I’m quite impressed by the borderline heretical grumblings over at FUC51. Not because I hate the Smiths, New Order or Joy Division (they’re actually three of my favourite bands) but because I hate the idea of living and working in a supposedly creative city that’s obsessed with a musical movement that ended twenty years ago.
Yes, Tony Wilson was great, Blue Monday is an incredible pop song and that anecdote about the Happy Mondays’ crack-based vacation in Barbados is truly one that unites us as a nation. We get it. We got it some time ago, in fact. But someone really needed to point out that the Peter Hook-backed FAC251 club sounds like a criminally boring money-making, credibility-losing enterprise, while Delphic are an average band whose claim to the title of “the new New Order” smacks of a desperate record company marketing person’s unconvincing hard sell. (Edit: Having listened to the album I’ve actually decided I really like Delphic. The New Order link is possibly more a result of lazy journalism than deliberate marketing.)
As FUC51 puts it:
While slating Liverpool for being a Beatle-museum, Mancs are still pretending it’s 1988. Look around the city and you’re given constant reminders of Factory Records, The Hacienda, The Stone Roses, The Smiths, Acid House, NewOrderJoyDivision and… you get the idea.
Our aim is to act as snipers to this relentless wave of borrowed nostalgia that continues to make stars of Madchester hangers-on and people steeped in yesteryear.
Something went a bit weird when these hangers-on became part of the Manchester establishment. Despite coining the slogan Original Modern, the council and its public sector marketing quangos are obsessed with the myth-making. They recruited Hacienda designer Ben Kelly to design the corporate stand at the MIPIM property fair in the south of France a couple of years ago, at which copies of CDs containing various baggy-era classics were handed out to the greying property developers in beige suits and Ray-Bans who gravitate there each March. The council’s recruitment of Peter Saville as creative consultant at a salary of a hundred and twenty grand a year is also, if we’re being completely honest, a little bit silly.
So down with this sort of thing. Let’s all listen to Autechre.
Hat tip (at risk of turning this blog into a Stockport-based blog love-in) to Marple Leaf for pointing me in its general direction.
The Conversation {4 comments}
Presumably the end result of this is a music scene bereft of originality – certain Delphic’s “positioning” has fallen foul of this.
But how does any of this explain (or excuse) the success of Elbow and Doves? Just a thought. Not close enough to any scene to actually know the answer, by the way.
Ha, you’ve written the blog post I was going to write pretty much down to the letter. I can now simply point people to it and say yeah, what he said.
A friend forwarded me on the press release for the club’s big launch night and it had that quote on it from Tony Wilson: “This is Manchester… we do things differently here.” If only. We don’t do things differently at all, we just keep doing the same thing over and over and over.
Spot on. Looking forward to the over-the-top, name-dropping, fawning review in a certain web-based magazine. My spies tell me a certain portly ‘publisher’ attended the opening party. Can’t wait
Autechre, indeed.
Apparently the whole club smelled of fresh paint. They must have rushed to get it open.
Oh and you *totally* stole “Madchester deniers” from my brain. I was going to give my post that title, but I logged onto the tinternet only to discover you’d beaten me to it. Very bizarre coincidence. Great minds and all that…
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