She Bop 3: Or Manchester to London and back again

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.

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A slice of Manchester’s musical history

With thanks to Manchester Histories Festival:

“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.”

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An interview with Natalie Bradbury, the woman behind The Shrieking Violet

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 … !

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Victoria Baths Fanzine Convention

Yesterday was the second Victoria Baths Fanzine Convention, and Too Late For Cake had a small slice of the action.

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.

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2nd October 2011

Feral underclass against the Tories

Today was the big march/protest in Manchester, called by the TUC but supported by a much wider base of groups. The main march was from Liverpool Road off Deansgate to GMEX where the Conservative Party conference is being held this week, but I’d heard that there was going to be a feeder march from University Place on Oxford Road and, given I’d enjoyed marching with the students last year, I decided to march from there instead.

The crowd by University Place didn’t seem that big when I arrived, but the police were out in large numbers again. Having said that, I think a lot of the mounted police were there to clear Oxford Road before moving on to other parts of the main march. We also had official observers this time, who were clearly labelled as such, and who were giving out ‘bus cards’ containing legal advice and phone numbers in the event of arrest.

The students had a giant black bird-like creature, made largely from bin bags and held aloft by giant poles. It had a pair of scissors for a beak and was called ‘The Culture Vulture’. There was also two or three mobile sound systems, a few people with drums, and quite a few protesters with dreadlocks. I’d say that the crowd was a mixture of students from both universities, academic staff, and unionists from both universities, plus some sixth formers and members of the public. Around half eleven a particularly boisterous young NHS contingent arrived, and my friend laughed upon getting a text from one of his friends to say that said NHS contingent had arrived fresh from chasing Tory delegates around the back of their hotel. Another of our friends arrived as the speeches were going on.

The speeches were a bit of a mixed bag as a lot of the speakers were from student groups, or the student union, and as such weren’t necessarily practised public speakers. The woman from UCU was probably the best, and there was also a speaker from Unison. The last of the speakers was an impassioned sixth former from Xavarian College, who was still speaking as we slowly began to form up and move out onto Oxford Road.

By this point we’d begun to collect an impressive amount of leaflets and flyers for various groups, including one for the current Jarrow March, which is taking place 75 years after ‘Red’ Ellen Wilkinson led the original marchers to London. The march is going on now, and whilst not passing through Manchester, will be passing through Sheffield next weekend. It is due to arrive in London on the 5th November, and the final leg of the march will be from Temple Embankment to Trafalger Square.

I picked up so many leaflets and flyers that, very quickly, I had to start decanting them into my bag. Upon arriving home and emptying my bag out I found three ‘Occupy! 2/10 Manchester Against The Cuts’ flyers, two flyers advertising a single by a band called Marivaux Horns, the profits of which will go to the student hardship fund, one flyer for an SWP meeting on Marx, Crisis and Revolution, one which was a timetable of discussions by the Northern Communist Forums at the Friends Meeting House, one flyer for the NHS Health Bill protest next Sunday (9th) in London (a protest called by UK Uncut, which is supported by Unite, Right To Work, Health Worker Network, and the NHS), one for the co-ordinated strikes on November 30th, another one about the 30th November but from Right To Work, one from Youth Fight For Jobs about the Jarrow March, and a massive Coalition of Resistance Newsletter.  When I emptied my pockets out, I also found DAN – the Disabled Peoples Direct Action Network (email contact only, to join the mailing list, danmail-subscribe@yahoogroups.com , and the Education Activist Network as well. I think I missed being given a few here and there, but had my friends and I emptied our bags out and compared notes, I think between us we would have had everything.

There was a young cub reporter from Key 103 moving around the crowd  by University Place, and that crowd was a lot bigger by the time we set out at about 11:50. Whilst there were a lot of people with cameras by University Place, the media seemed fairly low key and the police seemed friendly.

Progress down Oxford Road was slow and a bit clumsy, mainly due to the size of the group I think. We got approached by a woman from the BBC not long after setting off, who asked us if we were students. Two of us exchanged looks whilst the other confessed, yes, he was a student. They went off towards the very back of the march, but from what he said later his answers were probably too intelligent and literate to get used.

I’m not very sure of the route we took, but I know we turned off Oxford Road by McDonalds and started heading towards Deansgate. There seemed to be a period where it felt as though we were going round and round the town hall from various directions, but it’s probably more likely that we just went down every side street possible between Oxford Road and GMEX. Deansgate was good though: Our feeder march ended up in the middle of the whole march, which stretched all the way down Deansgate.

Culture vulture in flight on Deansgate

The Occupy! set peeled off at Albert Square whilst everyone else continued marching towards the party conference at GMEX. It was around this point that some protesters spotted some Tory delegates leaving their hotel and swarmed towards them, chanting ‘SCUM! SCUM! SCUM!’ and waving placards. We were near the back whilst this was going on, so we didn’t actually see much, just some men in suits trying to get through the crowd and a swarm of people in front of us.

The media were very much in evidence throughout the march, as were the police, and there was a helicopter overhead constantly throughout. Was it a police helicopter? or did it belong to Sky News?  As we passed GMEX both media and police were present and visible in high numbers. I noticed that the nearer we got to the conference the older and more expensively dressed the journalists became. I also, throughout the march generally, noticed two different police forces (GMP and Lancashire) plus Tactical Aid and police CCTV vans, all in significant numbers. I had my picture taken and got filmed a lot, so I made a big effort to look smiley, approachable and peaceful.

By the time we came to GMEX we were very, very strong...

Some of the marchers had brought their kids with them, and I spotted a toddler asleep on her mums shoulders at one point. I also spotted marchers representing Unite, UCU, the NHS (including a contingent from Leeds), and some WOBS (no, we didn’t know either, but it sounded cool) from Sheffield.

When we passed through Saint Peter’s Square there was a confusingly delivered call for all banners to be lowered until we were past the tramlines, which we eventually worked out was so that no one with a particularly high flying one would get themselves electrocuted by catching it on the overhead wires.

When we got past GMEX, the field was full of stalls and a stage had been set up at the far end for the speeches. We were starving and in desperate need of the loo by then though, so we headed over to Piccadilly for food, tea and relief.

Afterwards we headed back over to Albert Square to see how the occupation was getting on, and passed a group of people just off Saint Peter’s Square, who were petting and feeding the police horses. It probably did nothing for the animals digestions, but probably helped their nerves.  In Albert Square there were quite a lot of people sitting around whilst a smaller group played football as a soundsystem played Junior Murvin’s ‘Police And Thieves’.

After a bit of this we headed back towards GMEX, but people were heading back over to Albert Square by then as everything by the conference had finished. We  saw a very exuberant and slightly scary group of figures in David Cameron masks at this point, and not long after whilst we were heading back to Albert Square we got snarled at by a bloke in a grey suit, ‘If you push that in my face I’ll ‘ave yer!’ being the broad translation. This was ironic in that the incident occurred as we were strolling along with our placards unconsiously held at half mast, not really protesting demonstratively at that point.

Albert Square again

Things had livened up a bit by the time we got back to Albert Square again, but the rain was coming down quite hard by then. People danced to the sound system, now playing old school rave, under canvas held aloft on poles whilst protesters in harnesses scaled wet lamposts to hang banners. One of the banners already hung on the opposite side of the square read ‘If they won’t let us dream, we won’t let them sleep’, a reference to an idea put across on their flyers: that if enough protesters were in the square by nightfall, they would try to maintain a presence in the square throughout the night and see that the delegates in their nearby hotels didn’t get any sleep.

If you won't let us dream, we won't let you sleep

The police presence was robust but friendly at the point when we left, but I don’t fancy the occupations chances of an all night knees up: too many police, not enough protesters.

I overheard a nice conversation on the bus on the way home between a group of sixth formers who’d been on the march and one of their friends, who hadn’t. The one who hadn’t told them his mum had voted for David Cameron, and he freely admitted that he probably would have done too because he ”didn’t know anything about politics”. But since the election, and the protests, he’s done a lot of reading, he’s educated himself, and now knows a lot more about politics. He’d had a deadline though, so he hadn’t marched.

One of the group of boys who had been on the march got off at the same stop as me. He turned off down a side road just before I reached home, still carrying his placard.

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A couple of dates for the diary…

It's going to be a busy few months...

Saturday 25th September – Peace and Social Justice History Walk

Assemble 10.45am at Robert Owen Statute, Corporation Street, Manchester

A guided walk visiting sites in Manchester city centre associated with the movement for peace and social justice. Lasting 2 hours this walk will be led by Michael Herbert (Red Flag Walks).

Booking is essential. Tickets are £10 and £5 conc. Contact Jacqui on 0161 273 8283

Also:

Manchester For The Alternative

Jobs. Growth. Justice

Join the TUC’s National Protest March Outside the Conservative Party Conference, Sunday 2nd October 2011

Assembling in Liverpool Road from Deansgate down towards Water Street.

Start time not listed yet. Check the website for updates:

www.tuc.org.uk/northwest

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Postscript to last weeks shenanigans

I was speaking to a colleague at work today, who I didn’t see much of last week, and she said that she saw lots of people running down her street in Hulme last Tuesday night, pausing for breath, then running off again, hotly pursued by the police. Apparently the police were chasing rioters and looters from Deansgate and Piccadilly into Hulme… ‘Ooh,’ I said, ‘That’ll be why they were evacuating Oxford Road then…’

The name and shame pictures that have come out in the local press so far would seem to support the general theory that it was a fairly mixed bunch of age ranges and ethnicities who were rioting and looting in Manchester and Salford. Not many people look 10 in their pictures… despite the press reports.

As to the whys and wherefores… will we ever really know? I think we all have our own personal theories, but perhaps we shouldn’t necessarily share them all.

That said, Afflecks appears to be open again (I haven’t actually been into town yet to check, but their site suggests so) despite sustaining damage, which is good news. They are planning a spot of civic pride for the 26th August if anyone fancies getting involved…

http://www.afflecks.com/2011/08/12/afflecks-loves-mcr-show-that-you-do-too/

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Last night… and today

Last night David and I went to the Cornerhouse to watch ‘Break My Fall’. The film started at 6:20pm, and it would have been about halfway through the film when the lights were suddenly switched on and a member of Cornerhouse staff informed us that we were going to have to leave: There was rioting in Piccadilly and it had spread to Deansgate. Given Oxford Road’s proximity to Deansgate Greater Manchester Police and Manchester City Council were strongly advising the Cornerhouse to close for the night.

There had been storm warnings all day, with rumours circulating by word of mouth and on twitter and facebook. Trouble kicked off first in Salford Precinct in the afternoon. There was a scuffle, but it was contained and dispersed. In hindesight it seems very probable that a lot of the people who were dispersed either moved on to Piccadilly, or else onto the the estate in Pendleton. Another thing we realised later on, and especially today, was how unreliable the info on the GMP twitter feed had been.

The atmosphere on Oxford Road as we left the Cornerhouse was odd rather than frightening. We had been advised by the Cornerhouse staff to head for the Aquatics Centre if we were trying to get to South Manchester, so we started to walk in that direction. It would have been about 7:45pm by this time. As we walked we saw lots of buses, many parked at stops on both sides of the road, and a small but visible number of TFGM (Transport For Greater Manchester, the new name for GMPTE) staff near the stops, directing people. Whilst I know it was the standard large incident procedure, it did bring back memories of being in London on July 7th 2005, so I think my adreniline levels kicked themselves up a gear then.

As we walked, I observed a small but noticeable number of people heading down Oxford Road towards Piccadilly. Contrary to press reports, these people were not children and teenagers: They were adults. There were probably more people, like us, heading away from the area, but it was interesting to watch those going the other way. Those of us heading away from Piccadilly appeared either outwardly calm or slightly apprehensive, whereas those heading towards Piccadilly were visibly excited: Some of them looked as though Christmas had arrived early, wrapped up in New Years Eve.

Eventually we both got buses, and parted on the agreement that we would text each other once we were home. David got home first, and I got his text whilst I was on Plymouth Grove. The bus took a very long time to get down Oxford Road, mainly I suspect because they had been told to do long stops to pick up people who were basically being evacuated from Oxford Road.

We picked up the speed a bit on Plymouth Grove, where we passed two slightly self conscious seeming police people, and as we moved along Plymouth Grove talk moved from the riots, and from the scatter bullet phrase ‘Set on fire’, which I had been hearing repeated again and again up until that point, to more mundane matters.

I was on the 197 as this had been my plan all along: As soon as the rumours of a riot started to circulate at work and online, I knew that I would need a new way home: If I’m going out, I have to walk to Piccadilly and get the 192 home as the 191 stops running at 23 minutes past six. All the rumours pointed to riots happening in Piccadilly, so as the day wore on the 192 became an increasingly unviable option. This meant that I could get the 197 or the 42 from Oxford Road, and walk part of the way home, or I could walk all the way home. We’d paid for our cinema tickets in advance, and there was only one showing of ‘Break My Fall’, so cancelling would have been a wrench.

The 197 follows the 191 route until you get to Levenshulme, then it turns off down Albert Road and goes through Burnage and Heaton Moor to Stockport. This meant I had the option of hopping off in Longsight and walking it, or hopping off in Heaton Moor and walking it. Because Longsight has a history of rioting and Heaton Moor doesn’t, and because it’s less of a walk from Heaton Moor, I hopped off at the top of Heaton Moor Road.

It was a bit of a trek home, but all was calm in the twilight. There were plenty of Ladies Who Lunch, or their northern variant: Ladies Wot Lunch, plus their male equivalents outside the usual cafés and wine bars, roaring at each other, eating and drinking… not a care in the world. Fiddling while Rome burned…

Today, things seem to be back to normal. The clean up operation, which was organised on twitter, started this morning. There was still a latent tension in the air and a sense of wariness on peoples faces though.

At work, we all had our ‘How did you get home last night?’ conversations, and judging from the problems other people had I feel I got off very lightly indeed. One colleague had a very near miss with the mob on Market Street whilst trying to get to the Manchester/Salford border, another colleague had a long walk across the other side of town, dodging would be rioters en route to Piccadily, to a bus stop where she merely hoped there would be a bus.

The rumours were, of course, flying today as to who was responsible for the rioting, and why it had happened. I heard my first rumour on the bus on the way into work this morning when I overheard a pissed off business man loudly telling someone on his phone that he’d been in Piccadilly the night before, and that it had been the EDL (English Defence League) orchestrating things. This came to sound increasingly unlikely as the day progressed however, and the following rumours began instead:

• The riots were orchestrated by gangsters (Graham Stringer M.P)
• The riot in Salford was orchestrated by gangsters as payback for previous police actions (local media, and possibly local gangsters)

It has rained heavily and consistently today, and this undoubtably helped tonight in that there appeared to be no trouble and no buses appear to have been re-routed. Yesterday we relied on the GMP twitter feed for updates, and we were badly let down by it, so today we switched to the Stagecoach website, BBC Manchester, and the Manchester Evening News. The MEN had the most thorough coverage, both online and in the paper, though I’ve been told Manchester Confidential is also good.

I basically gave up on national papers and radio stations yesterday for coverage as they were all focusing on London, so it was almost impossible to build up any kind of idea of what was going on in Manchester from them, and that’s remained the case today really.

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Oxford Road post Slutwalk

Manchester Oxford Road post Slutwalk...

I spotted this as I was on my way home from work on Wednesday night. It made me feel really pleased, and not just because I had my camera with me for once…

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Peterloo

In the hot and humid early evening of yesterday, I trundled down Oxford Road in pursuit of food after work. 8th Day doesn’t seem to be doing evenings now that a substantional chunk of the students have gone home for the summer, so it was the Cornerhouse for me.

From the Cornerhouse I meandered towards Saint Peter’s Square, which is currently under seige because of the metrolink extensions (not started yet, so far as I could tell) and the radical overhaul of the entire area by Manchester City Council. The library and the library theatre have already fled the carnage, the war memorial and Peace Gardens are to be moved. In a few years time the place will be as unrecognisable to the average manc as it would be to a survivor of Peterloo today.

Matt Smith (no, not that one) local historian, political upstart, and – apparently – deputy manager at a branch of Asda, chose this day to mark the occasion of the Peterloo Massacre, a tragedy which occurred on the 16th August 1819, a hot day much like the 5th July apparently.

As with many of the various re-tellings and analysis of Peterloo (a dark satirical reference to the much celebrated victory over Napoleon at Waterloo, which occurred close enough to Peterloo to be in the minds of many at the time), Matt’s piece was an overview coupled with an exploration of the parallels between life for the average person in 1819 and now. There are parallels: a struggling economy, high food prices, and a overwhelming sense that things are going in the wrong direction and the wrong people are being made to suffer… But I always think it risks devaluing the importance of what happened in Saint Peter’s Fields (as they were then) on that day in August 1819 if we overconcentrate on the parallels with today, interesting though they are.

Having said that, Smith did an admirable job when it came to explaining the flaws of capitalism as a model (he likened it to a bus being driven over a cliff, with the surviving passengers having to pay the driver to buy a new bus, which  then gets driven over the cliff again, and the process is repeated ad neauseum) and the Rotton Boroughs style political arrangements of 1819 (Manchester had a population of approximately 1 million, only 145 people could vote, and only 1 person could stand as an MP).

You certainly couldn’t fault Smith on enthusiasm and energy, particularly during his agit prop moment as a smug Tory M.P complete with Lib Dem sock puppet, and I did enjoy his description of being filled with hope for the future of political protest upon coming across two men, who had previously been scrapping on the pavement, united by a common hatred, pissing up against a giant billboard of David Cameron just prior to the 2010 elections.

Matt Smith is not The Doctor, but you don’t need a sonic screwdriver to talk about history and politics. If it was 1981 I can’t help but think he would have joined The Gang Of Four instead…

The event is part of the Not Part Of Festival, a fringe festival in Manchester which runs parallel to Manchester International Festival. The name is an abbreviated way of saying ‘Not part of Manchester International Festival’, sort of ‘Off, off Broadway’ or perhaps ‘Off, off Saint Anne’s Square’ in this case.

I picked up a leaflet about the campaign for a proper memorial to the massacre, in which 18 people were killed and over 600 people were injured by sabre cuts and trampling. The previous memorial has always been deemed euphemistic and inadequate, and many, many people, including Mark Thomas, have  joined the campaign many years ago to have it removed and a proper memorial put up instead. With the re-development of the square, the council have promised a new memorial, but doubt is being expressed as to whether it will be any better than the previous one.  If you would like to read more about the history of Peterloo, and about the campaign for a decent memorial to the events, please click here.

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