Pies and Prejudice

by Stuart Maconie

  After promoting new-wave bands tirelessly and much to the chagrin of dads across the north-west on Granada slots such as What's On and Granada Reports (more used to items on inadequate drainage provision in Levenshulme), Wilson took the step into independent gig promotion. In May 1978, in partnership with his mate and sometime actor Alan Erasmus, he began putting on bands at the distinctly insalubrious Russell Club in Hulme under the name The Factory (nights recreated for 24 Hour Party People at sticky-carpeted city-centre rival Fagins, ironically). Those early nights have become legendary: Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire, The Durutti Column, The Stockholm Monsters, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, who were Scousers 'who looked like Leo Sayer'. Factory may have been very Mancunian but they were never parochial.

  The club's distinctive advertising – Russian constructivism relocated to Lancashire – was designed by Peter Saville. The first poster became the now legendary and elusive Fac 1, the first Factory artefact. Fac 2 was 'A Factory Sample', an EP of music by acts who had played at the club: The Durutti Column, Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire and comedian John Dowie. Local journalist Paul Morley wrote enthusiastically about the new venture in the NME of 2 December: 'Send Factory Records your cassette: The Factory, Hulme, Manchester. Let's all take risks this Christmas!' It was a kind of backstreet nativity. Factory Records was born under a grimy star overseen by four wise men, Wilson, Erasmus, Saville and producer Martin Hannett, partners in what would become Britain's coolest ever record label.

  There's not space here to tell you the whole Factory story. You can read about that elsewhere. But it is a wonderfully Mancunian story, full of vanity, lunacy, obstinacy and grand gestures. There were no contracts; Factory preferred gentleman's agreements, and as many of the bands on Factory were far from gentlemanly, they never made the money they should have. They put out the biggest-selling, most influential twelve-inch single of all time, New Order's 'Blue Monday', but because Factory wouldn't join anything as prosaic as the British Phonographic Institute, there are no platinum discs around. If there were, maybe they could have hung them in the forbiddingly severe offices they built behind the BBC on Charles Street, and which they eventually had to sell for just half a million quid when Factory collapsed (just two-thirds of the cost of Ben Kelly's interior design alone).

  I loved it, though. I've lost many an afternoon lounging in its weirdly uncomfortable chairs or around the boardroom table not interviewing the Happy Mondays, getting lost on my way to the toilet through a stone warren of corridors and high forbidding doors straight out of Mordor. If Sauron had a city-centre office, it would have looked liked this.

  Kelly's masterpiece, though, was The Haçienda, a nightclub built in an old yacht showroom, maybe because a yacht showroom in a landlocked city is, in itself, a quintessentially Factory notion. It was a dreamer's gesture that for a time came true, part folly, part Folies Bergère, paid for by New Order's money, as they would regularly remind you with mordant Manc humour; a kind of temple to Factory's crackpot, intoxicating ideals. The Haçienda took brutalism and artiness to comic extremes. Here was a club that was named after an obscure Situationist tract, that was dauntingly laid out for the newcomer with Cabinet of Dr Caligari angles and corners, had decor based around police accident tape and industrial warning signs, had a bar downstairs called the Gay Traitor as a tribute to Guy Burgess and which even in mid-summer and mid-Madchester mania could feel oddly cool and inhuman. It was a club that celebrated and mocked elitism in its very girders and concrete stairways and on its night, it was the greatest place to be in the world. For a time, I practically lived there and I don't think I ever passed through the doors in those glory years of the late eighties and early nineties without a thrilling, almost sickly feeling that anything might happen. Often it did.

  In the end, it failed; the new dawn faded. The Haçienda had always been built on cavalier fiscal foundations. As Peter Hook once said, 'New Order would have been better off if they'd given ten pounds to everyone who ever came to The Haçienda, sent them home, and not bothered with the club at all.' Later organised crime and firearms wormed their way into the club's engagingly disorganised body politic. ('Ah, Manchester. . . Cotton and guns!' as Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge once exclaimed.) It's a very expensive, very desirable apartment block now.

  Factory Records were not just made in the north. They were entirely, fundamentally, immanently of the north. They sounded like the north, and Manchester in particular, made into sound. Unknown Pleasures, the astonishing first Joy Division album, actually sounds like the places where it was made. Thanks to Hannett's extraordinary production, it's haunted throughout by splintering glass, industrial hums, by whooshing and clanking that sounds like traffic passing by in the rain on the Mancunian Way or lifts ascending desolate Hulme tower blocks. Writer Jon Savage has talked of how the record is 'a perfect reflection of Manchester's dark spaces and empty places: endless sodium lights and semis seen from a speeding car, vacant industrial sites – the endless detritus of the nineteenth century – seen gaping like teeth from an orange bus.' But there's more than that. Before moving to the tower blocks of the inner city, Ian Curtis had lived near Macclesfield and Savage is right when he talks of the 'witchy emptiness' of the Pennines weighing heavy upon them, making 'the definitive northern gothic statement'. According to Paul Morley, 'They transmuted what the Manchester damp and the shadows and omen called into dread being by the hills and moors that lurked at the edge of their vision.'

  Later, Factory's music would come to enshrine and embody another and entirely different facet of Manchester's culture – not long overcoats and expressionist angst but baggy Day-Glo tops, flares and unbridled hedonism. Factory Records were crucial in the development of Madchester too, in providing it with a creative crucible in the chemical temple of The Haçienda and in giving a home to the Happy Mondays, a group of street urchins and footpads from the benighted suburb of Little Hulton. Streetwise, charismatic, dangerous, psychedelic, utterly unpredictable, most record labels would have been terrified of them. Wilson and Factory embraced them, even indulged them. It couldn't last but while it did, it made Manchester the most exciting city in Britain.

  Maybe even the world. At The Haçienda and elsewhere, Mancunians were dancing to the new sounds of acid and Chicago house while most of Chicago was ignoring it and also using it as the basis of an alchemical new sound where rock and dance met on a nightclub floor beneath a strobing light. Wilson organised a panel at the deathly New York junket the New Music Seminar, called it 'Wake Up America, You're Dead' and, according to the NME, began it thus: 'Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the New Music Seminar. The rest of the shit going on in the rest of this building is the Old Music Seminar. This is the New Music Seminar. . . There is a new music now, however it is probably only reflected in this particular room in the course of this week. . .' The Americans were outraged, stung into walkouts, threats and patriotic blather. It nearly turned into a brawl, there in the conference suite of a posh Manhattan Marriott hotel.

  That was Factory for you. Excessive humility was never one of their failings. Peter Saville says, 'When I was working at Factory we didn't think we were the best, we knew we were.' He was probably right but in the mix was a great deal of Mancunian bluster. Factory could cock up for England. For instance, they signed and spent money they didn't have on the useless Northside but missed the greatest group ever to emerge from the city. And they had them on a plate. One day in the early eighties, Tony Wilson was invited round to tea by a well-known local character, one Steven Patrick Morrissey. 'So I went down to his mum's house in Stretford and he says, "I've decided to be a pop star." And I had to muffle myself. I thought, "Never in a million light years, Steven."'

  It took a lot less than that. Steven did get himself involved with a group called The Smiths, who became the Manchester band incarnate. Oasis may talk the talk but The Smiths walked the walk. Like the city at its best, they had glamour and gloom, winsomeness and wit, they were magical and proletarian a
ll at once. Morrissey had been raised on the film and stage play of Salford teen prodigy Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey, fabulously evocative of postwar Salford whether it be kids playing in the bombsites that scarred the city for years or Dora Bryan dancing at the legendary Ritz nightclub. Twenty years later, The Smiths played their debut gig there, performing songs that often quoted liberally from Delaney's writings. She was the Morrissey of her day; striking, precocious, working-class. After leaving school she held a variety of jobs in Salford – shop assistant, clerk in a milk depot, usherette – but she burned with the zeal to write. When she was seventeen, she saw a Terence Rattigan play she thought drippy and banal and so took two weeks off work and wrote A Taste of Honey. Produced at the Royal Court, it was a sensation. Like Moz, she gave good quote, telling an interviewer in 1959 that 'north county people are shown as gormless, whereas in actual fact they are very alive and cynical'.

  The Smiths' songs drip, like an evening drizzle off the Moors, with references to Manchester and its environs. Rusholme, Strangeways, Southern Cemetery, Whalley Range, the Holy Name Church. Morrissey has a video called Hulmerist, a wry reference to his childhood home. In an early interview, he said of his artistic self, 'I am forever chained to a disused railway line in Wigan.' While Thatcher, witchlike, cast the north into the outer darkness, The Smiths' songs illuminated it anew with northern lights and fireworks. We loved them for it.

  Two decades on, our preciously, jealously guarded passion is an industry. In the tourist information centre, right alongside '100 Hillwalks Around Manchester' and 'Manchester United The Religion', you can pick up a copy of 'Morrissey's Manchester: The Essential Smiths Tour' by Phill Gatenby. Clutching it, you can embark on your own pilgrimage, taking in a disused French restaurant that was once Crazy Face, the clothes shop where Johnny Marr worked, or the very iron bridge on Kings Road, Morrissey's old street, under which he kissed and 'ended up with sore lips' ('Still III'). Gatenby's slim, cheery volume makes official the Smiths tourism that's actually been going on for some years now and has made some very unlikely spots into sightseeing opportunities. Like Salford Lads Club, for instance. It's a fine Edwardian building opened by Baden-Powell in 1904, where generations of Ordsall youths have learned how to box (including Graham Nash and Albert Finney), but is most famous for appearing on the sleeve of The Smiths' The Queen is Dead album. Today, like most days, I can find a clutch of nervously giggling Japanese teenagers posing for pictures outside, its barred gates watched by scowling, acned Salfordian counterparts. Gatenby is not the most reassuring of guides at times like these. An early section of his little book is tided 'Surviving In Manchester' and reads, 'Book your accommodation before arriving in Manchester and go straight to your hotel. Do not walk around the centre looking for banks and shops while carrying your bags. Blend in and look local. . . Plan your route before leaving your room. . . Do not travel alone but do not travel in too large numbers. Remember in the winter it starts to go dark around 4 p.m.' I would hate to see Phill's book about downtown Kabul. As it is, the Japanese tourists and I return unmolested to the town centre.

  I take a walk around a few more old haunts for old time's sake. I walk past the new Haçienda apartments (you can have the penthouse for a few million and put your Bang & Olufsen telly where Bez and Shaun used to 'take a comfort break') down to the Boardwalk, where various bands of mine used to play and where Oasis used to rehearse. I never met them and I'm sure I would have noticed a man with one enormous eyebrow wearing a white leather snorkel parka in June. I stroll via Dry Bar, another uber-cool Factory enterprise, down to what is now depressingly branded the Northern Quarter, and then to lovely Afflecks Palace, an old department store converted into three floors of alternative retail outlets. On Saturdays in summer we would hang out here for hours, hoping for some kind of bohemian cool to rub off on us or to meet up with pale, interesting girls. If you were prepared to plough through the stuffed bears and ex-East German Air Force binocular cases, you could get some great stuff here; on the same afternoon in 1986 I once bought Prince's '1999', an import Woody Allen album, some oxblood Doc Martens and a vintage fifties Hawaiian shirt. And yes, I did still have change for chips and gravy.

  Outside Afflecks, there's a fancy mosaic that reads 'And on the Sixth Day God Created Manchester'. This almost entirely meaningless phrase has echoed around the city since the Ecstasy-popping heyday of Madchester and reflects yet again that famous Manchester attitude. Like the accent, it can grate on some. Now that it's cleaner and safer and the IRA have stopped bombing it, the city's worst fault may be that boundless capacity for self-congratulation, for tacky self-mythologising rhetoric like the Manchester Passion, for laddish bluster that manifests itself biliously in a teary Noel Gallagher telling an interviewer, 'The thing about Manchester is ... it all comes from here,' and jabbing at his heart. At least Ian Brown was being funny when he said 'Manchester's got everything except a beach'. It was said of Humphrey Bogart that he was a hell of a nice bloke until 11 p.m. After that he thought he was Humphrey Bogart. Manchester is at its most unattractive when it thinks it's Manchester.

  Pop into the city's fine art gallery on Mosley Street and make your way through the Pre-Raphaelites and the Pissarros and Canalettos and replica Elgin Marbles – architect Charles Berry was a devoted Hellenophile – and you'll even find a section devoted to 'Manchester attitude', billed as 'the first psychological profile of a city in an art gallery'. This probably seemed like a great idea when some enthusiastic young curator in rimless Issey Miyake specs first mooted it at the departmental meeting but it boils down to a couple of Happy Mondays sleeves, some oft-quoted Morrissey and a general sense of empty boasting. And in fact, if it stopped banging on about its football teams and its bands and its shops and its attitude, Manchester has something that it can be genuinely, enormously proud of, something that it should shout from the gallery's porticoed rooftops. Manchester changed the world's politics: from vegetarianism to feminism to trade unionism to communism, every upstart notion that ever got ideas above its station, every snotty street-fighter of a radical philosophy, was fostered brawling in Manchester's streets, mills, pubs, churches and debating halls. Before it fled to London in the 1960s and became 'Islingtonised', the Manchester Guardian was Britain's most radical and liberal newspaper. (En passant, thirty years ago, as Nick Cohen records in Cruel Britannia, one third of journalists were based outside London. Now ninety per cent of reporters work in the capital.) Lydia Becker, the daughter of a Chadderton chemical works owner, pioneered the notion of votes for women with her National Society for Women's Suffrage, a movement later radicalised and turned into a potent political agency by another Manchester family, the Pankhursts. The TUC first met here in 1968. Vegetarianism in the western world began in Salford in 1809 when the Reverend William Cowherd persuaded his congregation to give up meat and the concept swept Manchester; there were more vegetarian restaurants in the 1880s than today. The greatest military and economic super-power the world has ever known spent half a century sweating nervously, armed to the teeth and generally terrified of an idea born in Manchester, namely communism. Now that's attitude.

  Even the football team has a legacy as red as their shirts. An image of Manchester United as pampered aristocrats still clings to them even though the mantle of rich dilettantism has now largely passed to Chelsea. But United began, like many northern clubs, as a works team: Newton Heath LYR (Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway) in 1878. Ten years later, at the Royal Hotel in Manchester, the first professional football league ever was instituted. Those Corinthians and Royal Engineers may have enjoyed their jolly afternoons of 'clogging' but football as we know it is a northern invention. Of the twelve founder members of the league, six were from the north and none of the remainder came from anywhere south of Birmingham. Northern teams dominated the league for the first forty-odd years of its existence; Blackpool, Preston, Burnley, Blackburn, Sunderland, Sheffield, Newcastle and Huddersfield were the prized names, the glamour clubs, the Barcas and Reals of t
he day, except these galácticos had waxed moustaches and allotments, and if Hello! had ever been welcomed into their lovely homes they would have found coal in the bath. A southern team didn't come close to winning the league until Arsenal in the early 1930s.

  In contrast, by 1909 Manchester United had already won both the League Championship and FA Cup. Then they did what any good headstrong lot of northern workers would do: they went on strike. Manchester United's players were members of the Professional Footballers Union, which the FA refused to recognise. The players' union had been trying to affiliate to the Federation of Trade Unions, but the football authorities were worried that the players might get involved in other unions' strikes. In fact, they regarded the act of unionising as such utter impertinence that they decided to suspend any member of the union, stop his wages and ban him from playing. The clubs cravenly went along with all this, sacked their unionists and brought in amateurs.