from the Hallé to Happy Monday

Myth distorts the music history of any city, and in Manchester the myth is as big as the new Co-op Live, a £365m, 23,500-capacity mega-venue which opens today and will soon be staging big-name acts, including Take That. So, for every occasion music fans mention the triumphant band or, for that matter, 10cc or the Hollies, miles away from bark: Joy Division, the Fall, Happy Mondays. 10cc were not a small Manc band, but they peaked before the rise of punk and wall in the late 1970s which redeemed all that had passed before 4 June 1976 – the night the Sex Pistols performed at the Small Free Trade Hall – to prehistory, as in dinosaurs, fossils, folk musicians. There is no doubt that the printers have new carbs about music impresario Tony Wilson (1950-2007) as I write. But how about half an hour we spend wandering around the Rainy City on board the free buses and trams in search of the insignificant, surprising and tactile – with some Gen X/6 Music standards for when we are stuck under the lights.

You might not think Coronation Street is a promising departure point, but it gives us a glimpse of Bowton’s Yard. It’s one of those tricks that will evoke unpleasant memories of the BBC TV series Sit Thi Deawn, but listen carefully and you’ll hear that it’s actually a song made for a Victorian reality show. Written by Marsden-born, Stalybridge-based Samuel Laycock, it inspired Tony Warren when he was creating the characters for his Weatherfield/Salford-set soap opera. Granada Studios on Quay Street he also played a leading role in spreading the sound of the north west, from regional accents to theme tunes to the Beatles’ first television appearance, in October 1962.

Dialect ballads spoke truth to power after Peterloo – commemorated in 2019 by a lump of stone like Jeremy Deller’s burial mound – and during the cotton famine. To spread the word, printers ran broadsides around the Oldham Street-Swan Street junction. Lancashire songs were central to the country revival of the 1960s. Harry Boardman, singer and collector from Failsworth, revealed many anonymous songs for protest and historical record. Edward II has recorded a reggae version of the Great Flood, around the time the Medlock burst its banks in 1872. Jennifer Reid, from Middleton, plays The New Poor Law Bill a cappella on her Gradely Manchester album.

The most famous country number, Ewan MacColl’s Dirty Old Town, refers to a “gas works wall” or “gas works croft”, depending on the version. The works were in Ordsall, bounded by West Egerton Street, Liverpool Street and Regent Road. Before they were demolished in 2019, a prosaic infographic (not “muriel much”) was placed on the Egerton Street West wall. The Labor Movement Library is a repository of MacColl’s work and life and has significant holdings of sheet music and song lyrics.

The Hallé Orchestra was founded by Sir Charles Hallé, who was the conductor for the first concert at the Free trade hall, on 30 January 1858. The first time at the Hallé was Symphony No. 1 by Elgar and on Symphony No. 8 by Vaughan Williams. The second one, dedicated to the famous conductor of the orchestra John Barbirolli, was held at the King’s Hall, a restored tea house at Belle Vue (which was demolished to make way for a car auction) on 2 May 1956. It was recorded by the BBC a few days later. The third movement, cavatina, is a whirlwind of ascents and descents of the house.

Since 1996, the orchestra’s headquarters have been specially designed, vibration-proof Bridgewater Hall, with the former church of St. Peter in Ancoats, a Romanesque red brick building, used for rehearsals, recordings and personal shows. The IS Opera house, originally known as the New Theatre. Recent shows include The Full Monty and Peppa Pig’s Fun Day Out, but it could see higher fare as the ENO moves to Manchester in the next five years. The region’s greatest opera singer, like so much Manchester talent, was out of town. 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 it.

The Manchester School includes Accrington-born Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies from Salford and the German immigrant Alexander Goehr, who met at the Royal Manchester College of Music in the 1950s. They formed the group New Music Manchester with pianist John Ogdon, who attended Manchester Grammar School, and trumpeter Elgar Howarth. Inspired by avant-garde experimentation, they rejected cotton-themed concerts and parochialism of any kind.

If Unesco distributed roses for demolition, Manchester would have many. Most of the old pubs that hosted shifts, popular dance salons and music hall venues have been razed, along with mills, warehouses and factories. Concert halls and amusement palaces were removed to make way for multi-storey car parks and office blocks. The IS Free trade hall,, where locals including Gracie Fields, Van der Graaf Generator and James played, as well as Dylan (AKA “Judas” as he was called at a gig there in 1966), Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and Genesis, and it is now a hotel. Do you have a ribald, rollicking spirit living from the heyday of industrial Manchester? Certainly the restoration Bond on the Wall – which reopened in March – celebrates its location on the grounds of the George & Dragon and nearby Rising Sun pubs.

Every genre of popular music emerged in Manchester between 1950 and the present day, including big band, beat, rhythm and blues, soul, chart-oriented pop, punk, goth and all strands of post-punk. There are not as many landmarks as there are songs, partly because, as mentioned, the wreck ball is unsentimental and also, because pop stars generally use their art to escape – lyrically first, and then physically. The Bee Gees, who claimed that they practiced harmonizing in their childhood home at 51 Cape RoadChorlton-cum-Hardy, he never knowingly screamed a word about the town.

Northern Soul, which came through the docks of Liverpool and the airfield of Burtonwood, attracted a large following in Stoke, Wigan, Blackpool and, before any of those, Manchester. The Twisted Wheel had gigs on Brazennose Street and, later, Whitworth Street, with the Hollies and Freddie and the Dreamers, and lesser-known bands such as Powerhouse 6, but he is best known for his northern soul nights . The building is just gone Narrow Wheel “lives”, according to the members-only Facebook page, at Area, 50 Sackville Street. The Ritz, on Whitworth Street, survives as an O2 franchise. Originally opened as a dance hall (with a sprung floor) in 1927, it hosted Dancing in the Dark evenings in the 50s and 60s, with Phil Crumpsall “King of the Ritz” Moss and his Band (which became a pioneer on later). TV’s Come Dancing), and went on to transition through beat, northern soul, disco and mainstream rock scenes. The mobile phone firm also owns the famous art deco-style Apollo, a long fixture for bands on tour. Hitmakers MoR Stockport 10cc were classic art school, let’s-go-to-London-asap, but they played here when they came home, as did Sad Café.

A Pistols concert in 1976 made the Lesser Free Trade Hall a hallowed ground in Manc muso circles, but the Electric Circus, in Collyhurst (birthplace of pianist and crooner Les Dawson), his credentials through many dominant punk performances, including the first gig with Warsaw (first name of Joy Division), and shows with Buzzcocks, John Cooper Clarke, the Fall, the Nosebleeds and Killing and the Dogs, among others. Formerly a cinema, Bernard Manning’s Top Hat club and bingo hall should surely be one of the heritage buffs to list.

Richard Boon and Howard Devoto launched the New Hormones label in 1977 in a then ramshackle former hat shop, now listed. 50 Newton Street. The first release, the Spiral Scratch EP, was a punk portal and a declaration that bands didn’t need London or major labels. In 1980, Boon and others started up Beach Club (a reference to the Situationist slogan “Under the footpath, the beach!”) at Oozits on Newgate Street. In 1978, Factory Records started as a disruptive WFH DIY startup in Alan Erasmus’ first floor apartment at 86 Palatine Road (now a blue plaque), only moved to HQ proper on Charles Street in 1990 – where it was officially incorporated with catalog number FAC 251 (a substitute name for cover bands 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 which ran from 1978-80; two years later the Haçienda (FAC 51) in a former yacht builders shop and warehouse on Whitworth Street West, near the Rochdale Canal. The site now has “iconic” apartments.

The last Factory catalog number, FAC 501, was used for a plaque on Wilson’s coffin, and there is no number to adorn the tombstone of designer Peter Saville for his business partner in Southern Cemetery. Famed producer Martin Hannett is also buried at the necropolis – he is said to be entered through the Smiths Burial Gates.

There is no better destination than a musical graveyard. Undoubtedly, many of Manchester’s music venues are missing from this hop, skip and jump, including Rochdale recording studios, Tenth Summer Festival venues and countless bedrooms, garages and rave venues. But most tell versions of the same story, just like Venn diagrams of the influence of some songs; Oasis with Happy Mondays sounds like New Order with lyrics by Morrissey or Ian Curtis, on a bad day (“You’ve gone too far, and it’s gone all the wrong way”). If you want to condense every Manc motif into one song, check out Mike Garry and Joe Duddell’s St Anthony: An Ode to Anthony H Wilson (Andrew Weatherall Remix; lyrics here), perhaps while walking from the Aviva Studios stuck. /Factory International behemoth to the Epping Walk Bridge to search hopelessly – from the 80s – for Hulme Crescents and the dead souls of yesteryear.