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Notes from the book “Manchester, England: The story of a pop cult city” for anyone who wants to research historical connections between Manchester and New Orleans.

Author: Dave Haslam, Published in 1999

1. “The inhabitants are of a good sort, being pretty much of the old English temper, hardy and sincere in their affections and expressions, given to hospitality, very kind and civil to their friends, but very stiff and resolute against their enemies, well disposed to religion and very zealous in whatever they engage.” - William Stuckeley on Manchester, 1724. P. VII

2. Manchester is a hybrid town, born all in a rush 150 years ago, when those arriving looking for work in the fast growing factories, workshops, warehouses and foundries. P. XI

3. Famed and feared 150 years ago as it became the first industrial city in the world. P. X

4. From the 1830’s and 1840’s, as the burgeoning industries provided work for an ever-growing population, so a new urban, industrial culture developed, based on music and nightlife, street life, singing and drinking. P. XIII

5. Manchester was defined by work and hooked up pleasure. P. XIV

6. Nightclubs pull 50,000 people into the city center ever saturday night. P. XVI

7. Horrible public housing. P. XXII

8. It used to be claimed that if Dublin were destroyed, all you need to rebuild it could be found in the work of James Joyce. The same is true of Manchester and its pop music. …Travel the world and Manchester is known for two things: pop music and football. P. XXV

9. What gives further flavor to pop music in Manchester is perhaps because it’s a hybrid town, specializing in hybrid music. P. XXVII

10. The city’s historical links with other countries and cultures, via migration and trade, have left Manchester with open-minded attitudes. It’s one of the least insular music cities in the world; it can love its local bands without being deaf to the charms of others. P.XXVII

11. Just as Manchester music fans get into these sounds from out of town, Manchester musicians - and you can trace this back decades - have a well-developed consciousness of what’s going on elsewhere, and an inclination to bring these outside influences to bare on their music. Just as the city used to import raw material - cotton - and turn it into something else, so modern Manchester find itself importing, refashioning and exporting pop music… Manchester has been at the heard of English pop music creativity for at least 3 decades. Where once the Manchester mill-oweners and merchants, mill-hands and factory operatives created the wealth that financed the Empire, now the city dominates English pop culture, trading in music, the sounds from the streets resonating from around the globe. P. XXVII

12. The city’s pop music is soaked in the chaos, boredom and violence of modern Manchester. P. XXX

13. Manchester 150 years ago had a reputation for wild night life, for a special kind of raw, noisy, and gregarious weekend culture. The street had a special kind of vibe, and edge. There was drunkenness, violence, and vice. P. 3

14. Manchester became part of the global network in the era of rock & roll this would be just as crucial as in the days of cotton and coal. P. 7

15. By the end of the 1830’s after the industrialization of cotton manufacture, Lancshire was responsible for 90% of the cotton manufacture worldwide. England needed Manchester. Manchester was at the vanguard of wealth creation in the country; cotton had become hugely important to the national economy, accounting for nearly 50% of all export earnings. Liverpool had become the most important cotton port of its age, and Manchester the greatest cotton market. P. 7.

16. Manchester suffered the kinds of diseases associated with such poor decisions, cholera, small pox, typhus.

17. Engels “the condition of the working class in England.” P. 26

18. In Manchester millions have struggled to make the last farthing count, and imagined and created a better world for themselves. P. 27

19. Ann Lee started the shakers in 1774. Sailed out of Liverpool. P. 27

20. The hedonistic impulse in Manchester has always been strong, especially in hard times. It’s a city still full of ideas, and dreamers hanging on to optimism even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. (Recurrent on uncertainty and poverty, random violence, and suffocating preconceptions from out of town). P. 28

21. The search goes on, for something more than chopt straw and dry horse dung in our flour; if not a better world, at least a great night out. P. 28

22. From its first beginnings Manchester has had as much of a reputation for depravity as industry. P. 34

23. Manchester was full of strangers and travelers. P. 37

24. Cooke Taylor, in 1842, was claiming that Manchester had 309 brothels. P. 38
25. Memoirs of Madame Chester by Polly Evans, 1865, P. 39

26. You couldn’t get a quiet drink in Manchester in the middle of the 19th century… Out on the town, there’d be informal sing-songs, nights spent listening to mechanical organs, perhaps with accompanying drums and tambourines. Public houses acting as music venues were very much a part of early Manchester life. This close link between drink and music… P. 42

27. Jazz hit the city with a rattling jolt. In its own way the coming of jazz was as much a shock to Manchester as the industrial revolution. P. 54

28. The big boom in dancing which blew away the bourgeois, buttoned-up ways of behaving came after the First World War. P. 60

29. In the explosive dancing boom after the war, the young from 16-25 flocked to the dance halls by the 100,000. P. 63

30. Anthony Burgess, “A Clockwork Orange” P. 68

31. Jazz, dance, movie; they connected with the needs and desire of Mancunians in a way in which high culture never had. P. 78

32. It was the reaction of Mancunians to American popular music which was to shape going out in the last 4 decades of the 20th century. P. 82

33. Manchester’s first import record shop -1 stop - didn’t open until 1957. The two main means of obtaining authentic American records were either through contacts at Burtonwood air base near Warrington, which was manned by American soldiers until the mid 1960’s or - as Kevin Curtis did - via sailors. P. Both the Beatles in Liverpool and Eric Burdon of the Animals in New Castle are known to have relied for their early music education on imports brought by visitors to the ports of their respective cities, but Manchester, too, had its docks, courtesy of the ship canal, which was regularly visited by ships from Montreal, New York, and other ports on America’s east coast. According to Alan Lawson, sailors were on a nice little earner bringing boxes of records back: “I met one old chap who claimed he bought his first car on the proceeds from records he bought dirt cheap in America and sold for a fortune back home.” P. 85

34. The manchester club scene in the mid-1960’s: the clubs were cheap and it was likely that a night out could include a visit to more than one club. P. 98

35. Manchester is the clubbing capital of England, the city with a renowned night life and dozens of important bands. Manchester is the city with the most highly developed music consciousness in the world, sometimes you can imagine you can reach out and touch it, a palpable buzz of a night life culture that’s evolving, absorbing, period. P. 139

36. Going out has a long history in Manchester, and a central place in urban popular culture. P. 149

37. It all changed in the late 1980’s when the dance floor asserted its position as the focus of the British youth culture. P. 142

38. In 1948 Manchester had been the birth place of the digital revolution with engineers from the University successful creating the first programmable computer there was some historical symmetry then, that Manchester would also embrace computerated-music with enthusiasm. P. 163

39. In America we discovered pockets of people, little communities on our wave length. Networks were also being built between people in Paris and the factory bergade in Manchester. P. 185

40. In Manchester, one remove from the London-based press, bands can evolve at their own pace, make their mistakes in private. P. 187.

41. Rave culture was made, and thrived, out on the margins, the screwed-up places. P. 187

42. In Manchester itself the rise of rave culture was out of the control of the exisiting music community. P. 188

43. Gospel singers: South Manchester…Old Trafford, Chorlton, Whalley Range, Mosside, Holme. P. 206

44. Dogs of Heaven. P. 212

45. Hard times and baselines: The Moss side story.

46. It has now become accepted that shopping and tourism have key roles in the future prosperity in the city. For the young, especially, Manchester is becoming a must-see city, a cult pop city, and it was probably the Madchester area that brought in the first influx of tourists. P. 254

47. Manchester has often found inspiration from America, but often not from mainstream, corporate America: it’s outlaw American culture that’s fed into Manchester culture. P. 257

48. Pop music has reflected and also created Manchester…P. 258

49. Culture soon dies if it’s confined to one city or one country. P. 295

50. This street culture is not about civic pride and marketing intiatives, it’s about ideas, self-expression and escape. It can, and will, thrive in crappy coffee bars, under leaking roofs, or down unlit roads. It’s uncontrollable, uncomfortable, and never far removed from the problems of everyday living. Yet it’s survived - and, at times, prospered - because it’s had to; The alternative to this independent Manc, pop culture is silence. P. 260

51. Record stores. P. 260

52. Tony Wilson’s annual music conference. P. 260

53. People getting together to do things and make things better, that’s what Manchester’s always been about. - Ian Brown, P. 267

54. There are still 2 nations, still grim areas of real, deep poverty, a world away from glittering sites of civic splendor… P. 270

55. Greater Manchester police deal with more crimes per head that almost any other metropolitan force. P. 277

56. In Manchester, like Liverpool, Detroit - other places with similar problems of poverty and crime - music has given the city a voice, broken the silence, woven itself into the deep fabric of life. P. 278

57. The end of the story is yet to be lived, let alone told. P. 280

Notes from “Five Plants that Changed the World”

Author: Henry Hobhouse

Chapter: Cotton and the American South

1. 1784, first single bail of cotton arrives in the Port of Liverpool. Refused entry. Remained on the quayside until it rotted. P. 141

2. The years 1784-1861 were critical for the American South and for the North of England. P. 142

3. By 1861, the cost of industrialized cotton cloth in Europe or the United States in terms of gold had fallen to less than 1% of its cost in 1784. P. 142

4. Picking 100 pounds of bowls would take 2 man-days; ginning would take 50 man-days at best; and bailing by hand, cleaning, and carting another 20 man-days. All this effort resulted in only about 8 pounds of spinnable cotton, which would then require 24-40 man-days to spin. P. 144

5. Cotton was the luxury cloth in 1784. P. 144

6. London’s Dr. Johnson and friends helped the development of early mill machinery. P. 146

7. Arkwright’s first mill in Nottingham was powered by horses rather than water. P. 148

8. 1765: 500,000 pounds of cotton all spun by hand.
1775: 2 million pounds mostly spun by machine.
1784: 16 million pounds all spun by machine.

Before 1790 all the mills were water-driven. P. 148

9. Lancashire attractive because of port of Liverpool, cheap coal, cheap iron, large reservoirs of workers from Ireland, local mobilization of capital by people and institutions in Manchester and Liverpool. P. 148

10. Concentration of labor in factories…obliged to live in company owned “back-to-back” without sanitation, garden, or fresh air. P. 149

11. The period 1784-1861 saw an eight-fold increase in the number of slaves in America, it also saw an increase in the misery of the British cotton industry…In 1825 90% of the workers in the spinning section of the industry were women and children; The children had no opportunity for education, no protection against abuse, no redress against brutality, no rights in common law against dangerous machinery, inhumane overseers, or over long hours with no over time pay. P. 149

12. Labor was always treated better in new England (US) than in old, at least until the wave of paupers arrived from Ireland in the 1840’s and 1850’s. P. 150

13. It is hard to over state the important of the coincidence of the escalating demand for cotton from England combined with the increased production made possible by the new ginning process. P. 152

14. Cotton acreage in the new South was to rise to match demand, and with each 100 acres of cotton, between 10 and 20 slaves were needed. P. 153

15. Cheap, virtually empty, fertile land had more influence upon the early settlers than all the rhetoric of all the politicians who have ever inspired, amused, or saddened an American audience, and has shaped the American character more than any other factor. For the first time in modern history, land was available for about 1/50th the cost of the same quality of land in Europe. P. 156

16. In England, the most important trader, net imports rose from 20 million pounds in 1784 (none of it from the North American mainland), to just under 1.5 billion pounds in 1850 (82% from Dixie), a 150-fold increase in demand. P. 157

17. 1784: 1 bail of cotton
1800: Less than 10 million pounds
1830: Less than 100 million pounds
1840: More than 80 million pounds
1850: More than 2 billion pounds
P. 158

18. The beginning of cotton monoculture followed the adoption of the gin in the 1790’s. P. 160

19. In the whole of the deep south, throughout the first half of the 19th century, the only sophisticated metropolitan area was New Orleans. According to European travelers, it was also the only place in the whole of the United States with first-class hotels or restaurants. It was a great service center and entrepot, a market place, a city of leisure, creole cuisine, theater, music, lust, and vice. Transients were said to exceed the indigenous population in number, prominence, and criminality. P. 161

20. It was in New Orleans that slave ownership for reasons of conspicuous consumption reached it’s highest pitch. P. 161

21. Of all the crops exported from what was then the southwest, cotton was the most important. …Nearly half the exports to Europe came from New Orleans, easily outpacing the older ports of Charleston and Savannah and the new port of Mobile, Alabama. P. 162

22. The rise of industrial spinning, carting, and weaving in England coincided with the first growth of upland cotton in the South and the widespread use of the whitney-gin; as a result, by about 1820 there was an apparently insatiable British demand for raw cotton combined with a huge area available for production in America. For a hundred years Britain would spin more cotton than the whole rest of the world put together, and the United States would grow the huge tonnages necessary to keep the mills fully employed. P. 165

23. If the textile trade in England produced towns wholly populated by wave slaves, the growing of cotton in the American south produced a society wholly and apparently inevitably dependent upon slavery. P. 165

24. It is one of the awkward facts of history that obscurantist, backward, tsarist Russia emancipated the surfs two years before free, progressive, democratic United states freed the slaves. P. 167

25. Of the 1860 cotton crop, consisting of over 4 million bails, nearly 80% went to Europe. Cotton was one of the bulkiest raw materials, and certainly the most valuable, in the whole United States. P. 174

26. The greatest irony of all is, of course, that this great aggrien slavocracy depended upon the steam and the iron of Europe and New England for its market. The last great slave empire fed the first great industrial revolution. Each as dependent upon the other in symbiotic relationship. P. 176

27. All over the world, cotton textile manufacture became the first element in the first industrial revolution… the first great manufacturers were those of cotton. P. 176

28. In 1861 cotton by far was the most important industry in the United States. …Nearly 60% of the American crop (was) processed in England, mostly in Lancashire… P. 176

29. America produced 2/3rds of all raw cotton exported throughout the world, and Britain exported more than 2/3’s of all manufactured cotton products. P. 176

30. By 1861, cotton had become the single most important crop traded in the world, and more than 80% of that crop was grown in the South. P. 177

31. 1784: First bail virtually no cotton grown in the U.S. No cotton processed by steam power, less than half a million slaves in the 13 colonies, only a handful of spinning mills in England, most workers were adult males, no cotton exchange, no infrastructure, no means of public investment in the textile trades.

By 1861: Cotton was the most important trade in the world, the skies above Lancashire were black with smoke from steam-raising boilers whose power was devoted almost exclusively to the cotton industry, there were nearly 4 million slaves, female and child labor in Lancashire had become a disgrace which had aroused the indignation of all humane people, sophisticated economic infrastructure arose in New Orleans, Manchester, and Liverpool to support this trade

Manchester has a number of formal sister relationships.

Here’s the current list:

* Amsterdam, Netherlands

* Chemnitz, Germany

* Córdoba, Spain

* Faisalabad, Pakistan

* Los Angeles, USA

* Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua

* Rehovot, Israel

* Saint Petersburg Russia;

* Wuhan, China

For reasons we’ve stated elsewhere, it makes sense for Manchester to have an ongoing cultural relationship with its real sister city, New Orleans.

The plan for reviving the relationship between Manchester and New Orleans is simple.

Bring New Orleans artists, musicians, scholars etc. to Manchester and welcome Manchester folks to visit New Orleans.

Last spring, we got the ball rolling by hosting Manchester poet Grevel Lindop.

Last month, we brought a New Orleans poet Chuck Perkins to Manchester.

He’s the video of his first visit (the first one was so successful there are bound to be many more):

New Orleans poet Chuck Perkins visits Manchester

I love the music of places like Cuba and Brazil and God knows they have had a massive influence on the course of world music.

But let’s look at a few numbers for perspective.

The current population of Brazil is over 191 million people (191.000.000.)

Cuba has over 11 million (11,000,000)

New Orleans, at the height of its population (roughly 1960) had less than one million, 627,000 to be exact.

Today, after the federal levee catastrophe, the city is estimated to have something over 300,000.

So let’s line it up:

Brazil - 191,000,000
Cuba - 11,000,000
New Orleans - 300,000

For people who like percentages this means that New Orleans is only 00.15 % of the population of Brazil and only 2.7% of the population of Cuba.

Now, music is not a competition and the point of all of this is not to rank places and people by their importance, but it does illustrate a point about little New Orleans.

Jazz, R & B, rock and roll, funk, and a whole bunch of other varieties of music that didn’t get a name that stuck…no place on earth in the modern era has ever cranked out as much music as New Orleans.

Ernie K-Doe may have been right when he said it:

“I’m not certain, but I’m almost positive that all music came from New Orleans.”

Manchester, New Orleans’ sister city, which has also had a disproportionate influence on the course of popular music, has a population of less than 500,000.

Big things come in small packages.

For a while there, this Manchester band was second only to the Beatles.

During their six years in the sun, they racked up twenty British hits and seventeen US ones.

Their first EP “Hermania” which came out in January 1965 included two New Orleans R&B covers - Frankie Ford’s “Sea Cruise” and Ernie K. Doe’s “Mother-In-Law”

Reference:

http://www.hermanshermits.com/articles/musicmags/mar87_rc_p2.html

From an article about Henry James Allen, Jr, jazz great

“In the fall of 1959 Red accompanied Kid Ory and his Dixielanders to Europe - it was Red’s first visit and he enjoyed it immensely, as did European audiences, reviewers, and critics. Red was particularly well-received in Britain and would return again in 1963 and 1964, this time to play with the Alex Welsh Band. During the ‘64 tour, he received an award in Manchester for his contributions to jazz music.”

Source http://www.libertyhall.com/red.html

New Orleans is easily the most written about music city in the world.

Manchester is solidly in #2.

The latest: “The North Will Rise Again” about the Manchester music scene from 1976 to 2008 by musician and writer John Robb,

“The Buzzcocks. Joy Division. The Fall. The Smiths. The Stone Roses. The Happy Mondays. Oasis. Manchester has proved to be an endlessly rich seam of pop-music talent over the last 30 years.”

http://www.amazon.co.uk/North-Will-Rise-Again-Manchester/dp/1845134176

From the book “24 Hour Party People” pgs 205-206 by Tony Wilson

A half-hour profile - sorry - small, cheap documentary, of the textile billionaire David Alliance, big boss of Coates Viyella, answered the question, ‘why Manchester?’ once and for all. Alliance was answering the question from Wilson the interviewer: ‘Why do you, one of Britain’s richest industrialists, keep your head office in Manchester and continue to live in Manchester?

‘I’ll tell you why.’

Forty years in England had only mellowed the delightful Middle-Eastern lilt of his speech. Alliance was a handsome, charismatic man in his mid-fifties who once tried to warn his friend the Shah of Iran, ‘You’re feeding their bellies, you’ve got to start feeding their minds.’

‘I’ll tell you why. When I had been in this country from my home in Persia no more than ten days, I was looking for my uncle’s house in Clyde Road in West Didsbury. I was sheltering from the rain under the awnings of the old Rediffusion cinema in East Didsbury. I spoke maybe ten words of English. I had the address on a piece of paper. I saw a woman pushing a pram, I showed her the address and she indicated I should follow her. We walked, perhaps a mile and a half, through the rain, and finally got to Clyde Road and got to my uncle’s house. I knocked. He opened the door and flung his arms round me, shouting, “Davoud, Davoud.” And I looked back and the woman waved and walked back the way we had come, pushing the pram.

‘I turned to my uncle and said, “She wasn’t coming this way, why did she come all this way if she wasn’t coming this way?”

“Davoud, because this is Manchester.”‘

It is this city’s hospitality to the outside that gives rise to the great truism of Manchester music: Manchester kids have the best record collections. That’s not a Wilson line, though he wishes it was. He’d been given this gem by A&R hero Dave Ambrose. Right on, Dave. They do. They have the best record collections. Open to outside influences.

Why do you think Jon Dasilve, Graeme Park and the Pick were playing house music on a Friday night? Why were the Mondays listening to it every fucking night? It was bloody foreign, wasn’t it? It was and this is the city of the foreigner, with its open arms. And hands held out, palm up.

And maybe that’s why so many of the people in this book are mysteriously devoted to the town. Its open arms inspired a return. Even down to putting everything you’ve earned and everything you’re going to earn into a designer dance hall that was now slowly approaching break-even thanks to student (urgh) night and Stella a quid a pint.

And you never give up. That was the lesson of Wilson’s next small, cheap documentary. The story of the Manchester Ship Canal.

King Cotton made us first city of the empire. Foundation stone of the Industrial Revolution. Bit like Peter Saville being responsible for Designer Britain. Good thing or bad? Maybe like Chou En-Lai said when asked the same question about the French Revolution: it’s too soon to tell.

Anyway, come the American Civil War and all this cotton stuff comes to a halt. Famously, the textile workers of England’s North-West sided with the black (Liverpool-imported, if you don’t mind) slaves and Lincoln’s Republican army, although this was precisely against their own interests, holding down jobs that relied on the plantation owners of the South. They rightly identified the African slave labour as remarkably similar to their own alienated labour.

A little bit Bradley Hardacre and a little bit Andy Warhol.

New Orleans and Manchester have a history together that goes way back - but everyone forgets because no one on the US side of the ocean asks the question:

“Where did the cotton from New Orleans go?”

To Manchester, where textile mill workers - including children as young as five - faced conditions every bit as brutal as Delta slavery.

In spite of their own situation, Manchester workers stood in solidarity with enslaved Africans in America and called for Abolition.

Today, victimized by government corruption, incompetence and neglect on an epic scale, the people of New Orleans have been beaten, but are not bowed.

If ever there were a time for Mancunians who love the beat to turn their eyes back to New Orleans, now’s the time.

Every beat in popular music - jazz, R & B, rock and roll, funk - originated on a drum kit in New Orleans.

Chicago and Detroit? Musical nephews of the Big Uncle Big Easy. Look it up…and share the video.

Manchester loves New Orleans

Thanks to videographers Hubie Vigreaux, Ken McCarthy, and YouTubers. Edit by Matthew Lipscomb and Ken McCarthy.

Special thanks to A Guy Called Gerald.

Info about the upcoming Food Music Justice program in Manchester, UK is here:

http://www.ChuckPerkinsVoices.com