Let's say -- just hypothetically -- that I'd been pondering for several months what a new novel should be about, because I want to keep writing these things, now I've started. And let's say -- entirely speculatively -- that I'd actually refined and defined a slew of "signature specifications" to the extent that I was able to start writing the new book, suddenly, last week. Let's call it The Book of Pim, but let's say absolutely nothing about it at this stage, because it's not my business to tell or yours to know, at this point, what this notional book will say or do. Let's just say one thing, though: that although the book is set in a far-off People's Republic whose real world cognate I've never been to, Manchester (a city I've only been to once) figures in it. Not the real Manchester, but the city I built in my imagination while listening to the records of Joy Division, Magazine, The Fall and The Passage. Let's watch an information film:
The man delivering this lecture about Manchester, The Fall and Mark E. Smith at an academic conference at the University of Salford is Dick Witts, an academic at the University of Edinburgh. He begins his lecture with a brilliant deconstruction of a BBC4 documentary about Manchester -- a film good in its way, but also typical of the reductive, revisionist and tediously "iconic" way such history gets reduced to successes, soundbites and the same old talking heads. Witts lists the 35 individual shots the documentary uses to establish its vision of Manchester in 1977, sourcing them in documentaries from 1946, 1955, 1967 and 1978, often as much about Salford and Ordsall as Manchester itself, and as much about urban regeneration as the urban decay it's intended to convey. Only 10% of the visual material intended to evoke the seventies, Witts shows, actually comes from the decade.
The lecture continues without a single mention of Witts' own group The Passage. And it's at this point that I can reveal that The Passage is the only Manchester group I still listen to, and that the vision of the city conjured in Passage songs, especially the early ones, is what's informing the book I'm now -- hypothetically -- writing. Sure, sure, The Fall is an endlessly fascinating group, and Mark E. Smith is perhaps Britain's greatest living poet. But for me, personally, Dick Witts -- the modest, acute music lecturer at the podium -- is much more important and much more fascinating. I could write a book about why my book will contain echoes (transmuted to a far eastern People's Republic) of the dark, schematic Mancunian landscapes Witts' lyrics evoked across four Passage albums and several EPs and radio sessions. But for now I'll just write a couple of paragraphs.
The Manchester landscape of Passage songs is one of personal scenarios of love, hope and lust played out against a backdrop of politics noir, an environment poised between Blade Runner and The Threepenny Opera. This Manchester is presided over by "Mr Terror, Chief of Police", a Methodist police chief called Anderton whose motivations are religio-fascistic. Anderton is real, a policeman-puritan who claimed to take counsel directly from God and believed AIDS to be a punishment for the immorality of homosexuals. Anything that didn't contribute to Anderton's definition of "a good and useful life" was within his remit to quash. He may sound like the sacrificial Christian copper in The Wicker Man, but woe betide artists trying to pillory him in fiction: when David Britton portrayed Anderton as "Lord Horror" in a 1989 satirical graphic novel, the book was banned and Britton sent to prison for several months.
Anderton in Passage songs is described in Old Testament terms as a layer of "snares" and "traps". He plays a similar role -- authoritarian hate figure -- as The Dictator Hall plays in my own first album, The Happy Family's The Man on Your Street. Over music sinister, twinkling, thunderous, complex, modular and modern -- music which, like an operetta, keeps sweeping the same motifs into new combinations and contexts -- a series of schematic terms define life: FEAR POWER LOVE, the transition from midnight to a new dawn, fire and ice, bodies and minds, drugs illegal-forbidden and legal-compulsory, seconds, hours and days, the provinces and, beyond them, the chilly, distant capital LON DON, almost Chinese in its distant, imperial brutality.
The Passage website and above all the LTM re-releases might give you a glimpse of why this band, this man, wunderbar, ich glaube, n'est-ce pas? continue to mean so much to me. They took subversion and avant garde experimentation further than anyone else in the early 80s, and Dick Witts was simply more intelligent than any other British songwriter at the time, his wordplay more serious and more witty, his politics more radical and advanced. It's not particularly surprising that BBC documentaries (even BBC4 documentaries) gloss over The Passage, and not particularly surprising that Witts himself tends to as well. But important parts of my imagination got lit up by Witts' vision the way other people (including Witts himself) were illuminated by Morrissey or Mark E Smith, and I have a feeling that those parts are now flexing and stretching and, one day soon, will see the dawn.
One of the more illuminating conversations I've had about MCR has been with Linder, who actually raised an injunction to prevent her depiction in 24 Hour Party People appearing *at all* because the boys' club narrative that passes for a popcult history of the city, and the way she would be portrayed there looked hopelessly reductive based on the script she had seen.
I'd be really interested in reading a book that proposes a different history; part of the fun of traveling to MCR 20 years ago (!) was the sense of theatre available to anyone who imagined the city as a stage where musical drama was acted out and the sense of subversion I personally got from toying with that once I knew my preconceptions were both more and less than what played out before my eyes. When I went back in 1995 and 2003 I had confirmation of just how fleeting that world (and worldview) really was.
I think Devoto's solution was far better than an injunction: appear briefly in the film (and as a toilet cleaner!) to say "None of this actually happened!"
Parallel postpunk Manchesters have already been done I'm afraid, Momus. Jeff Noon's Needle In the Groove, for instance, has a Manchester where the streets and monuments named after The Passage, The Fall, and Joy Division.
You're absolutely right Momus! I agree. I am from Manchester and have always admired the Passage. Today's blog is a fine one. You're most interesting I find as a music critic. Perhaps so much so that it hinders you in some way from being as great a musician. But be it so, you're a man worth listening to.
Thank you for posting! I'm guessing that's from the popular musicology course at Salford Uni. I have been interested in for more than 2 year now, but never acted upon this interest. For lack of confidence and whatnot. However I'm moving back to Manchester soon, and will be sure to make my way to Salford Uni to enquire further. There's a fourth video you didn't post, everyone should watch that as well!
Hello. I've been to Manchester many times and found it really depressing! I've read, seen and heard a lot of the narratives about The Manchester Scene, but sometimes I really wonder whether it actually happened... and it does seem like a boys' club. (I am a girl). I love cities and try to find inspiration in all and any I find... Manchester was a really, really tough one!!! A struggle. Tokyo, on the other hand, I have been to twice... and... wow. That's all I can say. It's truly incredible and beautiful.
I'd love to find inspiration in Manchester, still. I think there is something great about discovering beauty and inspiration in a place one has already written off. I just sort of really hate it there. It embodies a lot of what I find really depressing about England in general. I shall keep trying. Thanks for posting this, maybe it'll do the trick - who knows!
Well, I'm not really advising people to go to the real Manchester. I'd rather say "Build a magnificent, dark, intriguing place in your mind and call it Manchester." I think the artists who came from the city had to work extra hard to enhance and embroider it, and that's what we're benefitting from when we enter their worlds.
Morrissey is good, and the world knows he is good. The world does not know how good The Passage were. That's why it's worth shouting it from whatever rooftops you can.
I knew they were good from the moment I heard Peel play Watching You Dance in late 1980. I bought all the albums the moment they came out, and saw The Passage play live at Clouds discotheque in Edinburgh, in front of an audience of about 30 people. I've also met Dick Witts several times -- he even came to a gig I did at Borders bookshop in London in 1999!
XOYO is a little over-celebrated just because it was their most heavily-promoted single, their attempt at getting some sort of crossover hit. That's why I didn't YouTube it, though I will here:
I never bought Pillows and Prayers, actually. It was an important release for Cherry Red, but I don't have much sense of what's on it. I think I have a copy somewhere on my shelves, but I've never played it!
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imomus's journal
The lecture continues without a single mention of Witts' own group The Passage. And it's at this point that I can reveal that The Passage is the only Manchester group I still listen to, and that the vision of the city conjured in Passage songs, especially the early ones, is what's informing the book I'm now -- hypothetically -- writing. Sure, sure, The Fall is an endlessly fascinating group, and Mark E. Smith is perhaps Britain's greatest living poet. But for me, personally, Dick Witts -- the modest, acute music lecturer at the podium -- is much more important and much more fascinating. I could write a book about why my book will contain echoes (transmuted to a far eastern People's Republic) of the dark, schematic Mancunian landscapes Witts' lyrics evoked across four Passage albums and several EPs and radio sessions. But for now I'll just write a couple of paragraphs.
