by Paul Morley
In Manchester the outside world, containing different sorts of outside worlds, poured in, in the form of groups and musicians with their own sense of history, identity, understanding and personal motivation. There was plenty to enjoy, but essentially to study. While my school teachers were turning the adventure of life into a retreat, these musicians, emerging out of the fluid 1960s, were in their way teaching me to believe that there was more to life and existence than what there was on the surface around where I lived. There was more to life than bricks and a bus ride from one part of town to another. There was more to life than school and family and the local shops. Even those groups I didn’t like had some form of advice to pass on about how to make the world a bigger, stranger, more challenging and transformative place.
At the Free Trade Hall, after T-Rex, within months I went to see David Bowie, Lou Reed, Black Sabbath, Curved Air, Deep Purple, Caravan, Rory Gallagher, Groundhogs, Steeleye Span, Mott the Hoople, King Crimson, Soft Machine, Fairport Convention and T-Rex again. The next year Pink Floyd playing Dark Side of the Moon, Lou Reed again, T-Rex once more, Roxy Music and David Bowie again – the last four especially giving me important, detailed information about how you could invent for yourself your own presence and role in life.
The world and my mind were getting bigger, pushed and pulled by the alien complexity, variety, volume and energy of these charged, confident characters, challenging, mirroring, destroying, reinventing a whole host of musical traditions and ideals. Another venue opened a couple of hundred yards along the Hyde Road from Belle Vue, on Birch Street between Gorton and Ardwick – the Stoneground, formerly the Corona Cinema and then the Southern Sporting Club, where the Beatles had played in 1963. The superstars did not come here. This was not as grand as the Free Trade Hall, more a dimly lit large undistinguished bar with a small low-lying stage, and a few seats and tables around the edges of a bumpy, tacky floor. You walked through the door, past the dubious hot-dog stall lurking outside under the still-existing Corona sign, into what was probably in daylight a wreck but which at night seemed curiously enticing. It was close enough to the Belle Vue complex, by the entrance to the speedway, that when I needed to queue for a ticket to a big concert at the King’s Hall – by the likes of the Rolling Stones or the Who – I would go to a gig at the Stoneground, and about 2 a.m. join the line for tickets so that I’d be near the front when the box office opened at nine.
The Who played two nights at the King’s Hall, on 2 and 3 November 1973, the week their mod song-cycle double album Quadrophenia was released. Showbusiness, an entertainment loaded with conviction, was presented with theatrical even violent force. The Rolling Stones played a couple of months earlier on 11 and 12 September during their European tour, a couple of weeks after the release of Goats Head Soup, the follow-up to Exile on Main Street, ‘the end of their golden age’, the last tour featuring Mick Taylor. They started with ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘Gimme Shelter’ and ended with ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and ‘Street Fighting Man’. Jagger was in a chest-baring jewel-encrusted skin-tight jumpsuit, wore full eye make-up, and looked as though he might have escaped from the nearby reptile house, or maybe from the wrestling ring. I watched both performances, feeling crusading showmanship cut open the moment, exciting but offering few clues about the future, never thinking that forty years later there would be such a thing as the Rolling Stones and the Who, still in action in a manner of speaking, demanding attention, made up of a past I had become a tiny part of.
At the Stoneground, set in a bombed-out wind-gutted wasteland where little would grow but bristly weed, hearing music mostly from what was then a vaguely defined underground, I extended my accelerating knowledge of this new world, which was itself continually changing shape. Exploring the world further, which separated me so satisfyingly from school and the cracking-up of my remote, failing dad, giving me a new sort of knowledge and therefore power. By the end of 1971 I was reading the New Musical Express, Melody Maker and Sounds. Music journalists became a new set of teachers, in new subjects that didn’t have names but settled around the ideas of thinking for yourself, relishing new directions and being ready for anything. This writing, about music, but also about other things, which seemed important to me and where I was, and which seemed connected to other reading I was doing, gave me some ideas about what I could do in my life. One thing I was taught by reading the NME was that you could earn a living, or at least get a job, writing about Atomic Rooster and the Edgar Broughton Band. This seemed astonishing, but eminently practical. No one had been helping me work out how to become a writer, but seeing these gigs made me plot my own route. This was me doing my homework, having never done any of the homework my teachers gave me.
I was not allowed to go out very often by my dad, certainly not before I was sixteen or seventeen, however much I pleaded and begged, seeing it as positive and enlightening, whereas he saw it as dubious and mysterious if not downright dangerous. It was not clear to me what he had got up to in Margate as a sixteen- and seventeen-year-old in the early 1950s, but he didn’t seem keen on releasing me into the night around Manchester.
I occasionally haggled my way out of the house and went to see Budgie, Amon Düül II, Arthur Brown wearing a phone on his head, Can, Alex Harvey Band, Gong, Gentle Giant, Kevin Coyne wearing a shoe on his head, Magma, Backdoor, Horslips, Hatfield and the North, Vinegar Joe and Leo Sayer – who had a hit single at the time, so that the Stoneground was full, people crammed into the often-half-empty hall, falling over each other and spilling out through the front doors. He dressed as a clown, the sort of clown dying across the road at Belle Vue, but which could temporarily come alive on Top of the Pops and the tiny taped-together Stoneground stage.
Another venue opened as if solely for me, and everyone else who felt the same way, was the Hard Rock and Village Discotheque, a former bowling alley in Greatstone Road, Stretford with a claustrophobic space-age feel, which could hold 3,000. It was close to the Lancashire cricket ground and symbolised how my allegiances had completely shifted, after initial reluctance, from cricket to pop music. The low-ceilinged chrome-trimmed venue could be turned into either a disco or a rock venue with upstairs seating and cheaper downstairs standing. The opening nights were 2 and 3 September 1972, and on both nights, at more or less the exact moment he was becoming self-defined living legend – the architect of his own fame – David Bowie performed, beginning his shows with ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’, ‘Hang on to Yourself’ and ‘Ziggy Stardust’, and ending them with ‘Suffragette City’ and ‘Rock ’n’ roll Suicide’ a few months after he had played a less-than-half-full Free Trade Hall, which I also went to. Seeing Bowie, leading his Spiders from Mars, turning the spur of the moment into mesmeric, lacerating entertainment, was like being able to get inside, and live there for a while, an enigmatic, hallucinatory story by the science-fiction writers I had started reading, Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Norman Spinrad, or even the books I’d struggled to interpret by Orwell, Huxley, Borges, Pynchon, Nabokov, Burroughs, Burgess and Kafka.
I went to both nights, although I now don’t understand how I got permission from my suspicious, anxious dad, other than the two shows were on a Saturday and Sunday, or how I could afford the one-pound entry. Morrissey lived around the corner, so you would think, even though he was only thirteen, he was there – or some spectral representative on his behalf. Maybe he hung around outside in the car park in a sad teenage sort of way, feeling rejected enough to fuel an entire lifetime of expressions of disappointment and exclusion.
Morrissey’s first gig (in the audience) was in fact also T-Rex, his at the Belle Vue King’s Hall on 16 June 1972. Marc Bolan and T-Rex had fuelled twelve months of unprecedented teenage hysteria, and Morrissey and I were among the only fifty or so boys in an audience of 5,000 frantically screaming girls. Over their sparking heads, in about the tenth row, in the midst of their tumultuous collective orgasms, on my own like Morrissey, as much worked up inside my own head, I caught
vivid sight of the now-famous Marc Bolan adoring being adored, transferring the chaotic, urgent energy into ravishing enchantment. ‘It was messianic and complete chaos,’ Morrissey recalled. ‘My father dropped me off outside. I was wearing a purple satin jacket. I think he thought I’d be killed and he waved me off like it was the last time he’d ever see me alive. It must have been like losing your child to a deadly cult.’ What kind of kids liked T-Rex? he once asked. ‘School-hating anarchists.’ (Oddly enough, fans at my school of the apparently more dark and devious Sabbath, Purple, ELP and Zep tended to be more obedient; fans of the apparently teenybop Bolan and the tarted-up, surely fraudulent Bowie were more untamed.)
A few months after his September Hard Rock shows, at the end of December, Bowie returns, for two nights, the tickets twenty-five pence extra, supported by Stealers Wheel, and I am there again on my own under fluorescent lights amid a stunning smell of incense that seems to lift you an inch or two off the floor. I get myself to the very front, right under the intensely present Bowie, and touch his red shiny space-age boots, just to see if I receive an electric shock. In a way, I do. Another abstract shock had hit the city.
Seeing Bowie five times in 1972, with more to come in 1973, including a visit to the Free Trade Hall the night before my maths O level under the cover of revising at a friend’s house, Bowie entering like a returning emperor checking his conquered empire, dressed as Aladdin Sane, yet another electrifying version of himself, leaping off the planet and back on, seemingly at will, he made it seem like what he was doing was calculating exactly how amazing the future could be, a future that was always on the verge of happening but always out of reach. He proposed an alternative reality, a number of alternative realities, getting to the very essence of what we want from our pop stars, who should, essentially, be at the dazzling forefront of the militant young using art as a cover for more direct action.
What makes you great, he was suggesting, is not necessarily your individual works, but your very existence and your personality. Borrowing from other visionaries and master illusionists, from Syd Barrett and Marc Bolan, from John Heartfield and the Velvet Underground, from Dada and Elvis, Cocteau and Cage, Modigliani and Ballard, from Burroughs and Houdini, but ahead of his time, as sampler, collagist and appropriating technological prophet, the one-time junior paste-up artist at an advertising agency took bits and fragments from the past, the rubble of art, entertainment, philosophy, music and film, and turned them into new ways of seeing the world. Intent on smashing the boundaries that separated art, he sewed together scattered fragments from wildly different traditions and scattered himself into one ready-made whole.
The Granada Television studios
I came to the conclusion in my own teenage way that he was thinking the most astounding things, sometimes very calmly, sometimes in a deep frenzy, about what it was to think at all, how comic, deeply tragic and astounding it was to move from thought to thought and use these thoughts to make yourself up, to invent who you were going to be from moment to moment. As a soft-centred lonely teenage someone who noticed that David Bowie really seemed to know things, and was so clever he could make an entirely original creation out of his mind and memory, I watched him closely during those fantastic and yet-to-be-fully fathomed 1970s. I wanted to know things too. I wanted to be that clever. I wanted to be that beautiful. I wanted to do something that no one else could do, like him, whatever it took. Bowie changing all the time suited how I was changing as an adolescent – his move from image to image, concept to concept, name to name was something I recognised as I went through all the planned and unplanned changes you go through as a teenager. Like a roving soul in search of a body, he entered another person whenever he wished and made them seem exciting and glamorous – one day your hair is orange and spiky, then it is white and cropped, then it is blonde and floppy . . . one day your clothes are space-age Edwardian, then they are Victorian surreal, then they are undeniably dubious . . . suddenly you are taller, hairier, stranger, with deeper, darker lusts, a deeper, darker voice . . . people around you are boring, and you are not, because of all this change, which no one can keep up with, bar Bowie and the other pop stars that ripped through reality with their speed of thought and their clear aversion to cliché and obviousness . . . and as you change, if people don’t like you, or ignore you, then you become someone else, another person, with another appearance, and another set of characteristics.
At the Hard Rock I saw Stephen Stills, Focus, Michael Chapman, Jeff Beck, went regularly to the ‘heavy night’ on Thursdays, but remember well not managing to get to see Led Zeppelin. I was there in 1975 for the last Hard Rock show on 19 October by Tangerine Dream, still a pound to get in if you stood downstairs; in many ways I am still at that concert, which is going on for ever, and everything else is a hallucination induced by the ecstatic pulses emerging from the machines on stage which three men with much hair and straight faces are operating, abstractly connecting with the atom-locating atom-splitting computer-pioneering history of Manchester and the questing, conspiring, analytical German curiosity of Marx and Engels.
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1641
The first mention of the soft and beautiful substance forming the covering or envelope of the seeds of the cotton plant (genus Gossypium) in manufacturing appears in a small treatise entitled the ‘Treasure of Traffic’, written in 1641 by Sir Lewes Roberts (author of the noted book The Merchants Mappe of Commerce), in which he states that ‘the town of Manchester buys the linen yarn of the Irish in great quantity, and, weaving it, returns the same again to Ireland to sell; neither doth her industry rest here, for they buy cotton wool in London that comes first from Cyprus and Smyrna, and work the same into fustians, vermilions, dimities, and other such stuffs; which they return to London, where they are sold; and thence, not seldom, are sent into foreign parts, which have means on far easier terms to provide themselves of the first materials.’
Jeremiah Horrocks died on 3 January 1641 in Toxteth, Liverpool, aged twenty-two. A memorial plaque in Westminster Abbey in London, erected in 1874, after two centuries of neglect, eloquently records his achievements.
IN MEMORY OF JEREMIAH HORROCKS
CURATE OF HOOLE IN LANCASHIRE
WHO DIED ON THE 3RD OF JANUARY `1641 IN OR NEAR
HIS 72ND YEAR
HAVING IN SO SHORT A LIFE
DETECTED THE LONG INEQUALITY IN THE MEAN MOTION
OF JUPITER AND SATURN
DISCOVERED THE ORBIT OF THE MOON TO BE AN ELLIPSE
DETERMINED THE MOTION OF THE LUNAR APSE
SUGGESTED THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF ITS REVOLUTION
AND PREDICTED FROM HIS OWN OBSERVATIONS THE
TRANSIT OF VENUS
WHICH WAS SEEN BY HIMSELF AND HIS FRIEND
WILLIAM CRABTREE
ON SUNDAY THE 24TH OF NOVEMBER 1639.
1639
On 24 November 1639, in the tiny Lancashire village of Much Hoole, Jeremiah Horrocks made the first observation of a transit of Venus. He was one of the first Englishmen to appreciate the astronomical revolution going on in Europe following the works of Tycho, Galileo and Kepler. It was Horrocks who first proved that the orbit of the moon is an ellipse, and Newton made good use of Horrocks’ discovery. Had he lived, would Jeremiah Horrocks have eclipsed Newton, who followed two generations later? That question obviously touched Horrocks’ nineteenth-century biographer A. B. Whatton, who left his own florid lines of Victorian verse:
That meteor-life, soon lost to vision here,
Now shines unclouded in a glorious sphere;
Yet here its light his bright example gives,
And here in fame undying Horrox lives.
1620
England was an importer rather than an exporter of linen, and the Lancashire product was probably intended mainly for the home market. The ‘homemade cloth’ of the county was coarse and cheap, as may be seen from the prices paid for the ‘Lancashire cloth’ bought by King’s College, Cambridge from 1563, and the ‘Preston cloth
’ bought by King’s and Eton College from 1600. In 1620 a Manchester draper was selling in London ‘Lynen clothe commmonlie called Stopport [Stockport] cloth’.
1619
Jeremiah Horrocks was born in Toxteth. His father was a watchmaker and the family were deeply religious Puritans. Jeremiah was a brilliant scholar and won a place at Cambridge University at the age of fourteen. By then he was already well versed in Greek, Latin and the Scriptures. He moved to Much Hoole, where he was a curate at St Michael’s, the local church.
1606
On Friday 31 January 1606 Guy Fawkes, Thomas Wintour, Ambrose Rookwood and Robert Keyes were taken to the Old Palace Yard at Westminster and hanged, drawn and quartered ‘in the very place which they had planned to demolish in order to hammer home the message of their wickedness’. The last of the four to suffer his appointed fate was Fawkes, the ‘romantic caped figure of such evil villainy’. A spectator of the scene later wrote, ‘Last of all came the great devil of all, Guy Fawkes, alias Johnson, who should have put fire to the powder. His body being weak with the torture and sickness, he was scarce able to go up the ladder, yet with much ado, by the help of the hangman, went high enough to break his neck by the fall. He made no speech, but with his crosses and idle ceremonies made his end upon the gallows and the block, to the great joy of all the beholders that the land was ended of so wicked a villainy. His remains were sent to the four corners of the Kingdom as a warning to other plotters.’
Between October 1605 and August 1606 the plague comes to Stockport. Starting with a woman affectionately known as Mad Mary, fifty-one people die in the borough. But Stockport gets off lightly compared to Manchester, where a quarter of the town’s population dies.