Extreme Listening Mode!

Due to a football match being held there tonight, Manchester has been very much in the headlines in Glasgow for the last few days. ELM is a footy-free zone, but it did get me thinking about some great Manchester bands. there can’t be many provincial cities in the world with the rich heritage of the place. So many wonderful bands, great performers and the Paris Angels. Well, you can’t have everything. Here are a few ELM favourites;

The Stone Roses – Fabulous, chiming baggy rock Gods. The Roses were, for a couple of years, the total package – insouciant, witty, confident. Most of all, what stands up even now is the music. The debut is still an astonishing piece of work, barely dated by almost twenty years. The stunningly generous singles and b-sides collection ‘Turns Into Stone’ was incredible too. Obviously, they burned themselves out in the Supernova days, and true potential soon became pure rock cliché as money and drugs tore them asunder. John Peel once famously said they reminded him of the Hollies, forgetting two things; namely that the Hollies were brilliant anyway, and half the shite he played in his career, well….let’s not cast the first stone here, Peely!

Download; I Am The Resurrection

Joy Division – As dark as a very dark night in the darkest bit of the darkest land. During a powerstrike. With a blindfold on. But they looked so ordinary. Just four working class lads in cheap trousers and cheaper shirts. It’s music which is timeless because it never fitted into any time. Ignoring the punk mantra of ‘fuck this, let’s start from scratch’ (because, let’s face it, scratch is a pretty impovrished place to leave from) they instead brilliantly re-designed what rock music could be. Two terrirfic and fearful albums, and so many great moments. Ian Curtis set the benchmark for suffering in rock, and anyone mining the soul for despair would always be judged fake against him, but that doesn’t change the fact it was a tragic waste of talent.

Download; Dead Souls

New Order – We’re not doing the usual trick of lumping one in with the other. Three members were the same, yes, but this is a totally different band. After a false start trying to be Joy Division mk II (‘Movement’) they settled into a hybrid of rock and dance which was revolutionary at the time. Their influence was huge, and some of their 80′s work can rightfully be labelled the most influential of the 80′s. They weren’t perfect – the lyrics are often moon/balloon/June – but their dynamism and songwriting nous covered that.

Download; Run

The Smiths – If New Order were the most influential band of the 80′s, The Smiths were the best. They were great, they were romantic, they were life-affirming. They were funny, too, in a way which fans got and detractors didn’t and just made it seem even more like we were in on something the world was missing. Marr’s guitar work still sounds unparalelled, like God had given him these astounding runs of chords and sequences. Add to that Morrissey – and forget what he has turned into, just remember how he was – and you had a band that you simply couldn’t replicate. One of those moments were everything aligned right in planet rock – as Marr once said ‘nobody could write music for Morrissey’s lyrics like me, and nobody could write lyrics for my music like Morrissey.’

Download; Panic

Oasis – Deserve to be in there. Hard for some people to understand now, but Oasis did shake British music when they first arrived. From years of Grunge, Greebo, self-harming and plaid, suddenly a band came along and said, actually, fuck that, let’s get drunk and have a party. And it felt so liberating. It was cool to wear nice clothes again! The first three years of Oasis career were incredible, Zep-esque monsters of big albums, bigger gigs, bigger albums, more tabloid controversy, drink, drugs and Patsy Kensit. When it was gone, it was gone, and Oasis are now a (still huge) loveable old national treasure. But what they did in the first few years, for people of my generation, was show them that you didn’t need access to the Met bar to have a good time, and kids all over the UK loved them for it. Niiiiice one.

Download; Supersonic

There are countless others – the Buzzcocks, The Fall, The Comsat Angels, The Happy Mondays, Interstella, John Cooper Clarke and more recently the Ting Tings and Elbow who we could have mentioned…but we could be here all day. Some place, some heritage. Now is it better than Liverpool’s? Well, I’m not getting into that!

Filed under: General Stuff | Tagged: Black Grape, factory, Hacienda, Happy Mondays, joy Division, Manchester, new order, Stone Roses, The Fall