For twenty years, Manchester was the greatest music city in the UK, perhaps the world. It produced Joy Division, the Fall, New Order, the Smiths, Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses, Oasis and many more of the most influential bands in UK music history. There may be arguments over the precise definition of this golden era, but few are likely to argue that it existed, or that it produced a run of bands rarely, if ever, matched by one city. 

Many would say this era was instigated in 1976 by the famous Sex Pistols concerts at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, which most of Manchester’s later music greats (and Mick Hucknall) attended. I suggest it began in 1978, the year that saw the release of Joy Division’s An Ideal for Living EP, the debut release by the first truly iconic Manchester band. The same year also saw the recording of A Factory Sampler, and thus the beginning of the Factory Records story. Not all the finest bands of this era, or even the majority, were on Factory of course. However Factory, and Tony Wilson in particular, were so big on self-promotion and the promotion of Manchester, that it feels like Manchester’s golden era and the Factory story are irrevocably intertwined. Similarly, to me, 1997 was the end of this era, as it saw the closure of the Haçienda, bringing the Factory story to an end a few years after Factory Records itself folded. Also, 1997 saw the release of Oasis’ bloated Be Here Now which made us realize that Manchester’s last ‘great’ band might not be so great after all. 

I moved to Manchester in 1998, when by any reckoning the golden era had ended. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time. Music had been my inspiration for moving to Manchester. Bands played there more often than any other city in the North of England, but it wasn’t only that. Like the narrator of LCD Soundsystem’s Losing My Edge, with his increasingly ridiculous claims of being at music’s most pivotal moments ‘I was there in 1974 at the first Suicide practices in a loft in New York City… I was there in the Paradise Garage DJ booth with Larry Levan,’ I wanted to be there. I couldn’t travel back in time to be at the early Joy Division gigs at Rafters or the Electric Circus. I couldn’t see the Smiths or Happy Mondays before they made it big — but I could be there for the emergence of the next great Manchester band, whoever they might be. 

However, in the twelve years I lived in Manchester, that next legendary band never appeared. I did go to many amazing gigs from non-Manchester bands. I also discovered several Manchester bands I enjoyed. (The Answering Machine, I Am Kloot and the Earlies were personal favourites, and Everything Everything, Elbow and Lamb were among those mentioned by contemporaries interviewed when discussing that time period.) However, whilst those bands were successful to one extent or another, none had the impact of the golden era bands. They will not inspire legions of devoted fans thirty years after their heyday as Joy Division or the Smiths do. They didn’t change the course of UK music as the Stone Roses or Oasis did. So I started to wonder why. Why did Manchester produce so many great bands in the Joy Division and Factory era, but none since? Was it just good fortune, a run of luck that was bound to end sometime, or were there reasons for the decline? 

My perspective is that Manchester’s obsessive devotion to the golden era bands was, at least in part, responsible for holding back new talent. Manchester had never been exactly shy in boasting of its musical heroes. Go to any indie disco in Manchester in the last twenty years and you could be fairly sure of hearing half a dozen Stone Roses songs, as well as Transmission, Blue Monday, This Charming Man and any number of other Manchester classics. Music (and football) were at the top of the list of reasons that Mancunians would recite as to why their city was superior to my own home city of Leeds. Over my time in Manchester, however, this braggadocio became increasingly commercialized. Noting the Beatles’ boon to the Liverpudlian tourist industry, Manchester’s institutions and businesses began to use its musical history as a promotional tool, to attract visitors, students, residents and businesses. Guided tours and walks appeared showcasing famous Manchester music locations, including a Joy Division tour visiting everywhere from Ian Curtis’ childhood home to the former Factory office on Palatine Road. Manchester’s museums and galleries displayed Peter Saville’s Joy Division record sleeves and other music memorabilia. The Haçienda was demolished, and in its place now stands a luxury apartment building named… the Haçienda. There was even a café named CAF51, after FAC51, the Haçienda’s Factory catalogue number, although it didn’t last so long. 

All of this promotion seemingly worked. During the interviews I conducted with contemporaries who moved to Manchester post-1997, many mentioned music in one form or another as a reason for moving to the city, with Joy Division and the Haçienda mentioned more often than any other bands or venues. A 2011 University of Bournemouth study on UK music tourism is also instructive, highlighting Manchester’s role in the North West of England becoming the biggest beneficiary of ‘music tourism’ outside London. However, Manchester councillor Mike Amesbury commented on the report: ‘Manchester needs to be careful, we need to strike a balance between the historical and the innovative…We don’t want to be like Liverpool, overegging something like the Beatles. They are fantastic, but Manchester doesn’t want to live in the past.’ Yet, to me, this is exactly what has already happened. 

Turning Manchester’s musical history into tourist attractions and museum exhibits began a process of ossification. It confines Manchester music history to a short time period, a small number of bands and personalities to the exclusion of all others (and yes, I recognize the irony that I am doing much the same thing). The history of Manchester music becomes a new Mount Rushmore, with the faces of Ian Curtis, Tony Wilson, Morrissey and Marr carved into stone as heroes, even deities in the case of Curtis and Wilson. The problem with this is that Mount Rushmore doesn’t change, is never added to. Manchester’s musical legends have been defined, set in stone, and the implication is they will never be matched. There is no room for newcomers. 

Wilson himself is partly responsible for this process, as he was writing the legend of Factory and Manchester as he went along, culminating in the book and film 24 Hour Party People. He did at least undercut the mythologizing with self-depreciation, a prime example being the promotional poster for 24 Hour Party People, describing Ian Curtis, Shaun Ryder and Tony Wilson as ‘Genius’, ‘Poet’ and ‘Twat’ respectively. When Wilson died in 2007, there was no one left to prevent his posthumous deification, as had happened to Ian Curtis before him. There has even been a recent attempt by Joy Division fans to purchase Curtis’ former home, to be kept as a shrine (provoking mixed reaction from the other Joy Division members, Bernard Sumner describing the attempt as ‘a bit ghoulish and… it’s a bit of a monument to suicide as well’). To claim Curtis or Wilson have been deified is not to claim they have become entirely immune to criticism, but death has brought with it the tendency to magnify their achievements and minimize their flaws. Unlike Morrissey, for example, they have not been around to remind everyone of their mortality by making provocative/ridiculous comments (or be deliberately misinterpreted by the media, depending on your viewpoint).

The impact of this deification and hero-worship of Manchester’s past musicians on later Manchester bands is not hard to imagine. ‘How can we be expected to emulate these legendary figures?’ they must consciously or unconsciously wonder. Oasis titled one of their post 1997 albums Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, but during my time in Manchester, it seemed that bands were standing in the shadow of giants, afraid or unable to match the achievements of their predecessors. Back in Joy Division’s time there were no such bands to compare themselves to, ‘Bands came to Manchester but they didn’t really come from Manchester,’ so there were no limits to what they could achieve.

The ever-increasing promotion of the golden era Manchester bands also had a strange impact on the members of those bands still inhabiting the city. To become a tourist attraction and part of your city’s history in your own lifetime must be a disconcerting experience. Some, like Curtis and Wilson are no longer with us to experience this, and others like Morrissey have long since fled the city and the country. However, many others remain. Having heard the legends of Joy Division, Factory and Manchester music so often during my time there, it was incongruous to run into characters from those tales during the course of my day to day life. Bez, confused, wandering the aisles of a Chorlton supermarket. Andy Rourke playing records in the basement room of a Fallowfield pub. Alan Erasmus as a friend’s landlord. It was as if characters from fiction had come to life and started populating my real world. 

These individuals now had to choose whether or not to profit from the suddenly more lucrative legacies of their former bands, and, quite understandably, most did. Peter Hook toured as a kind of Joy Division covers band named Peter Hook and the Light, playing Joy Division’s albums in full, as well as popping up in Manchester nightspots DJing ‘Haçienda classics’. (Laudably, he has more recently announced he is using the same band to stage a concert to raise funds for an epilepsy charity and to restore a church in Macclesfield, Ian Curtis’ home town.) Other bands reformed, either intermittently and underwhelmingly (Happy Mondays) or rather more lucratively (the Stone Roses). All of this added to the impression that Manchester’s music scene was focused more on the past than the present. Manchester’s 2015 ‘Summer In The City’ festival featured Noel Gallagher, Johnny Marr and the Charlatans among its headliners; but newer Manchester bands were conspicuous by their absence. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the transformation, deliberate or otherwise, of Manchester’s music scene into an idealized past rather than a living, breathing present, has impacted on the motivation and opportunities for younger bands.

A second explanation for Manchester’s musical decline is less directly about music itself. Manchester, especially during the earliest years of its golden musical era was, by most accounts, a grim, disheartening place to live. Its growth during and following the industrial revolution had long since come to a halt. The damage and destruction wrought by WWII had in many cases never been undone. Empty factories, abandoned industrial areas and high rise flats dominated the drab landscape. Bernard Sumner recalls, ‘I don’t think I saw a tree until I was about nine’ and ‘You were always looking for beauty because it was such an ugly place’.

Unemployment was high; peaking at over fifty per cent in certain areas of Manchester by the mid-1980s. Joining a band was a way of escaping, or at least dreaming of escape. But more than that, the environment impacted directly on the music itself. This is especially true of Joy Division, and much has been written on how Manchester, as a city, influenced their sound. Joy Division’s spatial circular themes and Martin Hannett’s shiny, waking dream production gloss are ‘one perfect reflection of Manchester’s dark spaces and empty places’ as journalist Jon Savage describes it. The impact on Ian Curtis’ lyrics is less remarked upon but also apparent in the ‘dark streets’ and ‘city limits’ of songs like Interzone.

The poverty and lack of opportunity in Manchester influenced other bands of the golden era in a multitude of ways, but the influence was always there. The songs of the Smiths are littered with direct, mostly negative, references to Manchester, the ‘humdrum town’. The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Oasis reacted defiantly, with swagger. They wrote joyous, drug and alcohol fuelled escapist anthems to show that it would take more than their bleak environment and a lack of jobs to keep them down. 

But during my time in Manchester, the city changed massively. An IRA bomb in 1996 had devastated part of Manchester’s city centre, but also led to its redevelopment and spurred economic growth in the area. The 2002 Commonwealth games brought new stadia, facilities and improvements to the public transport networks. Regeneration projects began to reclaim previously abandoned areas of the city, especially in the north and east. Luxury flats and offices sprang up with frightening regularity. The BBC moved a large part of its operations to Salford in 2011. Whilst the recession of 2008-09 onwards did slow Manchester’s regrowth, it could not be stopped. Manchester has, once again, become an economically vibrant city, awarded unprecedented autonomy and spending power by central government and in many people’s eyes displacing Birmingham as England’s second city.

This is all a very good thing for Manchester. But what does it mean for Manchester musicians? Architecture writer Owen Hatherley certainly believes the impact on Manchester’s cultural life has been negative: ‘Regenerated cities produce no more great pop music, great films or great art than they do industrial product. What they do produce are property developers.’ This chimes with my own experience of the changing city. Manchester has become cleaner, brighter and wealthier, but perhaps more sterile, less interesting. Whilst the motivation to escape poverty and ugliness may not have disappeared entirely, it is certainly less prevalent. ‘Is it worth the aggravation to find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for?’ was one of Oasis’ more memorable lines. ‘Is it worth the aggravation to find yourself a well-paying job in one of Manchester’s many creative industries?’ does not have quite the same ring. Would the great Manchester bands still have formed if economic circumstances had been more favourable? Would they have had the same motivation to succeed? 

The close correlation between the end of Manchester’s musical golden era and the beginning of its economic rebirth is suggestive, if not exactly conclusive. It is certainly true, however, that a lack of alternatives can be a powerful motivator in many spheres, whether cultural, sporting or even criminal. Just read the autobiography of any working class musician, footballer or gang member for evidence of that. Tony Wilson has claimed that Joy Division went on stage ‘because they had no fucking choice’, so perhaps they would have still formed and succeeded even if they had existed thirty years later in the new, more prosperous Manchester. It is safe to say, however, that without the influence of Manchester’s harsh, industrial landscape they would not have sounded like the Joy Division we now know. 

My view, developed during my years in Manchester, is that both the commodification of Manchester’s recent musical history, and its economic revival have contributed to the decay of its creativity. My Manchester never did quite live up to Tony Wilson’s dream of becoming an alternative cultural centre to London, a rival on equal terms. The capital city still dominates the UK’s cultural landscape and creative types still tend to migrate there despite physical location being less important than ever in this digital age. This is not to denigrate Manchester. It is a wonderful city to live in, and residents in the years 1997 to 2015 interviewed for this chapter spoke glowingly of their time in Manchester and their musical experiences there. However, Nick M’s (fanzine editor and gig promoter) statement that ‘my love of Manchester music is less about the bands the city’s produced, and more about the scenes it has helped to foster’ is fairly typical. Nobody claimed that a great Manchester band defined their time in the city, as past Joy Division or Smiths fans may have said, or that they had lived through a musical revolution like Madchester.

I never did achieve my ambition of being there for the birth of a great band, but my times in Manchester were some of the happiest of my life, and most of my formative musical experiences took place there. A piece of my heart will always belong to Manchester and listening to any of the city’s great bands, and most especially Joy Division, will always transport me back to my time there, and the unknown grey streets of Manchester past. Manchester will always be one of the UK’s great music cities, but unlike that glorious period of 1978-97 it may never again be the great music city