by Paul Morley
However wild, metaphysical, disturbing and gorgeous his music, there is always Salford grain, rebellion and defiance. ‘Cross Lane Fair’ is a musical impression of the fairground his parents took him to in the late 1930s: ‘We do what you do at the fair. We visit various rides and side-shows: a ghost train and a carousel, a juggler, a bearded lady and a five-legged sheep.’ The last two, Davies recalls, ‘were exhibited in a mysterious darkened tent, among other curiosities, where one paid threepence to enter’. He also wrote a tone poem based on his childhood memories of the bleak Chat Moss, south of Leigh, which caused George Stephenson so much grief when he built the Manchester to Liverpool railway line. The short piece is a form of exploratory sonic engineering inspired by Stephenson’s engineering ingenuity in crossing the black, miry landscape.
Jim Lovelock, who became editor of the Stockport Express at twenty-eight in 1949, was as notorious for his socialising as he was famous for writing, and was in turn journalist, author, potholer and mountaineer. Born in Edgeley, up the hill from Mersey Square, Jim overcame polio as a child of six, to become a legendary caver and climber, despite also losing his sight in one eye. His father had decided against a calliper and instead bought him a small bicycle with only one pedal to strengthen his polio-afflicted leg. ‘He was an entertaining raconteur too,’ noted a colleague, ‘often fulfilling the old journalistic maxim of never letting the facts get in the way of a good story. Jim was a brilliant bloke.’ Following in the footsteps of another Stockport explorer, Admiral Sir George Back, Jim also famously went on a 16,000-mile adventure to the Stockport Islands in Canada.
John Mayall – bandleader, mentor, multi-instrumentalist, wanderer – was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire on 29 November 1933. His father Murray was a keen amateur dance-band musician with a good jazz record collection, and by 1945, before even reaching his teens, John had become an enthusiastic guitarist and started to learn the piano. He gravitated towards the blues and built up a substantial collection of records. He started playing professionally in 1955, moving in 1963 from Manchester to London on the advice of Alexis Korner. His record collection would form the basis of the school – his ever-evolving group the Bluesbreakers – that all his young recruits attended. Eric Clapton, who lived for a while with Mayall absorbing and copying his collection, Jack Bruce, Davy Graham, Peter Green, Andy Fraser and Mick Taylor were all part of his experiment in finding a British context for the blues and feeding it into mainstream consciousness. This was a significant and direct influence on the great British rock album of the late 1960s.
Artist Trevor Grimshaw was born in Hyde in 1947, and from the age of sixteen to twenty-one studied at Stockport College of Art. He painted and drew a northern landscape related to Lowry’s in that it was both all in the mind and rooted in reality, radically personal and yet almost commonplace – a north he remembered as if it was the truth, which it was but wasn’t, because he moved the buildings, landmarks and hills around in his mind, abstractly pressed them together, and generated a perversely ideal version of depression, isolation and absence, fixing the past in place, anticipating how this north was in the process of disappearing, even as it left behind signs and structures that this was how it once was. As with Lowry, his north was a form of confession that appeared to give nothing away about who he was and what he was like, but ultimately said everything. Photographs can show how, in the years between its urgent industrial expansion and subsequent decline, the north around Manchester and Stockport, out towards the peaks and moors, had a certain bleary bleakness, a crammed, stained ugliness or a defiant, stoical beauty, an unearthly grace. Grimshaw’s unfluctuating images express the less physical even as they reflect nothing but the physical. He transformed the valleys, canals, viaducts, trains, telegraph poles, factories, machines, waste ground, alleyways, cindery mud and stone skies into pure grey spirit drained of colour, as though the industrial north was constructed out of smoke, shadows and radiant but oppressive emptiness, in which the people, roaming and teeming across Lowry’s streets and fields, had been abandoned or absorbed, so that what was in reality full of life became ghostly and anonymous.
The Preston bypass, 1958
Lowry had three large works by Grimshaw in his own collection alongside paintings by Rossetti, Maddox Brown and Lucien Freud, and Grimshaw would visit Lowry in Mottram-in-Longendale. Grimshaw painted Stockport Viaduct, and it was clearly the same Stockport Viaduct that Lowry painted, but so much from another mind, born into another age, with a different level of melancholy and wonder. In 1973 Grimshaw went to 10 Downing Street to deliver a pair of drawings bought by Prime Minister Edward Heath after he saw them displayed at a Tory conference held in Blackpool.
In his forties and fifties, drifting into obscurity, not as affectionately thought of as Lowry, Grimshaw became a recluse and an alcoholic, and five years after his final show, in the County Museum and Art Gallery at Prostejov, Moravia, Czech Republic, he died in a fire at his home. The smoke of infinity he set his north inside gathered him up, as though he had known all along where he was heading and was using his paintings to predict that his end would involve light and murk and ash, and a final, comprehensive veiling of compressed energy.
John Foxx was born Dennis Leigh in Chorley, eight miles north of Wigan, eleven miles south-west of Blackburn, eleven miles north-west of Bolton, twelve miles south of Preston, nineteen and a half miles north-west of Manchester, on 26 September 1947, the son of a coal-mining father and a mill-working mother. His maternal grandmother was a ‘life-long, Lancashire-industrial variety spiritualist’. He was reading futurist manifestos by nine, playing amongst derelict local mills, and after attending local schools and art college in Preston, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London, escaping what he saw as a backward local music scene.
His experimental mentality led to exploring the constantly evolving new sounds made available through the invention of synthesisers and the rapid development in tape-recording processes. He had started performing by singing with a 12-string acoustic guitar in Bolton in 1973, and in a room over a Salford pub, but soon developed an urge to follow the radical, avant-rock lead set by the Velvet Underground. In 1976, in London, after a few false starts, and almost joining an early version of the Clash, he had helped form Ultravox!, looking back to an idealised self-consciously high-brow form of art-glam music, and over the head of punk, to the electronic pop groups that would look to early Ultravox for inspiration – soon without the exclamation mark – as much as Kraftwerk, Can, Bowie and Eno.
Leaving Ultravox by 1980, before they became a more ordinary pop group, his first two solo albums, Metamatic and The Garden, were like precise, visionary J. G. Ballard commentaries turned into intense dreamlike musicals. Always one step ahead of fashion, exiled until the twenty-first century from critical currents, when his experiments with form and sound made more sense, he was almost wilfully off the beat of commercial acceptance.
His lonely, striving music constantly imagined potential futures by exploring both utopian and dystopian landscapes, investigating how cities, and the space around them, trigger and re-programme our memories. His other work, as a photographer, painter, theorist and as a graphic designer using his non-stage name designing book covers for the likes of Anthony Burgess and Jeanette Winterson, demonstrates an essential intellectual elegance and curiosity. However space age, dislocated and alienated his music became, however Ballardian, surreal and abstract his conceptual concerns, he remained fixed in a northern time and space. He has talked of how his childhood coincided with the dissolution of the northern factories, the devastation of World War II, and the construction of motorways. ‘Everything was change: decline, ruins, overgrowth, then re-growth.’
Dr C. P. – Christopher Paul – Lee, film historian, senior lecturer in cultural studies at Salford University, academic, member of the 1970s surreal musical comedy troupe Alberto Y Los Trios Paranoias (along with vagabond meta-Manchester music man, as much from the muddy 1760s as the rock and roll 1960s,
drummer Bruce Mitchell), author of a book on Bob Dylan’s appearance at the Manchester Free Trade Hall on 17 May 1966, at which Dylan was called ‘Judas’ by an audience member, was born in Manchester in 1950. Lee, who was at the Free Trade Hall that night, brought with him into this Lowry world not just spidery, volatile alley poet Dylan but also another of his favourite subjects, the unpredictably subversive slapstick comedian Frank ‘Bah, I’ve supped some stuff tonight’ Randle.
Born Arthur Hughes in Standish, Wigan in 1901, once a friend of George Formby, who he later reviled for selling out to the soft south while he stuck to his wild northern guns, Randle began as an acrobat called Arthur Twist. As a child, he sold ‘t’ finest oranges in Wiggin at t’ middle of Chorley market site proper next to t’ pump’. For a while he was a sports-car-loving superstar earning thousands a week, more popular in the north than cautious, docile Formby, dressing up as a variety of crackpot characters – randy ruffians, cursing deadbeats and belching buffoons. He always appeared on stage without teeth, exaggerating his grotesqueness: southern critics said he lacked polish; he replied, ‘What do you think I am – a coffin?’ When he appeared at the London Palladium, most of those in the expensive front-row seats made a rapid exit when he threw his dentures into the audience – when you couldn’t immediately think of anything funny to say, whipping out the false teeth for a quick gurn was good for a giggle. He would appear in a bathing costume.
Engraving by Joseph Wilson Lowry after a drawing by James Nasmyth detailing the interior of a power loom factory in Stockport, 1949
‘By God, that watter was cold. When I came out I didn’t know whether my name was Angus or Agnes.’ Always a bit of a bugger with a screw or two loose, spotlessly anti-authoritarian, he once bombarded Blackpool – or possibly Accrington – with toilet rolls from a plane after a censorship row.
The eight rickety rollicking cheap-as-chips films he starred in for John E. Blakely’s defiantly local Mancunian Films during the 1940s, before his career was effectively vaporised by television, madly outdid the corn and crudity of the coming Carry On films: in Somewhere in Camp from 1942 he is a soldier riding a donkey on parade being asked by his sergeant what he thinks he is doing. ‘Sitting on me ass!’ In Randle’s last Mancunian film, the drunkenly chaotic It’s a Grand Life, the one-man Lancastrian Marx Brothers, either the funniest man alive or the most deflated, still playing a private at fifty, appears with Diana Dors, whose stunt double was Pat Phoenix, later to play sharp, passionate Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street. (The film used the imposing exterior of Xaverian College in Rushholme, near to its studios, for some of its scenes.) In the early 1950s, threatened by new forms of entertainment, he referred to the new craze of skiffle as ‘piffle’. Beaten down by debt, neglect and alcohol abuse – towards the end it would take an entire bottle of whisky to get him on stage – he died in 1957.
John Noakes, born 6 March 1934, in Shelf, near Halifax, a member of the classic John, Pete and Val Blue Peter line-up between 1967 and 1972, proud owner of Shep, the most famous Blue Peter dog after Petra, often used the Frank Randle catchphrase, ‘Get off me foot!’
Mark Edward Smith, pitch-black comedian, fierce philosopher, singer, memoirist, sadist, scholar, gentleman, lover, hater, drinker, man with a black-hole grin like Randle and ‘veteran rocker’ (Daily Mail) is born in Salford on 5 March 1957, moving three miles north to Prestwich (priest’s farmed land) when he is six months old, earliest memory having a hot wash aged four before first day at school, leaves school at sixteen, works in a meat factory, is a docker at eighteen, auditions for local heavy-metal bands but is rejected for being tone-deaf and/or obnoxious.
He deforms The Fall in 1976 ‘to have raw music with really weird vocals over it’ and for decades is its only continuous member, organising the musicians, sound and things around him like Miles Davis or John Mayall. The Fall become known as John Peel’s favourite band possibly because they never stop and never will and always sound the same but different, and to some extent satisfy those wondering what Frank Randle would sound like leading a group as a fan of Can, Captain Beefheart and the Stooges. The Fall songs doggedly rummage through Smith’s taut bustling mind, which is something to be scared of, which is inside the north, which is inside his mind, which is made up of words, chopped-up blood and thunder, soiled Bury blues and dank cruel smells.
Manchester was pretty grey in the seventies, he says. ‘I liked them days. It’s turning touristy now. I can’t keep pace with it. I work away a lot and every time I come back there’s some new monstrosity of a building sprung up.’
Morrissey’s favourite Fall single was their seventh, ‘Lie Dream of a Casino Soul’, released in 1981. He once assured me the name of his group, the Smiths, was not a tribute to Mark. Smith called Morrissey south Manchester and Catholic as opposed to his north Manchester and Protestant. Morrissey stands close in this Lowry painting to the three greatest Manchester guitar players:
Johnny Marr, born in Ardwick, 31 October 1963, Manchester rapture, rain and romance ringing in his ears, streaming into his songs, lifting the Smiths to greatness, a candidate to feature in an ideal Bob Dylan band. Vini Reilly, born on 4 August 1953 in Higher Blackley, a candidate to feature in an ideal Miles Davis ensemble, Manchester/moorland gulfs of shadow, darkening skies and dreams of winter pouring from his fingers. Roy Harper, born in Rusholme, Manchester on 12 June 1941, who also has one of the loveliest most sensuous darknightofthesoul voices of any Manchester musician, with a desperate, cunning mind – often at the end of its tether and then completely in control – which cuts into and through the dream universe as deftly as De Quincey, E. Gaskell, A. Burgess or E. Smith.
At fourteen he formed a group, De Boys, with his brothers David and Harry. At fifteen home life became too much and he left, lying about his age to join the RAF, where he performed skiffle at camp concerts and ultimately suffered a self-induced nervous breakdown, which led to committal to Lancaster Moor Mental Institute and extreme forms of treatment including electroconvulsive therapy. At some point during his short stay at the hospital Roy was beaten for dressing without permission and then escaped through a bathroom window wearing his pyjamas. He was arrested a few weeks later while attempting to climb the clock tower at St Pancras station in London.
While serving one year in Walton Jail, Liverpool, Harper was put in charge of the library and began reading philosophy and writing poetry, all the while practising his frenetic, ethereal guitar. He was released in 1964 and travelled around North Africa and Europe for over a year playing his guitar. He began to perform in folk clubs to make a living and express his twisting, twisted mind, and was soon offered the chance to record by a small independent label, Strike. His first album, in 1966, The Sophisticated Beggar, featured his cracked, epic poetry and cracked folk melodies sung over complex acoustic guitar arrangements, generating an inflamed calm utilising Echoplex reverb and other effects. This record boasts the first known use of electric guitar effects on an acoustic guitar. The opening song, ‘China Girl’, reflects the increasing numbers of immigrants arriving in Rusholme in the 1950s, especially from newly independent India and newly created Pakistan as well as China. The immigrants quickly got their bearings, creating a chain of gaudy Asian restaurants along a section of Rusholme still known today as Curry Mile.
Harper would go on to write a radiant and traumatised series of albums that made him the closest compulsive European chronicler, curator, surrealist, troubadour, explorer, comedian, phantom, realist and illusionist to Bob Dylan – taking personal hold of history, seizing control of cities and loners, a life that began so abruptly and tragically in slummy wartime Rusholme, birthplace of L. S. Lowry, through voice, guitar and supernatural mental effort.
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Along the way, with paint and a particular presence of mind, Lowry monitored a solid world that was subsiding, the Victorian era breaking down, the murky climax of the industrial era, people crawling like refugees among the half-magical ruins of a once-heroic construction of new
wealth and reason, marooned on an island where it seemed just about possible to live. He drifted in his own dry, disaffiliated way through the thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, the decades leading to his death, further and further away from his Victorian beginnings, deeper and deeper into the daunting, enthralling white blanks in his paintings. His fame grew. His resistance to accolades, admiration, awards remained stubborn: he was renowned for turning down an OBE, a CBE and a knighthood – the last offered by Harold Wilson, a great fan, who used Lowry paintings for his Christmas cards while in office: The Skaters in 1964 and the epic near-futurist composite industrial landscape The Pond in 1965. As far as Lowry was concerned, Stockport Viaduct was more worthy of an honour.
The Pond was painted in 1950, and features Stockport Viaduct as a distant apparition amid an uncanny treeless weatherless glory of sublimely dull grey-white sky, smoking chimneys, rusty-brick houses, bobbing boats, cracked walls, spindly poles and anonymous preoccupied people. In 1967 Lowry’s Coming Out of School appeared on the highest-denomination postage stamp in a series dedicated to ‘great British artists’ (the others were Gainsborough, Reynolds and Constable). Eleven million were sold inside a month. His north, built around his own isolation from and vaguely official involvement in Lancashire life, was being appropriated by those yearning for a simpler, rosier but inattentive view of an imaginary north that was fast disappearing.