People will happily boast though that they have their individual taste in music and which chimes with or runs contrary to what’s going on in the wider world, especially with popular music. When the hipster or hairy sneers at One Direction, they are marking their patch and declaring their allegiance to their own particular herd as much as any besotted Harry Styles fan. Most people don’t have a favourite late Beethoven String Quartet, but if you’re over the age of 20 not having a favourite Beatles song or at least being able to name one you like, would be a little weird. When PMs Gordon Brown and David Cameron claimed that the Arctic Monkeys and The Smiths were their respective favourite bands, we knew that they were trying to show us their ‘men of the people’ credentials. Of course it backfired. When quizzed Brown couldn’t name a single Arctic Monkeys’ song and Johnny Marr of The Smiths was so annoyed by Cameron’s (disturbingly sincere) declaration that he gave a statement saying ‘I forbid you to like The Smiths’.
Noël Coward called popular music ‘cheap music’ and he meant it as a kind of compliment I think. In the same way, in a famous essay of 1972, the great E P Thompson talked of ‘“Rough Music”: Le Charivari Anglais’. Bashed out and blown on pots, pans, percussion, bells, brass and all kinds of primitive instrumentation, rough music was a form of social control exercised by the community on all kinds of miscreants; wife-beaters, adulterers, scolds and the like, and was designed to embarrass them and hold them up to ridicule. Thompson contrasted the ‘conscious antiphony’ of rough music with the self-conscious delicacy and grace of the classical symphony. Though both were products of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rough music and the classical symphony were very different from each other. Rough music was more like free jazz, or African tribal music, or even rock and roll. It carried the latest news and gossip, songs of sex and scandal and politics, improvised collectively. Anarchic and vital, the point of rough music was only partly to entertain, but it seems to have been entertaining enough, if you weren’t the one being mocked. Most intriguing of all of this, the chief purveyors of and participants in rough music seem to have been loose bands of young men of uncertain musical ability but great charisma and verve, taken very seriously by the community at large. Sound familiar?
Rough music, cheap music, folk music, popular music; all are part of a strain of music making and enjoyment that has always been alive in the north. To generalise, we might call it the music of the street not the salon. That’s not to say that it isn’t high quality, respectable or worthy of appreciation. But that it seems to have a rich vein of collectivism and communality running through it – subscription concerts, brass bands, dance halls, pop festivals, indie music collectives and labels, night clubs – rather than the cliché of the tortured genius in his room, composing in anguish, alone against an uncaring world, however much this might remind us of Morrissey. Northern musical culture takes the rough with the smooth. It encompasses Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, the angry young men of 1950s Salford, shaking up the classical world from the tumult of the Royal Northern College of Music down Oxford Road, Manchester, and the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses doing the same thing for pop music from the Haçienda Club, a few hundred yards away and three decades later. It’s the massive contradiction inherent in, say, the Houghton Weavers singing ‘Poverty Knock’, a chilling, despairing song about the grim life of the textile worker, for the enjoyment of just those textile workers, like my mum. (The loom would knock when it was empty, meaning there was no work, and echoing the empty bellies of the child workers.)
Like some of its mouthy, voluble practitioners, pop music tends to boss any room and dominate any discussion that you let it loose in. Rich and powerful and super-served by books, radio and TV as it is, pop can stick up for itself – so we’re going to shortly head further afield in search of what the north gets up to on its musical evenings. But before we do, a quick dip again into The Uses of Literacy. Have you your copy to hand?
In it, Richard Hoggart declares that ‘the finest period in English popular song seems to have been between 1890 and 1910’. Great man though he was, he was dead wrong here, or at least premature. Hoggart believed this was the era when working-class performers and audiences held greatest sway, dominating the musical culture. In fact, though he couldn’t have known, that golden age was just about to come.
As he wrote his venerable text in the Hull of the mid-fifties, not far down the road in another northern port, a bunch of Scouse teenagers were strumming the overture to an entertainment revolution (albeit one with music hall roots) that would eclipse the reign of Marie Lloyd and Dan Leno. From little houses on mundane streets and estates, like Paul McCartney’s childhood council-house home at 20 Forthlin Road, Allerton, drab streets, from mill towns and ports, factories and coal fields, were to come working-class kids who would shake the world with every shake of their heads.
In his own classic cultural summary of a decade later, Revolt into Style, George Melly implied that rock and roll immediately made Hoggart’s observations irrelevant and out of date, and that the Beatles and Bob Dylan ushered in a new classless intellectualism in pop. There was some truth in this, but what neither grasped was that the best pop music was made by working-class kids for working-class audiences, and it wasn’t just about romance or going on with life with a cheery whistle as Hoggart claimed, or the personal philosophising of Melly’s era. It could be about life as it is lived in the real world. Twenty years apart, in very different Britains, two songs by Liverpudlian pop groups about their home city captured the north of the day better than any academic treatise could ever manage.
In 1967, the Beatles released ‘Penny Lane’ in a double ‘A’ side with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, often cited as the greatest seven-inch vinyl single ever released. Both songs, the former by McCartney, the latter by Lennon, are named after areas of Liverpool, but it’s ‘Penny Lane’ that says most about place and city itself.
McCartney’s song is a strangely childlike nostalgic evocation of Liverpool on a psychedelic suburban afternoon, a never-never land that is both cute and spooky and peopled with figures who are at once recognisably real but hauntingly surreal. The fireman, the barber, the banker sitting waiting for a trim, the pretty nurse selling poppies from a tray who ‘feels as if she’s in a play’ and ‘is anyway’. Playful, radiant and mining the mysterious and luminous in the everyday, it is typical of McCartney’s genius and typically underrated by those whose tastes run to songs more plodding and sententious. (Against the stinging barbs of these critics, McCartney has only his immense wealth, full, rich life and place in history to console himself with.)
‘Up Here In The North Of England’ is a song by Liverpool rock band The Icicle Works written and released as a single in 1987. It was composed by leader Ian McNabb as a response to a time of ferment and unrest in what felt like every corner of British life, but specifically about how life was in the north of England, in the bitter, fissile imperial phase of Thatcherism. It has none of Penny Lane’s balletic joy; it is baleful and remorseless – if sweeping – in its arrangement and its tone is dark and savage. But it is as deft and brilliant and as evocative of its time as ‘Penny Lane’. The sunny optimism of the summer of love has gone, to be replaced by an anthem for doomed youth, doomed everyone really; unemployment, drugs, football violence, urban decay. But this is not delivered with the wringing of hands but with a kind of unfazed shrug, a wry laugh and a flinty, funny jab of defiance.
Right now, we’re in a jam
We’ll call you back when we get straight …
There’s lots of food for thought
But not a great deal on our plate
The Southerners don’t like us
Who can blame ’em seems we’re always in the spotlight.
The north relishes that position in the spotlight. The music business may be based in London but the business of making music happens elsewhere, many latitudes north. We take this as a truism; the notion of the Soho entrepreneur, the A&R man, th
e starmaker coming north in his Roller or Jag to exploit the raw talent of the northern pub, club or cabaret bar, and one that is as old as popular music itself. We sing as we go, Gracie Fields claimed, slushily but with some justification, even if the song differs from place to place.
If we think of the north starting at the Watford Gap, or even Watford, as some hardened Hampsteaders do, then in the Black Country we find the foundries and the bands making metal. From the iron triangle of Wolverhampton, West Bromwich and Brum came Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest, Slade, Black Sabbath and more, while from Birmingham itself there has always been a maverick strain of psychedelia, blues and electronica. They love their psychedelia in Liverpool too, nurtured by woozy days on the dole with older brothers’ Zappa and Floyd albums. Manchester is just Manchester, of course, claiming to have invented everything, with big contradictory seams of high-rise gloom like Joy Division and high-grade hedonism at clubs like the Haçienda.
Sheffield has two sides to its character, too, what local hero Jarvis Cocker calls ‘a sci-fi element, a fascination with the future’, heard in bands like the Human League and Cabaret Voltaire, and the gritty romanticism that runs through Jarvis’s own work with Pulp, the Arctic Monkeys and Richard Hawley. Neighbouring Leeds has become the modern jazz capital of Britain, thanks to its college courses and vibrant gig scene, where you can hear punkish young men and women in black play ‘muscle jazz’, a wild, anarchic take on the legacy of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.
However, even that can seem middle of the road compared to what they get up to in Huddersfield when the Yorkshire town hosts the UK’s largest, and one of the world’s foremost, festivals of contemporary music. Even after almost 40 years, and a roster of guest composers and artists in residence that’s included Karlheinz Stockhausen, Terry Riley, John Cage, Steve Reich, Brian Eno, Pierre Boulez, Brian Eno and Sir Harrison Birtwistle, that still sits a little awkwardly with even the most well meaning.
I love Radio 3. I would say that even if they didn’t let me broadcast there from time to time. When I was an impecunious teenager and later a flat broke student, I was lucky enough to receive an unorthodox but enviable state education in modern classical music via the good offices of Wigan Library, the music library of Edge Hill College (as it was then) and Radio 3. From Wigan Library, I lugged home various much-used and collapsing cardboard boxed sets on crackling vinyl – Bartók’s Six String Quartets, the complete Debussy Piano Preludes, Shostakovich Cello Concertos – held together with Sellotape and staples. These provided the best borrowing value, counting as one item each, and these things mattered when you are consuming music, voraciously, like a shark drifting though elvers. From the music room at Edge Hill, when I should have been parsing Chaucer, I sat dreamily with headphones on by the Grundig music centre and watched the term and the girls of John Dalton Hall drift by while discovering Vaughan Williams, Poulenc and William Walton.
And I filled tape after tape from Radio 3; furtively, illegally, fingers poised over play, pause and ‘rec’. I assembled a collection of cassettes that I must still have somewhere; felt-tipped scrawled index cards reading ‘Proms Premiere’ or ‘Composer Of The Week’, cradling tapes that accrued with every pass a crust of audio barnacles, oxidation and hiss. But through it, I could hear the rare, special music I played again and again and could never have afforded to buy; Panufnik, Petr Eben, Rautavaara. It was the best musical education money could buy, but I didn’t have to buy it. It had been paid for by generations of British people before me, proudly and cheerfully, from taxes not begrudged, and licences fees not carped at, at least not when they could see the kind of country it built for them and their sons and daughters.
So believe me, it was with affection as well as exasperation that I listened to Radio 3’s trail for their coverage of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2014. The tone was pleasant, genial even, but it sounded like the Blue Peter team about to blast off for the barren wastes of one of Neptune’s outer moons: ‘Once a year, we put on our warmest coats and biggest boots and head up to the hills and the chilly, windy northern town of Huddersfield …’ I think they even have gone, ‘Brrrr …’ Well-intentioned, intended indeed to be engaging and chatty, it came out hopelessly patronising and metropolitan, as if the Arts Council were off to meet the Moomins.
Being made of hardy northern stuff, I had prepared myself for Huddersfield not by goose greasing myself or packing snowshoes but by announcing my itinerary on Twitter like the metrosexual I am. One tweeter assured me I would enjoy myself in what they described as ‘the most chilled out town in the North’. I should point out that they meant in the sense of ‘easy in its own skin’ not ‘you’ll need your thermals’. Huddersfield, in fact, has a temperate oceanic climate, comparatively mild for its northerly latitude and moderated and warmed by the Gulf Stream. Concerns that it shouldn’t get any warmer though clearly exercise the townsfolk; Huddersfield elected Britain’s first ever Green Party councillor. It has also produced two prime ministers, Herbert Asquith and Harold Wilson, the latter commemorated in a statue at the railway station.
That station was described by no less an authority than John Betjeman as having ‘the most splendid station facade in England’. It is a Grade 1 listed building and looks more like a stately home than a railway station, except of course more useful than any stately home and therefore more splendid by far. Huddersfield is a grand looking town, an architectural enthusiast’s dream. Friedrich Engels called it ‘the handsomest by far of all the factory towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire by reason of its charming situation and modern architecture.’ By modern, he meant Victorian of course, and its buildings have all the thrusting civic virility and bullishness of that era. If you’d prefer a compliment more even-handed, back-handed even, then how about Derek Lindstrum’s assessment: ‘The post-war rebuilding of the larger towns in the West Riding is a dismal story… relieved only by the example of Huddersfield.’ But you can’t argue with the stats. At one point, Huddersfield had more listed buildings than Bath and with 1,660 still boasts the third highest number in Britain.
All of this speaks of a town that confounds expectations, especially southern ones. I say that not to be parochial or insulting. Huddersfield – ‘Odersfelt’, as those distinctly non-jessie southerners, the Normans, knew it in the Domesday Book – sounds thickly, resolutely northern, even to northerners. It sounds both bovine and bruising, flecked with rain and spittle, ruminative and slow. But culturally, it’s a powerhouse, one that can show Bath a clean pair of heels I reckon. It’s a hotbed of poetic talent to the degree that one can talk straight-faced of the Huddersfield Poets. It still has a thriving reggae soundsystem scene, a survivor of its seventies heyday when the town’s West Indian mill workers made it a rival to London. Sadly, there is no West Yorskshire equivalent to the Clash’s White Man In Hammersmith Palais, a tribute to the soundsystems called ‘White Man In Huddersfield Town Hall’.
TV presenter Nicholas Crane, he of the coastal adventures with an umbrella in his backpack (sorry, I’m sure he’s a lovely man but that wacky affectation brings out the Maoist in me) said of it that ‘it was a town no one seems to want to leave’. It is very definitely a town, by the way, and proud of it. The football team are called Town and, furthermore, nicknamed ‘Town’. Unlike some lickspittle, greasy-pole climbing boroughs, they have never applied for city status. They’ve got better things to do.
Even if you have no interest in Victorian architecture or Labour history statuary, you must visit the railway station simply because it has a cracking pub. In the East Wing, on George Square, there’s the King’s Head currently undergoing renovation, which will bring, as the Huddersfield Daily Examiner puts it ‘the serving of meals for the first time and a longed for rehabilitation of the toilets since the year Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979.’
I take refreshment in the Head of Steam though; four big rooms and an absorbing stash of railway memorabilia. Speaking as a Lancastrian, the barmaid strikes me as a very particular Y
orkshire type. At first she seems as hard as nails, hostile festooned with lurid homemade tattoos featuring the names of former boyfriends that she has presumably killed; the sort of person who regards smiling and such pleasantries as the mark of the degenerate and soft headed fop. But get her talking, make a few complimentary remarks about the beer or the menu, and she opens up, showing her kindly nature almost against her will. It’s as if some folks from round these parts have taken their own publicity too much to heart, all that weary guff about ‘speaking as they find’, and they don’t want to let on that they really are good people, generous and funny, and not at all like Geoffrey Boycott. They have been up to this game for some time though. In 1757, John Wesley wrote, ‘I rode over the mountains to Huddersfield. A wilder people I never saw in England… [they] seemed just ready to devour us.’ Maybe that’s what happened to the lads whose names are memorialised on the barmaid’s arms.
There is time before the evening’s concert to take in some of the sights of the town. If you come by car, be advised that there is a spectacular view from the south-east corner of the top floor of the multistorey car park. From here you can see Castle Hill, the town’s most prominent landmark and a cool place for Kirklees folk to hang out, have political meetings, barter, wrestle, etc., from the Mesolithic period to the Chartists. The town itself is busy, and everywhere there are signs of that most quintessential of Yorkshire qualities: pride. A Rotherham friend of mine claims he once heard a Rotherham man vox popped on local TV eulogising his county. ‘Yorkshire people are proud of where they come from.’ And what exactly was he proud of? He thought for a moment, then replied, ‘The pride.’
The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play Page 31