There is a photograph of my class at Elysian Street infants school taken in about 1955. I am the one at the right hand side of the back row, head tucked forward as if taken by surprise. I am looking smart in one of my mother’s home knits. Behind me there is a railing, and behind that the corrugated roof of a chemical factory that made dyes for Manchester’s cotton mills. Both my grandfather and his father were labourers in chemical factories like this: one worked in an alum works, and the other for Halls, dyers, on Mansell Road.
Fast forward sixty five years, and the brown field site behind Elysian Street school is part of Manchester City’s Etihad Campus. Premier League fans, European cup millions and the Arabs’ black gold pay Mancunian wages these days. The cotton mills are silent, and the warehouses have been turned into flats, but every winter weekend thousands of visitors pour their hard earned cash into Manchester’s hotels and bars, turbo charging the city’s economy. One week they wear the blue of Manchester City, and the next United’s red. They come for the football, eat at the restaurants, fill up the pubs and probably drop by Salford Boys Club, or some other icon of the Manchester music scene, for a snapshot.
When I left Manchester in 1969 I never really went back. Though the city owns my metropolitan heart, I didn’t witness the music scene in the 1980s, or the huge transformation afterwards. But in 1979, when the threads that held me to the city were being stretched to breaking point, Andy Spinoza, author of Manchester Unspun, arrived at Manchester University ready to fill in the gaps. From 1983 Spinoza edited City Life, an alternative guide to Manchester’s entertainment scene. He moved onto the Manchester Evening News, then formed his own PR company, which was employed by the movers and shakers, people like Tony Wilson, founder of the infamous Haçienda nightclub, and key political figures, such as Sir Richard Leese and Sir Howard Bernstein.
Manchester Unspun traces the modern history of the city in a series of chapters describing the different aspects of Spinoza’s career, and his interactions with Wilson, Leese and Bernstein. Spinoza presents a series of reminiscences that tell the story of the city thematically, but the focus is on what he saw. He does not try to disentangle the contributions of the key players, or provide an overview of the city’s development.
The anecdotes give some interesting insights about the Haçienda and the characters that populated it. Manchester was notorious for its gangs and shootings, and there are stories about the drug fuelled dancing, and the invention of Madchester. I knew very little about gang leaders or characters like Tony Wilson, who broadcast on Granada TV, though it’s clear that his personality and the philosophies he adopted were significant in developing the music scene, and creating the Manchester we know now. A key moment was the Sex Pistols’ appearance on Wilson’s show, So It Goes in September 1976, when they performed Anarchy in the Uk.
But let’s not succumb to the Great Man theory of history. Granada TV was groundbreaking in the 1960s, before Wilson became prominent, and Manchester was always a radical force. Look at Peterloo, and Manchester’s historical connections with Engels and the suffragettes. The Manchester Guardian, now just The Guardian, is a testimony to the deep roots of left wing politics in the city. My old school was visited by the queen, had neatly trimmed lawns and a cricket square that bred an England captain, but morning assemblies included John Cage’s Four Minutes and Thirty Three Seconds, and rabble rousing speeches from John Steinbeck. We were presented with Mother Courage, Malcolm Muggeridge and Anouilh’s Rhinoceros and left to think about what they meant to us. That was Manchester in the 1960s.
I enjoyed Manchester Unspun but it did not give me the kind of insights I had hoped to find, because Spinoza is not that interested in what I wanted to know. I would have liked to discover more about the music and lyrics, perhaps find a comparison of the styles and approaches of different groups, but Spinoza is not that into poetry. He does write about Wilson’s counter cultural philosophy, touching on the ideas that drove him and groups like The Smiths and The Happy Mondays, but the music and lyrics are not explored in detail.
Spinoza witnessed the political wrangling in the city, and the way that the Labour council got in bed with Thatcher’s public /private enterprise philosophies, but he does not set out to deal with that as an issue either, it just bubbles upon every now and then as he tells us his story . He explains how the grants they gained set the city on the road to its current prosperity but makes few comments or judgements on the impact of the policies on ordinary Mancunians. The few relatives I have left in the area seem to have gained little: the city I last saw was like a dart board, its centre a high rise bulls eye surrounded by empty spaces, derelict terraces and boarded up shops.
Spinoza does draw some political threads together in a final summary but I would have liked to see more of that kind of political analysis, a more incisive examination of the way that Manchester exchanged its industrial and trade union roots for of a mess of skyscrapers, cheap hotels and football stadiums.
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