from Hallé to Happy Mondays

Myth distorts the music history of every city, and in Manchester the myth looms as large as the new Co-op Live, a £365 million, 23,500 capacity mega venue that opens today and will soon host big names including Take That. So for every occasion, a music fan mentions the hit-making boy band or, for that matter, 10cc or the Hollies, and a thousand others bark back: Joy Division, the Fall, Happy Mondays. Not that 10cc were a small Manc band, but they reached their pre-punk peak and in the late 1970s a wall went up that degraded everything that had happened before June 4, 1976 – the night the Sex Pistols performed in the Smaller Free Trade Hall – to prehistory, such as dinosaurs, fossils, folk musicians. New hagiographies about music impresario Tony Wilson (1950-2007) are undoubtedly in the printing press as I write this. But how about we spend half an hour strolling through the Rainy City on the free buses and trams, looking for the underexposed, surprising and tangential – with a few Gen X/6 music stands for when we’re at the traffic light.

You may not think Coronation Street is a promising starting point, but it gives us access to Bowton’s Yard. It’s one of those tunes that might bring back unpleasant memories of the BBC TV series Sit Thi Deawn, but listen closely and you’ll hear that it’s in fact a song from the Victorian reality show. Written by Marsden-born Samuel Laycock from Stalybridge, it inspired Tony Warren when he created the characters for his Weatherfield/Salford soap opera. Granada Studios on Quay Street also played a leading role in spreading the northwestern sound, from regional accents to theme tunes to the Beatles’ first TV appearance in October 1962.

Dialect ballads spoke truth to power after Peterloo – commemorated in 2019 by Jeremy Deller’s barrow-like stone bump – and during the cotton famine. To spread the message, widths were printed at printers around the Oldham Street-Swan Street intersection. Lancashire songs were central to the folk revival of the 1960s. Harry Boardman, a singer and collector from Failsworth, has unearthed many anonymous protest songs and historical records. Edward II recorded a reggae version of the Great Deluge, around the time the Medlock burst its banks in 1872. Jennifer Reid from Middleton performs The New Poor Law Bill a cappella on her album Gradely Manchester.

The best-known folk song, Dirty Old Town by Ewan MacColl, refers to a “gasworks wall” or “gasworks croft”, depending on the version. The works were in Ordsall, bounded by West Egerton Street, Liverpool Street and Regent Road. A prosaic infographic (not quite a ‘muriel’) was posted on screen prior to demolition in 2019 West Egerton Street wall. The Working Class Movement Library is a repository of MacColl’s work and life and contains a significant amount of sheet music and lyrics.

The Hallé Orchestra was founded by Sir Charles Hallé, who was conductor at the first concert in the Free Trade Hall on January 30, 1858. The Hallé premiered Elgar’s Symphony No. 1 and Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 8. The latter, dedicated to the orchestra’s celebrated conductor, John Barbirolli, took place in the King’s Hall, a converted teahouse in Belle Vue (demolished to make way for a car auction centre) on 2 May 1956. The BBC recorded it a few days later. The third movement, a cavatina, is a swirl of lark-like rises and falls.

Since 1996, the orchestra’s headquarters have been purpose-built and vibration-resistant Bridgewater Hall, featuring the former St Peter’s Church in Ancoats, a colossal red-brick Romanesque building used for rehearsals, recording and intimate shows. Manchester has one Opera House, originally known as the New Theater. Recent shows include The Full Monty and Peppa Pig’s Fun Day Out, but things could get tougher as the ENO moves to Manchester over the next five years. The region’s greatest opera singer, like so much of Manchester’s talent, came from far outside the city. Tom Burke, a miner from Leigh, was known as the “Lancashire Caruso”. What used to be the city’s Hippodrome is now a Wetherspoons named after him.

The Manchester School includes Accrington-born Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies from Salford and German immigrant Alexander Goehr, who met at the Royal Manchester College of Music in the fifties. They formed the New Music Manchester group with pianist John Ogdon, who had attended Manchester Grammar School, and trumpeter Elgar Howarth. As exponents of avant-garde experiments, they eschewed cotton-themed concertos and any form of parochialism.

If UNESCO handed out rosettes for demolition, Manchester would have a lot of them. Most of the old taverns where theater performances took place, popular dance salons and concert halls have been razed to the ground, along with mills, warehouses and factories. Concert halls and amusement palaces were removed to make way for parking garages and office buildings. The Free Trade Hall, where locals like Gracie Fields, Van der Graaf Generator and James played, but also Dylan (AKA “Judas” as he was called during a performance there in 1966), Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and Genesis, is now a hotel. Does a bawdy, boisterous spirit still live on from the drunken days of industrial Manchester? Especially the renovated ones Tape on the wall – which reopened in March – celebrates its location on the foundations of the George & Dragon and nearby Rising Sun pubs.

Every genre of popular music appeared in Manchester between 1950 and the present, including big band, beat, rhythm and blues, soul, chart pop, punk, goth and all forms of post-punk. There aren’t as many landmarks as there are songs, partly because, as mentioned, the wrecking ball is unsentimental and also because pop stars have generally used their art to get away – first lyrically, and then physically. The Bee Gees, who claimed to have practiced harmonization in their childhood home Keppelweg 51Chorlton-cum-Hardy, never knowingly shouted a word about the town.

Northern Soul, which arrived via the port of Liverpool and Burtonwood airbase, attracted large followings in Stoke, Wigan, Blackpool and, before one, Manchester. The Twisted Wheel on Brazennose Street and later Whitworth Street hosted performances by the Hollies and Freddie and the Dreamers, and lesser known bands such as Powerhouse 6, but is best known for its legendary northern soul nights. The building is gone, but Turned wheel “lives on,” according to a members-only Facebook page at Area, 50 Sackville Street. The Ritz, on Whitworth St, survives as an O2 franchise. Originally opened as a dance hall (with a sprung floor) in 1927, it hosted a Dancing in the Dark evening in the 1950s and 1960s, led by Crumpsall’s Phil “King of the Ritz” Moss and his band (who later became a regular was in the dance hall). TV’s Come Dancing), and then moved on to beat, Northern Soul, disco and mainstream rock scenes. The mobile phone company also owns the famous Art Deco-style Apollo, long a fixture for touring bands. Stockport’s MoR hitmakers 10cc were a classic art school, let’s get to London ASAP, but they played here when they got home, as did Sad Café.

The Pistols concert in 1976 made the Lesser Free Trade Hall a holy shrine in Manc muso circles, but the Electric circus, in Collyhurst (birthplace of pianist and crooner Les Dawson), earned its reputation through many groundbreaking punk performances, including the first appearance of Warsaw (Joy Division’s first name), and shows by Buzzcocks, John Cooper Clarke, the Fall, the Nosebleeds and Including Slaughter and the Dogs. The fact that it had previously been a cinema, Bernard Manning’s Top Hat club and a bingo hall should certainly have made it a place of mention for heritage enthusiasts.

Richard Boon and Howard Devoto launched the New Hormones label in 1977 in a then dilapidated, now listed former hat merchants’ warehouse on the Newtonstraat 50. The first release, the Spiral Scratch EP, was a punk turning point and a declaration that bands needed neither London nor major labels. Boon and others started in 1980 The Beach Club (a reference to the Situationist slogan “Under the pavement, the beach!”) at Oozits in Newgate Street. In 1978, Factory Records began as a disruptive WFH DIY startup in Alan Erasmus’ first-floor flat at the Palatine Road 86 (now marked blue), only moving to a proper headquarters in Charles Street in 1990 – where it was officially incorporated with the catalog number FAC 251 (the name of a cover band venue on the site, partly owned by Peter Hook). The Factory was the name of a night at the Russell Club on Royce Road in Hulme that ran from 1978-80; two years later the Hacienda (FAC 51) opened in a former yacht builders’ shop and warehouse on Whitworth Street West, next to the Rochdale Canal. The site now houses ‘iconic’ apartments.

The last factory catalog number, FAC 501, was used for the plaque on Wilson’s coffin, and there is no number on designer Peter Saville’s gravestone for his business partner in Southern Cemetery. Legendary producer Martin Hannett is also buried in the necropolis, which is said to be accessible through the Smiths’ Cemetery Gates.

There is no better ending than a musical graveyard. Inevitably, dozens of Manchester music sites are missing from this hop, skip and jump, including Rochdale’s recording studios, the Festival of the Tenth Summer venues and countless bedrooms, garages and rave venues. But most tell versions of the same story, just as some numbers on Venn diagrams seem influential; Oasis by Happy Mondays sounds like New Order with lyrics by Morrissey or Ian Curtis, on a bad day (“You went too far, and it went completely the wrong way”). If you want to aurally imbibe every Manc motif in one song, head to Mike Garry and Joe Duddell’s St Anthony: An Ode to Anthony H Wilson (Andrew Weatherall Remix; lyrics here), perhaps while walking from the powerhouse Aviva Studios. /Factory International colossus to the Epping Walk Bridge to search hopelessly – 80s style – for Hulme Crescents and the dead souls of yesteryear.