Since I have been in London I have been meaning to get up to Northwest England, well, Manchester and Liverpool anyway. Ironically it wasn't until I saw an advert in the movie theatre promoting 'Northwest England' that I realised they were so close together. So I schemed with AM to do a weekend trip and cover both places.
We took a very early morning train up to Liverpool from London, which took around 3 and a half hours and put us in Liverpool in time for lunch. Liverpool has plans to be the European Capital of Culture next year, whatever that means, and obviously they are working on it. There was construction everywhere. We headed straight for Albert Dock, which has both the Tate Modern and the Beatles Story museums for a quick taste of Liverpool old and new.
At the Tate, we saw this years nominees for the Turner Prize, which were displayed in Liverpool for the first time. We actually just saw a retrospective of all the Turner Prize winners a couple of weeks earlier in London, so it was great to see this year's finalists in person before the winner, Mark Wallinger, was named. The Tate Liverpool has great little collection, very compact and accessible compared to its older brothers in London.
After the Tate we went over to the Beatles Story, which had a queue even in the rainy October Saturday. It looked pretty cheesy from the outside but it was pretty good actually. There was a lot of commentary from some of their families and rooms devoted to Paul and John's solo careers. The recreation of the bar where they played a lot of their local gigs was pretty neat too. And as a bonus one of the guys working there looked and sounded just like John Lennon. I don't think that was intentional - I heard quite a few guys with John Lennon's accent walking around town.
I never put this together until we visited, but Liverpool is a very important spot for the history of music. In World War II it was a big port for allied soldiers, so the US soldiers brought across their music and brought home the Mersey Beat records. You could argue that all this cross-pollination in the 40s and 50s led to the stardom of Elvis and later the Beatles.
After visiting the history of music in the 50s, 60s and 70s, we moved on to Manchester, which fathered many bands in the 80s and 90s. Manchester has always been a mythical place to me since I became a hard core New Order fan in high school. I was fascinated by their history, having formed after Ian Curtis hung himself and Joy Division ceased to exist. At one point I owned practically every disc ever created by the band and its various offshoots, Revenge, Electronic, the Other Two, etc and I read all kinds of books including Deborah Curtis' autobiograpy and I have seen 24 Hour Party People and Control. When I was appreciating all things New Order in the late 80s and 90s there was no Internet, so the only way I could appreciate the Madchester culture was by buying import Factory CDs and magazines at the Beat or Tower Records in Sacramento.
Just this August Tony Wilson, who started Factory Records and the Hacienda in Manchester, passed away from cancer, and here in London it made the BBC news. So it is fitting we got to see a great history of what he created at Urbis, a really cool arts complex in downtown Manchester. Urbis was created in the new Millenium Quarter after an IRA bomb destroyed a big chunk of Manchester. Ian Simpson won the right to design an amazing glass structure that is now a very unique cultural centre, with different rotating exhibit spaces, a restaurant and its own television studio. Right now they have a huge exhibit about the Hacienda and the impact it made on Manchester culture. It was great for me to see the whole history unfold and to check out all I missed as a teenager in Nevada. It's funny to read about it and see the pictures and imagine how we were going to lame Carson City and Reno nightclubs for most of the time the Hacienda was around. The music there was of course better but I suspect the crowds were much of the same.
I really liked Manchester itself. It has a nice feel to it - a bit of older architecture mixed in with the modern, a manageable sized downtown area and a lot of artists and musicians living there. It is about half a million people or so and reminded me a lot of the Pacific Northwest. I think I am too old for the nightlife now - the clubbing anyway, but I think it is a place I could probably live in for a bit, a bit more manageable than London.
The pictures from both cities are posted here.
