Pies and Prejudice

by Stuart Maconie

  Leaving Johanna from Helsinki behind and going back to A. J. P. Taylor, he also said, 'Manchester has everything but good looks.' This used to be a common refrain. In the late eighties, author Charles Jennings called it 'belligerently ugly' in his cheerless anti-northern polemic Up North. Even proudly northern writer Hunter Davies described it in 2000 as 'a building site . . . full of gaping holes', claiming 'St Ann's Square is the only attractive part of town'. I like Hunter Davies but I have to disagree here. Building sites don't stay building sites for ever. Like caterpillars, they emerge from their cocoons of steel and wire as butterflies hopefully. This one certainly did, I think, as I stand on the walkway over the Manchester Ship Canal and gaze at Salford Quays.

  Salford isn't really Manchester. It's a separate city; to reach it you go west, young man, across the Irwell, the 'river the colour of lead' immortalised by Shelagh Delaney in A Taste of Honey and Morrissey in The Smiths' 'This Night Has Opened My Eyes'. Manchester sees itself as the new Barcelona, a cool, classless, cosmopolitan twenty-four-hour party capital with style. But it has its own class divisions too, even its own north/south divide. The south has better wages, bigger houses, posher suburbs, smarter eateries, while north Manchester has the poverty, the sink estates and the appalling health statistics. But the biggest divide in town lies across the Irwell. You can walk from Salford to Manchester in about five minutes. Most southerners think Salford's a district of Manchester. But real Salfordians get very upset at this. Salford, they will tell you, has its own cathedral and university and charter. They think Manchester is soft and conceited, shallow and flashy compared to Salford's older and often darker lineage. The two are inextricably linked, though, as the local writer Paul Gent put it: 'Like Siamese twins, joined at the chest and sharing several vital organs; but one is permanently aggrieved at the strength and health of the other. They grew up together, they depend on each other, but it doesn't mean they have to like each other.'

  All of Britain and great swathes of the world know Salford; its streets and chimneys and two-up two-downs. They gaze on it in their millions night after night, with an omnibus edition at weekends. In the early 1960s, a young man from Salford called Tony Warren wrote a drama about the lives and loves and trials of working-class folk based on the people and places he'd grown up with. He called the town Weatherfield and he called his drama Florizel Street. Then a Granada producer said that Florizel sounded like a disinfectant and the name Coronation Street was chosen. At first, the show was dismissed by London critics as yet another piece of tiresome kitchen-sink drama from the desolate north. Ken Irwin of the Daily Mirror opined, 'The programme is doomed from the outset with its dreary signature tune and grim scene of terraced houses and smoking chimneys.'

  Like Decca Records' rejection of The Beatles on the grounds that 'groups of guitars are on the way out', this must rank as one of the most myopic assessments in the chequered history of criticism. Corrie went on to become one of the best-loved, most iconic television programmes ever. Over twelve million people tuned in to watch Ken Barlow and Deirdre Rachid get married in 2005 compared to only 9.7 million who watched Prince Charles marry Camilla. For many years, till telly became an orgiastic riot of multi-channel madness, the most expensive advertising slot on British TV was 7.45 on Mondays and Wednesdays, smack in the middle of Coronation Street.

  There's quite a lot of smack in the middle of Coronation Street now. And kidnappings, internet child abuse, sex changes, the usual stuff of Salford life, or so the producers must think. It retains its lightly camp humour and its huge audiences but I find it much harder to love than I once did. Its humour comes from a legacy bequeathed by Warren, a gay northerner who gave the show its characteristic tone as seen in the vivid portrayals of strong women like the aforementioned Elsie Tanner, Annie Walker and Ena Sharples. Warren loved a good catfight, a sexy, brassy femme fatale or formidable matriarch. I could be wrong but whenever I see the show now, the women – indeed all the characters – seem to be simpering fools or freaks. The one educated man, Ken Barlow, is a tragic bore who has careened from doomed relationship to failed employment opportunity. The one successful entrepreneur was a Cockney. In fact, as of 2006, half the cast seem to be Cockneys. Perhaps this is to snare the EastEnders vote. It certainly isn't snaring me.

  This could just be me being po-faced, of course. If so, it seems I have a soulmate in Professor Michael Harloe, Vice Chancellor of Salford University. He told the local paper in 2006 that the show was doing 'untold damage to Salford's reputation. . . We are very closely tied to the image of the area, which is constantly reinforced in the media. If we could remove Coronation Street from the TV I would cheer; it does more bad for the reputation of Salford than anything else. It's a completely romanticised picture, and wrong. If people really want to know what it was like to live in Salford's slums in the 1930s they should go down to The Lowry and look at the pictures.'

  And that's what I've come to do. With all due respect to Delaney, Warren, Graham Nash, Emmeline Pankhurst, Walter Greenwood, Albert Finney, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, John Cooper Clarke, Alistair Cooke, Christopher Eccleston and all the rest, Laurence Stephen Lowry is the most famous son of the city. When Hunter Davies came here, 'The Lowry' may have been just a building site. But these days, it is one of the gems of the breathtaking Salford Quays development and a far finer and more fitting tribute to that eminent son than that bloody song from Brian and Michael.

  Let's nail this canard immediately. L. S. Lowry never painted any flipping 'matchstalk men' or 'matchstalk cats and dogs'. He painted beautiful, detailed, childlike, haunting evocations of the streets, architecture and people around him. In fairness to Brian and Michael, whose tribute made number one in 1978, that wouldn't have made a snappy song tide, and, yes, their song does mention Ancoats and the St Winifred's School Choir do sing 'The big ship sails on the alley alley-o' in a nod to the film of Delaney's A Taste of Honey. But surely this gormless ditty has contributed to a hackneyed stereotype of the north (I've lost count of the number of southrons who've asked me, chuckling, what 'sparking clogs' means and have I ever done it) and, worse, to an undervaluing of Lowry's unique talent.

  Fortunately for Picasso, he never had some comedy Spaniards in sombreros singing a novelty hit entitled 'Ola, Signora, Your Nose Ees On The Wrong Side Of Your Face'. Vincent Van Gogh did have a number one single about him called 'Vincent' but that was a lush slice of seventies cheesecloth balladry full of luminous imagery and sung tremulously by Don McLean. Brian and Michael, dressed as 1920s chimney sweeps and surrounded by urchins, were irredeemably rubbish and gave off that unwholesome whiff of 'Wasn't rickets and mass unemployment great?'

  The Lowry Centre is a much better and hopefully more lasting monument to L. S. It cost £94 million, just under a third of which came from the National Lottery. Next time you despair at the lines of shabby, defeated people in Asda blowing money they don't have on a one in fourteen million chance of freedom, remember the Lowry and think that it's not all wasted. For that sort of money you get an art gallery, two theatres, an interactive exhibition, a restaurant, corporate hospitality suites, a bookshop, a publishing house and a study centre. Arrived at by road and via a grim expanse of dirt car park, it's unprepossessing. But walk over the bridge, designed by Casado of Madrid and engineered by Parkman Ltd of Salford, and look back. At sunset or dawn, it's beautiful, 'like a futuristic ship crashed into the dockside', according to one proud guide I spoke to. But even on a raw March afternoon, it's impressive. The view from Pizza Express, I have to say, is limited, but the American Hot is terrific.

  The Lyric Theatre within the Lowry has 1,750 seats and the largest provincial stage in the UK outside London. Big, big entertainment stars vie to play here. But for me the star of the building is Lowry himself. The dedicated galleries are on the north-facing side of the building to prevent damage from the sun, but light streams in from the promenade windows even from an opaque March sky. Salford began collecting Lowry's works in 1930 and has more than 350. What
I love about the permanent exhibitions is that the full range of Lowry's work is on show. Not just the trademark (and wonderful) industrial townscapes but wistful, eerie portraits and sketches. My personal favourites are his seascapes, an obsession which he returned to again and again; vast empty canvases of remote horizons where sea and sky inter-mingle at the edge of the world. I find them as stately and spiritual as the most monumental Rothkos. An old art teacher of mine, Mrs Taylor, knew Lowry a little and once, accompanied by a friend's little girl, went to see him when he was an old man but still working in his studio and completing just such a seascape. Lowry asked the child if she liked it and she replied, 'It's too empty. It needs a seagull.'

  'Put one in then,' said Lowry, amused, and handed her a brush. Horrified, Mrs Taylor went to stop the child but Lowry insisted and the little girl put a tiny stylised child's seagull – like a flattened McDonald's M – in the corner of the sky where, according to Mrs Taylor, it remains to this day.

  I love that story. Some critics think that there's a wry irony in the fact that a withdrawn loner – he died a virgin, it's assumed – who 'inhabited a dark cave of the imagination', as one put it, should be celebrated in the shining futuristic creation of the Lowry Centre. I like to think of him as a genial old boy who would let a little girl paint a seagull on a canvas that he must have known was worth a fortune. That playfulness in him would approve of the fact that the Lowry rings daily now to the sound of kids doing workshops, going to and from pantomimes and concerts, pointing at his paintings and maybe thinking, 'I draw like that.'

  On the other side of the Ship Canal from the Lowry, past the incongruous and dowdy Lowry Factory Outlet Mall, is another remarkable building: a huge, forbidding thistle of gunmetal splinters, gaunt against the Salford skyline. This is Daniel Libeskind's Imperial War Museum North, its dramatic design representative of a globe fragmented into three giant shards, reconfigured in pain and turmoil. It symbolises a world shattered by war and is both disturbing and strangely serene, like a battlefield long quiet.

  Inside, it is a triumph of what you might call new museumry. There's enough interactivity to keep the most tartrazine-addled toddler happy. But there is real substance here; some powerful and moving exhibits that illustrate what a bloodthirsty century or two we've been living through. It's the small stuff that haunts: the documents of the disappeared, passport photos, ration books. That said, Renato Giuseppe Bertelli's 'Continous Profile', a futurist bust of Mussolini, is an amazing piece, that famous profile turned into an abstract 3D whirl of speed; for a second you can see the seductiveness of it all before you shake it off with a shudder.

  Leaving the building I find that high winds have shut the towering 'observation shard'. A shame; I'd like to have seen Salford Quays from up there and maybe gazed across the Irwell to Manchester itself and tried to pick out on that crowded, blossoming skyline yet another new monument to Lowry's memory.

  Whatever you feel about the Lowry Centre, the Lowry Hotel does seem to come wreathed in irony; a fabulous opulent watering hole and five-star hotel named after a man who painted, ahem, matchstalk kids sparking clogs or huddled factory workers shuffling and scampering to their shift. If you arrive, though, as I did, in the most biblical hailstorm even rainy Manchester can muster, it's an irony you can get to enjoy as the top-hatted, smoothly professional doorman opens your car door, shelters you with an umbrella and guides you into the airy, ultra-modern foyer before disappearing with your keys to valet park you somewhere snug.

  Gratifyingly, there are original Lowry sketches on the walls of the bevelled corridors. My room is an understated but masculine symphony of red upholstery, black mahogany, brushed steel and burnt umber leather. The windows are huge; from them you can see how the hotel curves, hugging the bank of the moss-green Irwell. You can see the balconies and the mast that towers rakishly above the river. The bed is the size of a tennis court.

  The River Room restaurant is run by Marco Pierre White, one of the first of that now ubiquitous, faintly tiresome modern tribe, the celebrity chef. Our waitress is slightly cool, bristling slightly at every query with the very Mancunian air of someone who thinks she shouldn't be doing this. At one point I hear her complain to a colleague that a diner is 'mithering' her, a uniquely Manc word meaning 'bothering'. She clearly thinks she should be running her own health spa or duetting with Kanye West but she does get the food right. (Minted pea soup with crab and pear, followed by watercress risotto and then coconut panna cotta with spicy roast pineapple, if you're interested.)

  The Lonely Planet guide to this infuriating, invigorating powerhouse of a city says: 'Manchester is looking up. Gone are the Dickensian days of grinding poverty. Gone too the gloom'n'doom of the 1980s indie punk scene and its Joy Division pessimism: over the last 15 years the city has developed a champagne-for-breakfast insouciance and an almost giddy attitude towards fun.'

  I quite liked that Joy Division pessimism actually, rather more than I think I like 'champagne-for-breakfast insouciance'. The tramps in Piccadilly Gardens were always pretty insouciant by lunchtime anyway, though not often on champers. But I love the fact that Manchester is showing off, something it's always been very good at.

  In his classic 1950s folk song 'Dirty Old Town', Ewan MacColl envisioned a dream for his native Salford, a dream that seems to have been realised. 'We're going to make a good sharp axe, shining steel, tempered in the fire. We'll chop you down like an old dead tree. Dirty old town, dirty old town.' Manchester and Salford are still mucky kids at heart but having been mithered by Mam and had their faces wiped with spittle on some big civic hankie, they've scrubbed up dead smart.

  * * *

  It's a Sunday evening in May and it's raining in Manchester. We cross the bridges from Salford, pass the G-Mex and St Peter's Fields on the right and turn onto Deansgate as the lights are coming on, park the car by Quay Street and follow the crowds through the drizzly dusk to the foyer of the Opera House. There's a Cup Final buzz in the air, a palpable dizziness and thrill. We've come into town in our droves, pallid girls and boys in quiffs, mums and dads, lads and ladettes, to welcome back an old friend. Morrissey is in town and therefore, like moths to a flame, so are we.

  As part of his evocative selection of introductory music, there's a punkish version of 'You'll Never Walk Alone', the anthem of Liverpool FC. Something in the air sours; a couple of rows behind me, five or six lads rise up angrily and join in with the derisive and combative Manchester version. 'Sign on, sign on...' they jeer. I was at Finsbury Park in 1992 when Morrissey took to the stage draped provocatively in a Union Jack and, for his pains, was pelted with coins and bottles. Within two years, the Union Jack had been denuded of all inflammatory power, commodified into a tacky Britpop/Spice Girls/Oasis/New Labour logo. But then it was still seen as the flag of the far right. Morrissey's was a defiant gesture of blithe disregard for acceptance. He's still winding people up, the stirrer.

  Back on stage at the Manchester Opera House, he tells us how he came here in 1974 to watch Mott The Hoople supported by Queen ('they were quite good, actually') and, for a moment, he's just a kid again in love with a dream, like we all are. He introduces his band, Cockneys and Angelenos all, and says conspiratorially, 'They're not northern but I hope you won't hold it against them.' At one point, there is a sweetly maudlin snatch of 'Sally, Sally, Pride Of Our Alley' (Gracie Fields). Then he brings up the ticklish matter of 'You'll Never Walk Alone'. 'I know some of you weren't happy with one of the songs on the interval tape. Well, it does go back a lot further than football, you know.' This does nothing to placate the aggrieved, who keep up a low-level fusillade of abuse until other sections of the audience, who've been chanting 'Morrissey, Morrissey, Morrissey' to the strains of 'Here We Go' all night, turn on the dissenters and threaten them with violence.

  Morrissey ends his set with a version of 'How Soon Is Now', which contains a signature closing flourish: 'There's a club if you'd like to go, you could meet somebody who really loves you/So you go and you stand o
n your own, and you leave on your own/And you go home and you cry and you want to die.' Tonight, this plaintive, private mantra of despair, which when we first heard it pierced every one of us here, I imagine, is bellowed lustily in unison, a clamorous roar that could challenge the Stretford End. There's an irony there all right. I hope Morrissey laughs about it, as we laugh about it later, on cold leather seats, as we head down ghostly arterial roads to the real Lancashire.

  Mills and Bhuna

  Bulgarians think the town of Gabrovo is funny. Pop into a bar in Sofia or Plovdiv and tell them you're on your way to Gabrovo and the clientele will slap their stocky thighs and spill their plum brandy in mirth. In Germany, they find the city of Emden a hoot; well, you know what they say about East Frisians. Parisians used to tell jokes about the hopelessly provincial Toulouse while in the United States, the very mention of Peoria, Oshkosh or Dubuque – hick towns, as they are known – is guaranteed to split the collective sides of the David Letterman audience.