Suggested playlist for Manchester Music Tour at 6pm, 15 January 2021

The songs are not in chronological order because the Zoom tour follows my actual walking tour route. And yes, I know there are loads of bands and performers missing but I can’t cover everyone.

I will mention the performers in the list but not play their songs through Zoom as Zoom does not deliver good sound quality for music.

You can play them of course, while I'm conducting the tour, although you’ll have to have the dexterity of a DJ mixing snippets of songs because I’ll be working through the Manchester Music story at my usual pace.

It’s going to be great fun.

New Order - True faith
Dobie Gray  - Out on the floor (Not a Manchester sound but representive of Northern Soul)
Buzzcocks - Ever fallen in love
Magazine - Songs from under the floorboards
The Hollies - The air that I breathe
10cc- I’m not in love
Bee Gees – Night fever
Sad Cafe - Every day hurts
Elkie Brooks – Pearl’s a singer
Joy Division – Love will tear us apart
New Order – Bizarre love triangle
Happy Mondays – Kinky afro
Simply Red – Money’s too tight to mention
A Guy Called Gerald - Voodoo Ray
808 State – Pacific State
Doves - Here comes the fear
James – Laid
Lamb – Gorecki
Durutti Column – Sketch for summer
Oasis – Morning glory
Rick Astley – Never gonna give you up
Lisa Stansfield – People hold on
Stone Roses – Made of Stone
Josephine Oniyama – What a day (very entertaining Youtube video featuring a walk around the city)
The Smiths – Nowhere fast
The Fall – British people in hot weather
Elbow – Leaders of the free world
I am Kloot – From your favourite sky
Blossoms - Charlemagne
Carnival Club – House of cards
Broke Casino – Wedding (My son’s band, got to be included of course)

This is from The Manchester Guardian, 2 December 1893, writing about the construction of Manchester Ship Canal and the Rivers Irwell and Mersey at Irlam. ‘To advance four miles it was necessary to cross the course of the rivers fourteen times.’ ​

It was brutal. The Manchester Ship Canal sliced like a knife through the former river courses leaving strange long lakes where the old rivers had flowed. The Canal stole their waters too. As it needed to maintain its own water levels.

This was Victorian Manchester’s domination of nature writ large. Here was the might of civil engineering bending river courses to its will. 

As that 2 December 1893 report puts it, ‘Manchester took hold of the river…’ Even in its faded grandeur the Ship Canal remains magnificent. To see the lock gates and the mighty sluices at Irlam is stirring. 

These are best appreciated from the east side of the canal on Irlam Road, Flixton. The Irlam High Level bridge is equally impressive here lifting the Manchester to Liverpool railway across the canal. 
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The lead engineer for the Ship Canal was Sir Edward Leader Williams.

In the Kings Arms pub, just off Chapel Street there’s a room with big fish displayed where the Salford Friendly Anglers Society meets. This is the oldest surviving angling club in the world and it’s related to that lost stretch of the River Irwell. 

The Salford Friendly Anglers Society wasn’t just about fishing when it began in 1817. It was about fishy friends with benefits. This is what the history says: ‘As a result of the passing of the Friendly Societies Act a group of like-minded anglers in Salford decided to institute a Friendly Society for the benefit of local anglers.  

‘As well as offering fishing on the local River Irwell, society members as part of their subscriptions paid into monthly savings, sickness and death benefit policies. If an angler was unable to work through an accident or ill health they received an income of 5 shillings a month whilst unable to work. If a member died – then a levy of one shilling per member was paid out from club funds’. The Society had their own pub for many years at 10 Chapel Street. Unsurprisingly it was called the Fisherman’s Hut. 

​Recently the free to join Salford Friendly Anglers Society has done some remarkable things.
 
Let them blow their own trumpet.
  
‘In addition to securing fishing rights on 8 lakes, 13 miles of canal, and 6 miles of river… the committee has overseen the restocking of more than 50,000 fish into local venues in recent years to ensure that anglers can continue to enjoy great sport.’

This includes: ‘'7,000 tench, carp, roach, rudd and bream into The Old River in Irlam in partnership with the Hamilton Davies Trust.’ 

So, while the river might not be a river anymore it is certainly not that ‘useless trench’ described by The Manchester Guardian correspondent in 1893. This river, now a thin lake, lives on in active use both as a place of sport and recreation.
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The Irlam 'old river' can be accessed from Fairhills Road, off the A57 in Irlam. 

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Many of these stories and hundreds and hundreds of others appear in my three books about Manchester. 
Manchester: The Complete Guide - £11.99.
Lost & Imagined Manchester - £16.99.
Illusion & Change Manchester - £16.99. 

I WAS followed by a crow today because I had a fish in my hand.

The fish was a fried fish from the chippy called the Hut on Liverpool Road into which my good friend, a Scot, by the name of Steven Lindsay, has in a spirit of civilising progressiveness encouraged the sale of the battered sausage. It’s ‘a belter, a Glasgow delicacy,’ as he describes.

The crow was noble in its devilish darkness, its head swivelling from side to side each time laying a black eye upon me and my haddock. It looked healthy as hell too, with a sheen on its feathers as rich as a polished jackboot. As Mark Garner of Manchester Confidential says, when birds look at you like that, they remind you of nothing less than their ancient relatives, dinosaurs, in this case a big predatory T-Rex.

The crow hopped from wall to wall on Longworth Street never taking its dead vision from me as though Hitchcock were directing it. A woman in her mid-thirties was walking the other way. “It’s following you,” she said with a strange smile, “is it your familiar?” She was dressed completely in black, like the crow. The only difference was she had platinum dyed hair and very black mascara.

The city was looking interesting in the late afternoon winter. It was half three, the light was failing and in the cold air every building seemed outlined in ink against the tarnished silver sky. Yet it was getting a bit scary down on Longworth Street. I swear that as soon as the woman spoke the crow gave her look, bobbed its head, and flapped away arrogantly. I was left alone with my fish and a slight chill down my spine.

Writing the time as half three, reminds me of something. I had a typical Northern European misunderstanding on the weekend. I was conducting tours of Chetham’s Library at 1.30pm and 3pm. There were a couple of Norwegians on the first tour who’d arrived a little early. They’d arrived at 12.30pm. This was because they’d rung me in the morning and asked me when the tour was starting. Half one I’d said. In many Northern European countries people think half one is half twelve, an hour earlier, in other words half the hour. In our island logic it clearly can only mean a half hour after the hour.

The Nordic guests were still delighted to come on the tour of these almost 600-year-old buildings: as were an American woman and her daughter who were looking up universities in the UK. The daughter wants to do a Masters in building conservation over here. When Michael Powell, the librarian, revealed letters from the Heywood collection signed by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, they shook their heads in astonishment.

The 3pm group loved the buildings too. As Michael, with his trademark sardonic delivery, was entertaining the guests while showing them remarkable materials such as a medieval bible in manuscript from the 1300s and the utterly lovely first edition of Saxtons’ Atlas of England and Wales from 1579, one woman noticed something about her friend. She thought he looked like the founder of Chetham’s School and Library, Humphrey Chetham, so she got him to pose behind Michael’s back and took the picture. “It’s the nose and the eyes,” she said later. David, as her friend was called, seemed happy to go along with the description. He was Humphrey for a day. 

This reminded me of the time when I was taking a large group around Manchester Art Gallery and we stopped in the Pre-Raphaelite gallery. As I was talking I saw four people detach themselves and walk to a Holman Hunt picture. This was The Shadow of Death and features Christ with his arms raised in a Y-shape. It depicts him in his pre-Messiah days when he had a proper job and he’s stretching after sawing wood in his carpenter’s shop, ominously in the Hunt painting, his shadow on the wall behind is reminiscent of the crucifixion.
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The wandering four from my group split. One took a picture, while, with Christ’s Y as the first letter, the other three made the MCA of the Village People’s disco blast. It was hilarious - if irreverent.

On that second Chetham’s tour were a father and daughter from Perth, Australia. They have relatives in Hartlepool and had seen Chetham’s Library on an Australian travel programme. Robert had called me in the morning to see if there were any spare tickets. There weren’t, but he seemed desperate to come along and when he said he wanted to drive from Hartlepool to Manchester and back for the tour in a day, I had to say yes.

The English (rather than perhaps the Scots’) sense of distance isn’t long. Two hours in each direction is perhaps the upper limit for most. When I grew up in Rochdale I never went out in Bury, all of six miles distant. Then again there wasn’t much there that Rochdale didn’t have aside from a better fish market and no teenager goes six miles for fish. Even when the crows leave you alone.
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Robert’s daughter is studying at a Sydney university. Previously she’d stayed with friends on that side of the country but way outside Sydney and she said: “We’d drive six hours each way to get some city life.” I guided a journalist from Colorado once and he lived two hours from the nearest shop. I like to live two minutes from the nearest shop. And bar. With a national park and the Pennines within ten to fifteen miles. Convenience is so convenient.

TWO crazy and fruity stories from a Manchester hotel manager the other day. 
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My friend had been called by the PA of a company that uses the hotel frequently and asked if a visiting company director could be ‘looked after’. This means an upgraded bedroom, a free bottle of bubbly or wine and maybe some chocolates. A couple of days after the visit, the manager was called back by the PA and said, “What did you think I meant by ‘looked after’? I didn’t mean send an escort to his room.”

Apparently the director had gone for a jog in the morning and returned to the room. Just as he was about to shower there was a knock on the door, so still in his jogging shorts he answered. There was a beautiful young woman outside who pushed her way in, kissed him passionately on the lips and moved towards the bedroom. “No, no, please no,” stuttered the man and ushered the surprised woman out.

After calming the PA of the company down, assuring her that the hotel would never send a prostitute to a guest’s room, the manager checked the CCTV. He saw the escort enter the room and quickly leave whereupon, clearly confused, she checked her phone, shook her head and walked round a couple of corners, knocked on another door and this time didn’t come out for a while. What had happened was she’d originally gone to room 412 when she should have gone to 421. Not good with figures in this sense of the word.
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He had an even more disturbing story. A maid one day came down from one of the rooms and said, “There’s a body in room 238.” The manager took a concierge to investigate and there in the darkened bedroom there was a prone figure. “You open the curtains and I’ll call the emergency services,” said the manager. When the curtains were opened the body turned out to be a sex doll. This was removed to the office where a short time later a call was received. A male voice said, “I left something in room 238.” “We know you did,” said the manager, “lots of people leave things like gloves and hats but not what you left.” “I wouldn’t have left her but we’d had an argument,” said the man about an inanimate plastic doll. “May I come and get her?” “Of course,” said the, by now, bewildered and bemused manager, “but I advise you don’t leave the doll in bedrooms for maids to find and think they are dead bodies.” “Right you are,” said the man as though he’d just had a conversation about buying teabags.
​                                                                  *
On a more savoury note had some fabulous fun with Belgian guests recently in Tatton Park as the snow fell. The picture below show several incentive tour buyers hosted by Visit Britain about to scoot through the deer park on all-terrain Segways. Ha, this was fun including a tremendous and dramatic fall I suffered when being too cocky on the way back to the start point. Proper head over heels as I tried to take a bank too sharply. The good news was that it was in full view of everyone. My how they laughed at me.  

The Belgians took several pictures of the red deer sheltering in the park. With the snow falling it was pretty as picture. The day before we had gathered in Cloud 23 for a champagne reception, 23 floors up in the Hilton Hotel even though the guests and me were staying over the Midland Hotel. Good job we hadn't had the champagne before the Segwaying otherwise I might have tried to do a wheelie somersault on my machine.

On Friday last week I took artists and festival organisers on a Peterloo Massacre tour for a project for Manchester International Festival (MIF) next year, which will also be the 200th anniversary of Peterloo. Fabulous people seen in the top picture below. This is the best thing about a specialist tour. People are on the tour because they want to learn things and they want to talk about them. An energised audience is always the best.

Of course, it is the performer’s job (guides are performers and entertainers not academics although they need a bit of that too) to get the most from an audience, but there’s only so far one can go. Faced with a group of teenagers who have been told to come on a tour after maybe a four hour drive from Oxford where they had already been subjected to a morning tour simply isn’t easy. Similarly with a Malaysian group recently who didn’t really want a full coach tour, they just wanted to get to the Manchester United bit so they could take pictures and tick the visit-to-Britain box for stadia.

With the MIF group it was blast, loads of fun, lots of questions, lots of to-ing and fro-ing, despite the topic.

This Wednesday I conducted a tour for the Alliance Business School. It involved post-grads from China, the USA, the Czech Republic, Spain and Australia. I said, “It’s a shame you aren’t studying the weather because on this tour it’s going to throw itself at you in five different ways: rain, hail, snow, wind and sunshine.” Actually I was wrong we got sleet too. 

A PSYCHIC medium called Lee came on my Chetham’s tour on Saturday. He’s a pleasant man, very gentle and gracious and had previously come on my Mayfield tour. I am naturally of a sceptical cast of mind but it’s always interesting listening to those who consider themselves in touch with ‘the other side’. Turns out he had three ‘experiences’ or ‘visions’ or ‘manifestations’ at Chetham’s  – not sure of the right word.

By the main gate he saw a group of young boys seemingly at play. The costumes he described could have been those of the ‘poor boys’ admitted in the late 1600s. He thought these spirits were happy in themselves. Then in the Baronial Dining Room he saw a group of gentlemen from the early 1700s having a serious meeting but again nothing threatening.
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However, in the Audit Room, which already has a hell mouth carving of a demon eating a sinner (see picture below) and a burn mark supposedly from Satan, he found himself standing next to a beautiful young woman from the nineteenth century in a striking red dress to which something terrible had happened. Oh dear. 

This echoed Lee’s Mayfield tour experience. He’d ‘seen’ a dead man from 1968 walking up and down one of the platforms his soul stuck in time and lost up there. There was nothing troubling about him though. Meanwhile in one of the old parcel offices in the depot he sensed 'a very dark presence’ and that something awful had occurred which was hidden from him.

Now like I say I am of a sceptical mind but when you are alone in these ancient, on the one hand, and abandoned, on the other hand, places, you can’t help things playing on your mind. Why can’t all ghosts be happy ghosts, just hanging around because they so enjoyed it down here and can’t let go.

By the way the diesel pump in Mayfield is becoming a celebrity on the tours. It’s a seventies entity in vivid yellow with a Total tag for Total Oil. It’s a handsome devil too and in the quiet of the vast Mayfield depot, in my mind’s eye, I imagine it comes alive and hops around the depot when nobody is there. Matt Wilkinson, a photographer, came on the Sunday tour and took some marvellous images, including one of the diesel pump, below. I particularly like the picture at the top of this page too of the rows of iron pillars receding into the distance, like something from the Lord of the Rings..

It was my birthday on Saturday  - 27 January. And that of Alice in Wonderland’s Lewis Carroll. Or Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, as he was called when he was born in Daresbury, 21 miles from Manchester in 1832. There’s some sort of connection in that. There’s something very ‘down the rabbit hole’ and ‘through the looking glass’ about my occupation of writing on lots of different things from food to architecture to politics, taking people into places they’ve never been and into places that may have been closed for decades, while writing on imagined or illusionary buildings and projects.
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27 January is also a very sombre day as it marks the liberation of Auschwitz and is thus International Holocaust Day. I took the family to Auschwitz several years ago, everybody should visit. It never leaves you and nor should it. Alice and death camps. 27 January, it seems, is absurdity and horror. I suppose one way or another every day is, somewhere in this imperfect world. Not the most cheerful of thoughts but pertinent given what Holocaust Day represents.