The North

by Paul Morley

  Logan asked me to come to London for an interview, suggesting there was a chance I could actually write for my favourite music paper. It was now forty years since the last Briton had won at Wimbledon, and ten years since England had won the World Cup, with Roger Hunt, born near Wigan, six miles north of Warrington, Cheshire in Golborne (stream where marsh marigolds grow), Lancashire, playing at inside left, number 10. Geoff Hurst consistently points out that he was confident his controversial second goal, England’s third, definitely crossed the line, despite German appeals, because Hunt, a born striker, two yards away, celebrated a goal rather than ensuring that the ball was in the net. Hunt had no doubt; good enough for Hurst. It was Alan Ball, born in Farnworth, then of Lancashire, three miles south-east of Bolton, five miles south-west of Bury, nine miles north of Manchester, on 12 May 1945, at twenty the youngest member of Sir Alf Ramsay’s squad of twenty-two, who had chased down the ball in the 101st minute as part of a memorably tireless two-hour display and crossed it for Hurst to smash against the underside of the crossbar, and then down on, over, around the German goal line.

  My dad was falling backwards, the wrong side of the line, as shown by the move back up the A6 towards Manchester, away from Cheshire. The house we now had was big, but old and bleak, beyond any possible better days, with a back garden I don’t remember anyone ever visiting, filled perhaps with uncherished remnants of our previous houses and lives, falling apart and rotting into the ground. The sun never seemed to shine; neighbours never visited. For me it was just a functional resting place between gigs and music venues, where my life was increasingly located, and it encouraged me to make plans to get away.

  The house in Heaton Moor was my dad’s last house, his final place, and the last home of the Morley family. You could say it was hopeless, even when there was hope. Together, at the end, perhaps, of our authentic father–son relationship stretching back to standing on thirties-style terraces to see Manchester City win the First Division in 1968, we saw City win the League Cup at Wembley in 1976, against Newcastle United. Peter Barnes, born in Manchester the same year as me, scored the first goal, and after Newcastle equalised, Dennis Tueart, Newcastle-born and a Newcastle fan as a boy, scored the winner with what he called the greatest goal of his career, an overhead shot with his back to the goal. For thirty-five years I could mark this match as the last one I went to with my father, because it was the last trophy City earned until they won the FA Cup in 2011.

  I left Stockport station one morning to travel to London and the NME. I caught the train from Manchester which had to stop at Stockport after it had crept across the viaduct with a view of the Merseyway shopping centre – now shifting into yesterday, as old-fashioned as the 1960s at a time when five years passing seemed like a generation and a new generation was needed. In London, high up in an office building overlooking the River Thames designed by the same architect who had created the station approach gracefully curving down its sixties groove from Piccadilly into Manchester, and the busy, sleek Euston station where my train arrived, I was asked by Logan to write some concert reviews from Manchester.

  Because of the Sex Pistols getting inside our heads at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, there was now a local scene of groups, labels and personalities to report on. My first review in the paper was about the Buzzcocks’ sixth gig in a venue along Deansgate. I thought they were amazing, and I was absolutely right, and they made me want to be amazing.

  The series of self-inventions I had achieved since arriving in the north – moving to Reddish, walking around Reddish, joining the library, exploring Stockport, taking in Manchester and venues around the city – now reached its latest stage. My father lived long enough to see me write a few articles for the NME, including my first interview, with Marc Bolan, which seemed a dream a bit like a night at Belle Vue in the late 1960s, and even now seems like a memory I have made up to satisfy certain narrative requirements.

  I’d seen him a couple more times, and he had invited me to the Granada TV studios, where he was recording his Marc series – his friend David Bowie was a guest on the show – but I had an appointment interviewing C. P. Lee of Alberto Y Los Trios Paranoias in Didsbury for the NME and failed to turn up to watch the pair of them messing about and singing a new Bowie song called ‘Heroes’ in what turned out to be the last few days of Marc’s life. This was the only chance I ever had of meeting David Bowie, as if he was actually real. I once played Marc some Buzzcocks music in his Granada dressing room minutes before he went to have his make-up done in a chair next to William Roache, the actor who had played Ken Barlow since the very first episode of Coronation Street – and who might yet play him after he has died. Bolan thought Buzzcocks were cute, which I thought was a bit like calling Albert Camus cute.

  One part of my life now clashed with another, and sent me spinning through space, pretty much to where I am now, writing this sentence.

  A few weeks before Bolan died, in June 1977, my dad, not much of a traveller, set out in his car from Heaton Moor, heading for what may or may not have been an unknown destination. Within minutes he would have crossed the hidden Mersey, ignoring the immortal, watchful viaduct, heading away from Manchester, up the sterling Buxton Road, through devious, renamed Hazel Grove, south into east Cheshire, and north Derbyshire, and then beyond, to where the north clearly is no more, and everything changes. Perhaps he took another route out of Stockport, driving out to Cheadle to join the A34, driving down towards Handforth, where his wife had been born, between the airport and Bramhall, joining the A535 outside Alderley Edge, heading towards Holmes Chapel, crossing the Crewe–Manchester railway line, making the gentle climb out of Twemlow, spotting for the last time the always unlikely Jodrell Bank, where the 1950s stayed put in space and time, joining the M6 near Sandbach, moving west on to the M5 around West Bromwich, by which time his destination was clearly going to take him past Worcester and Tewkesbury, driving beyond Gloucester and Cheltenham, looking for the end of the world.

  He found it, and never returned, deciding, in the way you must if you decide such a thing, to kill himself in the early hours of what must have been a particularly tense morning outside Stroud, Gloucester, in the south-west of England, a place I had never visited until I went to his funeral on a day that for many people probably turned out fine.

  He died in his car, but not in a car crash, crossing a final one-way border separating him from me, turning blue in the face thinking that having to survive one more stunning day, one more hour, one more minute and, in the end, even one more second was more than he could cope with. A man who had seemed particularly undaring for most of his life, give or take the dramatic move north, executed one monstrous dare right at the end of his life with such commitment it wiped him out. He had driven himself to an early grave. It was forty-one years since Fred Perry was the last British tennis player to win Wimbledon.

  If he had lived, what would he have made of the new, confident Manchester that started to develop through the 1980s and nineties, building on the past as a foundation, as a direct and indirect bloody-minded response to the startling connection that the Sex Pistols made with local history, to a bomb planted by the IRA, ripping out the Arndale Centre with almost architectural precision, to the Commonwealth Games held in the city in 2002? Would he have felt at home in a post-bomb, modernised, sweet-talking, boutique Manchester, decorated with uninspired examples of contemporary civic space, lacking a little traditional local personality, lacking signs of Toast Rack verve, shoving the gutted, unmodernised past behind the scenes, but nicely relined with swish retro-future trams, streets now tidily draped around rediscovered even cherished canals mostly released from dismal, manky limbo, as though they introduced a continental flair to local proceedings, set in a wider north that at least in the prime city centres was being splashed with post-slum newness, pop-culture life, international festivals, consumer gear, art galleries, slick restaurants, branded cafés, illuminated corporate logos and post-industrial endeavour? Or was he always destined on
e way or another to leave?

  What would he have made of Manchester City becoming by the time he was in his mid-seventies, after nearly forty years of retreat, disappointment and embarrassing mediocrity, the richest team in the world, richer even than their monstrous local rivals Manchester United of Stretford, who played at a refurbished Old Trafford ground next to where the BBC had built a new ‘media city’ in a Salford injected with dust-obliterating Eurostyled steel and glass, as if the Corporation can bring to national broadcasting something of the spiky, sparring northern views and differences so boldly displayed by the Granada TV of the 1950s, sixties and seventies?

  Manchester City would become once more League champions, forty-four years after me and my dad had seen them win the League up in Newcastle, and even though there were those who complained they had merely bought it, been given it as a gift by distant, calculating Arab owners, those who had been around all of those forty-four years knew that it had taken more than cash to finally win the title again. It had taken belief and communal willpower, a northern spirit rooted in centuries of shared experience and an accumulation of attitude, shared among families, friends and communities, many of them in the Stockport part of Greater Manchester, where United tended to stand for privilege and City for self-sufficiency and a moral purity that outside investment however immense, suspicious or unlimited could never corrupt.

  If my father had still been alive, Manchester City winning the League, in a twenty-first century resembling but complicatedly, technologically removed from the 1970s he never made it beyond, would it have been an occasion that made it clear, perhaps with a clarity never previously achieved, that we were deeply, fantastically father and son, and he loved me, and I loved him, and we now hugged all the time, making up for all that time in the sixties and part of the seventies when we just never did, because we were in our own space, in our own minds, only connected by a shared surname and a vague feeling never quite openly articulated that we were in this – whatever this was – together?

  Winning the League made me think this and about all those years I had spent without a father, without really, deeply thinking about not having a father, because it would have been too much to bear, and would have made me think about my own possible trips to Gloucester, on the outskirts of oblivion. When City won the Premier League, losing a match they had to win with four minutes to go and then scoring two goals when it seemed like it wasn’t going to happen, and the might of United was after all that horribly eternal, and then, in a moment, it wasn’t, because there was such a thing as a change, and you could see history take shape right in front of you, I cried not just because it was all so unexpected and exciting, but because I thought of my father, and it felt like he was thinking of me. That wasn’t about money or cynical outsider manipulation of market forces, a despoiling of once-resonant-now-wilting tradition. It was about something else, the something else that makes you think, about how all change begins with someone having a thought.

  If he had lived, would he now be northern enough to wonder if this moneyed, mannered, same but different north, home to much of the BBC in a Salford sealed off by committee decisions and diplomatic niceties from the Salford of ‘Dirty Old Town’, even as it sentimentally clings on to simply put memories and mementos of Lowry, is still the north he never warmed to, but then fell in love with, or at least just grew used to, to the extent of losing his elongated Kent vowels and getting a mite Stocky curt around his accent, or a facile, vapid new north, turned by market research and fine-tuned opinion polls into another place altogether?

  Or would he have left the north, a few weeks after his exploratory drive to Gloucester that ended not with a suicide but, after a period of anguished contemplation, a clumsy divorce from his wife, our mum, and a move back to Kent, leaving us behind, because he had to, because we were in the north, and he never really got it, and he never set out to explore it and make it a real home. If he had moved back to Margate, and lived in whatever circumstances until 2012, surviving in his own way, as separated from me as much as he was separated from his father, because some patterns can simply not be altered, what would he have made of the decline of his hometown?

  When he grew up in Cliftonville, in the 1940s and 1950s, and then when we visited on holiday during the sixties and seventies, the place seemed to have survived without being marked down, or maimed, by the war and the staggering post-war disorientation. Cliftonville, the more salubrious district of Margate, seemed when I went there as a young boy to be even more clean and smart than an idealised version of Cheshire, and set by the swaying spraying sea in a way that opened up the world and cleared the mind.

  A certain amount of fun lay at the end of every street, which all smelled exotically of the English Channel and a wide, perfect, Famous Five sky. The sand glowed, the deckchairs evoked sun-baked contentment, colourful wooden beach huts were arranged along the beaches and bays with an almost glamorous, cheering neatness. Forty years later, the town seemed in tatters, the sheen worn off, Margate a once-perky seaside resort given bad advice by an anonymous part of an unnamed country until quite recently on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The beach huts had gone, pulled like rotten teeth, latterly used by the homeless as places to doss; the sand had somehow faded; the sea seemed more menacing and half-hearted.

  The Dreamland Funfair that I visited every year from the early 1960s until I stopped going to Margate in 1973, feeling too old to go on holiday with my parents, once a distant cousin of Belle Vue, a primitive ancestor of the postmodern theme park, was now derelict, the sorry remains hidden from sight, as though what was left had been placed in an unmarked grave because it too had killed itself. The shops on the front, if they were not boarded up, were mostly filled with stuff that had no relation with being so near the sea. The charming, lively amusement arcades glittering with candyfloss promise now monotonously clicked and churned with something a little surly. The cafés looked broken, the sky embarrassed that such squalor had been allowed to grow at the water’s edge.

  A new art gallery was boldly perched at the edge of the sea up the hill from the main seafront, made out of the nicely balanced space, white and glass you would expect of such buildings, as if blown from across the Channel, a hopeful sign that the inspiration behind the art that would be displayed there might seep out into the town and impress itself upon the torn, splintered ugliness. Imagination might feed imagination, which one day might then take off and change things for the better. Margate had also been given a little manicure, a single kiss of life, and people were trying to spruce up the place with a little spit, polish and attention, because such towns are on the verge of becoming ghost towns right in front of our eyes.

  Margate and Stockport, my dad’s main homes, where he started, where he ended up, were two of the twelve towns chosen in spring 2012 by the government and their ‘high street tsar’ Mary Portas for a pilot scheme committed to the regeneration of depleted, depressed high streets. The plan, inevitably framed around a cosmetic television series, was to liven up derelict shops and wrecked communities and inspire new market areas, hopefully recapturing a declining local sense of spirit, enterprise and place in a Britain where town centres were increasingly the home of pawn, betting, charity and pound shops. The intention was to reintroduce some of the original haphazard but determined enterprise that had invented, designed and fuelled the two towns, turning them into places with their own striking, distinctive spaces, faces, walls, roads and dwellings.

  Each town received £100,000, as if it had won a quiz show, alongside the haughty motivational hectoring of Portas. The money was perhaps enough to last a day or two, produce some stirring but simplistic television, and add a temporary frisson of jolly, jollying activity to a tiny area of the two tired towns; it was nowhere near enough to inject the necessary level of inspirational power, planning and vision required to alter the direction in which the towns were drifting.

  If my father had returned to Margate – had witnessed its decline, seen it become
a run-down reflection of his own mean inner tension, resembling more and more those blighted areas around Reddish, so that Cliftonville, unbelievably, started to look like a close cousin of Gorton, Hyde and Denton, as though it was just the other side of North Reddish Park, hemmed in by the Nico Ditch, stuck in the shadows like those thrown over decades and terraced square miles by the Moors Murderers – would he have somehow felt he was to blame? That he had brought something infectious back with him from those cracked, confounded northern streets, a virus that had spread from his tarnished mind and skin out into the fresh Thanet air, that turned Margate, hopeful and happy by the sea, into an abandoned inner-city district where nothing was due to happen but an evacuation of spirit and a squandering of energy? Was that why, when he headed out of Stockport, off into the great unknown, he headed south-west, to Gloucester, so that he didn’t take back to his hometown whatever it was that made him think there was no point and purpose to anything? Did he try to save Margate? But it would take a lot more than his terrible self-sacrifice. It was all destined to happen; it wasn’t his fault.

  Not long after he died I left the north, at least in body. I moved to London to work full time for the NME, not knowing how long I would be there, not knowing that whatever happened, whether I knew it or not, I was northern and always would be. I couldn’t feel it banked up behind me, and mostly went out of my way to avoid noticing it, but eventually it became clear that whatever reinventions I might have designed in the south – crossing new sorts of borders and making, or missing, very 1980s deadlines – they would never have as much effect on my voice, accent, attitude, character, sensitivity as the few years I spent becoming myself in Reddish and without even knowing it taking in all that north. Nothing outside Reddish had as much impact on the forming, and deforming, of my personality.