I swung by Manchester recently to visit a friend. Ben Small, a chap I had met back in Hamilton over a year ago, lives in Leeds, a short distance from the ‘Chester. I met Ben at McMaster, where he had been attending for a year on a student exchange, but he’s back in England now, being a guy.
Ben plans on spending his summer in Chicago, and he’s already got a couple of writing internships lined up in the city. One of them is for a music publication, if I recall correctly. During the job interview over Skype, Ben and the employer bonded over a mutual love for the band American Football. Yeah boi. Neither of the internships pay, so to finance his trip he is going to have to either find a pub job on the side in the Windy City, or hope the wind blows his mouth right onto some guy’s cock as a means of income. We’ve all been there.
Until he leaves for Chicago, however, Ben is trying to maximize his time back home. Naturally, that means getting drunk and playing as many punk shows with his band as possible. He invited me to see his band play in Manchester one night. “We’ll show you a time,” he assured me. “Us punks are an inclusive bunch, don’t worry.”
Little more encapsulates the punk ethos than that: community. I knew I would be in good hands, welcomed, befriended, and with the knowledge that I would be in the company of hospitable people. A common thread runs through every punk scene from one side of the Atlantic to the other: a space its peoples create to lose yourself in the moment. An emancipatory escapism rooted in the history of the genre; there are many things wrong and unjust with the world, but for 120 fast-paced, head-spinning seconds, a new world is born, and everyone is welcomed as a citizen. It’s the environment of a punk venue, the spatiality of the mosh pit.
Manchester has a rich history regarding the interconnected relationship between spatiality and subversiveness. Guy Debord famously recontextualized the French word dérive (literal English translation: “drift” or “drifting”) as a term to convey subversive acts that incorporate psychogeography. It’s more than just getting lost in a city, intentionally wandering adrift as a way to subvert the mapped and structured architecture of an urban landscape. A dérive denotes a contradictory interaction with one’s environment: on the one hand, it requires a conscious awareness of how one’s space is indeed a reflection of themselves, in other words, having a knowledge of the possibilities and utilizations of the space around us and thus how we can shape it; on the other hand, it requires us to drop all of our regular activities and usual motives for movement and action—as Debord would say, to simply let ourselves “be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters” to be found there.
Subversion is a key factor here, and certainly Manchester’s anti-establishment history is impressive. The city provided a healthy contribution to the birth of 19th-century communism as we know it. It was Manchester that inspired Engels’s groundbreaking book The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Marx visited his friend in Manchester often, where the two collaborated on their theories. To this day, Manchester’s Chetham’s Library preserves Marx and Engels’s frequent study desk as well as the shelf holding the very economics books Marx read at the time.
Some of the U.K.’s largest worker trade and labour unions, most notably, the Trades Union Congress, got their starts in the hush-hush, hustle and rush of basement gatherings in Manchester pubs. In North America, the term “working class” is treated as a beat-up opportunistic release for the other 80% of the population to have their cake and eat it too; “working class” is CNN’s dried-up hooker. In a smooth continuation from the Industrial Revolution, Manchester adopted the romanticized 20th-century English image of a rainy working-class city and ran with it. The city’s beauty is in what the bricks of its antiquated buildings don’t say. They have stories to tell but they remain silent because it’s raining outside, too many people are scurrying by with no time to listen, and there’s too much melancholy for the bricks not to hold back. Mothers working crowds at Piccadilly Gardens; babies crying past the distant street-lamp glow; kids falling over before the pub and tram rush; a hurried girl has to smoke nice and slow. That’s entertainment!
Punk music was one of the many torchbearers to grab the mantle of social justice and social activism and run with it in the latter half of the 20th century. Despite originating from London, it was in Manchester where The Sex Pistols really started to bloom. Many consider their June 1976 Manchester concert to be the band’s springboard to international recognition—indeed, it helped introduce the genre of punk itself to the world. Both Morrissey and members of Joy Division/New Order had attended that concert, well before The Smiths or Joy Division ever had a name for themselves. The concert served as a major catalyst for the birth of punk rock and future subgenres that came out of Manchester in later years, such as “Madchester”—of which early New Order was a feature player.
Madchester proceeded England’s mod revival movement and is commonly regarded as a main precursor to grunge. Its defining characteristic was its combination of punk rock with more rhythmic sounds. Punk provides the space, and rhythm provides the catalyst for movement. Madchester didn’t aim to corporatize punk or to incorporate it into the mainstream (although that’s what ended up happening). It was just a bunch of punk kids who wanted to dance more. Sex Pistols songs have melody, yes, but they are warped under too much bullshit noise and distortion. Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten are in the history books for good reasons, but none of which include their songwriting prowess.
All punk bands in Manchester from the past couple of decades and up to today live and die under the shadow of Madchester. Stay punk and give us a space to dance that we create with you. Turn the mosh pit into a metaphorical image of our other selves that we never see, the other world that we simultaneously and contradictorily create but consciously let ourselves be drawn and lost into. I walked right into a dérive in Manchester, and my glasses broke as a result. It was the time of my life.
I met up with Ben in the early evening at the venue, on the second floor of a pub in central Manchester. Outside, the establishment had a chalkboard on which was written “PUNK/SKA BANDS ALL DAY, 3-11 P.M.” in block letters. Welcome to Manchester.
I arrived a couple of hours late and missed the first few bands. Ben’s band wasn’t on for another hour or so, so we grabbed a beer and went back upstairs to watch a metal band shred some Wheaties. As is expected with the genre, they were all wonderfully talented musicians, but their melodies were boring and they lacked stage presence. There was probably close to 200 or so people in attendance, but none of them were responding to the music and I didn’t know anybody. I was starting to wonder into what I had gotten myself—it certainly wasn’t punk, yet alone ska, but my bigger worry was the lack of movement from the crowd and interaction between them. No community, no dérives. Ben, upon noticing my malaise, told me not to worry. “This is the only metal band on the bill,” he yelled in my ear over the pulsing noise. “C’mon, let’s go meet some people.”
Outside having a cigarette we got talking to others. It was overcast outside but not raining. They were all happy—they were all dry. A lot of people scattered around different areas outside the pub ended up knowing each other. They were all friends, they all played in each other’s bands, they all partied and got drunk with each other, and they were all ecstatic to meet me.
Some guys I bonded with especially well. It wasn’t long before we would go out exploring the city in between bands’ sets. No awkwardness arose; Ben’s presence wasn’t even needed. The next few hours brought forth a barrage of punk and pop-punk bands (and a ska band, of course). I was expecting mediocre three- and four-chord patterned, high school-esque pop-punk music. My presumption was fortunately short-sighted. These bands were good—real good. These kids knew how to write catchy punk and pop-punk songs: invest properly in decent equipment, balance out the distortion, add in a sing-along, have more nuanced parts than just power chords, and dance, dance. Ben came on stage with his band Throwing Stuff, dedicated a song to me, and then the next thing I know people were Throwing Ben. His friends' band, Leagues Apart, pleasantly brought back nostalgic times reminiscent of 1990's styled thrash punk.
A drummer from one punk band would get on stage and front a ska band, playing trombone. Another drummer hopped on stage randomly and subbed for a heavy punk band that worked the crowd well. All the while I photographed the kids getting lost in the space, but having an awareness nonetheless of what was going on around them. Bonding was happening in the movement; everybody subverted the structure of their lives by getting closer with each other while contradictorily getting further apart, from themselves, from what exactly was going on. I put the camera down and joined in the fun—my glasses fell off and were trampled on quickly.
The frame was bent horribly and the lens missing; I could barely see a thing. It didn’t matter though, because the world I was viewing with my glasses through the camera was upside down—it’s the very principle of a camera obscura. I was trying to trivialize the Manchester dérive by freezing it in time. Debord contextualized his whole concept of the dérive on Marx’s thesis that everywhere around man the spaces surrounding him are images of himself—of his own creation. The landscape is alive, and seeing it upside down treats the space and the people around you as comatose. My glasses bring the world into focus. The dérive I thrusted myself into was a statement and a half: we create the world around us in our own image, but trying to focus it inclines us to merely stare. Passive spectators are voyeurs of themselves without realizing it. The punk show in Manchester was a response, a passionate subversion to the cultural systematization of the conditions of the downtrodden mother, the crying baby, the lost kids, and the browbeaten teen girl. Manchester is a living organism of its own. Dance, dance. Live it, live it.
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