The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play

by Stuart Maconie

  Sometimes, the signs of this deep-seated pride are literally signs. The Merrie England café proclaims our ‘famous roast beef is now available to take home’ with the proud but understated assumption that only a lunatic would not want to do just that. Outside the Grove Inn, a blackboard proclaims ‘Lovely Yorkshire pub food’. This again is typically Yorkshire. I have never seen a pub in my own county boast ‘Lovely Lancashire pub food’. Yorkshire has a shared mentality other counties lack. Wigan is different from Lancaster, Blackburn is different from Southport, and Manchester is very, very different from Liverpool. But sporting rivalries aside, scratch a bloke from Helmsley and a bloke from Pontefract, or Barnsley or Sheffield and you will find the same underlying bedrock. The pride.

  The art gallery is superb, and gives one an object lesson in the place of art in the community instantly, in that there is an elderly Asian man in the first room eating a giant pasty and gazing at a Lowry pencil sketch of the town. In this wonderful gallery I make some new discoveries that I’m keen to find out more about, like the reclusive Harold Blackburn and his bright urban pastoral ‘Daisies on the Piazza’, or Mary Lord whose ‘Winter Morning Over Highburton to Holmfirth’, an austere rhapsody of sky and space, will fill any northerner with an ache that is laced with dread.

  Most of all, though, I am taken by the work of Peter Brook. In this I am not alone I find when I do a little research, since he was apparently a friend of the actors James Mason, Rodney Bewes and Tom Courtenay. But if this sounds clubbable, the work is anything but. ‘Midwinter, Lonely Pennine Farm’, ‘Abandoned’, ‘Outside’ are all as stark as the title, and the one on the wall here, ‘West Riding’, is typical; haunted figures imprisoned on a grim street, behind the roofs the cold detachment of the hills beyond. But there is a stony love of the north at the heart of them all. It’s the same one that runs like cold beck water through Jake Thackray’s wonderful ‘The Rain on the Mountainside’. Against stiff competition, this is maybe the best song about the northern landscape ever written, and one that expresses the link between us and the hard, beautiful ‘grim indifference’ of the countryside we grew up in. Go and listen to it the minute you put this book down.

  Outside on Chapel Street, the same one immortalised by a Lowry on the art gallery wall, the wind is so raw and bitter that I start for a moment to change my mind about that Radio 3 trail. And that of course is why I am here; for the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. ‘Huddersfield is a town with music coursing through it as powerfully as rugby league or poetry or Pennine winds. It has three professional choirs, which is three more than many more genteel towns of similar size. It has numerous music societies, brass bands, folk clubs and the like.

  But it is the Contemporary Music Festival where Huddersfield, and by extension the north, shows a truly ruggedly individual side to its nature; a celebration of radical sounds from the furthest shores of experimentalism in jazz, classical, rock, improvised music and electro-acoustic work. It began in 1978 in a spirit of cussed DIY fervour from some of the town’s passionate music fans. Fog nearly forced them to abandon the inaugural festival but it has grown into a British cultural institution with a global cast and an international reputation. The town is justly and mightily proud of it. Maybe I didn’t hear anyone in a chip shop saying, ‘Hey up Doreen, look sharp, tha dunt want for’t miss start o’t Morton Feldman. It’s reyt quiet and repetitive,’ but the daunting lady behind the bar of the Head of Steam knew of it. The taxi drivers and shop keepers know of it, even if they might run a mile from the music itself.

  A word on that sort of music. I have a radio show called the Freak Zone which reflects part of my musical taste, what some people might call ‘weird shit’. The older I get, the more I’ve come to realise that in music, I like danceable, attractive, well-crafted pop and I like weird shit. I like Abba, Tamla Motown and disco, and I like stuff that frightens horses and has people asking, ‘What the hell are you listening to?’ That’s a simplification but it tells you a little about the music too. Abba and Chic are more deep and complex than you think, and weird music is fun too if you give it a chance.

  What I don’t like is the stuff in between; middle of the road rock, landfill indie, earnest singer songwriters, self-important rock stars who think they’re old bluesmen or great poets, stadium rock bands, divas, legends, anyone who has got to the stage in their career when they now wear a hat thinking it makes them interesting, all the stuff that ends up in those rock critics’ list of the 100 Greatest Albums. Brian Eno once said that he didn’t like relaxation music and background music because it made him tense. I get that. In a lift or waiting to be put through to the gas board, I would much rather hear Penderecki’s ‘Threnody For The Victims of Hiroshima’, George Crumb’s Black Angels On The Point Of Departure or Tuvaluan throat singing than Van Morrison or Oasis. So the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music is my kind of party, and Henry Cow is my kind of party band.

  I once asked Richard Branson about Henry Cow and even the genial Croesus-alike blanched at the very mention of their name. It seems that even now as he reclines on a li-lo on Necker Island, glamorous companions and frozen daiquiri to hand, he still remembers the nightmare he had when he signed Europe’s most prominent hard-left jazz classical prog ensemble to his label. He had a much easier time with Culture Club I bet. Then a few months after meeting Richard, I met the drummer of Henry Cow, Chris Cutler. I told him how Richard reacted and a thin smile of satisfaction played round his owlish features. ‘Up The Workers’, it seemed to say, in 15/8 time.

  Henry Cow were in the vanguard of a movement that they called Rock In Opposition, which included bands from Britain, Italy, Sweden, Belgium and beyond. It was a kind of Revolutionary Socialist Atonal Contrapuntal Eurovision Song Contest. Musically the bands were very different but all were challenging and adventurous and espoused Marxist politics and a distrust of the banalities and corporatism of mainstream seventies rock. At one point, in an effort to get more hits and subvert the system from within, Henry Cow merged with the avant-pop group Slapp Happy who weren’t averse to choruses. This didn’t work out and the Cow (as no one called them) ended up kicking Slapp Happy singer Peter Blegvad out for being too ‘flippant’, something Blegvad will tell you with delight. Eventually, Henry Cow disbanded in the late seventies and fractured into several equally daunting and brilliant offshoots like the Art Bears and News From Babel, none of whom got mentioned on the Chart Rundown with Mark Goodier.

  When Henry Cow announced that they were going to reform for two shows in 2014 as a tribute to their late member and composer Lindsay Cooper, there was flurry of excitement among those of us who get excited about such things. Tickets sold out in a trice for both shows. The first was at the Barbican in London and attracted a fabulously diverse crowd, including comedians Stewart Lee and Vic Reeves, snooker player Steve Davis and novelist Jonathan Coe. The only other show was at the Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield and it attracted, among other people, me.

  Henry Cow are about the nearest to a regular rock group that will ever play the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. They have a drummer, singers, amplifiers, electric guitars, probably a rider of a few cans of average lager and some Doritos and such, but after that any resemblance to Coldplay ends. (Come to think of it Coldplay probably have something fancier than lager and Doritos; Faustino Rioja and Kettle Chips I bet.) The music is technically complex and draws as much on Schoenberg and Elliott Carter as it does on Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran. It’s also underpinned with a pretty rigorous political philosophy, a radical socialist critique that, Manic Street Preachers and Scritti Politti apart, has little in common with the hippy vagaries most bands spout. They were always more feted in Europe, where progressive rock and leftist politics sat happily together, than they were here. One Italian rock website sums them up thus: ‘Virtually ignored by the press and by histories of rock music because their albums never entered the charts, they were actually one of the most significant groups of all time.’
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  Henry Cow were not a typical rock band then, and this is not the typical rock band crowd either. It is a truism of all public events that the ladies’ loo will have a far longer queue than the gents. Not here. I have to queue up for ages with other men of a certain age and weakening bladders. In fact, I feel quite perked up by being, for the first time in ages, the youngest bloke at a gig, me having been just leaving the juniors when the Cow were in their pomp, while these guys were doing their mock O levels, I guess. That would be around 1971, a big year for Huddersfield and Henry Cow. The band were getting their first John Peel plays and the town’s football team were briefly in the First Division, led by striker Alan Gowling who because he had a degree was nicknamed ‘Bamber’.

  And here come Henry Cow! The men in the band mirror many of the men in the audience in looking like they might teach European Literature or Film Studies at a redbrick university; linen jackets, leather blousons, severe glasses, lots of black.

  Legendary guitarist Fred Frith sits barefoot and Buddha-like on a low chair, guitar in lap – no feet up on the monitor in Henry Cow – looking left wing and professorial and conducts the band from this position. The insanely complicated opening number falls apart under the sheer weight of its own complexity, like a collapsing star, but Fred turns and looks over his shoulder, and counts them back in a few beats later and they pick up the thread like a unicyclist wobbling away on his bike.

  Dagmar Krause is still one of the most striking and unlikely singers ever to make ‘pop’ records, with a voice that can go from icy mittel-European operatics to girlish levity in a bar. John Greaves and Chris Cutler may be the greatest unsung rhythm section operating in what we might call rock; for all the music’s density and detail, they gently swing through it, keeping even the most didactic moments light on their feet and graceful.

  A row of Singaporean students lean forward as one to catch a shriekingly intense violin cadenza, as gleefully excited as teenage girls at a One Direction show. The final number has what for Henry Cow is a ‘lighters in the air’ moment, a ‘Robbie Williams Angels’ moment, except that theirs has a chorus that goes ‘Let ownership devolve to all’ which is just perfect. Then it is out into the Yorkshire night, with the merry, mesmerising tunes ringing in the ears. Looking back it was, for all kinds of reasons, a very special night. Who’d have thought it? Huddersfield; ‘a town no one seems to want to leave’. I certainly didn’t.

  Those earnest Italian fans of Henry Cow will know the phrase Il letto è opera del povero, ‘bed is the poor man’s opera’, by which is meant that what the upper classes get out of opera, the lower orders find via sex, by which I assume they don’t mean long stretches of boredom interrupted by random bouts of yelling and the occasional stabbing. This is me letting my prejudices show, but it seems I am in good company. The great Claude Debussy said that ‘in opera, there is always too much singing’, and I know just what he means. American humourist Dave Randolph said ‘Parsifal is the kind of opera that starts at six o clock and after it has been going for three hours you look at your watch and it says six-twenty’. I know what he means too. Lovers of opera contend that it is the highest of all the musical arts, one of the great achievements of human civilisation. Conversely, this writer feels that opera might be the silliest of all musical forms, and I say that being fully aware of the existence of both skiffle and trad jazz, two other genres whose popularity baffles me.

  I have long suspected some kind of snobbery at work, and my suspicions were not allayed when I went to Glyndebourne for the festival. I have now no recollection of what I saw except that it was sung in Italian with English surtitles that ran along the top of the stage on a red LED display, like the ones that tell you that the 11.47 to Didcot Parkway has been cancelled due to failure of lineside equipment.

  What I remember chiefly is the sheer preposterousness of the evening. The first ‘half’ went on for about two hours and then we all shuffled out into the sunlit gardens and grounds of the theatre for an interval that lasted ONE HOUR AND 40 MINUTES. This was called, not without good reason, ‘the long interval’, an unarguably accurate name for an interval that lasted longer than a football match. During this time people lugged (or had lugged for them by liveried luggers) hampers onto the lawn and ate cruel exotic pâté and swan roulade and sipped champagne. There were a lot of Japanese people there and a good many blokes who looked like hedge-fund managers or arms dealers. Then we went back in and were shrieked at in Italian over fairly nondescript tunes for about 20 MINUTES before it finished, bringing the whole lopsided event to a close. Then everyone went nuts. Really nuts. People leapt to their feet as if a high voltage current had been passed through the stalls. Most of Kew Gardens was flung at the prima donna, who took about 30 curtain calls. It was a ludicrous way to pass an evening, and the music was terrible.

  I keep trying. I can claim some expert acquaintance with the Immortal Bard’s Macbeth, having played the title role in a production that is still talked of in hushed tones in the Wigan area. So I decided this would be the perfect one of Verdi’s operas to begin with. What dawned on me quite quickly is that it all sounds the same. Now you could say the same for Phillip Glass, and I quite like him, but it’s a real drawback if you’re telling a story. Flipping through the CD tracks at random, I expected to be able to tell what kind of scene was playing, if not exactly where in the drama we were. But no. Late night smoochy chat between Mac and wife, horrific slaying of Duncan, appearance of Banquo’s ghost, tender moment between Lady MacDuff and child, long drawn out conversation between MacDuff and Malcolm, eerie bit with Lady Macbeth wandering around castle at night … all sounded exactly the same, that is like people shouting at the tops of their voices in order to be heard over an orchestra that is playing a series of bombastic gestures with no discernible tune.

  But I was determined not to be thought a philistine, or to be accused of being a quitter. Here was the perfect opportunity to combine my ongoing attempt to learn to love opera with a look at the north at play. I also wanted to avoid the crass line taken by both some on the left and the populist right wing press that opera was some kind of fanciful, useless amusement for poshos and didn’t deserve such things as Arts Council grants or Lottery subsidies.

  I knew first hand that working-class people could enjoy opera because I grew up with my mum singing the hits as she washed up or peeled potatoes. My house as a kid rang to my mum’s wobbly contralto versions of various ageless arias. I knew ‘Il Pagliacci’, ‘Catari Catari’, and ‘Nessun Dorma’ long before it became a football theme. I knew every groove of Peter Firmani Singing Your Requests, an album made by a tenor who sang in the Labour and social clubs of Lancashire, belting out arias from Donizetti to packed houses of miners and mill workers. So I know I am not representative of all my countrymen. The north loves its opera, and I knew where I needed to go to see that love. The clue was in the name.

  Opera North was founded in Leeds in 1977 just as punk rock also raged across the cities of the north. In its own way, it was just as revolutionary and just as ideological in thrust. Its stated aim was to bring first rate, high-quality opera to the north of England, which then had no permanent or properly established opera company and was something of an operatic wasteland. Its first production was Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah, its first director was David Lloyd Jones, and since then has gone from strength to strength through sometimes demanding financial and artistic climates. (I am embarrassed to tell you that I scrolled with real excitement to a section of the Wiki entry called Opera North: the Paul Daniel years before I realised my mistake – he is a conductor and was their music director.)

  Why Opera North then? There is no Opera South, but then there doesn’t need to be, in the same way that there’s no need for a south of England correspondent on the BBC News. The centre of gravity, the attention, the implied and real power, the money, is in the south already. In the V&A’s several pages of its online history of opera in England, ‘regional’ opera merits four lines. Most of tho
se are about Opera North.

  The fact that Leeds is twinned with Ulan Bator, capital of Outer Mongolia, is always going to be worth a chuckle, but in truth, as a city it’s the Barcelona of the West Riding. It is steeped in art; hometown of Henry Moore and Damien Hirst. Writerly wit abounds here, from Alan Bennett to Keith Waterhouse to Helen Fielding. Jude Kelly made the West Yorkshire Playhouse one of the county’s theatrical powerhouses. But it wears all this learning and culture lightly, and it knows how to have a good time. Come to Leeds on any night, not just a weekend, and you will find its streets buzzing, thronged with people in search of thrills cheap and otherwise, shouting lustily to each other, crossing the roads erratically in implausible heels and dresses. It is a big student city, and many of them never go home. Well, to paraphrase the old song ‘how you gonna keep ’em down in Sidcup after they’ve seen Briggate on a Saturday night’. And as well as my favourite market, my favourite Italian restaurant and some of my favourite hotels, my favourite indie club in all the world is here, down on the aforementioned Briggate, where they have got their bands and their wires wonderfully crossed. The sign above the door quotes a Smiths lyric: ‘There’s a club if you’d like to go, you could meet somebody who really loves you’ and ending ‘Welcome to …THE STONE ROSES CLUB!’

  But there’s also a posh Leeds, a moneyed Leeds, and it likes to go out and have its own good time. I have come to see Opera North’s production of The Marriage of Figaro, which has been getting rave notices everywhere, even in them sniffy London papers. ‘Delightfully spoofy’ said the Guardian. ‘Rich in charm, humour and vitality: beautifully sung, sensitively staged. For pure enjoyment, what more can opera offer?’ Gosh! Consider it sold. What, as they say, is not to like?

  The Marriage of Figaro is probably the world’s favourite opera. Mozart’s charming tale of clever women, daft men, class struggle as soufflé and what used to be quaintly known as ‘the battle of the sexes’ is smart enough for the intellectuals but light enough for everyman. In essence, it’s a supremely sophisticated rom-com with great tunes, although oddly none that I could bring to mind on my journey to Leeds.