by Paul Morley
Except for being a music critic. There was no escaping that. Being a rock journalist was the perfect job for someone like me. It needed no official qualifications or experience other than having gone to gigs for a few years and listened to records and John Peel all the time on my own. On my own, in my bedroom, I could make up stories about what I thought about various sorts of music, act like I knew what I was talking about – because it was all being made up as we went along – and invent versions of the legends and myths that first got me excited about this sort of music. After leaving Reddish, and spending a few years unknowingly accumulating the correct idiosyncratic qualifications and finessing the perhaps desperate determination, I moved to the New Musical Express. In place of the north but still in its shadow, because it had given me the confidence to think for myself, even as I felt there were those who would never take me seriously because I was northern, there was a history of music to absorb and understand, a new path to follow until I reached some sort of destination all of my own making, which would set me off somewhere else, which might take me back where it, I, all began.
After writing for the New Musical Express for a few years, as if it was always meant to be, and experiencing the 1980s as if it was another reality, another set of myths and tall tales to turn into facts that challenged fiction, I wrote a book about my father’s suicide. It was set in a remote northern world I was beginning to remember after a couple of decades forgetting while I moved in a direction I hoped was forward, and I called it Nothing because T. S. Eliot had sat in a shelter on the promenade overlooking the sea in Margate in 1921 and written as part of Part III of The Waste Land, ‘On Margate Sands./ I can connect/ Nothing with nothing./ The broken fingernails of dirty hands./ My people humble people who expect/ Nothing.’
I sat next to the novelist Doris Lessing at a book awards dinner in the early 2000s, and she was disgusted when I told her the title of my book. She shook her head and tut-tutted like I had named my child Void or Junk. I felt as though I was being scolded by a Stockport Grammar School teacher but then considered that the fact I had travelled all the way from my box-bedroom capsule in Reddish down the road from shabby Houldsworth Square at the lustreless far edge of the collapsed Industrial Revolution to being sat next to a literature Nobel laureate was the equivalent of becoming lord mayor of London, or a prince in my own mind, which even then I was still making up. Other events that were a sign of having made it, if only in my own mind, included sitting in the back of a Ford Granada on the M4 with J. G. Ballard discussing the spiritual and psychological stature of motorways for a 1990 Channel 4 documentary, Lou Reed sneering to my face at the idea I was any kind of journalist – ‘Delmore Schwartz was a journalist!’ – and comedian Steve Martin telling his press representative to give fifteen more minutes to ‘the funny guy’ when I interviewed him for a magazine.
Thirty-odd years after the Sex Pistols in Manchester had led, what with one thing and another, to me leaving the north, having spent three decades in the south going round the houses away from the north, I was encouraged to write this book, and to find the north, where it begins, who decides such things, and what has happened to it.
I had written about northern music, including many of the groups that formed after seeing the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, and at the end of that year they played, along with the Clash, the Damned, Talking Heads, the Ramones and Buzzcocks, at a new Manchester venue putting on punk gigs, the Electric Circus in bashed-up Collyhurst along the Oldham Road – my Golden Garter, another stage on from Reddish Library.
Tan Hill on the Pennine Way in North Yorkshire
I had written a book about Joy Division, set in a northern world that was all atmosphere, mental noise and close attention to the detail that could erupt in a world where there was the action and reaction of the city, all those buildings and decisions, triumphs and disasters, and there was the rampant quiet and the stillness of the moors, and somewhere in between there were all sorts of astonishing tension and diminished intensity. There had been films about Factory Records of Manchester and Joy Division that I had appeared in either as myself or as a character. I seemed to belong in the north even though I did not live there and had not been born there. The north was the context inside which my life seemed to make sense. I grew up in a society I did not choose and then worked out for myself how to belong. The story of my life was embedded in the community where I had first derived my identity; to cut myself off from my past was to deform my current relationships, with people, with those I loved, and with reality. I am a part of history, and whether I like it or not, the bearer of a tradition. There was, after all that, no escaping it.
I needed to find out what that meant. I wrote a proposal about a north book, to clarify my own thoughts, and see if anyone was interested.
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Extracts from a proposal about a book on the north
In some ways, North will be the sequel – or prequel – to a memoir I wrote about my father’s suicide, Nothing. (Perhaps it should be titled Nowt, as long as Doris Lessing does not find out.) In Nothing, I examined how my father, born and bred in the south, found living in the north a dark and difficult prospect. He moved there in his twenties, in the early 1960s, largely because his wife, my mother, was born in the north – and perhaps in the end what separated them was this difference. It became more and more of a problem, and eventually tore them apart completely. I think the north tore apart my father’s whole life.
He ‘survived’ for about fifteen years. I left the north not long after he died in 1977, looking for my own security and stability away from a place that now lacked a centre because of the loss of my father. The north was shattered for me by my father’s ultimate rejection of a place that had become my home. I was driven to find another home. I found it in music, in writing, in books, and then, reluctantly, in London. I raced to the city in order to escape the violence of my father’s death, imagining perhaps that I was just passing through, on the way to where I needed to get. But I have never left London, and perhaps only will the day that I am described as a Londoner.
I would take the north with me, but I wouldn’t stay inside it, as the north had taught me to crave new experiences, and new discoveries. The north had taught me that once you were northern the north was wherever you were. As Ian Brown, the singer in the Stone Roses, would say – the north is not where you are, it’s where you’re at. To find the north perhaps means always coming to it. Always moving away from it, so that you can continually come back, and see it as something fresh, something alive, always forming. I am not saying this because I moved away, but I feel that to be a northerner does not mean having to live in the north from the moment you are born to the day you die. The north has become the north because of those that have moved there, or simply visited in spectacular circumstances, adding to the mongrel intensity, the hybrid complexity, the stitching together of myriad forms of otherness. The north has become the north because of those that moved away, and look back to see it more for what it is than if you stay there.
The book will be a kind of travel book that ventures into a part of the world that seems so close to us but which is as exotic as anywhere. I will set off from London’s Euston Station and head Up North, looking for that magic moment as I cross a real and/or an imaginary border from outside to inside and begin my search for the heart of the north.
I will disembark at Stockport, which is where I spent my early years, on the edge of Lancashire, Cheshire and Derbyshire, on the edge of the Pennines, a mixture of green and grey located between the country and the city, between past and future, between motorway and valley; take in the deathless desolation of the moors, the cheap flirty fun of Blackpool, the breathtaking beauty of the Lakes; and when you follow the Mersey which flows through Stockport you soon reach the New York of the north, Liverpool. From Liverpool, I will move up the coast, and explore the eastern coast, the other coast, because there is the other north of Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland. So from Stock
port, I would cross the Pennines to Sheffield, Bradford, Hull, move up to Newcastle, across to Carlisle . . . down past the Lakes through the Lancashire of Lancaster, Bolton, Bury, Rochdale, Burnley, through Manchester, learning about the birth, death and rebirth of the Manchester Ship Canal, back to Stockport, easing gently further and further south of Stockport to learn where the north dissolves, and disappears . . . and as I travel, I create a mental map, extending and expanding the idea of the north into something magnificent and secret, imposing and public.
The book will strive once and for all to answer the fundamental questions raised by the idea of the north. Where is it? What does it mean today? Where does it begin? Where did it begin? Where does it end? Where is it going? What is a northerner? Where do you start to be in the north? Does the south become the north at Watford Gap, whereas the north becomes the south at somewhere above Stoke? Does the north stop south of Scotland? Why? Is it a definite geographical location or a state of mind? Is it something that is being transformed, along with most of reality, and our memories and experience of reality, by the existence, expansion, and ultimately distorting presence of the Internet, turning it into an illusion, or more of an illusion? What will I find if I look for the north on the web – and will the web be where ideas, concepts, histories, places like the north end up, in pieces, waiting to be assembled into a new form of sense and meaning?
The book will look beneath the clichés of what makes a northerner: heart, humour, spite, chippiness, determination, passion, toughness, sentimentality, ‘northern soul’, stoicism . . . to ask what it really means to be a northerner? What makes the north special?
Is it a unique mix of the philosophy of working-class values, and ideals, coupled with the harsh living conditions, that creates a resilience and hardihood . . . Is the idea of The North rooted in what T. E. Lawrence believed, that ‘The harder the life, The better the person?’
The book will of course also contain elements of memoir, journalism, fiction, history, cultural analysis; personal memories of the north, why I lived there, why I left, why I still feel northern, why that will never disappear, if in fact the true way to write about the north is to leave it. And it will ask other questions. Why is it that we take our compass from the idea of the north? Why is it the defining upstroke on navigational devices all around the world? Does it also carry the weight of a deeper integrity; a darker intensity; a moral compass?
As the book progresses, and as I travel, looking at what is around me, and into the past, both my own and the region’s, I will begin to build some history.
The book will celebrate the brilliance of the north, claiming it as the home of independent thinking.
There will be a chapter on the seismic effect of what Arnold Toynbee dubbed the Industrial Revolution – which changed the face of the world, and which began in the north-west of England at the end of the eighteenth century. It was here that modern industry was born through enterprise, industry and the development of merchant skills, the admixture of climate, natural resources and geography, the inventiveness of its people, the building of transport infrastructures and a powerful industrial entrepreneurial spirit said to typify the region. It still produces more than half of Britain’s manufactured goods and consumables.
Before the Industrial Revolution, Lancashire was a backwater: few visited the place, roads were impassable, and there was nothing to come for anyway. But the strategic importance of the north-west has been evident since the times when the Romans mined lead in the Lake District, iron in the Furness peninsula and copper and salt in Cheshire. It was no accident that Lancashire became the home of cotton, and it was cotton that spearheaded the revolution leading to the changes, for better or worse, that we take for granted today.
Lancashire’s lowland plain was mainly arable farmland, while the moors supported farming communities which eked out an existence in the harsh winters by weaving wool. But when cotton began to compete, Lancashire had all the attributes to turn it into the workshop of the world: a moist climate, an experienced, honest workforce, and a collection of imaginative men who created the machines that made the Industrial Revolution gain momentum.
Yet every story has its dark side. And so it was the Industrial Revolution, with its dark satanic mills, that gave Lancashire its reputation as a hell on earth where innocence died and the soulless world of organised labour was born – the routines of the modern lifestyle. Fortunes were made overnight. But on the other side there was misery for millions.
I will move from industrial invention to look at the poetry and cultural distinctiveness of the north, home of the Gothic and the sentimental, the romantic and the gritty, the traditional and the radical.
I will note how the history of the north has been entered into the Internet, by thousands of individuals in their own minds, and rooms, and computers, for commercial, or educational, or obsessive, or nostalgic, or arcane, or scholarly, or speculative, or artistic, or poetic, reasons, or reasons so personal they appear unfathomable, and of course for reasons that are simply to maintain threatened historical narrative. The Internet North is most of the history of the north ever written or thought, ideas about the north, people of the north, directions, ancestors, arguments, schedules, triumphs, disasters, plus hints and whispers of all the missing silences, in-between-ness, gaps in the history and unknown blanks, waiting to be filled in or become even more silent, empty and alone. It is an impression of the north combined with the here and now tangled up with the dead and gone. The north, like everything else, has come this far, and now it is placed somewhere strange and new, dumped, perhaps, as some sort of metaphysical waste, as unwanted details that will drift off into the nowhere, as echoes of everything that happened that might yet fade away. Or it is the beginning of a new kind of north, one that brings with it everything anyone could ever need if they want to understand exactly what the north of England was and is?
This journey through the north, through history, through the book, through memories, will come up to date with the way recent popular culture, social regeneration and cosmetically enhanced city-scapes in the north have symbolised or compromised gumptious northern reality and the idealistic northern dream. It will emerge in the twenty-first century and the much-vaunted and genuinely impressive, or merely perfunctory, Renaissance of the north, where the modernisation of the north and the intended transformation of its image have created some of the most enterprising and fashionable areas in all of Europe.
I won’t necessarily write this history to claim that the north is ‘better’ or more transcendentally ‘other’ – than what, who knows – bolder, more brilliant and more breathtaking, that inside such a small ugly-shaped slab of wet rolling land on a small set of islands broken up amid a lot of water looking a little isolated off the north-west coast of Europe all of THIS happened either to it or because of it. It’s more to say this is what makes the north, always on show, and showing off, and showing the way, sometimes on the quiet, behind closed doors, the other side of lace curtains, down forbidding steps, along cryptic corridors, under the radar, and these, sure, are the highlights, with an undercurrent of lowlights, but history itself is made up of high and low lights, and a lot of action replays.
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I liked the idea of such a book, but to some extent the proposal was a set of instructions so that anyone interested could write their own book about the north, their north. Perhaps these instructions were all that needed to be written – this is the sort of book that should be written about the north; this is a starting point for how you might do it; now imagine it for yourself. In the end I decided, or it was decided for me, that I would follow these instructions, imagine it for myself and find out where I might end up. I would end up in the north, but what kind of north? A true north, a fantasy north, a shadow north, a historical north, a north made up of ghosts and disappearing places, a north setting like concrete, or the sun, into mounting Internet reality, a north all in my own mind – far removed from the north of other northerner
s, so sure of their north, where they are more northern than others, inside their own rooms, streets, dreams and memories of childhood, their own back gardens, bus stops and sweet shops.
Would I write about a personal, subjective northern front, a map of the north as it seems to me, based on my selective memories and ideological preferences and the selective memories and ideological preferences of others but based on my choice, one that abandons simplistic notions of continuity and coherence, capturing history by focusing on my own small world and my attempts to survive in it, involving a certain amount of forgetting, in order to fulfil my ambitions? And were my ambitions in the end simply to write such a book, as if all my life, everything I remembered in greater detail the older I got, all the skills I achieved, were solely for the purpose of eventually constructing a north, my north, inside a book? I had been writing my own story as I went along, without knowing it, and I would only begin to understand that story, what it was all for, how everything fitted together, where it was all heading, if I wrote a book.