Danny Moran: handbags at town hall, the cut-throat business of watching Morrissey, anger and the Irk

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    Above the murmurs in a city centre coffee shop Alan Good’s excuses are refreshingly bold. “Sorry I’m late,” the Lib Dem man says. “I was up ‘til six last night in The Eagle.” That’s the Bloom St leather bar where the he tops up his municipal allowance pulling pints at the weekend. It’s Monday morning, so back to council business, and with the total of non-Labour members in the chamber having reached the magic number of five (following Ekua Bayunu’s July defection to the Greens) Alan is preparing to present the first opposition motion in eight years.
    “I’ve worded it very carefully in order to try to entice as many Labour members as I can,” he says of his call to Manchester City Council to publicly endorse proportional representation. He knows voting reform is popular with left-leaning members and Labour’s rank and file. “It all depends if Labour whip it or if they table a spoiler amendment.” “How many votes do you expect to get?” I ask. “That’s difficult to say.”
    Two days later, and full council is in session. With his white shirt, skinny tie, biker’s beard trimmed neatly back, the cub councillor’s southern vowels are as an appeal to decency as Alan lists the reasons democratic reform will help tackle the nation’s problems. “Backed at Labour conference…wasted votes in the first-past-the post system…leads to complaceny, incompetence and corruption…”  It is Pat Karney who cracks his knuckles and gets to his feet to deliver the response. As sandcastle-kickings go it is brutal and alpha.
    He begins by suggesting Alan’s boss, the former Withington MP John Leech, may have composed his own Wikipedia entry. Then he pulls out a copy of Nick Clegg’s autobiography – no slender pamphlet – and rifles the index for mention of Leech’s name.  “Nothing.” There are sniggers from among the ninety-one-strong Labour group as the Harpurhey veteran monsters the memory of coalition and Leech’s much vaunted stand against the pact…so electorally secure he has no need to stray into today’s world. Two Labour councillors who came out in support have deleted their tweets. Labour’s amendment says the Lib Dems are rubbish and it is passed. “I think we caused some discussion among the Labour group,” Alan suggests to me afterwards. “It’s a start.”
    So you go home
    In the car en route to the Apollo my advice is clear and unambiguous. “Decide your budget limit and don’t exceed it. If it’s forty quid for the pair then stick to that and be prepared to walk away. There will be another time.” She has her wage packet in her pocket and in my mind’s eye I can see her handing it over. As we rock up to the venue the gig is starting – which is the plan – so now we need to find a pair of tickets before it’s too late. Scanning the scene I try to recall if Morrissey has ever recorded a song about a ticket tout. Not yet, I decide.
    There isn’t a scalper in sight though. How Soon Is Now is burning through the tiles and there’s just a pale man in a Harrington jacket swaying at the barrier…so drunk security won’t let him in. “Have you got tickets?” my girlfriend asks. “Yeah, two. Two hundred and forty-five quid they cost me.” “How much do you want for them?” I hang back and watch from a few yards away as she helps him find them in his email account on his phone. Then he says: “A hundred quid.” “I’ll give you thirty,” she replies. There’s a roar from inside the venue. She gives me the side-eye. “I’ve got the tickets,” she whispers through the side of her mouth.
    “What?” “Thirty quid and nothing more,” she says. But he won’t take the money. “Hundred.” She’s edging me towards the entrance. “Come on, go go go!” “You can’t rob the man,” I say, as the man who isn’t going to see Morrissey sways sadly on his evening’s last legs. “Hundred,” he insists. “Thirty,” she replies. She’s elbowing me towards the entrance. “Forty,” he says finally. He looks heartbroken. “For Christ’s sake will you give him another tenner,” I say, “You were fine with forty before we got here.” The pitiless look in my girlfriend’s eyes looks very final. “Blimey,” I say as we enter. “He’ll be all right,” she says. “At least he didn’t go home with nothing.”
    Acid tongue
    Across the pages of a zine a spatter of verse inspired by a Middleton railway signal box. “I am the acid in the dirty Irk…the filth and the fury in that foul smelling stream…where the outcast weds the unwanted…out of this putrifaxious cauldron my righteous venom flows…” If there is a kind of Manchester Selfie indigenous to the poetry Tony Walsh, Mike Garry or Arrgh Kid then this is its inverse, its negative, its answer. “I grew up near this signal box,” writer Maureen Ward tells me. “It’s been at the back of my mind since I was a girl.” We’re standing beneath a nameplate bearing the words VITRIOL WORKS. “Once there was a sulphuric acid factory here. All the factories along the Irk were chemicals, dyeworks. We were never part of the Cottonopolis narrative, like they were in Ancoats and around the Irwell. The people here could never claim that same identity. And we were people who had no stake in regeneration.”
    We admire the signal box. Punk-reared and paragraph-speaking, and with a tendency to
    I am the acid in the dirty Irk…Shock City zine
    communicate through noms de plume, Maureen is a kind of bluestocking paramilitary; her zine Shock City a dispatch on the theme of Manchester and toxicity. “If this had been built in the Victorian-era they’d either not have bothered or they’d have made a palace out of it. If it had been built ten years after it was it would have been concrete, with all that goes with that. If they’d built it today it would be a piece of crap.
    “But it was built in an era when the state, the municipality, felt obliged to build a version of everything…from houses to halls to bus shelters to electricity substations… and build them well. I like that it’s clean lines and made of brick. It’s like a house.”
    “It’s a taboo these days but the state once promised to educate and look after you.” As we talk a pale sun gives way to sudden squalls, a submerged roar in the atmosphere’s megaphones, the expectation of trains, the snap of electricity on the wind.
    A window opens and a man leans out to inquire our business so we retreat and look a last time at the sign speaking to us from another world.

     

    Shock City: facebook.com/shockcitymanchester

    dannymoran.co.uk

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