The Working Class Movement Library, Salford

I’ve been spending a lot of this week at the Working Class Movement Library on Salford Crescent. There are buses and trains, but I generally get the 192 to Piccadilly and walk it the rest of the way. This takes you through the bustling sensory overload of Piccadilly and Market Street, out the other side and over the bridge into Salford, past the rise of development and regeneration on Chapel Street and Salford Crescent. While the sight of yet another block of yuppie flats being built within screaming distance of Manchester city centre does depress me, the idea of them becoming the ‘Vimto flats’ does amuse me and take the edge off the depression somewhat.

Anyway, to the WCML. I can’t think of another library or museum where you would encounter the Manchester post punk fanzine City Fun, trade union history and Oliver Postgate. I am re-reading Oliver Postgate’s memoir at the moment, so was particularly pleased to encounter the Postgate exhibtion in the entrance hall in its display case. Like Postgate and Firmin’s films, it is small but perfectly formed. Bagpuss sits in the middle and, amongst other things, it is revealed that the folk singer Sandra Kerr provided the voice of Madeleine the rag doll and that Professor Yaffle was based on Bertrand Russell.

I originally started trawling through the collection of City Fun about two or three years ago when I’d first decided to develop the punk women series I wrote for The F-Word into a book, and I’ve been meaning to finish the trawl ever since. Like a lot of fanzines that went on for a long time, City Fun clearly started to believe their own hype after a bit, and to develop their own personal shorthand/language. But I think that they were very quick to spot when they were disappearing up their own arses, and to take steps to correct that. I think that showed a good dose of self awareness and maturity on their part.

City Fun, which (amongst others) featured writing, artwork and input from Martin X, Andy Zero, Liz Naylor, Cath Carroll, Bob Dickinson, Linder Sterling and a certain Stephan Patrick Morrissey, has, over time, proved itself to be a really good social document of the 1979-1982 period, particularly from a punk/post punk and mancunian history point of view. It’s also been digitised now, a sure sign of its historical and cultural importance.

Last night was film festival night at the WCML, so I stayed until 7pm in order to watch the Lindsey Anderson/Shelagh Delaney project The White Bus from 1967. It’s described as being “A prelude” to If, and revolves around a series of small adventurous journeys undertaken by an anonymous young woman around Manchester and Salford. At one point she is on a civic bus tour on the aforementioned white bus, which is dominated by the excessively forthright and jolly Mayor, played with gusto by Arthur Lowe. I liked the bits in Central Library: “You have some filthy books in here!” and the sly double meaning inferred by the juxtaposition of the new towerblocks in Salford, and the march of progress they represented, with the rather more picturesque houses of the famous and wealthy in the suburbs. It’s an odd film, but an interesting and enjoyable one.

Anderson, while probably most famous for If, also directed the video to Carmel’s ‘More, more, more’ in 1984. It was also filmed around Manchester.

The film festival continues tonight with Luke Fowler’s The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott. Which mixes archive footage and newly shot material

“in an evocative video essay that reflects on the life and times of critic, historian and activist EP Thompson. It captures a moment of optimism, in which Thompson’s ideas for progressive education came together with political resistance and activism.”

There’s also a benefit in aid of the WCML, which has been hard hit by cuts to Salford Council, on 9th June at Islington Mill, at 3pm.

Photo of the Working Class Movement Library by pandrcutts. Used thanks to a flickr creative commons licence

I had suggested we get the bus, but Transport For Greater Manchester’s journey planner was sulking when I tried to look the buses up, and Trainline revealed fares for under £10 so we got the train from Victoria instead.

Rochdale came as a bit of a shock to us upon our arrival. The powers that be are in the process of installing tramlines for the Metrolink, so a lot of the roads from the train station (and neighbouring metrolink station) through the town centre are barricaded up while the lines are layed, making an already slightly daunting prospect of finding our way over to the museum somewhat more difficult. It was also colder than it had  been in Manchester, and it’s not often we get to say that…

After a somewhat bleak and vaguely surreal trek through the town centre and out the other side to Toad Lane, where the museum is, we grabbed a much needed cup of tea before sitting down to hear Natalie’s talk.

Titled ‘Woman’s Outlook: 1919 – 1967: A surprisingly modern magazine?’, Natalie’s talk was unusual in structure in that she doesn’t get on with Powerpoint and, what with being a trained journalist, she instead made a magazine, provided paper copies of it to the audience, and used a digital version of the magazine instead of Powerpoint to structure her talk.

Woman’s Outlook was a magazine for co-operative women, published by the Co-Operative Press. Natalie describes it as having “mixed the political and the domestic”

As Natalie says in her summary, the magazine took “an often daring political stance on hot topics of the day” and appeared “ahead of its time on issues such as abortion, equal pay and divorce law” but “many of the subjects covered by Outlook would not appear out of place in a women’s magazine today.”

As Natalie explained in her talk, she grew up reading the music press, then newspapers, so she never read the girls and womens press while she was growing up. The only women’s magazine she reads now is Stylist “because it’s free” and it was interesting, and very revealing, so see a comparison of stories in Woman’s Outlook and Stylist: There are more similarities in subject matter than you might think.

Natalie took the audience on a journey from the magazine’s beginnings in the ‘Women’s Corner’ in the Co-operative News in the late nineteenth century to the founding of the Co-operative Women’s Guild, to the founding of Woman’s Outlook at the end of the First World War.

Natalie talked of some of those involved with the paper, including notable editors, columnists and contributers, and discussed the prejudice they faced. Editor Mary Stott had wanted to cover ‘hard news’ in her journalistic career, but instead found herself consigned to ‘women’s issues’, which were taken less seriously. Her 1973 memoir Forgetting’s No Excuse was a touchstone for Natalie in her research, as were interviews she conducted with some of the surviving members of the Co-operative Women’s Guild, Pat Williams and Margaret Tillotson.

Natalie is an enthusiastic speaker, and her interest in the subject and her research really came across as she spoke. It made me want to find out more about the Co-operative Women’s Guild and Woman’s Outlook.

After the talk, David and I headed back to the train station as it was getting a bit late and we needed to find some food.

As we wearily tried to remember our way back through the dark, empty barricaded streets we spotted a sign that stated encouragingly ‘Rochdale: Open as usual’ but even that didn’t console us much in the misery of the cold. David remarked that he hadn’t felt this cold since he visited his ex boyfriend in Berlin a few winters back, whereas I fervently wished I’d put more layers on. We both felt flasks of soup and sandwiches would be a good idea next time. Either that, or we will have to wait until the mythical summer arrives before venturing this way again.

It wasn’t much better once we got back to Manchester, as the storm was drawing in, but it still felt a couple of degrees warmer at least. On our way back to Piccadilly to catch our buses home we walked past the old Co-Operative building, providing a neat ending to the evenings adventure.

She Bop is out now

At the end of January I received an invitation to attend the book launch of the newly revised and updated third edition of Lucy O’Brien’s She Bop: The definitive history of women in rock, pop, and soul. As a big fan of both the first and second editions of the book, I have been very excited about the prospect of a third edition. I was sixteen when the first edition came out, and its sophisticated degree of historical, cultural and musical detail coupled with its intelligent readability made me an instant fan. Not only did the book include women who I already listened to and enjoyed (Siouxsie Sioux, Janis Joplin, the Voodoo Queens) it also shed a light on areas of music I hadn’t really had much time for at that point (soul, hip hop, disco) and delved into the somewhat murky world of the music industry behind the scenes.  It was an eye opener, an education, and above all, a very enjoyable and inspiring read.

I was in the midst of sitting my GCSE’s at the time the book was published in 1995, but had taken some time off from sitting them to go to London to attend Le Grandienne, an all dayer held at Kings Cross Arts Centre which was put on by the lovely folk at Piao!, who had been involved with the two day Piao! Festival in February 1994 (along with members of Linus). I travelled down to London by train from Stockport for the first and, it has to be said, only time in my life. This was before privatisation and the fare, paid for by my long suffering mum, was £30. I was met at Euston by Chris Phillips of Piao! very early in the morning on the day of the event, and sat quietly on the sidelines as the stage and festival were set up around me.

Highlights included Minxus, [For the benefit of the tiny minority of people who read my fiction blog Screaming In Public, Minxus’ singer/bassist, She Rocola, was the visual inspiration for Violet. Fliss, meanwhile, was visually inspired by the seventeen year old Lauren Laverne in Kenickie. Who, inbetween leaving Slampt Underground Organisation and signing to EMI, toured the country in a stage outfit comprised of a rubber mini skirt, converse all stars, and the top half of a childs jujitsu suit that she’d found in a charity shop in Sunderland.] Yummy Fur, Heck, Lungleg and Quickspace Supersport, amongst others.

When I returned to Hazel Grove, the copy of She Bop that my mum had requested for me at Hazel Grove library was waiting for me. It was the summer holidays, and I sat down to read it with some level of curiosity and, as a riot grrrl, a certain amount of trepidation as the back cover had mentioned riot grrrl and I wasn’t sure how I felt about riot grrrl being written about outside of the riot grrrl scene.  As it was, my uncertainty and vague suspicions were very quickly displaced and, becoming increasingly engrossed in the book, I devoured it in three days.

A couple of months later, still fascinated by and very attached to the book, I read it again and decided that I wanted to write about it. Normally this would have meant a review for my fanzine, Aggamengmong Moggie, but I took the unusual step of writing to Lucy c/o her then publisher, Penguin and sending some questions for her to answer by return post. I didn’t necessarily expect an answer, but I decided to try anyway. I was pleasantly surprised when, a little while later, I received a set of long detailed answers back.

And so began a correspondence.

The second edition of She Bop was published in 2002, by which point I was at the end of my first year of my English degree at Manchester Metropolitan University and was working a market research job in Hazel Grove to keep me in funds. I reviewed She Bop II for my new fanzine, Euro Tourist, and interviewed Lucy via email for The F-Word. Friends went to Ladyfest London that year, but (with some regret) I went to Amsterdam instead, meaning I missed an authors reading of the newly updated She Bop II at Ladyfest.

Since 2002 I have had a certain modest journalistic success, writing small pieces for Record Collector, contributing to a book on Riot Grrrl, writing a series on women and punk for The F-Word website, and, more recently, taking on the role of music review editor at The F-Word, which I share with Holly Combe. Along the way I have received some very good journalism and writing advice from Lucy O’Brien, who I also interviewed by phone for the aforementioned punk women series.

That said, it was a pleasant surprise to receive the invitation to attend the book launch for She Bop III, and I was very touched to have been asked. The invitation arrived as I was taking a week’s leave, and knocked me for six somewhat. The next day (a Saturday) I logged into my work email from home and checked the shared calendar at work to see if anyone else was on leave that day, and seeing that someone was, I phoned my friend and weekend boss Nicola on the Sunday to ask about how many staff could be on leave at the same time. Nicola, in a strange twist of fate, is an old school friend of F-Word founder Catherine Redfern and, given that she has a secret life as a Philosopher outside of work, has been most understanding about my secret life as a journalist.

Leave was granted, a hotel proved to be surprisingly available, and coach tickets were booked. I did take a look on Trainline at London train tickets, but all this led to was a desire to pen a list or blog post on the theme of Things I Could Buy For the Cost Of A London Train Ticket. An Anytime Return from Stockport to London costs £308.00, whereas the same ticket in First Class costs £441.00. Things I could do for the cost of an Anytime Return include paying my rent for a month, buying my library pal Rachel’s monthly season on the train from Buxton to Manchester Oxford Road, and buying half an annual System 1 (which guarantees unlimited travel across all buses and bus companies in Greater Manchester). The coach it was.

As a veteran of National Express, I opted for the 9:30am coach from Chorlton Street Coach station to Victoria Coach station in the end. I’ve tried the 8am service before now, and last time I used it it was absolutely rammed, thus defeating the whole point of getting up at 5:30am to catch it. Interestingly the half 9 was half empty, so I felt vindicated in my lie in. Also, it was an express coach so it only stopped to swap drivers and then for 15 minutes at Milton Keynes. I got into Victoria at 2pm.

It was the bus journey into Manchester that proved to be the point of interminable go slow. The new 192’s (the green wifi hybrid buses) advertise that there are “Up to 18 buses an hour”, but it would be more accurate if they added the caveat “but not in rush hour, that would be madness”. I got to Chorlton Street with 10 minutes to spare.

I had a bit of a sartorial crisis the night before the event as I was packing. I’d sought the advice of Nicola as to what I should wear as I’d never been to a book launch before, or anything that might be comparable. Nicola has the advantage of having attended academic conferences and, besides, I had given her feedback on her choice of wedding dress so fair’s fair. But whereas I’d sorted out my skirt and top, I hadn’t been able to find a suitable jacket to wear over my short sleeved top, and it was threatening to snow again. There was also the earlier related saga of the quest for the perfect vegan cruelty free lipgloss that wasn’t pink, but I think that’s best not gone into here.

As someone who has grown up with She Bop, it felt important to attend and show my support for both author and book but I was also nervous as hell when it came to attending my first book launch and also meeting Lucy for the first time. My friend and occasional collaborator David Wilkinson emailed over some words of reassurance as I packed:

“Now don’t you worry about heading London-wards! Or working the room, or anything like that – concentrate on having a nice time, as I’m sure you will. Look forward to hearing about it”

I ran hither and thither (which is quite difficult to do in a studio flat, admittedly, but much less time consuming than in a house…) frantically trying clothes and jewellery on as the mix CD I was playing seemed to echo the ridiculous melodrama of the situation: The Supremes incredibly over the top ‘My World is empty without you’ being followed by Patrick Wolf’s plaintive wail of ‘I can’t do this alone!’ in ‘Together’. In the end I had to just pull myself together, pack and hope for the best.

My hotel was in Victoria, very close to the coach station, so it didn’t take long to check in and unpack. I looked up the venue for the launch, The Society Club, in my much battered A-Z and, having decided that it looked a bit tucked away, opted to do a dummy run before the event started at half six.

In the end, it was quite easy to find. I got the tube to Oxford Circus, then went in search of Poland Street and Ingestre Place. The Society Club looked very small, but I found it and headed back down Poland Street to Oxford Street. I had decided that I still needed something to finish my outfit off, as well as food pre-going out as there was going to be booze and I didn’t want to get drunk and embarrassing. So I wandered up and down Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road aimlessly pursuing these aims until about half 4/5 ish when I realised I needed to be back at my hotel.

Having not found any charity shops to peruse in my wanderings (wrong bits of London I suspect), and been disappointed by the pastelisation of Accessorize, I did a three scarves for £10 deal with one of the guys in one of the shops on Oxford Street. It is very touristy along Oxford Street, but the scarves were nice. He also tried to interest me in a new beret or three, but I resisted. 

In the end I wore my new black and silver scarf slung around my shoulders in homage to my library pal Rachel, who has perfected the art of dishabille, and once acquired a long waited for scarf from the library lost property box after four weeks of waiting. She happily slung it around her shoulders, where it looked perfect, and went about her work. The next day, the scarf was gone. “Where’s your new scarf?” I asked, “Went out last night, got drunk, left it in a tepee in the club” and so the perfect scarf re-entered and continued its lost property cycle.

I had brought my copy of She Bop III with me, with the intention of getting it signed if possible. But in the end I didn’t because the book wouldn’t fit in my handbag and I didn’t want to risk leaving it on the tube or similar. I really regret this now. When I told Nicola this part of the story, she said: “You could have used the other two scarves to make a sort of knapsack thing for it.” And I am kicking myself now for not thinking of this.

I arrived at the Society Club just before 7pm, and it was really busy. I didn’t really know anyone so I  ducked inside very quickly and found a corner to hide in with a glass of wine while watching and observing until I’d found my bearings a bit. I found myself wishing that David was there, but at the same time it was better that he wasn’t in that it meant I had to make the effort to be sociable and not rely on someone else to be sociable for me. I still missed him though. We are very good at giving each other well needed confidence boosts.

I had spotted Lucy fairly quickly as, although we haven’t met, I have seen pictures of her and seen her on TV.  I didn’t want to butt in on any conversations so I continued lurking in my corner for a bit instead. Then I spotted Helen McCookerybook in intense conversation with Caroline Coon, both of whom I interviewed in London in 2009 for my punk women series for the F-Word. Once there was a lull in that conversation, I said hello. Caroline got talking to other people, but I was able to have a nice long conversation with Helen, who I have always found very easy to talk to. Because I had never met Lucy before I got Helen to introduce me to her, as this seemed the least awkward and friendliest option.

Later, Lucy made a very nice speech about the book and its continuing reinvention and re-emergance. I liked the way she spoke of the book as a creature in its own right, an untethered heroine out there in the world. Or, as Lucy has written on her blog, Her Mistresses Voice , an archive of women’s musical history. As Helen McCookerybook has written in her blog post on the launch, Skin from Skunk Anansie took to the floor to thank Lucy for her services rendered to the history of female musicians and this went down very well with those present.

The journey back to Manchester the next day was a good one, the only problem being that I was in a lot of pain with my neck and shoulder (this is a long standing issue). I tend to try and avoid doing two coach journeys two days running for this reason, as I always seize up on the coach and have to put up with a lot of stiffness, aching and – worst of all – stabbing pains. But I was lucky enough to have a two seater to myself both on the way down and on the way back, so at least I didn’t have to put up with my bad arm being squished up and tensed against a complete stranger, which has happened more times than I can count. I used my scarf to make a pillow, closed my eyes, and got through it.

It was the Glasgow coach, which I’ve never got before, and it goes to Manchester, Carlisle, Hamilton and Glasgow, with toilet breaks at Norton Canes and Manchester. I’ve been through Norton Canes so many times now I can find the toilets blindfolded. We got a fantastic Glaswegian driver doing the safety announcements, including a discreet caution against men using the coach toilet. I’ve heard a less discreet version of this before on a coach to London in 2009, and it basically comes down to ‘Don’t piss standing up unless you’re looking forward to falling over with your trousers round your ankles and nutting the cistern whenever we go round a bend’. You don’t get bon mots of this standard on Virgin trains I don’t think.

My current favourite National Express announcement is from last summer when I was coming back from visiting my F-Word colleague Holly Combe in Bristol. As we were drawing into Stoke coach station, the intercom crackled into life: “Welcome to Costa del Stoke-On-Trent. If you are leaving the coach here please remember to take any rubbish and small children with you, but please feel free to leave behind any laptops and smart phones so we can flog them on ebay”. I also once heard the following exchange between two drivers on the way to London in 2009, as we were pulling out of Stockport bus station. Driver 1 (exceedingly chipper cockney gentleman): Have you got the details of that taxi? Driver 2 (exceedingly grumpy sounding cockney gentlemen): What taxi? Driver 1: The one I hit last week. On the return journey on that occasion, the engine conked out on the coach by Bowden Roundabout, or, as my dad put it, “deepest, darkest Cheshire.” The journey took about 8 or 9 hours.

I got the bus into Piccadilly and felt rather depressed as the bus turned off down Whitworth Street and went past Legends, now boarded up and poised for either demolition or partial restructure. Then I walked through Piccadilly Gardens to Mosley Street (honoured by John Cooper Clarke in one of his more lugubrious works) towards Saint Peter’s Square. I feel quite bleak about the redevelopment going on there too – the Library, Library Theatre, Peace Gardens, Metrolink…

Library Walk by cantwont used via a flickr creative commons licence.

When it’s redone the council are glassing over Library Walk, one of the most architecturally beautiful walkways in Manchester. Not only do the architect’s and the council appear to be deliberately blighting a really nice bit of Victorian architecture, but the council also intend to put a new Peterloo memorial plaque on the gate. It will be the 200 year anniversary of Peterloo in August 2019, and to mark this event with a plaque honouring the death of 17 people and the severe injury of 700 more for demanding the right to vote, on a gate obstructing a public right of way adds insult to injury. Not only have Manchester City Council for years had an extremely euphemistic blue plaque marking the massacre, they’re also now revealing a massive irony deficit.

Despite its reputation and Victorian gothic splendour, the only time I’ve previously visited the Rylands was for a staff meeting about three years ago. Though, as I discovered when I was making my way there, I’ve a pretty good idea of how to find it because it’s been on at least one of the protest march routes I went on in 2011.

The Rylands Library has the misfortune to be situated next to Emporio Armani, which is itself next to RBS. Old meets new… They have  a combination of old and new within the Rylands itself, but they’ve preserved as much of it as possible so there’s lots of old glass and a lot of the old gothic building. I really enjoyed my visit, and I take my hat off to Enriqueta Rylands for founding such a long lasting legacy both to her husband, John, and for the people of Manchester.

“The historic Whitworth Street building that is home to The Twisted Wheel night club, often dubbed ‘the Birthplace of Northern Soul’, is earmarked for demolition in the New Year. On 9 December, a mods farewell ride past provided the opportunity to pay tribute to the legendary venue, and to say a fitting goodbye.”

The Shrieking Violet

The Shrieking Violet is a perfect example of everything that is good about Manchester. So it was with a great deal of sadness that I heard that editor Natalie Bradbury might not be continuing her zine for much longer.

Natalie recently contributed an article on the history of the little known white poppy, the pacifist alternative to the more well known red poppy, to the Working Class Movement Library’s blog. You can read her article  here.

In the light of these recent developments, I decided that an invitation to interview Natalie was long overdue.

When did you start the Shrieking Violet and why?

 The Shrieking Violet started in summer 2009 – the first issue came out on August 1 of that year. At the time I had been unemployed for several months after finishing an NCTJ course in newspaper journalism, and I was struggling to even get work experience at local newspapers as there were widespread redundancies at that time – it was a very bad time to try and get into newspaper journalism! I was becoming increasingly frustrated and disillusioned, but decided to put some of the skills I’d learnt during my course, such as page layout, to good use, and to turn being unemployed to my advantage and use that time to do something productive.

 I was also doing a lot of writing on my blog, also called the Shrieking Violet, at the time. When I started it I never thought that anyone might read it, but as more people started reading it I became frustrated by the limitations of the blog format and wanted to make a finished product that came off the screen and involved more people, and could be picked up physically by different people who might not necessarily know about my blog.

Why did you choose to do both an online version and a paper version? How was the paper copy distributed?

I’ve always been too lazy to lay out my zine by hand and cut and paste text and pictures in the traditional way. From the start I designed Shrieking Violet digitally using a design package, then created a PDF which I printed and took to a 2p photocopier shop to reproduce. As I had already made a PDF, it seemed logical to put it online for people to download and print themselves at home if they wished (or just read it on the screen if they preferred). A friend later told me about the PDF hosting site Issuu, which enablea readers to flick though the pages of a PDF online as they would a magazine. 

I made between 50 and 70 free paper copies of each issue, which is a tiny number really – especially when you consider that online views on Issuu stand at around 2,000 for each edition! Nevertheless, I think it’s important that there is a choice of either reading online or on paper. I advertise each issue on my blog, with links to both the download version and a list of places where a paper copy can be picked up; typically cafes, bars and other creative and social spaces around Manchester city centre. On my blog, I also invite people to email me if they want me to send them a copy in the post.

Are fanzines about places more common these days do you think? (as opposed to fanzines about music, or football) 

There are a lot of magazines and fanzines which seem concerned with urbanism, architecture and cities these days, and topics related to these such as regeneration and the creative economy, whether they are based in Sheffield or Liverpool, Manchester or London. Something I have noticed is that there are a lot of zines made by collectives – for example, people on the same course at university, or a group of graduates who have studied together and have that geographical location in common. Naturally, they look to what’s around them for inspiration. There are still a lot of music zines/self-published music magazines around. Football zines I know less about – although I have read FC United of Manchester’s fanzine, which is quite political and is not actually that football (or even Manchester)-orientated!
 

A collage of Shrieking Violet’s

What inspired the Zinefests at Victoria Baths?

The first zine fair I ever want to was at Urbis in Manchester in August 2008. As well as having stalls, I remember that Bob Dickinson did a talk about making a radio documentary about zines, presented by Jarvis Cocker, and there was a ‘psychogeography’ walk around the area led by the Loiterers Resistance Movement.

I volunteered at Victoria Baths for a while on the oral history stall. One day I was sitting in the cafe folding piles of copies of the Shrieking Violet and Alison Kershaw, the arts co-ordinator at Victoria Baths, suggested running a zine fair in the space; so the Victoria Baths Fanzine Convention was born. It’s a brilliant space to work in. I was keen that the event should be far more than just a market for buying and selling, and offer activities that anyone could get involved in. I loved being able to draw on the history of the building and the wealth of resources in the Victoria Baths archive, which encompasses pictures and objects relating to the building’s history as well as thousands of donated memories, to encourage people to make their own swimming-inspired zines on the day. On the day of the Fanzine Convention, Future Everything had a Maker faire in the main sports hall below, so Fanzine Convention stallholders spread out around the balcony of that space, looking over the technological contraptions at the fair below. Smaller rooms upstairs, comprising the flat where Victoria Baths’ superintendent used to live, just off the balcony space, were perfect for fanzine talks, film screenings and workshops.
 
Could you write a little about the Manchester Modernist Society and their heroines project?
 
The Manchester’s Modernist Heroines project was a collaboration between the Shrieking Violet, Manchester Modernist Society and the Loiterers Resistance Movement which took place in March 2011. It celebrated ten overlooked women in fields ranging from architecture to aviation via art, psychology, archaeology, family planning and journalism. We placed a call out for modern-day women to produce responses to each of the ten women, which formed the basis of a publication, compiled by myself, and walks around Manchester led by the Loiterers Resistance Movement. The responses were received in the form of articles, poetry, images and concepts for performances.

Manchester has a long history of feminist activism, but many of its key figures are now forgotten, who are your favourites and why?

It’s not specifically a Manchester organisation, as there were and continue to be branches all over the country, but I am really interested in the Co-operative Women’s Guild, a campaigning organisation which was founded in 1883 to provide education to its members, primarily working class women, and give them more of a voice both in co-operative societies and within society. Manchester has a long association with the co-operative movement, and I have been researching a co-operative women’s journal called Woman’s Outlook which was published by the Manchester-based Co-operative Press between 1919 and 1967. Outlook was a curious mixture of the domestic and the political, recognising the importance of both to women’s lives; it urged its readers to get involved in political campaigns, for example for women’s representation in parliament, equal pay and peace and disarmament, but also provided practical advice such as recipes, dress-making patterns and child-rearing tips. I will be doing a talk at the Rochdale Pioneers Museum on Thursday 21 March 2013 entitled ‘Woman’s Outlook: a surprisingly modern magazine?’.

As a journalist, one of my favourite women in Manchester’s history is Mary Stott (one of our Modernist Heroines). She edited several co-operative publications over the years, including Woman’s Outlook, before she became editor of the Guardian’s woman page, for which she is best known. As editor of both Woman’s Outlook and the Guardian woman’s page, Stott really involved women in the publications, encouraging them to write in and share their stories. Whilst Stott was initially reluctant to solely focus on women’s issues, preferring to be taken seriously as a journalist who could tackle hard news just as well as men, she succeeded in creating a ‘community of readers’ and ensuring content reflected their lives and what was important to them. Stott’s autobiography, Forgetting’s No Excuse, is well worth a read.

Why do you think Manchester has such a historical culture of feminist activism?

Manchester is often called the ‘first modern city’, reflecting its rapid industralisation and expansion in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. This new way of living and working created rampant inequalities, with a huge gulf between the richest in society – those with power – and the rest, the working classes, who laboured in terrible conditions to make the few rich. A lot of the historic feminist activist figures I have come across were concerned with addressing some of these inequalities on a practical level by improving people’s living conditions, and empowering them by offering access to education. Women were already fired by with the injustice of what they saw around them, and also realised the powerlessness of their own situation in society – being unable to vote, to own property, to work, etc, and wanted to do something about it, to be able to make a difference. If you want to know more, I highly recommend making contact with Manchester historian Michael Herbert, and going on one of his Women’s History walks around Manchester, which covers women active in the suffrage, socialist, trade union and co-operative movements. He has also just written a book called Up Then, Brave Women.

What do you think the legacy of that activism is?

Feminism is, of course, still highly relevant today, and there are still battles to be fought not just over women’s status and their value in society but how women are perceived socially and culturally. I’m inspired by the ongoing work of a new generation of feminists in Manchester, from groups like the Riveters at Manchester University who work to raise awareness of issues affecting women within the university, the city and in society in creative, inclusive and engaging ways, to other collectives such as Manchester Women’s Design Group, who do interesting work around women and the city, for example by exploring women’s emotional relationships with different public spaces in Manchester.

How would you describe the relationship between Manchester and Salford?

Manchester and Salford are two neighbouring cities, separated by the River Irwell. To me they are quite different in that, whilst Manchester is quite compact as a city and has a clearly defined centre with all the facilities and attractions you’d expect, I think of Salford as being more as a collection of smaller towns and villages (each with their own attractions – see the awe-inspiring Manchester Ship Canal and Barton Aqueduct, canal-side folly Monton lighthouse, Eccles Wurlitzer museum, the bright orange Bridgewater Canal at Worsley, Clifton Country Park, etc!) than a city in itself, as it has no real focal point. There are several really great places just over the Salford border, within easy walking distance of Manchester city centre – alternative arts and music complex Islington Mill, Salford Art Gallery/Peel Park, the amazing social/people’s history resources in the Working Class Movement Library, Salford University and the Medieval magnificence of Ordsall Hall – but as a whole I think it’s a bit underexplored by Mancunians. Salford Quays, now home to BBC North as well as the Lowry theatre and arts centre and Imperial War Museum North, is a bit further out, but within reach of Manchester by tram and bus. The Quays is also doing its bit to attract people into Salford, but I very rarely go there as to me it feels like a bit of an island with a strange atmosphere, detached from the rest of the city – it is, let’s face it, perfectly possible to get the tram in and out of Salford Quays without registering that it is surrounded by some of Britain’s most deprived communities.
 
What are you planning to do next?

I’m going back to university in the New Year, so I’ll be a student again, which is both exciting and scary so I’ll have to see what that new challenges and experiences that throws up … !

Onstage Hoop comes across as an engaging, sweet woman who likes to tell stories both through her songs and through direct conversation with the audience. That she comes across as wide eyed in her enthusiasm, somewhat shy and self conscious at times is part of her charm.

Her voice has a tremendous range from low roar to angelic high notes, and she is able to sing in a number of different narrative voices, from that of a young child to a world weary older woman. Both of these skills compliment the complex musical rhythms and lyrics of her songs.

The style and look of new single ‘Born to’, all surging guitars and strong and fierce vocals, made me wonder if Hoop had crossed over into spiky post punk territory as so many artists have lately, but the gig and new album The house that Jack built have revealed a more complex picture. Despite a minor protestation from her that she and her band are a punk band rather than a folk band because they do everything themselves, her songwriting does have a folky feel to it at times.

The song ‘Peacemaker’, based on a story from one of the ancient Greek plays, in which the women go on sex strike to stop the men going to war (and perpetuating the sins of war), was particularly stark and powerful in a live setting. At the other end of the scale were jaunty tunes such as the incredibly catchy ‘Hospital (to win your love)’ which owes more to sixties pop and was inspired by Jesca’s younger brother, Biz, and his childhood broken arm.

And then there was ‘When I’m asleep’, a transcendental almost bhangra tinged song, which occurred around the middle of the set, and during which the self effacing Jesca briefly became a pagan goddess of the dance. The result was mesmerising.

The band were called back for encores and at the very end of the gig when all the stage lights had been switched off, the band had left the stage, and the gig was over Jesca stood with the microphone on its stand at her back and softly but powerfully sang acapella a little song on the themes of winning over an initially restless audience. In some performers this could be taken for arrogance, but in her case the effect was moving, charming and it nicely encapsulated the gig for me.

Early on into her set my shoulder had seized up, my neck was aching and I’d had a high temperature, plus I was feeling irked by the couple in front of me who seemed to think that they were watching the Stone Roses in Heaton Park and were dancing accordingly. But Jesca and the band won me round, I was absorbed and spellbound. And I bought both the albums on the way out.

Victoria Baths, all hail

Yes, I went paper for the day in collaboration with friend of the cake, David Wilkinson. Paper copies of the Stockport special edition of Too Late For Cake are still available, and right now we’re trying to decide what to do with them. If you’d like a copy, please post a comment below and include your email, and I will get in touch with you.

I arrived not long after the event started at 10:30am and, as is the case with all zine events I’ve been to, the first hour or so tends to serve as time for people to look at the stalls and exhibitions, and generally orient themselves and find out where the food and loos are. I managed to find the stalls, including Manchester Municipal Design Corporation who were selling our previously mentioned publication, but I couldn’t find David or convention organiser Natalie Bradbury.

Future Everything had stalls, installations and exhibitions downstairs at the baths, and I watched somewhat bemused as a young woman tenaciously attended and adjusted a wooden bobbin device on the floor. It was attached to a long thread of wool which was trailing down from some slowly unravelling crochet, which was itself suspended from the ceiling. I believe the idea was that it would start to unravel at the start of the day, and just be finished unravelling at the end of the day.

I went in search of the loos and café after that, and observed a rather puzzled group of girls trying to negotiate breakfast in the café only to discover that soup, cake, sarnies, crisps, biscuits, tea and coffee were what was on offer instead.

I instantly warmed to the café because they served the tea out of a teapot into polythene cups, and they got you to add your own milk and sugar. Also the teapot was wearing a tea cosy. I had bourbons and tea and texted David and Natalie.

I had a brief hello chat with Natalie a little while later in the café, and caught up with David by the MMDC stall, where the paper edition of Too Late For Cake had been installed. I also had a rather excellent vegan whoopie pie (like a french macaroon but Americanised) from the vegan cake stall. David was good enough to point out that heavy work with a tissue was required afterwards.

Stall holding

We lurked by MMDC for quite a bit, then David went for a wander and I went off to watch Salford Zine Library’s film Self Publishers of the world take over. I found it really interesting as there were a lot of mancunian and salfordian zine makers in there, including MMDC, Natalie, and some I didn’t recognise. It was interesting to hear people talk about their work and how they write and produce, the mechanics of it, as well as why. The Q&A was interesting as well, as I didn’t know a massive amount about the library.

I missed quite a bit of Rotheram Zine Library’s talk because I was in the café thoroughly enjoying a veg pie with pickled beetroot and pickled cabbage, plus more tea. There were mushy peas on offer, but I didn’t fancy them. In a city that seems to have wholeheartedly embraced the Pannini, it is refreshing to encounter proper warm, filling, nutritious food of the kind your mum used to feed you. And it was homemade pastry.

I had a similar regional good food experience when I was a student at Bolton and, on bonfire night, was introduced to culinery bliss in the form of black peas with salt’n'vinegar.

Fanzine making workshop and lovely stained glass

After I’d scarfed down my scran, I went back to the superintendents office where the film and talks were being held, and caught the remainder of Rotheram Zine Library’s talk. I think I may have missed the crucial bits, but I did enjoy hearing about their new projects, which revolve around ‘found’ content. There is one in which they’ve taken random nonsensical bits of footbal commentary and turned them into an epic poem, another about badly tagged clips on Youtube that people have uploaded of themselves, often singing, and another of re-constructed impressions from old photo development equipment.

It sounded as though Youtube was a real source of fascination, particularly the discussions that take place beneath clips, or used to until Youtube changed the format. Me and David talked to them afterwards and they seemed really nice. David did a zine swap later.

The next talk was David’s, and our friend Clare and David’s mum and dad arrived, also Dave Haslem. After David had soundchecked his music for his talk, and got his slides ready, he nipped out and I caught up with Clare and then had a bit of a chat with Dave Haslem, who confessed he had spent an impressive amount on fanzines, including Too Late For Cake.

David did a very good job on legendary Manchester fanzine City Fun, he made it very irreverent and funny, which is appropriate. He also kicked off his talk with a Ludus song, which was a fine idea. I learnt quite a few things I hadn’t known before (I have started the City Fun odyssey at the WCML, but I haven’t even reached the halfway point yet…) which is always good.

Some of the crowd who’d come for David’s talk stayed to watch mine, and just before my talk Making a noise: an express ride through the world of punk and riot grrrl fanzines and the UK feminist underground, 1977-2012 I had a very interesting conversation with a PHD student in the front row who had read the interview I did with Natalie via email for For Books Sake, about riot grrrl.

The talk itself was a bit of a blur. It felt as though it was descending into the chaos and that I had to keep wresting it from the jaws of disaster, but the feedback I got from people seemed to suggest otherwise: They couldn’t understand why I felt it had gone badly. And they seemed to enjoy it. I was particularly thankful for David’s dad, who laughed heartily at all the crucial bits. I even got some unexpected laughs: the idea of a 2nd generation RG zine from Wilmslow amused people no end.

I really liked the glass floor in this corridor

Anyway, I got through it, the slides seemed very effective, and people said they’d enjoyed it so all is well. Major speech trauma over, I can move on now.

Afterwards I chatted with Clare, David, his mum and dad and a couple of other people, many of whom I didn’t know. We drifted back to the stalls before packing up time. Almost all the vegan food had gone, and some of the stalls were packing up.

We sold just under half of the Too Late For Cake’s which, for a fanzine exclusively about Stockport, isn’t bad. We gave £3 to MMDC, who’d also done well, for subletting their stall to us. Clare bought a copy and she and I got embroiled in a very long but fascinating conversation with a bloke called Richard who does a zine, is one half of the duo who do Under the pavement on the Manchester online radio network, and who used to live in Bradford in the nineties. He said he’d really enjoyed the talk, but how weird it had felt to hear me talk about people he’d known then in Bradford. I did quite a bit on the Leeds and Bradford Riot Grrrls, and he’d known Sarah Bag, Lianne Hall and Jane Shag Stamp. He was telling us about the RG club night Frocks’N'Docs at the 1 in 12 club, where the men had to wear dresses to get in. Apparently there was some trouble with skinheads on one occasion, and a surreal punch up between skinheads and weedy punk blokes in drag. One of his male friends also had the surreal experience of a trip to A&E in a silver dress after walking into a lamp post while walking through Bradford. I miss seeing cross dressed men at gigs, there used to be quite a few around in the mid – late ’90s, especially in London and Leeds.

After we’d settled up, me, Clare and David wandered down Hathersage Road to Oxford Road, chatting. Upon reaching Oxford Road we all decided we wanted to go home and eat something, so said our goodbyes. I headed back the way we’d just walked, then walked down Plymouth Grove to Longsight.

In Longsight, a spirited (in both senses of the word) preacher was doing catechism via a microphone and PA system outside the bookies. Not sure which religion he was endorsing, but Pakistan got an emotional mention, which might narrow it down a bit possibly. Then again, maybe not.

I got home feeling very stimulated, content, happy but exhausted.

This weekend has been the tail end of Manchester Histories Festival, a largely free and very diverse event. I found out about it quite late, so decided to cram as much into Saturday as possible.

Manchester Histories Festival events for Saturday 3rd March 2012

The weather looked distinctly unpromising when I headed out at 9:30, a fine mancunian drizzle and grey skies suggested a damp day best spent indoors.

On my way down Mosley Street I was very aggressively (though I soon decided ‘desperately’ would be the better word) asked for money by a homeless guy I’ve given money to before. Everytime I’ve given him money it’s been the same story: He’s been kicked out of the house by his stepfather. I don’t know if he keeps going back or what, and it’s not up to me to make value judgements about vulnerable people, so I won’t.

This time he was very agitated, very desperate, and practically in tears because he’d been asking people for money for 12 hours and all he’d got was 20p. He wanted notes, but I wouldn’t give him any as it felt too much like being mugged. Also, whenever I have given him money in the past, it clearly hasn’t helped him any, and it became apparent after the first couple of occasions that I wasn’t doing him any favours in the long term. Of course, the agencies who might be able to help him – hostels, The Big Issue, Shelter, other housing charities, the council and social services – are all under the cosh of the recession.

There definitely seems to be more homeless people on the streets of Manchester than there was even a year ago, and what with rent increases, diminishing wages, negative equity/mortgage defaults, unemployment, cuts to benefits, anti squatting legislation and a lack of affordable housing, it will only get worse in the next few years.

Desperation really is in the air. You can see the signs more and more since the riots last year: people picking up dog ends of other peoples cigarettes from the pavement because they can’t afford to buy their own, metal thefts, the Co-Op being ram raided last month. Last week I encountered two young northern Irish lads with back packs asking for hostel locations.

To get back onto the festival, the first three events were at the Friends Meeting House on Mount Street near the Town Hall.

The first talk was by Alison Ronan, a historian at MMU who talked about Margaret Ashton, a suffragist and pacifist who was the first woman to be made a councillor for Manchester City Council. The title of the talk was The hanging of a pacifist: the story of the lost portrait of Margaret Ashton, Manchester’s first woman councillor.

She opened by discussing the portrait in question, and went on to fill in a lot of detail about the largely unknown Ashton’s life and character, her politics, associations and friends and allies. The portrait of Ashton was painted in 1925, and the council refused to hang it in the Town Hall. The pacifist stance she took during World War I being part of the reason. The painting was eventually hung in 2006 following a campaign.

I liked this talk but I found the atmosphere a little exclusive in that it quickly became apparent that the speaker knew half the audience. It was still an interesting talk about a hidden aspect of Mancunian and women’s history though.

The talk after that was given by Robert Poole, a historian from the University of Cumbria, about the Peterloo Massacre. He has a project going on at the moment in which a group of volunteers have been transcribing previously unseen written eyewitness accounts of the 1819 massacre.

The talk was an opportunity to share those freshly transcribed accounts, and he concentrated initially on eyewitness accounts from the authorities, all of which had a series of interesting inconsistencies. For example, a flip flopping in describing the marchers and crowd as both ‘A mob’ (suggesting mindless and disorganised behaviour) and military like (suggesting lots of organisation).

The eyewitness accounts of those in the crowd, or independent witnesses, made for much more consistent reading. There were some interesting details that emerged that I hadn’t previously been aware of, for example that Special Constables had been amongst those injured by the yeomanry and the cavalry. It was a very interesting and engaging talk, which I enjoyed a lot.

Also mentioned were the new plaque, which is red, not blue, and which was unveiled by the council in late 2007, and the symbolic re-enactments, the veterans stories that emerged years after Peterloo, and the march home by the Middleton contingent from the massacre, with the shocked and wounded survivors swearing they’d go armed to any protest they attended from then on.

The event after Peterloo was Dave Haslem and his Brief introduction to Manchester’s alternative music magazines. David arrived at this point, and we sat enthralled as Haslem spun us tales of Mole Express and City Fun. I didn’t feel that he covered the ’90s that well, but I think that this was because he was taking an evolutionary approach musically and so concentrating on dance fanzines, of which there weren’t that many.

There was time to kill after this event so we went to Cafe Nero with a lecturer from MMU who David knows, blogger Greg Thorpe, and Dave Haslem. This felt a bit weird as I’m not used to such exulted company, so I mainly kept quiet.

Afterwards David and I got some cake (and the best veggie sausage rolls ever) from Earth Café and mooched about the city centre for a bit, making our way down Market Street and observing the huge crowd watching the gaggle of children breakdancing. The dancing puppets man was also present, with his puppets I mean, not watching the breakdancing children.

Haslem had talked earlier about a history based workshop he had done with a group of young fanzine makers in the city in the weeks previous, including the makers of Things Happen. Five fanzines were produced from this, and were sold at the

Five fanzines, fresh as morning dew

The panel at the final event, Fanzines, was made up of a guy from Mole Express, Bob Dickinson, Liz Naylor and Dan Russell, who is part of the Things Happen ollective.

The guy from Mole Express seemed either reluctant or hazy, but did slowly start to warm up a bit. Dickinson, Haslem and Naylor discussed City Fun in the main. Dan was pretty quiet.

I hadn’t met any of the Things Happen people before, though I had heard of them. After the panel discussion we talked to Dan and the other people involved with the fanzine workshop and Things Happen, also Natalie Bradbury who writes the excellent Shrieking Violets, and is organising another fanzine convention at Victoria Baths.

We headed over to Hotspur House afterwards, which is an abandoned and derelict printing mill behind Oxford Road train station. The Things Happen people have a studio space there where they create design work, including their fanzines. They are also engaged in the process of clearing up and fixing up the mill, and developing spaces for other artists to move into.

Stuff Happens

The relationship with the council appears to be edgy but productive so far. Hotspur House is a derelict Victorian mill surrounded by hideous steel and glass yuppie developments though, and that makes it very vulnerable. You suspect that it’s the recession that has saved it so far, not any preservation interest by the council or the developers.

The space the group have is good, and they’ve fixed it up as well as they can with the resources they’ve got. Manchester Mule have an office on the floor downstairs, and other designers work in the building as well. I hope it works out for them, they seem a nice lot. Very focused as well, and idealistic in the nicest sense.

As I was scurrying back towards Piccadilly this afternoon I came across the surreal sight of a young woman belting out some kind of Celine Dion esque ballad and, less than two feet away, a man selling dancing puppets. Two Bart and Lisa Simpson dancing puppets were merrily dancing away to Hot Butter’s ‘Popcorn’, threatening to derail the diva’s performance, but she continued valiantly…

Also spotted: Candyfloss for sale, and lots of it, which felt distinctly odd in February.