Manchester Music City 1976-1996

by John Robb, Jean-François Caro (Translator)

Des premiers orages punks aux grandes heures de la britpop, en passant la new wave, l’âge d’or du label Factory et les folies acid de l’Hacienda… Peter Shelley, Howard Devoto, Morrissey, Peter Hook, Shaun Ryder, Johnny Marr, Noel Gallagher, Ian Brown, Tony Wilson, le journaliste Jon Savage et plus d’une centaine d’autres figures de la scène de Manchester, parfois plus obscures mais tout aussi essentielles… Tous ont longuement raconté leur histoire à l’écrivain et musicien John Robb. Leurs souvenirs, leurs analyses, leurs confidences (souvent pleines d’anecdotes et de révélations !) dressent le portrait haut en couleurs d’une ville indissociablement liée à quelques grandes pages du rock anglais.
Un document unique aux allures de folle épopée, plein de fraîcheur, de naïveté et de passion.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, History, Punk

615 pages, Paperback

First published April 10, 2009

About the author

Author/Music Scribe/TV Presenter/Environmental Activist and Bass Player for perennial post-punk survivors The Membranes, John Robb is a man who cannot sit still. When he’s not touring with his band (they recently toured in Europe with The Stranglers, The Chameleons and Fields Of The Nephilim), he’s presenting, moderating or writing for his popular UK music site Louder Than War. John has previously written the best-selling books “Punk Rock : An Oral History” and “The North Will Rise Again : Manchester Music City 1976-1996”. His latest opus is the 550-page “The Art Of Darkness : The History of Goth”, an in-depth account that he feels presents the first major and comprehensive overview of Goth music and culture and its lasting legacy.

Starting with a night out in a Goth club, it then takes us on a deep-dive into the wider culture, exploring the social conditions that created ‘Goth’ in the post-punk period. It examines the fall of Rome, Lord Byron and the romantic poets, European folk tales, Gothic architecture and painters, the occult to modern-day Instagram influencers.

The book is built mainly around the 80s post-punk Goth period featuring interviews with Andrew Eldritch, Killing Joke, Bauhaus, The Cult, The Banshees, The Damned, Einstürzende Neubauten, Johnny Marr, Trent Reznor, Adam Ant, Laibach, The Cure, Nick Cave and many others. …it looks at the music, style and the political and social conditions that spawned the culture and the great music, fashions and attitudes - clubs that defined it, and is also a first-hand account of being there at some of the legendary gigs and clubs that made the scene happen...

Reviews

[Ben Winch]

P.S. Goodbye
The Chameleons UK
(July 2014, handwritten, keyed in March 2015)

It’s 9 a.m. of a school day, I’ve driven 45 minutes across the hills to technical college only to find the lesson’s cancelled, and I’m in a cafe with some rare downtime, far from a computer (which would consume my mind with web design and book/record-release plans) and―having listened to most of the Chameleons’ second album What Does Anything Mean? Basically on the way here―thinking of Manchester.

Funny thing about the Chameleons―nowhere, not even in this otherwise balanced/exhaustive study by Blackpool native and Manchester rock music stalwart John Robb, have I seen their story told beyond a mention (that’s what Robb gives them, and it’s more than they usually get) yet in Manchester they’re revered, despite never having infiltrated the Factory Records/Hacienda scene. Truth is, even in Manchester their audience is small, if passionate. But this is not an obscure or “experimental” group. Think U2, Cure, “shoegaze” forerunners with northern soul―the soul of the Roses and Verve and Joy Division. These guys mean it. No, unlike Joy Division (to this day, cliche be damned, my pick for pre-eminent northern, English, postpunk and maybe even modern rock band) they’re not sophisticated. No mad-hatter producer or Throbbing Gristle obsession here. Not much urban paranoia either. Hailing from Middleton, a small former industrial town 5 miles north of Manchester (in the UK, enough to qualify them as not quite a Manchester band), it’s just possible the Chameleons felt more country (or outer suburban) than city, and in their sad, spacious atmospherics there’s a romantic sense of forces massing at the edge of consciousness rarely present in their peers. (Joy Division, though having ties to semi-rural Macclesfield, coalesced, rehearsed and gigged in Manchester, from which, I assume, issued the near-fatal sense of doom―of life and its rituals and systems gone to seed―which makes their mechanical, near anti-melodic groove more futuristic than nostalgic.)

In other words, here―in the Chameleons, in Joy Division―are two responses to the spread and near-demise of industrialisation from the epicentre. (Manchester, “Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution,” and: “Oh Manchester, so much to answer for,” sings Morrissey.) I can hardly warrant it, feel slightly embarrassed saying it, but in this music is something that pulls and pulls at my heart―that seems to be the land singing, against all odds, through the sheen of eighties production (mostly held in check), through the pop structure that the Chameleons (unlike Joy Division) still are constrained by. The melodies! Here is the difference: even the Roses (folk and Mary Chain-infused, rock-classicist, and residents―except bassist Mani―of breezier, leafier, middle class southern suburb Altrincham) didn’t have this. Every note is rationed, thought-out, placed exactly, as if to waste colour were reckless, but through the discipline of this limited palette singer/bassist/everyman philosopher Mark Burgess speaks from the heart:

Whatever lies in my past
Or what is yet in the future
Time passes so fast
Suppose there’s always the danger
I won’t pull through
I’ll have to think this thing through
Despite my fear it helps to
Share my nostalgia with you
(Nostalgia)

No blasted, gothic eloquence (a la Ian Curtis) here. The words are plain but heartfelt. Did the communist tradition so prevalent in the north (in Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool) influence the democratism of its bands, or the direct, populist (but not crass) delivery of Mark Burgess? Don’t get me wrong, there’s beauty here, lots of it, but never is it florid or lavish. Still, nor were the Chameleons an “indie” band. Disqualified from the eighties UK indie charts by their associations with three major labels, after small-scale, typical, frustrating label problems they signed eventually with Geffen in the U.S., after which their manager died, the band split and they left behind a small back catalogue owned by three labels on two continents, who couldn’t or wouldn’t work together to promote it. For my part, I might not have heard them if not for a Mancunian I met in Sydney shortly before I moved to Manchester in 2009, who berated me for my Joy Division fixation and exhorted me: “Get into some real Manc. music,” thus ensuring my first months in Manchester―on the bus through leafy suburbs and the train through treeless hills in the Peak District, in the gym or my Withington bedsit with the rain outside, in pockets of woods by the Mersey under the freeway overpasses or riding by the ship canal with warehouses and empty lots and long grass all around―were saturated and infiltrated by this music. To this day, the Chameleons are the sound of Manchester to me, not Joy Division, the Roses, the Smiths, the Mondays, all of which I’d heard long ago in other places. To me, What Does Anything Mean? Basically, despite the shabby title, is their masterpiece, and it sings. If Joy Division’s Closer (aside from the two lyrical tracks that close it) is the machines or the future singing, this is the blighted near-beaten resilient earth. In urban gardens, in repurposed industrial spaces, in canals flushed of gunk and made picturesque, maybe, yes, the North Will Rise Again.

Read this book, it’s great, probably as transparent a document of the era as you’ll find. John Robb knows his stuff. He has kind words for everyone and an insider’s access to the bands that shows in the in-depth quotes he conjures from them. But spare a thought for the also-rans, who were never packaged like their more famous brethren but who sang for and from the north with voices just as pure, just as heartfelt.

The night’s growing colder
The enemy bolder
But as you grow older
You cease to care
(Home is Where the Heart Is)

Brother can you hear my voice?
Every second that you cling to life
You have to feel alive
(Intrigue in Tangiers)

I realise a miracle is due
I dedicate this melody to you
(Second Skin)

[Robert Southern]

The definitive book on Manchester music from the 60’s onwards, loved it!

[Martinxo]

I enjoyed the pre-punk, punk and post-punk sections of this book but quickly tired of reading about Hacienda playlists, DJs and stuff.

The chapters on The Smiths, Stone Roses and Oasis weren't of interest as I'm not a big fan of those bands.

[Hayley]

It's a story of Manchester music you've most likely heard before in some sort of way. however it's the format of the stories and people in this book that makes it unique and interesting.
It's a documentary in book form. Refreshingly different

[James Rice]

Deserves a bigger audience this does. Fine primer on the city's greatest period of music.

[Antoine Menet]

What a fascinating and poignant book!

A tribute to the city of Manchester and all the unique bands that made the city the center of the world across two decades.

[Tracey]

Another excellent oral history from Mr Robb. Best read straight after a Johnny Marr biog and any number of Tony Wilson/Factory/Hac biogs!