I’m back, and I am writing this while thinking about how things have changed in my 11 years in this Rainy City, both musically and in general. I am thinking about joined up thinking and the lack of it. And of course I am thinking about music. At this current moment, I am thinking back to that marvellous epiphany that I had while walking back from town a couple of nights ago that linked all my tangled threads into one entry worthy of a Post comeback. More specifically, I am currently trying to work out exactly what that was, because I have no clue at the moment.

So let’s start with two things that are getting larger, then ramble about a bit and hopefully end up talking about music from this great city.

The first thing to get larger is my waist line. The other is bus fares. To people who live in London and other cities which enjoy a flat fare on buses, enforced by a transport executive with some teeth, then I envy you. When I arrived in Manchester, there were seven bus operators running 20 or so routes between the city centre and south Manchester, via the Universities and the student areas of Fallowfield and Withington. Nominally, each company had its own pricing system, although sometimes fares differed from driver to driver. Stagecoach even had its own sub-brand of buses, the Magic Buses, which ran alongside its own buses on the busier sections of the routes at lower prices. It wasn’t that they were offering a discount on the other companies; it was that enough people used only Stagecoach buses for them to justify much higher fares. 11 years on and Bluebird and R Bullocks buses have moved to other routes. Stagecoach subsidiary Campus Link has vanished as have, after various tax and immigration investigations, UK North. Which leaves Finglands and Magic Bus at the cheap end of the market, and Stagecoach at the other. I discovered, as term starts anew in the institutes of higher education in Manchester, that the fare that used to cost me 40p when I started now costs well over a pound. I’m not an economist, but I can’t think that the inflation over a decade has amounted to nearly 200%. The fuel prices haven’t gone up that much to be sure, no matter what the protest groups say.

Because of both of these, I am walking into the city centre to watch a gig. It’s only four miles there and (unsurprisingly) the same back. It is the Saturday that the students return which has contributed to general chaos in Fallowfield as thousands of proud parents from around the nation arrive in a strange city and try and unload their beloved offspring in halls of residence or grotty terraced houses. This is just the start of the problems, as for the first year in memory, tens of thousands of students can’t get places in the now full universities. More funding has been introduced, but funding providers don’t have the money to give out at the start of term. These scenes mirror the incompetence that I witnessed when Tony Blair’s Labour government backtracked on their fees promise and introduced a 'pay before you learn' policy that caught students, universities and funding providers unawares. When, a few years ago, the University of Manchester Student’s Union started to try and twin with a terrorist run University in the Middle East, when incidents of anti-Semitism were on the increase on the campus and the concerns of the average student were being ignored as the socialists and the Islamic blocks battled with the Jewish society for control of the union so they could use it as a political platform instead of a place to hold the university to account, I stopped paying attention to student affairs. As such, I can’t say if the universities had enough housing for its new students; some of the others around the country didn’t. If one or more of them didn’t, I would not be surprised. Manchester’s infrastructure is not one for joined up thinking.

We have no direct motorway link from the South of England into the South of Manchester. The shortest way is using an overstretched A road to get between the M6 and M56. We have a Manchester to Sheffield Motorway that doesn’t even reach Yorkshire. It just travels east for a few miles then dumps its traffic onto a roundabout for a single carriageway road up into the Peak District that is in permanent gridlock. When Manchester hosted the Commonwealth Games in 2002, they were going to build an extension to the Metrolink Tram system to get to the stadium. The line should be open in 2011 or 2012! I am always happy to point out a slip road off the inner ring road that stops in midair. Nobody thought about it until well into construction, but if that slip road had come into use, they would have had to redesign the whole one-way system in the city.

To be fair, it’s not only the big folks in suits: we can look at the teens who complain about who much the bus costs then in ‘protest’ destroy a bus shelter or throw a bus seat out of the window. Then again, even a few years in teaching have taught me never to expect joined up thinking or joined up writing.

So, where was I? Oh yes, walking. I’d reached Rusholme, the infamous Curry Mile, home to one of the largest Muslim populations in the north west. It lies between the student halls and the universities on Wilmslow Road, the main road that the students and buses use to get to civilisation. Today was Saturday. Eid, the Islamic festival at the end of Ramadan was due on Sunday, so I thought I’d check out the strip tonight. There were pairs of policemen every couple of dozen metres or so. Larger groups were patrolling along the pavement. It seemed like the whole of the Manchester Police Force were out, and this was the night before the celebrations.

From my limited understanding, on the night of Eid, the fast is broken and everybody gathers and feasts. The feasts are prepared all day and are spectacular. In Rusholme, things are different. The restaurants are all full, as excepted, but the road is congested with young men in flash, often borrowed, cars, driving up and down beeping their horns and blocking traffic. Add to this, lots of celebrating men on the streets getting drunk. Hence the police are needed to keep order and to suggest to non Muslims that they take another route, as it can be intimidating.

Woe betide anybody who has to get in and out by bus as they are faced with an extra hour or two onto their normal 20 minute journey, as buses get caught in the jams or on the alternative routes. I was glad that I was bypassing it all on the Sunday by using the train, not an obvious move for the students as the local station is well out of the way, beyond the normal student’s radius of discovery.

Given that this is probably one of the highest crime weekends for students, being especially easy prey their first few weeks away from home, having all the police force in Manchester engaged elsewhere would make them a much easier target.

Okay, so I’ve walked past that now. And on through the universities. I’ve now got to my destination, the Thirsty Scholar pub, underneath the railway arches at the end of Oxford Road Station. It is the second time in a month I’ve been here to see the same band in a month. I’ve written about Frank is Dead before, and so I won’t again. Suffice to say they still exist, they are still great fun and the songs are amusing and very catchy. To bring my narrative to a more fitting climax, I’ll start with the second gig and go back to the first. I am here for a free festival, which is a relief as last time I turned up without being told there was an entry fee, it turned out I needed four pounds to enter. (Note to Self, if friend says it is free, then it is free; if friend forgets to mention price, it is a pay gig). The Scholar is often referred to, at least by me, as the Dirty Squalor. I got into the pub just in time to see a chirpy singer songwriter launch into the first of at least three chirpy songs about how everybody was going to die in the end, but only after society has crumbled and his woman has left him. I moved to the toilet, which I found to be populated with a menagerie of flying insects. It was a warm night, but the bar had an air of the sauna about it, hot, humid and oppressive.

I will now tell you a bit about this pub. It sits in a cobbled street next to two other pubs. These other two normally cater for the metal and rock crowd, so me and my friends, if we were considering drinking at ‘The Railway Pubs’ as we called them, would always choose the Squalor. It had a nice atmosphere. Admittedly, we tended not to go in late weekends, as every other week we saw police vans outside. One time, I was sitting in there, when a glass ashtray flew across the bar and knocked out a middle aged man sitting alone on the table next to mine. Since then I have been a bit twitchy downstairs. It has a club upstairs called The Attic, where I have gigged and helped put on bands.

Anyway, now the Squalor has outside decked seating, and being under a viaduct, it is almost dry for those people wishing to still drink and smoke in the Mancunian weather. Inside, there are now some well worn soft, wipe clean, sofas and armchairs. All the tables now have candles on. Otherwise, none of the decor has changed. Perhaps the introduction of candles was a gesture by the owners to suggest an air of class. Or at least try to justify charging over £3 a pint for normal beer that is over a £1 cheaper five minutes’ walk up the road. With prices like that, you would assume they could have forked out for fly spray.

After the chirpy guitar guy had apologised for doing a Jimmy Eats World cover that everybody else does (I’ve never heard the song, nor anybody else covering it), I went upstairs to The Attic. I watched Frank Is Dead sound check and got myself a cup of water. Up here it was even hotter, and again, the place had not changed in terms of furniture (some black sofas) or decor (black and dark blue) in the six years since I’d first been up here. The room is not very large, say the size of a large classroom in a school, probably with space for a hundred people. Half the floor was vibrating thanks to the sound system feeding back on itself. About this time, a fly decided that it had had enough of this life and drowned itself in my water, so I asked for a new one.

In an attempt for them to not have to give away any more free water due to fly suicides, they then turned off all the lights except for one spotlight as the light cue came on. By the time Frank is Dead were on, the sound guy had lost all the settings for the PA system. One of the reasons that I used to like playing here was the DIY nature of the venue. A band would turn up and there would be a PA for the microphones and maybe an acoustic guitar. You didn’t need to mic up the drums and so even the most modest guitar amps didn’t have to be cranked up to provide a good loud noise for the punters.

Tonight, the drum kit had more microphones than an Obama press conference. To cope with that, both the guitar and bass amps were hocked up to the PA system. The guitar amp was a Marshal Half-stack of some sort that probably could deafen people at the back of a room twice the size with ease. So, with everything amped up, and the sound guy having remembered what the settings were (everything on loudest), they started. Yay. I took some photos and drank my flies and water and sweated a lot.

Then when the next band came on, I realised that this place had gone a bit Michael Bay, where the theory on how to best win over your audience is to just make it too loud to think. Or hold a conversation. Yes I am approaching 30, and I would like to talk with my friends. Fat chance here. I ended up outside and leaving before my ears bled out.

But a few weeks previously, (got here at last) I saw some reasons to remain hopeful that the Manchester music scene still has something to offer. No, it wasn’t the sound-alike metal band which were reasonable enough if you like a half naked blond Scandinavian man to shout a lot about stuff then reward the audience with platitudes that have all the spontaneity of the chimes of Big Ben. The first was Louis Barabbas, a high kicking dangerous voiced guitarist with a female cohort who blasted the cobwebs out of this jaded ex-journo with some delicious vocals coming from beneath his majestic moustache.

Then there was the band that inspired the kind of curiosity that would have put pay to a cat. Used to the normal routine of guitars and bass, with maybe a keyboard, we were amazed to see a girl strapping on an accordion! Sadly, my hopes of a Zydeco band were dashed, but alongside the accordion were a banjo and a mandolin, as well as some guitars, drums and bass. , The Roughneck Riot were a breath of air so fresh that it was like being transported from this stuffy venue to a Scottish glen. Full of energy and with more rock and rollism in them than a barrel of Embraces, they blasted punk-folk at us until the majority were unable to resist dancing. See for yourself.

The nearest I can say would be the Pouges, which is fitting as they were supporting old Gappy himself, Shane MacGowan, in Brixton this December. If you have managed to read this far, then please, check them out on line and have a listen. If only for the fact they inspired me to make a comeback to the Post !

So, till next time

Love, peace and the Blues

The_Jon_M

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