Pies and Prejudice

by Stuart Maconie

  Where does it come from, this monumental, hubristic vanity, this 'cock of the walk' self-assurance, this civic, city-wide swagger pimp-rolling its way from Ancoats to Harpurhey, from Crumpsall to Chorlton, from Didsbury to Whalley Range? Not from the Gallagher brothers or Shaun Ryder or from the heady chemical euphoria of Madchester. It predates all that, just as it predates the swelled chests and heads of Cantona or George Best or the quieter glories of the Busby Babes. Basically, Manchester has fancied itself rotten for as long as anyone can remember.

  Its mouthy arrogance rankles with a lot of people, many southerners in particular. But nowhere more than on Merseyside. The rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester is not like the rivalry between, say, Edinburgh and Glasgow, based on a philosophic and cultural gap between two proud cities whose very difference and diversity is somehow useful and fruitful. It doesn't actually make sense to think of what goes down between the Scousers and the Mancs as a rivalry at all; it's a vendetta, a blood feud that's Sicilian in intensity, contemptuous at best, raw, visceral hatred at worst, each always out for vengeance and reparation like the Hatfields and McCoys or the Campbells and MacGregors. No player has been transferred between the two teams since Phil Chisnall moved from United to Liverpool in 1964. Also, the malice and ill-will borne by fans of Liverpool and Manchester United's football teams outweighs by far that felt by either team for their traditional rivals across the city, Everton or Man City. Just check the priorities evident in this charming ditty sung by Manchester United's Stretford End supporters to the tune of 'Oh My Darling Clementine'.

  Build a bonfire, build a bonfire

  Put the Scousers on the top

  Put Man City on the bottom

  And we'll burn the fucking lot

  On 19 April 1992, Manchester United were beaten at Anfield in one of the last games of the season and thus, right at the death, forfeited the league tide. Stunned and distraught, United manager Alex Ferguson and his players scuttled to their bus, pausing politely to sign autographs for some waiting Liverpool scallies. After Lee Sharpe, Paul Ince and Ryan Giggs had scrawled their names on the proffered scraps of paper, the Liverpool fans jeered, tore them up and threw the pieces back at them, crowing derisively. As they left Liverpool, a trembling, angered Alex Ferguson told the silent coach, 'Remember this day. What has just happened should tell you all how much people envy you.' By people, he really meant Scousers. And remember they did. United won eight championships in the next eleven years, succeeding and usurping Liverpool as the country's dominant football power.

  The balance of power is much more even these days and so hostilities have, if anything, become even more fractious and intense. As tensions built in 2002, before the Second Iraq War, a huge banner was unfurled at the Millennium Stadium at the Liverpool/Man Utd Carling Cup Final. It read 'Don't Bomb Iraq, Nuke Manchester'. During a superheated FA Cup tie between the two in February 2006, United's Alan Smith slid in to block a shot by Liverpool's John Arne Riise and snapped his leg in gruesome fashion. Team mates running over to assist turned away, covering their eyes in horror. Neutrals were shocked. Among sections of the Liverpool fans, though, a chant soon rang out to the tune of cheesy Euro-hit 'Hey Baby'. It went 'John Arne Riise, we wanna know-oh-oh-oh, how you broke his leg'. Objects were even thrown at the stretcher as Smith was carried off.

  It gets much, much worse than even this. The sickest, thickest sections of both sets of supporters take pleasure in rubbing salt in either city's rawest wounds: the 1989 Hillsborough tragedy and the Munich air crash of 1958. Some Liverpool fans sing 'Always check on the runway for ice' to the horribly jaunty tune of 'Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life' while doing childish airplane impressions. United's idiot rump chant 'You should have all died at Hillsborough' to the lilting melody of 'Guantanamera' and 'If it wasn't for the Scousers we could stand'. I've been among otherwise reasonable people who, after a drink or two and in the red fog of the moment, have sung these songs. That tells you a lot about just how crazy some people can get around football and even about how deep the rifts and the old scores go between the Scousers and the Mancs.

  They go right back to what ex Man Utd boss Ron Atkinson used to call 'early doors'; the kick-off of British economic might, the Industrial Revolution. As smoke and noise and seismic change shook the whole of northern England, Manchester and Liverpool were already stoking the fires of their vituperative feud from a mere thirty-five miles' distance. Liverpool became resentful of Manchester's staggeringly swift civic rise; it mushroomed in size from what Defoe patronisingly called 'the greatest mere village' in the 1700s to a metropolis of 100,000 people by 1812 and the world's first industrial city. Its wealth was based largely on cotton, the raw materials of Manchester's booming textile mills. As you'll know if you've spent any time around these parts, cotton fields are at a premium in Chorley and you've always been hard pushed to get a decent Mint Julep in Ramsbottom. Manchester's cotton therefore had to be imported from the plantations and the slave estates of America's Deep South. And after its journey across the Atlantic, how did it get to Manchester, resolutely and distantly inland? Via Liverpool, of course, which, as we've seen, opens its blousy arms wide to transatlantic travellers of every kind.

  Thus Liverpool spied a chance to get its own back on uppity Manchester. Holding the trump card of that sea access, it imposed a tax on US cotton imports. But Manchester retaliated in audacious and spectacular style by constructing a broad, artificial waterway pretty much parallel to the Mersey on the Wirral bank of the river and carrying traffic from the ocean. This grandiose gesture was the Manchester Ship Canal, the civil engineering equivalent of Gary Neville running the length of the pitch to kiss his United badge in front of enraged Liverpool fans. The canal was opened in 1894, rendered Liverpool's levy redundant, and for a century made a thriving port of a landlocked city. No mean feat. The glory days of the Ship Canal have gone but the waterway still has a shining place in the city's history and culture. Just as Bethnal Green market traders and city wide boys will boast to you of being born within the sound of Bow Bells and therefore 'pukka Cockney', so you may be collared by a nasal, drawling man in a Burnage boozer who will tell you that he is a 'proper Manc' by virtue of having a grandad who 'worked on the canal'.

  In 1830, when the world's first passenger railway was built between the two cities, not even Stephenson's Rocket could bring those hearts and minds together. The opening day was somewhat marred in any case by the fact that William Huskisson MP got hit by a train and killed, but even before this, many people were hostile to the enterprise and wanted it to fail. Some Liverpudlians felt that passenger traffic with Manchester, a grubby, sooty inland town with ideas above its station, railway or otherwise, would bring the wrong sort to Liverpool.

  'The Liverpool gentleman and the Manchester man' is a nineteenth-century distinction still preserved by some old-school Liverpudlians, meaning that the inland city grew prosperous on oily, blue-collar industry and manufacture, while Liverpool was a city of commerce: shipping, insurance, trade, customs and excise.

  My agent, a delightful woman called Kate, not known for misanthropy but nevertheless a Scouser, claims that she 'even hates the Manchester one-way system. I always get lost on it. It's nasty and unhelpful. Typical.' Bernard Manning, a comedian who has done much to help prove the Merseyside assertion that Mancs aren't funny, says, 'I like Liverpool. I go there to visit my hubcaps.' When I worked among Scousers, my Mancunian mates found this both baffling and humorous. 'Watch your wallet,' they'd caution before telling me the de rigueur Mancunian joke of the late eighties: Q. What do you call a Scouser in a suit and tie? A. The Accused.

  At their most caricatured and embattled, the citizens' attitudes towards each other might be summarised thus. Mancs think Scousers are lazy, sentimental, smackhead thieves in tracksuits; Scousers think Mancs are dour, gun-obsessed wannabe gangsters with no sense of style or humour. Guildford probably thinks both are pretty much right.

  As a kid, Manchester seemed to me the very
acme of big city allure. Growing up in a cotton town loosely in its orbit, Manchester was rich, sexy, glamorous, cool, near enough to be kindred but far enough away to be exotic. The buildings were bigger, the people brasher, the accent racier. Manchester was nightclubs, steakhouses and pizza parlours, the floodlit fairgrounds of Belle Vue, Denis Law and George Best with their shirts untucked and sleeves worn long like Bash Street Kid superstars, or Colin Bell, balletic elegance in that fabulous seventies red and black striped City kit.

  I had family in Swinton, a suburb of Manchester, and my cousins Eileen and Elizabeth were archetypal Manchester girls of the period: mini-skirts, crocheted tops, white PVC boots, hotpants, cobalt eye shadow. They had boxes full of seven-inch singles: Decca, Deram, Regal Zonophone, Major Minor. From being a toddler, Manchester was girls and pop music, an escape from routine, the liberating thrill of the city. How could I not love it?

  In my teens, I would go there under my own volition with mates to see gigs at the Free Trade Hall: Tangerine Dream, Martha Reeves, Gentle Giant, Linda Ronstadt (I had absurdly catholic taste, it would appear). It was always an adventure. Pulling your trenchcoat up around your bumfluffed cheeks and sneaking past the bouncers for a crafty pint of Best on Deansgate. Later on, the rattling train home through eerily deserted late-night stations like Hindley and Westhoughton, sharing a can of Colt 45 or, if you were very lucky, snogging a girl in a cheesecloth shirt and faded Levi's, missing your stop and ending up in Maghull.

  In my late teens, I started going out with a girl from Manchester. Actually, she was from Boothstown, a rough suburb straddling the arterial East Lanes Road and later famous as the bit of town where the legendary Eric Cantona made his home in a typically maverick gesture. Boothstown's distance from the bright lights of Piccadilly Gardens didn't matter to me, though. As far as I was concerned I was going out with a girl from Manchester, which conferred upon me the same worldly sophistication as Mick and Bianca or Rod and Britt, those other famous pan-global couples. The fact that she really liked Rush only slightly spoiled her metropolitan chic.

  Greater Manchester buses of the eighties were famous for their 'fried egg' orange and white livery. Twice a week I would get the number 32, which would crawl slowly to her house through a succession of neglected and forlorn former pit villages like Atherton and Tyldesley, known for some bizarre reason locally as 'Bent' and 'Bongs'. I never passed through Tyldesley without a shudder; right there in the grand Victorian baths hall was where my Uncle Brian had taught me to swim by hurling me in from the side and then making encouraging noises as I spluttered and thrashed. Gin Pit, Astley, Mosley Common; the names as ringingly northern as clogs on cobbles, the route still etched in the memory.

  This spring morning, though, I step down from the Pendolino high-speed train into a dazzling steel and glass piazza, the concourse of the newly refurbished Piccadilly station. For years, Piccadilly was a grim entree to the delights of the city, windswept and soulless, with its one real advantage being that as it lay at the end of the line, you could fall asleep with an easy conscience and that way you passed through Stoke oblivious, always a bonus. Then for years it was a building site. But it appears to have all been worth it. Now when your train is delayed due to failure of lineside equipment in Congleton, Piccadilly is a diverting place to kill some time. You can buy a Coldplay CD or a caramel macchiato or Heat magazine or any of the other things that twenty-first-century Britons do.

  It's a glorious day, and that's not natural, of course. According to myth, it always rains in Manchester. Rainy City was Manchester's CB radio handle during that brief fad and, in the days before sunbeds, it was said that if you saw a Mancunian with a tan they'd gone rusty. Adrian Mitchell wrote a poem about Manchester's moistness called 'Watch Your Step – I'm Drenched', in which he talks of the city's 'thousand puddles' 'poised on slanting paving stones' that 'lurk in the murk of the northwestern evening'.

  Manchester's damp climate has been mooted as responsible for everything from its textile mills (water and coal make good factories) to the gloomy sound of Joy Division. In fact, it's the ninth wettest city in Britain and positively arid compared to Swansea, Glasgow and Plymouth. Sheltered by the Pennines, it hardly ever snows here. Today it's just beautiful; blue skies and fluffy clouds above the endlessly evolving cityscape.

  Every time you come to Manchester these days, the skyline has changed. It's the Shanghai of the north-west, construction crazy, in a state of permanent restless revolution, a frenzy of hard hats and scaffolding. In 1962, Frank Kermode wrote, 'The worst thing about Manchester is that it's unstoppable, like spilt beer.' And it's still spreading. The Beetham Hilton Tower is the latest vaunting gesture of architectural ambition to thrust its way skyward. On the very morning I emerge from Piccadilly station, the Daily Mirror carries an amazing picture of a construction worker (in high-visibility tabard, of course) catching forty winks stretched out on a girder hundreds of dizzying metres above Manchester's pavements. It will be the tallest residential tower in the UK and from the top there are views of the Pennines, the Welsh mountains, Blackpool Tower and Liverpool's cathedrals. Which it dwarfs, much to the locals' delight of course. This new tower is more than just a very tall partly constructed building; it's regarded by mooching Oasis wannabe and besuited branding consultant alike as a symbol of the city's resurgent virility and regional dominance.

  If you think those cocky Mancs have only got this way in the last couple of years, think again. A century ago, folks round here were saying, puffed up with aldermanly pride, 'What Manchester does today, the world does tomorrow' In the late sixties, in his wonderful book The North Country, Graham Wilson chided them on their 'ridiculous self-congratulation'. Filmmaker Chris Lethbridge probably came closest to how I feel about the place when he wrote in 1994, 'It has a compulsion to preen and show off; it is narcissistic, contrary and wayward, and yet you cannot help but love it. It is both admirable and maddening.' Nowhere is this galling, charming, maddening, admirable self-belief better seen than in the city's musical culture and, in particular, in the gloriously Mancunian tale of Factory Records.

  Musically Manchester skulked in Liverpool's shadow in the 1960s. They did have the wonderful Hollies (Britain's unsung pop treasure, as I will expound on at length if you're buying). They also had in Graham Gouldman one of Britain's most gifted songwriters, who actually coaxed a clutch of brilliant singles from the irredeemably goofy Herman's Hermits. Manchester bands were ubiquitous in the charts here and in the States. But there was a sneaking feeling of inferiority; while The Beatles were experimenting with Indian music, blowing their minds and inventing rock culture, Manchester's Freddie And The Dreamers were jumping in the air, kicking their legs and singing 'We wear short shorts'. It was no contest, really; Manchester knew it and it rankled.

  That said, Manchester did have the legendary Twisted Wheel soul club and later played host to what writer Richard Williams has called 'the most electrifying single event in postwar culture': the appearance of Bob Dylan and band powered by electricity at the Free Trade Hall in 1966. As Dylan cranked up the amps, the crowd instantly polarised into proto-hippies who'd never heard anything so loud in their lives and loved it and oddly puritanical young Mancunian folkies in bottle-bottom glasses, jeering, shouting 'Judas' and rending their tweed jackets in despair.

  If the Dylan gig did electrify Manchester, it took a while for the city to feel the aftershock. 10CC aside – who admirably decided to build a state-of-the-art studio in a backstreet in Stockport – Manchester had a somnolent early seventies. Journalist and local boy Paul Morley remembers that 'Manchester was a very boring place to be. It had no identity, no common spirit or motive.' But then another bunch of noisy mavericks came to the Free Trade Hall (or its upstairs parlour, at least, the Lesser Free Trade Hall) and this time Manchester reacted as if the city had stuck its finger in the mains.

  When the Sex Pistols played Manchester on 20 July 1976, there were more people there to see them than the first time a month earlier ('The audi
ence was very slim,' according to one Steven Patrick Morrissey, who was present) but it was still an intimate affair. Brian Eno says that hardly anyone bought the first Velvet Underground album but everyone who did formed a band. So every one of the undernourished throng who saw the Pistols that summer night was empowered into action.

  Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook of Joy Division and later New Order were there. So was Morrissey again. The gig itself was promoted by two students from Bolton, Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley, whose fledgling band Buzzcocks played that night. A young docks clerk called Mark Smith saw Buzzcocks, thought he could do better and formed The Fall, one of Britain's most subversive, unique and influential acts ever. Mick Hucknall was there and so energised was he by events that, well, a decade later he made some horribly dull plastic soul records. Or something. But you get the picture. If not, you can actually go and see the picture: Michael Winterbottom's terrific film 24 Hour Party People recreates the gig and the rolling aftermath for Manchester's music scene.

  A local TV reporter called Tony Wilson was so impressed that he invited the Pistols onto his Granada TV show where, leering and radiating menace and glamour, they played 'Anarchy In The UK' to a generation of stunned northern teenagers. Watching in Wigan, I could feel the tectonic plates rumble as the earth shifted. Wilson himself was a man possessed. Formerly a Cambridge-educated Leonard Cohen fan who'd come back to his home town to present the local news show, he found himself at the centre of the greatest youth cultural foment in a decade.