Before we leave the subject I should say that a night or two later I was recounting my trips in these parts to some friends from Wakefield and at the mention of Slaithwaite they began to roll around on the floor slapping themselves in near parodic mirth. Apparently it isn't Slaythwayt but Slawit. So they said, anyway, but I've since learned that at least four separate pronunciations are in regular use. It's different from pub to pub, it seems. Typical bloody Yorkshire orneriness, if you ask me. These kinds of lexical traps are waiting to ensnare unsuspecting southerners (and Lancastrians), so you should also know if you're heading north and east that Linthwaite is Linfit and Appletreewick is Aptrick and that they'll laugh at you in Chichester on South Tyneside if you pronounce it with an itch rather than an eye. Not as much, though, as I laughed at my New Zealand friend Brendan's first attempt at Clitheroe. You had to be there. But you can guess.
As Slaithwaite or Slawit or Slewitt, or whatever you call it, recedes in the rainy rear-view mirror, we begin to enter what the French might call Le Yorshire Profonde: Deepest Yorkshire.
The comparison here, at first ridiculous, between the rough-hewn, hail-hardened tykes of Yorkshire and the indolent gastronomes of the sun-kissed Dordogne, actually makes sense. Yorkshireman and Frenchman alike share a stubbornly unreasoning pride in simply being a Yorkie or Frenchie. They believe they have the best food, the best rugby teams, the most beautiful women. They share an almost mystical attachment to their native land. Just as the wine-growers and peasants of the Languedoc believe no one is their equal in the cultivation of the grape, so Yorkshiremen think that their beer has no equal but is similarly, mystically, bound to the soil, like the friend of my editor who loves Tetley's bitter of Leeds but says that 'it dunt travel'. In other words, it only really tastes right in Yorkshire. The French call it 'terroir', the sacred, inexplicable union of weather, ambience, landscape and history that imbue a region and its drink. Yorkshire calls it things being 'proper'. (I would like it greatly if Yorkshire adopted the French term though. Then I could have a pet theory about a Yorkshire Terroir. Thank you. Goodnight.)
Deepest Yorkshire fans out before you now; north, east and south are Bradford and Leeds, Barnsley and Rotherham, the Dales and the Moors, where the caps are always cloth and the chips are always Harry Ramsden's and livestock cowers on the hillsides waiting for Ted Hughes to stride among them with his notebook or Christopher Timothy to come and put his hand gently up their bottom. J. B. Priestley said, 'From such heights, you look across at hills that are constellated and twinkling with street lamps,' adding, 'If the towns of the West Riding were as brilliantly illuminated as Los Angeles, they would run excursions so people could see these patterned hills at night.' That was in 1933. Now, of course, these great cities fizz like LA with electricity and from the right Pennine heights in the right dusk you can see them strung out across the east of England like clusters of fairy lights. Nothing remotely fairy about them, though, obviously, owd lad.
In the south sits Sheffield, and Sheffield is a curio. Graham Turner described it as 'a great city with an international reputation which is capital of nowhere'. The south of the city is pretty much in Derbyshire and the wild and woolly north-easterners of Redcar and Middlesbrough regard it as essentially the Midlands, all soft hills and Daiquiris on the terrace. Because of its origins as an agglomerate of hamlets and villages in a bowl of seven hills, it's always been thought of as fiercely individual and slightly 'other', even by its near neighbours. In Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Chesterfield, they call Sheffielders 'Dee-dars' because of their unique and slightly daft pronunciation of thee and thou. Some Sheffield folk will smile tolerantly at this, others will smack you in the mouth. When Rotherham looks down on you, some would say you're in trouble. I would never be so rude. But I will say this of Rotherham, Sheffield's smaller, sourer, more ingrown neighbour. An American visitor I knew watched a head-scarved Rotherham woman who could have been anything between thirty and seventy walking home with her shopping, leaning into a gale, carrying cheap plastic bags over a concrete bridge between two of Rotherham's uglier estates. She said that it was like a bleak vignette from one of those forgotten chemical towns in the former Soviet Union.
Sheffield may not be as northerly as Irkutsk or Murmansk but whatever the Geordies think, it's surely the north. If Sheffield isn't the north, what is? Think how the town grew rich, not on accounting or tailoring or anything smooth and white collared but on two hard, hard materials. Coal and steel. What could be more northern?
Sheffield still makes steel. In fact, it makes more than at any other time in its history. You just wouldn't notice the fact any more as you wander its streets and pop into its latte bars. The skies are no longer black and streaked with fire, the foundries no longer clang. Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh of The Human League claimed that it was a Sheffield childhood soundtracked by booming turbines, forges and hammers that led them to make their own percussive electronic music. Sheffield's pretty quiet now but if you want to rekindle the foundries for an afternoon, you can visit the Sheffield Millennium Galleries and a room devoted to steel craftsmanship. Alternatively, you can pop over into the former Soviet Union, or Rotherham if you prefer, and visit Magna, an award-winning and frankly breathtaking science adventure centre set in the former Templeborough steel works.
Mention of The Human League should remind us that Sheffield has been mighty industrious and hugely successful in the production of that other great British export, pop music. It's produced two very different Cockers – Joe raw but Jarvis wry – who have both captured the different voices of the city's working class. At the time of writing, youthful sons of the city the Arctic Monkeys are enormously fashionable and successful thanks to a witty, punkish take on modern Britain and particularly modern Sheffield viewed from the bottom of a bottle of Smirnoff Ice. They're very Sheffield. I love their line, 'Ask if we can have six in, if not we'll have to have two,' ('Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not') which must be utterly opaque to folks in certain places but is instantly recognisable to anyone who's ever had drunken discussions about how to divvy up cabs.
Mainly, though, Sheffield means electronic music, maybe because of those relentless inhuman foundries which, like Stanlow, might even be glamorous if you don't have to work there. It's an impressive list: The Human League, Heaven 17, the Thompson Twins, Cabaret Voltaire, Dave Ball of Soft Cell, and more latterly the wonderful Warp Records, original home of the Yorkshire bleeps and bass scene now sadly relocated to London just as Motown moved to sunny LA from their own northern industrial town of Detroit.
I'd like to think that it was this illustrious, slightly off-kilter lineage that led to someone deciding that the National Centre for Popular Music should be built in Sheffield rather than in Liverpool or London. Both these cities wanted it apparently and what with The Beatles and, er, Spandau Ballet, both could lay claim to it.
What no one had stopped to think though was that a National Centre for Popular Music was a very, very bad idea, one engendered by a brief rush of national cockiness called 'Cool Britannia'. In that horny golden dawn, a newly priapic Blighty felt all youthful and sexy again after the deathly Ice Age gerontocracy of the late Tory years. We had a new young guy in Number 10, champagne receptions with Noel Gallagher and the Spice Girls and a general mood of coked-up overconfidence buoyed by a bulging macho package of Lottery money.
The National Centre for Popular Music gave the lie to that old adage, 'If you build it, they will come.' They did build it in 1999 – four huge horrible tin drums with spouts on top – but no bugger came, to use the local parlance. It had to close down within a few years, saddled with enormous debts. Before it did I visited it and a depressing afternoon it was too. It didn't help that my Sheffield minicab driver curled his lip with contempt when I told him where I was headed and offered the opinion that it would be far better if his old mates who'd got jobs there were smelting or soldering rather than 'poncing abaht with Phil Collins posters'.
He was right. It
was rubbish. It somehow contrived to have all of pop music's cheesiness without its sass and vigour, all of pop's populism without its charm and fun, all of pop's earnestness without its passion and power to move. The highly individual Scottish musician Nick Currie aka Momus called it 'a glorified shopping centre, a feebly educational day out for the kids... A scenario in which all creativity, all rebellion, all originality have been co-opted by a horrible consortium of music industry people. It's hypercapitalism in league with the government and academia. It stinks. Here, no matter what buttons you press, you basically get the same conformist shit.'
It's difficult to improve on that beyond making the obvious point that Britain doesn't need a centre for popular music; our houses and schools and clubs and bedrooms and streets are already that. Like Sheffield makes steel, Britain makes pop. It's what we do. It's in our blood, handed down from generation to generation like a monkey wrench or a pair of greasy overalls. Anyone remotely interested in doing this and doing it properly is already doing it in a bedroom with a computer or in a garage with a pawnshop guitar, not 'poncing abaht' in front of a video screen pretending to be Will Young. I'm sorry for the people who lost their jobs (sixty-nine to be accurate) but no one mourned its passing. Like the Millennium Dome, it stands as a monument to the arrogance of the people who think they know what 'the people' want.
Bradford got it right, probably to Sheffield's chagrin, when they opened the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television in 1983. That quickly became the most visited national museum outside London, attracting an average of 700,000 visitors each year. This was a quietly significant moment in what I think of as the northern renaissance. The museum is an offshoot of London's Science Museum and was something of a test case. Some in Islington and Hampstead would have loved it to fail but it flourished, proving that there is an appetite north of Watford for more than rugby league and shin-kicking contests, great fun though they both are, of course. Far from faltering through the nineties, it embarked on a £16 million expansion programme. When it reopened in 1999, it attracted over a million visitors the following year and Bradford folk are now as proud of their elegant curved glass landmark as Sheffield are queasy about their tin white elephant.
Unlike the NCPM, the NMPFT was based on a sound practical selling point: you can't watch rare archive film or look at pioneering photographs or gawp at a massive IMAX cinema in your front room whereas you can listen to Jo Whiley or play your Sex Pistols records. There's still the usual knee-jerk worshipping at the altar of interactivity but at least it's fun. You get to play with cameras and read the news. Plus there is stuff you might conceivably want to see like John Logie Baird's original telly – I had one quite like it as a student – or what is regarded as the world's first example of moving pictures, Louis Le Prince's 1888 film of Leeds Bridge.
It was the reason I first came to Bradford with a gang of media studies students in the late 1980s. After we'd spent the afternoon pretending to be newsreaders and cricking our necks at an IMAX film of the Grand Canyon (IMAX cinemas are great but there's only a slim canon of subjects that really work: moon launches, Mount Rushmore, etc. You wouldn't want to see Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage like this) we sampled the delights of Bradford. Delights aplenty there were too, particularly if you liked Indian food. I still remember the looks on the faces of our party upon entering one of the city's many fantastic cheap and cheerful curry cafes. We were seated at a table with the cutlery chained to it and scanned a typewritten flyer offering us sheek kebabs at l0p a pop and chicken bhuna for a quid. John Burke ate so much that the waiters came out and marvelled at him in quiet amusement. Then he asked for a doggy bag.
Bradford has long luxuriated in the smells and tastes and voices and colours of half a world away. It was built on wool and buying wool means travelling the globe. It's been said that you may meet a florid man sipping a whisky and soda in a Bradford saloon bar who looks as if he has never been further than Morecambe. But in his pocket he may have the timetable for the Istanbul sleeper. Bradford has always been a city of travellers. The textile men bought from Australia and Argentina, they sold to Belgium and Beijing, and the result was a city that was a funny mix of the bluff and the cosmopolitan. Barbara Castle and J. B. Priestley are one kind of Bradfordian: humane, liberal, doughty. Composer Frederick Delius was another: patrician, urbane and of German stock like many Bradfordians. Bradford's famous bohemians include the Californian exile David Hockney and Billie Whitelaw, Samuel Beckett's favourite actress.
Bradford gets very angry when casual observers overlook its proud, individual character and assume it to be a continuation or even worse, a suburb, of a certain other city ten miles east. It doesn't help that the local airport sports both their names. But it rankles with Bradford; especially these last few years. While Bradford gets docudramas about inner-city riots and criminology, Leeds – flipping Leeds! – gets Harvey Nichols, cafe culture and Guardian features about its bloody fusion restaurants.
Here's an illuminating little episode. A decade or so ago, I went to Leeds to interview a band (I've forgotten who, sadly) and took a minicab back to the station on a hot summer's day. I sat in the back with the window down as we waited at traffic lights and a couple of likely lads walked by, giving me a grudging, contemptuous look. Then one walked over and, leaning almost into the car, snarled 'RICH BASTARD!' at me.
Back in London, even my editor James Brown, a Leodensian himself, laughed in a rueful sort of way. Here was the north, no, maybe here was Yorkshire in a nutshell; bitter, envious, aggressive, impoverished, the kind of place where if you take a four-quid taxi ride, you're a pampered aristocrat.
I thought about this on my most recent trip to Leeds as I reclined on fat, plumped pillows on a handmade maple bed in the penthouse suite of 42 The Calls. The bedroom was enormous, hewn from stone and, as the whole building was a converted corn mill, buttressed and criss-crossed by the original dark wood riveted beams. The in-room hi-fi was tuned to some serene Ravel piano music on Radio 3, which mingled with the sounds of the River Aire below me and the swoosh of the hot water from the deluxe shower room. I realised, with mild annoyance, that I'd left the recessed plasma widescreen in the living room switched on and that I could still hear Ray Stubbs on Grandstand. Never mind, I'd go through in a minute just as soon as I'd finished my Bombay Sapphire and leafed through the menu one more time. White Crab Meat in a Saffron Aioli looked nice, as did the Sautéed Calves Liver with Crisp Pancetta and Roast Shallots. But, you know, I really ought to eat out. I was, after all, in Leeds, Britain's most improved city, the gentrified jewel of the new north, the Barcelona of the West Riding.
I have always had a special place in my heart for Leeds. During the 1970s, when most people detested it, I loved it for pretty much the same set of reasons: namely Revie, Bremner, Giles, Lorimer, Clarke, Yorath and Madeley. Week in, week out I went to watch Wigan Athletic vainly try to lift themselves from the gloom of the Northern Premier League into the rarefied glamour of League Division 4. But a twelve-year-old boy needs something slightly more thrilling in his football life than Tuesday night trips to Goole and Altrincham and so my other team were Leeds United.
I can now see what I couldn't at the time, namely that my beloved Leeds United were essentially the Nazis in Umbro, the Daleks dressed by Gola; a crack squad of inhuman automata with one purpose in mind, the ruthless subjugation of other life forms. Perhaps that's a bit strong. Let's say that they were a team of eleven J. R. Ewings; duplicitous, untrustworthy, conniving and, as in when they taunted a beaten Southampton with those thirty-two passes on Match of the Day, heartlessly smug. The press hated them and never had a good word for them, their dispassionate zeal and their Moonie-like teetotalism.
I loved them.
I'm not sure why, though. I think it may have been to do with Billy Bremner, who was little and feisty and a good role model for a shortarse and whose busy, combative style I could emulate in the playground whereas the technical virtuosity of George Best would al
ways elude me. Or perhaps it was because they were northern but not obvious. But probably it was because no one liked them. Everyone in my class supported either Manchester United or Liverpool, both of whom I felt carried themselves with the irritating hauteur of the self-styled playboy. No one in my part of Lancashire supported Leeds even though they were a top side. So I did. Given that I also had a partisan thing about Björn Borg, who was similarly austere, loathed and all-powerful, a psychologist would have had a field day.
I didn't get to Elland Road much but my dad would sometimes take me to Blackpool or Burnley or Preston whenever Leeds came to town. Whenever they did, the away end would fill up with Leeds hooligans in white butcher coats daubed with the names of their heroes in marker pen. They were the most frightening thing I had ever seen. They may still be just that. And I've drunk in Redcar on a Friday night.
When Leeds won the FA Cup in 1972, I watched it lying on the rug at my Auntie Maureen's house watching her big new Rediffusion colour telly and my Uncle Brian said I was the most biased football supporter in Britain. I dimly remember them romping to the '74 Championship. But what I mainly remember are a series of crushing disappointments and a taste like ashes in the mouth. Ray Kennedy's goal at Spurs pipping us to the Championship when I was ten, probably my first introduction to the random existential cruelties of adult life. We lost again to Derby the year after, made worse by the crowing of Brian Clough. Then we lost the Cup Winners' Cup to AC Milan. Horribly, in 1973, 'plucky' Sunderland of the Second Division snatched the FA Cup from under our noses. Everyone in Britain thought Bob Stokoe and Jim Montgomery, the gallant minnows manager and goalkeeper respectively, were adorable except me. I brooded under the incessant 'chauving' of my school mates.
Pies and Prejudice Page 21