Steve Coogan, in his embodiment as Tony Wilson, says at the end of 24 Hour Party People that his main motivation for running Factory Records and the Haçienda was simply ‘an excess of civic pride’. Tony Wilson loves this city, as many of us non-Mancunian students are learning to love it, and his role in building its music scene is now well documented. The list of reasons to be bloody proud of its musical heritage is long, from Joy Division and The Fall to the A Guy Called Gerald and Counter Culture records, but are we running out of musical innovators? Badly Drawn Boy’s falsetto is starting to grate, especially when accompanied by the sight of Hugh Grant’s face on a twelve-foot screen. The words ‘Oasis’ and ‘innovation’ have never gone hand in hand, even if they are still capable of topping the pop charts. The Doves (sorry, ‘Doves’), Alfie and the Alpinestars are not without merit but fail to excite in the same way as the Stone Roses still can. Nostalgia is a dangerous thing, and admittedly there are plenty of great things happening in Manchester’s club land, although the names never seem to change. Believe it or not many beautiful cities in idyllic-seeming social-democratic countries like Sweden and the Netherlands actually try to model themselves on Manchester. Manchester regenerated its city centre from a derelict testament to the evils of Thatcherism to a vibrant cultural centre and student-magnet, thanks to a few cultural specialists and rock’n’roll hooligans like Wilson, Andy Spinoza, Stella Hall, Martin Hannet and all those bands embedded in metal slabs on the pavements of Oldham Street. They did it to make a bit of money, to avoid getting proper jobs, and due to an excess of civic pride.

Dave Haslam, DJ, writer and general wise man of the city, suggested seven reasons for Manchester’s musical success, as part of the recent ‘Of The City’ series of debates at the Met. I’m sure he won’t mind me reproducing them here (these are not his exact words):

1)  Manchester has pulling power. It is a big city in easy reach for a lot of people.
2)  Manchester is never stagnant. It is a city of immigrants, like New York.
3)  Manchester generated anger, and anger generates creativity.
4)  Manchester has to be independent. It’s a long way from London. 199 miles, I believe.
5)  The size of the city is just right. It’s not too big that you disappear, but it’s not too small, either.
6)  Success breeds success, and encourages others to have a go.
7)  Manchester is a laboratory; an incubator. You can hone your talents here, away from the spotlight.

These days, Manchester is Barcelona, only with more rain, or so the advertising agencies would have you believe. It’s not Mayfair, sir, nor is it Amsterdam or Madrid, but it’s got a posh restaurant or two, King Street and a cannabis café, so who’s going to notice the difference? This city, the birthplace of the industrial revolution, is being marketed as a hybrid of everything good about all other cities, copying and amalgamating their best bits as if it deserved no credit of its own. It has indeed been a success, and become a centre of business for those who can’t be bothered with the congested monster that is London, or who simply want a presence in the North. Now, to entertain the resultant expanding class of young professionals, we have the Printworks, an Americanised entertainment centre which needlessly creates fake streets where there were previously real streets, next to the Triangle, a sanitised temple to the designer label, built around Exchange Square, a new public space that is open for everyone except skate-boarders, rollerbladers, nu-metal Satanists and anyone else who might enjoy the place and disturb the middle-managers’ sushi lunch. And it’s all just two minutes walk from the dilapidated buildings and shut-up shops of that part of town that time forgot, between the Northern Quarter and Co-op land.

It seems to me that Manchester has traded on its cultural vibrancy to transform itself into a two-tier service economy, split between financial services and fast food restaurants; disenfranchised, bored office workers and disenfranchised, bored office cleaners. For the majority of the population, life hasn’t got much better, and for many it is getting worse. The prospect of getting a steady, permanent, full-time job with some kind of purpose to it is being eroded by forces beyond even Mr. Blair’s control. There is plenty of reason for people to remain angry, and for number three to remain on the list. But the structures of the city are shifting under our feet, and people keep telling us it things are getting better. The politics of identity and consumption have attempted to take over from work and ideology as a source of meaning for our lives, like a smoke screen. And nobody around here is pissed off enough to make revolutionary pop records any more. At least until the smoke clears. 
 

(‘Sounding the City’, part of the ‘Of The City’ series of debates, took place on Thursday 7th March 2001, Geoffrey Manton Building, Manchester Metropolitan University).