music? I doubt it. This year seemed particularly difficult in the choosing. There was so much to love. I shed some genuinely beloved tracks to get to this utterly arbitrary fifty. I just love lists and I love all these songs like wayward and beautiful children. But first off…

Cover versions

I fell pretty hard for James Vincent McMorrow’s cover of Steve Winwood’s ‘Higher Love’ (from the lovefilm advert). Once you hear it you sort of can’t credit that it wasn’t done before. Then tucked at the end of Ane Brun’s astonishing album I found a tinsel and ice version of Cyndi Lauper’s ‘True Colors’. I thought this would not be beaten, and then I heard Glen Campbell singing ‘Hold On Hope’. It’s my very favourite Guided By Voices song and it’s there like a little pearl on the last album that Glen will ever record, because he has Alzheimer’s. ‘Everbody’s gotta hold on hope. It’s the last thing that’s holding me…’ Are you crying a bit? I did. Listen here.

Remixes

A nice warm boot up the arse was given to Corona’s ‘Rhythm Of The Night’ by Manolo. Likewise, RAC turned Foster The People’s otherwise humble ‘Houdini’ into a rollicking digital handraiser. In a nice bit of synchronicity I played the latter at Clique this year and then the Clique boys themselves delivered my third favourite remix of the year: ‘Wooden Heart’ by the Kill Van Kulls. If only the Hurts album had been as good as this track is. Magic.

And here are my songs proper. I hope you find something here that you love, it’s the only reason I do this. The Spotify list is right HERE...

50. Jonathan Johansson – Stockholm

49. Holestar – The Insider

48. Björk – Crystalline

47. Fingersnap – I Wanna Rise

46. Statement Haircut – Barely Legal Lover

45. Florence + The Machine – Breaking Down

44. The Sound of Arrows – My Shadow

43. Jay Z – That's My Bitch

42. Help Stamp Out Loneliness – Angelyne

41. Jonas Alaska – In The Backseat

40. Ford & Lopatin – World Of Regret

39. Little Dragon – Summertearz

38. Anna Calvi – Blackout

37. Quiet Company – The Confessor (You Could Exist Without It)

36. Washed Out – A Dedication

35. Those Dancing Days – I'll Be Yours

34. St Lucia – All Eyes On You

33. M83 – Midnight City

32. Low – Especially Me

31. Summer Camp – Brian Krakow

30. Dum Dum Girls – Bedroom Eyes

29. EMA – California

28. Justice – Civilization

27. In Flagranti – Hollow Discourse

26. Tennis – Marathon

25. Radiohead – Codex

24. Beirut – East Harlem

23. The Vaccines – Wetsuit

22. Will Young – Come On

21. Frank Ocean – Nature Feels

20. The Antlers – Putting The Dog To Sleep

19. Sbtrkt – Wildfire (feat. Little Dragon)

18. Bright Eyes – Ladder Song

17. Azari & III – Manic

16. Lykke Li – Sadness Is A Blessing

15. Discodeine – Synchronize

14. Jens Lekman – Waiting for Kirsten

13. Beyoncé – Run The World (Girls)

12. Hercules & Love Affair Featuring Shaun J. Wright – My House

11. Lana Del Rey – Video Games

And my top ten …

10. Azealia Banks – 212

Hands down the dirtiest thing I heard all year, in every sense of the word. It’s hip-hop, it’s a bit grimy, it’s a total skank-fest and she’s utterly adorable. It’s like being excited about the first M.I.A record all over again. Dancefloor it to death.

9. Junior Boys – Banana Ripple

I think this is the best thing they’ve ever done, and I’m including the epic ‘Parallel Lines’. It’s almost ten minutes long and that’s not long enough. As simple as the simplest pop can be, that first ascending bassline manages to carry your pulse with it. The Field remixed it and it was a bit dull really, there’s nothing you can do to polish something so perfect.

8. PJ Harvey – On Battleship Hill

It’s probably everyone’s album of the year even if they haven’t heard it, and it’s a fair cop. Only Stories From The City… held so completely and cohesively as Let England Shake and here is that latter album’s finest moment. After a minute or so of skiffling the song grinds to a halt and Polly pulls some kind of falsetto medieval madrigal from the air. It’s audacious. ‘Cruel nature has won again…’ But it hasn’t, art has won again. I feel like the whole record is a call to arms for something passionate and brutal that I can’t quite put my finger on.

7. Joe Goddard – Gabriel

I went to a Hot Chip gig this year. It was pretty dull. Who called it ‘coffee table House’? Yeah that. I wasn’t massively interested to hear Joe Goddard had put out one of his rare solo singles. But this is unbelievably good. It was actually written by John Beck of It Bites! which is so unlikely I can barely believe it. I haven’t been able to find the original anywhere. I guess this might count as a cover except that the epically tribal production number Goddard has done here is all his own work. That weird tremor on vocalist Valentina’s vowels is an actual knee-trembler. Magnificent.

6. Foster The People – Pumped Up Kicks

It’s advert music I know, but I loved it first. This makes a great pair with the next track on this list, they are like little dancing sisters, I always play them together. There are oodles of great and not-so-great remixes of this, it’s completely infectious. Do they still have Number Ones? Well this should have been Number One.

5. Metronomy – Corinne

I nearly chose ‘The Look’ and that would also make the top ten if not for my stupid ‘one band, one song’ rule. But ‘she just wants to dance all the time’ is the best line in a song probably ever isn’t it, and anybody named ‘Corinne’ should telephone me because I love you and I would like to be your boyfriend.

4. Nicola Roberts – Beat Of My Drum

Before this record I wouldn’t have known Nicola Roberts if she stood up in my dinner, and truthfully it’s not that important who’s singing this (Annie could’ve done an admirable job). But it’s brilliant. The shave-and-a-haircut intro, the military drums, the dramatic pause, the Daphne and Celeste shouting, the childish deep breaths she takes between lines, the amazing spelling-out-the-words dance; it’s just unavoidably and chronically brilliant.

3. James Blake – The Wilhelm Scream

Based on a song that his Dad wrote which is kind of touching, this is the track that I crave to hear when I crave to hear James Blake. I heard it live before the recorded version and it stuck with me like a weird virus. It’s a bulging sonic mantra, it almost suffocates you after a while, I keep taking my headphones off when I’m playing it because I think I can hear something else. It’s majestic. It’s technology and soul.

2. Elbow – lippy kids

Elbow previewed the track before Christmas last year in a live video session from Blueprint Studios and it was remarkable on first listen, all woozy and hypnotic with that lilting metronomic piano. Nothing can ready you for the swell a minute and a half in though. ‘Do they know those days are golden?’ When you go back to it, the swell is always there waiting, like when you meet someone who’s so beautiful you can’t quite summon them to mind afterwards, then you meet again and blush from the neck up. That’s what it’s like.

Cut to Glastonbury and we’re drinking beers in the sunshine with the Elbow boys on the morning of their first ever performance on the Pyramid Stage. Katie has found a snazzy pair of discarded sunglasses which in true Glastonbury spirit she donates to Guy. The boys are a little nervous. We talk about Polly Harvey and Glastonburys past and we agree to try and stay relatively sober for the performance that evening.

When showtime comes the sun is beginning to dip and everything and everyone is glowing and we’re all so happy to be there. The band take the stage and the camera immediately cuts to Guy wearing Katie’s shades, projected across giant screens. ‘Those are my shades!’ says Katie. No doubt somebody else in the crowd is saying the exact same thing. About halfway through a magical set the piano refrain begins and when the line comes, ‘Do they know those days are golden?’ with the light just so and everyone together, I have a little cry.

A couple of weeks later Simon Pegg Tweets: ‘The more I listen to the song 'Lippy Kids' by Elbow, the more I'm convinced it's one of the most gorgeous songs ever written.’ He’s right of course. By then the song is like an old friend. One day I’ll be all alone, remembering that beautiful weekend, and the colour of the light, and that line will come back to me: ‘Do they know those days are golden?’ Can you imagine it?

1. Bon Iver – Beth/Rest

There’s a very real danger that Bon Iver is the album of Justin Vernon’s career. It’s certainly the best album I heard this year. I mean hands down. I think he knew how good it was going to be, I think that’s why he called this album Bon Iver, and not his first one. How do you go about closing such an album? An album where tracks are named after American states and geological epochs such is the scope and feeling of their huge sonic reach. Basically you close it by writing ‘Beth/Rest’. The opening seconds are a steal from REO Speedwagon’s ‘Can’t Fight This Feeling’ and there’s a distinctly John Hughes soundtrack feel to the rest of it, but actually I’ve never heard anything quite like it. It dissolves into something so poignant it’s almost too much. The lyrics have a weird tumbling occasionally meaningless, and therefore terribly potent, feel, like a Melville poem: ‘I know that you'd offer, would reveal it, though it's soft and flat, won't repeat it, cull and coffers that for the soffit, hang this homeward, pry it open with your love…’ Did you hear that? Pry it open with your love… After three minutes it almost goes away entirely and then it comes back…. with soft rock guitars. Pry it open with your love… Beautiful. So so beautiful. Words fail me.

It’s An Off The Hook Christmas

Off The Hook is in its second year. We’re toddling! Or is it bogling? Either way it’s hard to believe we’ve been sweating it on the dancefloor all that time with our amazing posse of hipsters and drag queens and bears (oh my).

Our formula is dead simple: African-American pop for North of England homos and their homies. That basically means if it’s got a good beat then we’ll chuck it in: hip-hop, RnB, disco, reggae, daisy age, dance energy, guilty pleasures, you name it.

Our heroes are Michael Jackson and OutKast and Prince and Flava Flav and Stevie Wonder and Eric B and Rakim and Jay Z and Wu Tang and Billy Ocean. Our Soul Mammas are Neneh Cherry and Queen Latifah and Janet and Salt N Pepa and Beyonce and Roxanne Shante and Aaliyah and Mariah and Amerie and Cookie Crew and Jamelia and Rihanna (we like our girls…)

We encourage: dressing up, bringing it, copping off.

We discourage: being cool, laying low, pale imitations.

So Christmas music is basically toilet, yes? WRONG. Everyone plays the same Yuletide crap year after year while the gems lie forgotten like broken Christmas lights at the bottom of the box. Well here's a bunch of sparkly Christmas tunes to restore your faith in that end of year groove. We couldn’t let the end of year slip by without a good list could we?

Get your full firm festive asses down to our Off The Hook Xmas Party and you can shake it to all of these and more. Our spesh guests star DJs this time are Matt Rothery and Dave Dobson, aka Wasp Nest. Check out the amazing mix they made for us right here.

... and then there's this....

The Imogen Styles

‘It’s Johnny Depp Pop, Dark Pop, English Pop, Perfect Pop, it’s Lit Pop, Clit Pop, Dick Pop, Electro Pop, it’s New Wave, Nu Rave, Short Wave, Dance Phase …’

If I were doing promo (look, I am!) I would signpost this band for you thusly:

Black Box Recorder / Ladytron / Pet Shop Boys / (We Are) Performance / Stock, Aitken & Waterman

Electro never died, it just turned into POP. Come celebrate this healthy transition with The Imogen Styles live and in the flesh at Dry Bar this Friday. The beautiful people are using it as their pre-Homoelectric party, and you should too. The Imogen Styles will get you in the digital disco mood good and proper.

This is my current favourite track…

… and here is THAT darkly genius Stock, Aitken & Waterman cover version you might have heard about...

The Imogen Styles, Live at Dry Bar

Oldham St, Northern Quarter, Mcr, Friday 2^nd December, 9.30 pm

Speed Reading: Part 1

I’m devouring novels for my MA in Creative Writing. I’ve been on a heady journey from a post-War US college to the foggy streets of 1950s Dublin, from Trinidadian streets to harsh South African farmland, from genteel Edinburgh to tempestuous Malaya. I’m going to do some microblogs about the novels I’ve been reading, starting with …

The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1961)

‘This is nineteen thirty six. The age of chivalry is past…’

So says Jean Brodie, progressive schoolmistress of Edinburgh, trapped between the romance of a Renaissance past and a brave new Continental future. The novel dramatizes a dilemma: when you foster independent thought, how are you to cope when those minds independently begin to disagree with you?

‘You will get used to our ways. What religions are you?’

Not even Maggie Smith’s note perfect rendering of the on-screen Brodie can overshadow the powerful eccentric charge of the book. I quote it endlessly. Brodie is no heroine but the novel in its cruel way makes you yearn to turn her into one.

‘It is seven years, thought Sandy, since I betrayed this tiresome woman …’

The style is classic Spark: droll, precise, bathetic. Fay Weldon adopted a similar style for the duration of her career proving its endless, wondrous durability.

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov (1953)

‘In the beginning Pnin was greatly embarrassed by the ease with which first names were bandied about in America…’

Pnin is a towering comic creation. Pnin himself does not tower, he is ham-fisted, wonkily self-translated, a klutz. But under the blissfully comic veneer of the character lies the sadness inherent in exile literature. Pnin’s Russia is far away and perhaps no longer existent. When he is among exiled countrymen he flourishes, his language asserts itself, it’s a joy to witness.

‘Now a secret must be imparted. Professor Pnin was on the wrong train…’

The narration is a lesson in control, the narrator attempts to coerce the reader into a mockery of Pnin but the writing gives you the space to resist, and you do. The narrator too relents eventually. An evening spent witnessing a drunk colleague unkindly aping Pnin leaves him with ‘the mental counterpart of a bad taste in the mouth.’

Sometimes the writing is so lyrical that it’s a sorrow when the line ends:

‘There are some beloved women whose eyes, by a chance blend of brilliancy and shape, affect us not directly, not at the moment of shy perception, but in a delayed and cumulative burst of light when the heartless person is absent, and the magic agony abides, and its lenses and lamps are installed in the dark…’

It is also a campus novel, and a good one. Pnin’s University department is to be phased out, the coming of Cold War hostilities places a Russian professor in something of a new and unsettling light. The image of Pnin driving away from the town and off the page, befuddled and alone, is a unique modern tragedy. If you love John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy Of Dunces, you might find its spiritual parent in this novel.

The Millstone by Margaret Drabble (1965)

‘The thought of marrying Roger was pleasantly exciting and most unattractive…’

The fact this is an ‘issues’ novel alone can explain its presence in the repackaged ‘Penguin Decades’ series. Thin writing can’t evoke the sympathy sufficient to bear the narrator Rosamund, who charts a largely sexless and uncommitted single life, followed by her pregnancy and the birth of her child as a single academic living in her wealthy and absent parents’ flat in mid-sixties London.

‘I felt ashamed of an emotion as irrational as dislike…’

If you’re not sure what kind of feminist you are, read the novel. If you find yourself shouting a great deal, you’re probably a socialist feminist. The novel is not completely without merit. Lydia, the protagonist’s best friend and lodger, breathes fiery energy into the passages in which she appears. Her life runs parallel to Rosamund’s but free of the sour mixture of self-pity and self-importance that makes the latter more or less unbearable and appears to function little in the story.

‘I could not rid myself of the notion that if Octavia were to die, this would be a vengeance upon my sin…’

Even Elaine Showalter’s introduction seems unsure of the novel’s merits. Given that ‘A Taste Of Honey’ had played twice in London in the years prior to this novel's publication it seems as if working class versions of these stories are of only prurient and not literary interest if Drabble’s work is to be considered innovative (Drabble’s version conflates the gay man and the black man from Delaney’s play into one white gay man who fathers Rosamund’s child). Some time capsules are best left in the ground where they can be better built upon. Two short years after The Millstone saw the light of day, Fay Weldon (her second mention in this blog, I realise) publishes The Fat Woman’s Joke, rendering Drabble’s type of novel mercifully unnecessary for the foreseeable future.

Dance dance dance till you're dead ...

Two KILLER parties for this Halloween, with a whole day in between to recover!

First up is the annual ZOMBIE PRIDE party. This year it’s bigger and bloodier than ever. Traipse your rotting self up and down the cobbles of Canal Street first beforeoff to Legends where all your favourite nights are assembled under one dripping mausoleum roof. Here’s the lowdown …

Zombie Vogue Off - Dress to DISTRESS and take your look to the catwalk!

Blige Sisters Chapel of Death - Death is hell but you look fabulous!

The Blige Sisters will be reading you your last rites at your own fabulous open casket funeral!

Pisscotheque … Lurking in the toilets enter a dark room of horrors and dance the night away!

Tranarchy's CREEPSHOW with Zsa Zsa Noir, Kurt Dirt, Sahara Dolce and more TBA!

DJ's Off The Hook, Chew Disco, The Niallist, Trash-O-Rama, Pumping Iron and Raw Like Sissy!

I’ll be representing Off The Hook with my homie Anthony Crank down in the bowels of the club, with the gorgeous Chew Disco in between and the Pisscotheque massive next door.

HEADS UP: that vogue trophy is MINE ....

Zombie Pride, Saturday 29th October, Legends, Whitworth Street, 10.30pm, £6. Zombie Walk on Canal Street at Taurus from 9.30pm

Then on Halloween proper, get out there for the real spirits of the night. The House Party massive are hosting their annual Haunted House Party, this time at Mint Lounge, smack bang in the heart of the Northern Quarter. Yours truyl will be hitting the decks at some point, warming up as best I can for, oh my god only Tim Burgess and Dave Haslam. Plus Zvook! Dance Party, Nik Void (Factory Floor), Good Vibrations, The Power Ballad Salad, Jamie El Muerto and Ron Negro AND MORE ...!

Facebook jargon here …

Tickets available here… BE QUICK!

The Haunted House Party, Monday 31st October, Mint Lounge, Oldham Street, 9pm, £8.

Remember, bad requests will earn you a stake in the heart …

HAPPY HALLOWEEN …