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Cities tell stories about themselves. Manchester likes to tell a story about itself that’s often summed up in the alleged words of Tony Wilson, founder of post-punk label Factory Records: ‘We do things differently here’…But do we really?
Isaac Rose’s recent book The Rentier City suggests that Manchester is less an exception and more a prime example of the way capital has exploited urban space since the 1980s. The city’s musical legacy has played an important role here, being used and abused as a form of ‘place marketing’.
This collective listening session cuts through the clichés, disintegrating the Hacienda stripes that now adorn estate agent windows. Through a combo of lesser heard gems and familiar classics made strange, together we’ll try and tell a different story: of small town weirdos, popular modernist resistance and sludgy utopian visions dredged from the bottom of the canal.
Dr David Wilkinson is Senior Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University. He’s the author of Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain and is currently working on a follow-up, Welfare State Weird.
