Manpool, the musical
Harmony and counterpoint on the Lancashire Plain
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.32552Keywords:
Burtonwood, Eric’s, ethnography, ethnomusicology, the Fall, Haçienda, Liverpool, Manchester, north-west England, Oasis, popular music studies, post punk, Simply Red, UNESCO City of MusicAbstract
Since 2015 Liverpool has been designated a UNESCO ‘City of Music’. Not so its neighbour Manchester, which has nonetheless been hailed in the press as the ‘capital city of music’. They remain globally valued as two of the chief cities identified with the development of popular music in the second half of the twentieth century. As de-industrialised centres seeking new engines of growth, they have invested in these cultural reputations in order to attract for themselves tourists, university students, the conference trade and foreign business. Yet across the past decade numerous claims have been made in a range of journalistic outputs that Liverpool and Manchester are cultural rivals. These claims appear to be predicated principally on sport and music, key meeting points of commerce and leisure. There are certainly differences between the two conurbations – the industrial site of Manchester grew at the interstices of three rivers while Liverpool evolved as an Atlantic port. Yet the major transport initiatives in the area (the 1830 Manchester-Liverpool Railway, the 1894 Manchester Ship Canal, the 1934 East Lancs Road, the 1976 M62) were constructed in order to accelerate connections between the two cities. Most recently urban strategists such as Andreas Schulz-Baing have fused the diarchy by describing them as a potential polynuclear metropolitan zone, a megalopolis. From this the businessman Lord O’Neill has popularized the union as ‘Manpool’. Taking this as its cue to correct the music history of the ‘adversary’ cities, this chapter examines three diverse examples of musical figures associated with one city who played in vital, but forgotten, part in life of the other.
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Heseltine, M, 2000. Life In The Jungle: My Autobiography. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Hook, P. 2012. Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division. London: Simon & Schuster.
Harper, T. 2013. ‘The Biggest Company You’ve Never Heard of: Lifting the Lid on Peel Group—the Property Firm Owned by Reclusive Tax Exile John Whittaker’. The Independent, 18 October. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-biggest-company-youve-never-heard-of-lifting-the-lid-on-peel-group-the-property-firm-owned-by-8890201.html
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LCRCA. 2016. https://www.liverpoollep.org/economic-strategy/combined-authorities (accessed 15 April 2016).
Littlefield, D. 2009. Liverpool One: Remaking a City Centre. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
Mackay, L. 2006. Re-apprasing Hulme in 2004—a VivaCity2020 Report. Manchester: Vivacity.
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Munck, R. 2003: Reinventing the City? Liverpool in Comparative Perspective. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. https://doi.org/10.5949/UPO9781846313912
Nice, J. 2010. Shadowplayers: The Rise and Fall of Factory Records. London: Aurum.
O’Neill, J. 2014. ‘Could Merging Liverpool and Manchester Boost UK Growth?’ Daily Telegraph, 13 November. http://tinyurl.com/10654182 (accessed 15 April 2016).
Phillips, C. B., and J. W. Swift. 1994. Lancashire and Cheshire from A.D.1540. London: Longmans.
Pye, K. 2014. Liverpool: The Rise and Fall and Renaissance of a World-class City. Stroud: Amberley Publishing.
Quilley, S. 2002. ‘Entrepreneurial Turns: Municipal Socialism and After’. In City of Revolution: Restructuring Manchester, ed. J. Peck and K. Ward, 70–93. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Reade, L. 2010. Mr Manchester and the Factory Girl: The Story of Tony and Lindsay Wilson. London: Plexus.
Schulze-Baing, A., S. Dembski and O. Sykes. 2015. ‘Urban Renaissance—What is the Prospect of Places in the Periphery? Manchester-Liverpool and the Spatial In-between’. In host publication, Polycentric City Regions in Transformation—The Ruhr Agglomeration in International Perspective, Essen, 11-13 July.
Sykes, B. 2012. Sit Down! Listen To This!—The Roger Eagle Story. Manchester: Empire Publications.
The Tab. 2012. ‘Manchester v Liverpool. The Music Scene. You Decide’. http://thetab.com/uk/liverpool/2012/11/15/manchester-v-liverpool-the-music-scene-you-decide-1858 (accessed 3 April 2016).
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UNESCO. 2016. http://en.unesco.org/creative-cities/home (accessed 31 March 2016).
Wainwright, M. 2009. True North: In Praise of England’s Better Half. London: Guardian Books.
Wilson, A. 2007. ‘Westward Ho!’. In Mersey: The River that Changed the World, ed. I. Wray and C. McPherson, 94–102. Liverpool: Bluecoat Press.
Witts, R. 2010. ‘Building up a Band: Music for a Second City’. In Mark E. Smith and The Fall: Art, Music and Politics, ed. M. Goddard and B. Halligan, 19–31. Farnham: Ashgate.
Published
2017-01-04
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Witts, R. (2017). Manpool, the musical: Harmony and counterpoint on the Lancashire Plain. Popular Music History, 10(1), 10-29. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.32552
