by Mark Kermode
Here, for the record, are the lyrics of my best efforts in this area:
James Anderton is big and strong
James Anderton is in this song
James Anderton, his friends call him ‘Jim’
How truly wonderful to be like him
Oh please don’t think I’m faking
But I’m swirling in a cesspit of my own making
For you
Do-be-do-be-do.
You probably had to be there.
One of the acceptable hobbies for a fledging comrade was the writing and publication of articles in newspapers, presumably because this would provide a future opportunity for ‘subverting the mass media from within’. By happy coincidence I had been making inroads into journalism ever since my arrival in Manchester thanks to the open-door policy of Mancunion, an award-winning publication based on the second floor of the Students’ Union. As far as I could tell the paper was pretty much obliged to support any and all budding student journos by printing their submitted copy, no matter how poor – an opportunity which I exploited to the hilt. It was in the pages of Mancunion that I made my ‘proper’ newspaper debut, a review of the funk-punk band the Higsons (hark, is that the sound of the system collapsing?) at the Hacienda. As before, this was yet another attempt at sub-NME scribery which I spiced up with interview quotes obtained by cornering frontman Charlie Higson backstage armed with a pen, a pad of paper, and the scarily convincing declaration that I was ‘from the local music press, alright?’ By a peculiar twist of fate, Charlie Higson would later go on to present the short-lived Channel 4 film show Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, making him a far more famous and successful film critic than me and thus the subject of my ongoing envy. He also starred in The Fast Show which, for my money, is one of the funniest TV programmes ever.
But I forgive him.
Hot from my ‘page twenty-three, lower-left column’ success with the Higsons review I filed an equally hot-headed account of Orange Juice’s Hacienda show, by which time I began to feel that I had utterly conquered rock journalism. I still wrote with all the style and grace of an idiot fanboy who desperately wanted to be Lester Bangs but was more (as Kurt Vonnegut put it) Philboyd Studge. Yet I had learned two important lessons: firstly, that you should keep and file all your old press cuttings, because nobody else will; and secondly, that in journalism you can be whoever you want to be as long as you have enough front. And no shame.
Of course, what I really wanted to be was a film critic (if I wasn’t going to be a pop star, which I clearly wasn’t and if the revolution wasn’t happening right now, which it didn’t seem to be), but there was no chance of that at Mancunion. Gig reviews were fine – you just paid to see the show then wrote about it the next morning. But film reviews had to be filed in advance and that meant gaining access to private preview screenings. figuring out who organised these secretive screenings, and where and when they happened, was difficult enough, let alone getting your name on the mystical ‘list’ which was spoken of only in hushed whispers and overheard asides. You remember all that nonsense that Tom Cruise’s character goes through in his attempts to get into the masked orgy in Stanley Kubrick’s rubbish Eyes Wide Shit (sorry, Shut) – having to get a piano player drunk to prise the location out of him, then hiring a fancy dress get-up at midnight from some Slavic pimp-cum-costumier, then getting a taxi to drive for hours to the middle of nowhere before enduring hours of awful ‘plink plonk bong’ avant-garde atonal piano squonking and failing to get even a blowjob despite being able to produce the password ‘fidelio!’ when requested to do so by a man dressed as a chicken? You remember all that? Well, trying to get on to the Manchester film preview screening circuit was worse – and a lot less funny.
For a while, I thought you probably had to kill someone and eat their still-beating organs in some Angel Heart-type twisted satanic ritual before the wanton pleasures of the preview screening would be revealed to you. Later, I discovered that you just had to be ‘invited’ by someone ‘in the know’ – or to be ‘sent’ by a magazine, which in my case turned out to be City Life.
City Life was a small but thriving Manchester listings magazine which had been set up in 1983 as ‘a cross between Time Out and Private Eye’. Over the years the magazine had become an admirable thorn in the side of James Anderton, thanks largely to the persistence of news editor Ed Glinert who seemed to have an inside track on the chief constable’s bizarre beliefs. One story had it that a disgruntled copper had actually bugged his boss’ office and was feeding stories to Glinert (who stoically refused to reveal his sources). Whatever the truth, City Life was a flag-waver in the war against Anderton, and that made working for it a worthy cause indeed.
Like City Limits in London, City Life was a workers co-op, which brought numerous benefits including (crucially) assistance from the Manchester Co-operative Development Agency, aka Mancoda. The co-op structure put in place a rigorously egalitarian framework within which everyone did everything and everyone was equal– at least in theory. In practice, the magazine was run by three quixotic editors: Glinert, Chris Paul and Andy ‘Spin’ Spinoza, all graduates of Mancunion , and all of whom would ultimately go on to excel in their various chosen professions.
Spinoza was particularly industrious, becoming the diary editor at the long-running Manchester Evening News before setting up the thriving Spin Media agency and establishing himself as the North-West’s premier public-relations guru. Spin could make a news story out of anything. When I completed my PhD thesis in 1991, he got in touch to ask me if I had any ‘interesting’ plans for the future, now that I was officially a ‘Doctor of Horror’. I told him that Linda and I were getting married in Liverpool that same week, after which we were going to travel around America for a fortnight, stopping off briefly at Georgetown in Washington DC so that I could finally see the ‘Exorcist steps’. Spin promptly filed a story for the Evening News which ran under the splash headline ‘Dr Horror Plans Haunted Honeymoon’. I still have it framed on the mantelpiece, one of a very few genuinely treasured press cuttings. (Spin reckons I got off lightly, pointing out that when a fellow City Life r got a PhD in Popular Culture, the MEN diary pages dubbed him ‘Dr Disco’.)
‘I edited City Life for six years,’ Spin told the Guardian when interviewed about his lively career a few years ago, ‘and never earned more than £75 a week. We lived off the thin of the land. But it wasn’t about the money. It was about our independent voice. It was a fun, very creative environment. I interviewed everyone from Alan Bleasdale to Bernard Manning. And we gave the first chance to writers like Jon Ronson and Mark Kermode …’ Reading this made me strangely proud, because it suggested that no matter how piffling my role in City Life had been (and believe me it was really piffling) I had somehow passed into the annals of its illustrious history – a feat I never dreamed could become a reality.
I first joined the (outer) ranks of City Life when I answered an ad for an ‘enthusiastic and outgoing’ (ha!) wannabe journalist to sell advertising space in their forthcoming ‘Student Special’ edition. Back in the eighties, Manchester was home to 60,000 students (there are even more now) making it ‘the densest student population in Europe’ – a totally non-ironic phrase which I would repeat down the phone for weeks on end in the desperate attempt to sell some wretched ads. It turned out I was a completely useless salesman, and the amount of ad revenue which I personally managed to raise for that issue was way below par. But by the time the balance sheets were totted up I’d already got my feet under the table and was attending co-op meetings like my life depended on them – which, in a way, it did.
Co-op meetings were fun, if a bit mad. Politics were always high on the agenda, with the inevitable interface between lofty ideals and practical commerce provoking regular sparks. At one meeting we rowed for hours about whether to accept a lucrative full-page ad for Brian De Palma’s new film Body Double which depicted a semi-clad (and apparently endangered) Melanie Griffith being leered at through half-opened blinds by a s
hadowy stalker. In the end, Spinoza and I won the day on right-on points, and the ad was voted in true co-op fashion to be ‘unsuitable’ – to the dismay of the ad team who were having a hard enough time financing the mag, and who shook their heads at the loss of such badly needed income.
Of course, the core City Life team were a volatile bunch given to vigorous squabbling for which the co-operative rule-book provided a firm and rigidly egalitarian structure. I remember more than one meeting in which the agenda of issues for discussion (neatly typed and recorded for posterity) would read something like: ‘ITEM ONE – The frankly unacceptable behaviour of Co-op member X, as proposed by Co-op member Y; ITEM TWO – The frankly unacceptable behaviour of Co-op member Y, as proposed by Co-op member X; ITEM THREE – The frankly unacceptable behaviour of Co-op members X and Y as proposed by everybody else.’ The exact nature of the ‘frankly unacceptable behaviour’ would vary from week to week, but the key issues remained the same: creative people, crammed together in a small office like Coppola’s colourful Rumble fish, needing to blow off steam in the relatively safe environment of a really well-organised row.
Occasionally, the creativity tipped over into madness. Like all my memories of Manchester, everything that happened in the City Life offices seemed unbelievably important and prone to controversy – even the simple task of making a cup of tea. I remember my first experience of ‘being mother’ for the assembled masses, proudly scrabbling around the smelly kitchen in search of an old teapot in order to prepare a proper brew – after all, the people who worked here were ‘real journalists’ and frankly I was in awe of them. I diligently took orders for milk and sugar, and produced a tray of steaming teas that duly matched their exacting demands. Everyone was suitably grateful and polite except one CL stalwart who made a silent but commanding gesture for me to wait while he tasted the tea which I had brought. I stood, uncertain as to whether this was a joke. It wasn’t. It was deadly serious. He lifted the cup to his lips, took a tiny slurp, swilled it around his mouth, considered for a moment, took another slurp, exercised his palette some more, and then slammed the teacup down on to the desk, a look of assertive rapture in his eyes. He stared at me, astonished.
‘Number four!’ he said grandly.’Straight in at number four!’
I had no idea what he was talking about.
I looked at him. He looked at me.
Then he swung round in his chair and ripped down a piece of paper which had been Sellotaped to the wall of the office.
‘Number four!’ he said again.‘Ahead of Auty in ’83, but just behind Spinoza and Spinoza again in ‘84, and way behind Hill, still untouchable at the top spot.’
‘What?’ I said, confused.
‘Top Ten Teas!’ he replied grandly, as if it were the most obvious thing on earth.’You’re straight in at number four, but Hill and Spinoza are still ahead. Spinoza twice!’
I looked at him, certain that he was having me on. But the list, which he was now studiously rewriting, spoke for itself. There, scribbled but precise, was an account of the top ten cups of tea that had been served in the City Life office, with names and dates dutifully recorded like a court record-keeper’s log. And there was I, new on the list, going ‘straight in at number four’, thereby displacing the former numbers four to nine and knocking out number ten entirely.
City Life really did keep a list of ‘Top Ten Teas’.
And this was years before Nick Hornby and High fidelity.
And I was straight in at number four.
I loved working for City Life!
But inevitably, City Life didn’t always love me – particularly when I crashed their delivery van.
The delivery run was one of the many tasks to which more lowly members of the co-op would aspire. Due to my student status, I was only ever a part-time worker and therefore a part-time co-op member, which meant that I got all the perks of working at the mag with little or none of the real responsibility – both practical and financial. I was, in effect, a makeweight, although it has since pleased me to insist that I was a core member of the City Lifefamily. The truth is more mundane – I was a hanger-on, albeit an enthusiastic one.
I wasn’t much good at anything, but I did have a clean driver’s licence and I had never been declared legally bankrupt, which was not something that everyone at City Life could say. So, more often than not, I got the job of driving the City Life van over the moors to the printers in Batley, and then shipping the finished copies back to a string of distribution warehouses on the outskirts of Manchester overnight, before doing early-morning drops at local newsagents in the city centre. It was fantastically exciting stuff, turning up at remote depots at all hours in the morning and being referred to as ‘Driver!’ (rather than ‘Student Wanker’) wherever you went. The vehicles themselves came from Manchester Van Hire, and if you were lucky you got one with a radio and even (occasionally) a cassette player which would turn your journey into a sublime musical odyssey. I remember pulling out of the printers with a full load and pressing uphill on to the dual carriageway with the Comsat Angels’ first album Waiting For A Miracle warbling on the stereo and thinking I had never been happier in my entire life.
The problem was that driving all night with your hands wet on the wheel (in the immortal words of Golden Earring) wasn’t great from a safety point of view, particularly if you’d spent the whole of the previous day industriously attempting to smash the state by standing on some dodgy student picket or other and playing South African liberation songs on the French horn and trombone. This is not a joke; I really did play in a quasi-revolutionary brass band who performed foghorn-like arrangements of ANC anthems to lift the spirits of protestors as they trudged through the streets of Manchester – a weekly occurrence in those heady days. We were very enthusiastic but also quite terrible. I remember very clearly turning up late to one particular march and as my mouthpiece-wielding compatriots and I ran to catch up with the crowd, a long-suffering policeman was heard very loudly to exclaim, ‘Oh God, not the band … please, not the band!’
But marching and blowing can leave you all puffed out, and driving the van after a hard day’s radical flugelhorning was always going to end in tears. So it was that early one morning, toward the end of the City Life run, I was coming off the M56 on to the series of slip roads which feed on to the Princess Parkway – a large dual carriageway leading straight into the centre of the city. There was neither traffic around nor any adverse weather conditions – surprisingly for the so-called rainy city. As I came off the motorway I banked left with the slip road, then curved right as it looped back on itself before snaking up toward the dual carriageway. It’s a tricky stretch, ideally taken at around 30 mph but with a temptingly twisty appearance which seems to say ‘Go on, you can do it, it’ll be fun …. Let’s floor it.’ For the record, I never actually ‘floored it’ – I was always too chicken. But I would take asinine delight in accelerating slightly out of the first turn and into the second bend because the van would lean one way, then the other, in a manner which seemed far more dramatic than it actually was. Pathetic, I know, but hey I was young and foolish.
Nowadays I am old and stupid. So it goes.
Anyway, as I came into the second bend, something happened. For years I would assert that the load shifted in the back of the van – which indeed it did, toppling awkwardly from one side to the other and thereby briefly unbalancing the vehicle. Recently I have come to accept the more shameful possibility that I was actually checking my hair in the rear-view mirror and was temporarily caught off guard. Whatever – the result was the same; the van wobbled and I overcorrected with the steering wheel, causing it to slew. The back of the van swung out and the whole vehicle started careening gracefully toward the restraining barriers on the outside rim of the road. Although I wasn’t actually going very fast, the rear end of the van had a fair amount of weight and thwacked into the barriers, striking the offside corner with a rubbery thud. Now, if you know anything about motorway barriers (which I d
idn’t, but do now) you’ll know that they are designed to be flexible, to absorb the shock in the event of being struck by a vanload of City Life s. In my case, the barrier absorbed the shock extremely effectively but then, like some oversized guitar string being plucked, appeared to twang back against the van, swatting the rear corner away like a fly, and causing the front offside corner to perform an almost identical pluck-and-recoil manoeuvre. Baffled, but still moving forward, I hit the brakes which simply put the van into a skid and sent it lurching back across the carriageway toward the opposing barriers, upon contact with which it conducted another vehicular hokey-kokey, putting its front end in, its back end out, in-out in-out shake-it-all-about-and-turn-around, while in the cabin I went all knees bent, arms stretched, ra ra ra!
By the time the van came to rest in the middle of the slip road, I had managed (very effectively) to knock seven bells out of all four of its corners, prompting the question upon my return to the City Life office, ‘Which direction were you actually travelling in when you hit the barrier(s)?’ From the look of it, the van had been at the centre of a complicated four-way pincer movement in which the entire motorway had risen up from north, south, east and west and struck the unsuspecting vehicle from all sides at the same time. It was pretty impressive.
In the wake of the van incident it was decided that I could probably do less damage behind a desk, and since I’d been promised some writing assignments when I first came on board, it seemed the right time to let me loose in the pages of the magazine. The first major piece I filed was an interview with Douglas Adams, who was in town to promote the newly published scripts for his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series. I was a huge Hitchhiker’s fan and grilled him with the intensity of a sci-fi stalker, which he seemed to find at once flattering, annoying, and unsettling. As for my prose style, I had graduated from writing like a tea boy at the offices of the NME to Minister in Charge of Paper Clips at the Department of Pedantic Dullardry. I saw this as a huge improvement, and indeed ‘pedantic dullardry’ remains a touchstone of my journalistic endeavours to this day.