The Smiths' City

For many music fans, especially angsty teenagers, the miserablist group and Manchester are synonymous. Here's a guide how to find them in the streets around you.

The artist more commonly known as Morrissey, who was born Stephen Patrick Morrissey in Davyhulme in 1959, will be returning to the city in 2009 to play two sold-out dates at the Apollo. A concert on 22 May will mark the fiftieth birthday of the man who has sound tracked the lives of generations, first as frontman of the Smiths and then as a distinctive performer in his own right.

The Smiths' lyrics may be awash with references to areas of Manchester and its history, but Morrissey hasn't actually called the city home for a while. The bequiffed one left to live in the sunnier climes of first Los Angeles, and then Rome, over a decade ago.

The remaining Smiths still contribute a visible presence to Manchester's musical landscape, though, and the band's legacy lives on in the city, not least in the Star and Garter's monthly Morrissey and Smiths disco, which caters for both those old enough to have been there from the start and teenagers young enough to have not been born yet when the Smiths split up. This guide will trace the history of one of Manchester's most famous musical exports, which also roughly coincides with some key events and places in the development of Manchester.

1: Park Hospital (now Trafford General Hospital)

When Anuerin Bevan symbolically handed over the keys to this hospital in 1958, it marked the start of the NHS and free healthcare. Eleven years later, Morrissey, the man who would go on to change the course of popular music (at least in cult circles), was born in the hospital.

2: 382 King's Road, Stretford

Morrissey spent his first six years in Hulme before his family relocated to Stretford during a slum-clearance scheme. This unassuming semi was where the momentous first meeting between unemployed writer Morrissey and guitarist Johnny Marr took place in 1982, the culmination of Marr's search for a singer and lyricist to match his distinctly crisp Rickenbacker sound. It went on to be one of the great rock partnerships, although not always a happy one. Johnny Rogan's dense tome Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Alliance is recommended for more reading on this well-documented topic.

Morrissey has since gone on to have a lucrative solo career, collaborating with established artists such as Nancy Sinatra. Marr is still at the forefront of new music, appearing on records by both the American band Modest Mouse and the Cribs in recent years.

Mike Joyce went on to play drums on Julian Cope's acclaimed album Peggy Suicide, as well as joining punk groups the Buzzcocks and Public Image Limited and touring with Sinead O'Connor.
The Smiths' bassist, Andy Rourke, is now a DJ on XFM.

3: Crazy Face, Portland Street

This innocuous looking wholesale clothes shop, situated close to Chinatown, was where The Smiths honed their unique sound. Mike Joyce describes its importance to the band: “It was the first time we ever played together as a band. I think it's a restaurant now. We had our offices there and Joe Moss, our manager at the time had his shop Crazy Face in the basement where he used to sell his clothes. We used to push all the trousers and jeans and tops to one side and just play there. We used to hang out there every day – it was a base for us. It was pre-Smiths, really – before we even had our record deal. Then he bought the upstairs, the second to top floor, and we used to rehearse there for about a year in 1982.”

4: The Ritz, Whitworth Street West
One of Manchester's major gig venues, the Ritz holds over 1,000 people, which is a scary proposition for any band's first gig. The Smiths made their debut here supporting the decidedly less catchily named Blue Rondo A La Turk on 4 October 1982. With a name like that, taken from a jazz tune by the Dave Brubeck Quintet, it's no wonder The Smiths made it big and Blue Rondo A La Turk seem to have been forgotten in the mists of musical history. To dwell on the name a moment, it's been suggested The Smiths was chosen as it sounds quintessentially, ordinarily English (which is ironic, as all of the band were of Irish descent).

Last year, Whitworth Street West gained a new Smiths association: Mike Joyce now hosts a weekly club night at the Brickhouse venue just across the road from the Ritz, named AlternativeTherapy after a popular Revolution radio programme he used to present.

5: Ancoats (or Ann Coates)
Manchester was a very different place when the Smiths were recording. The old mill area and birthplace of the industrial revolution is all about regeneration and expensive flats now, but in the 1980s it was a symbol of Manchester's decay. Morrissey may be famous for his moroseness, but at least he had a sense of humour: backing vocals on the tune Bigmouth Strikes Again from The Smiths' 1986 album The Queen Is Dead are attributed to Ann Coates, but are really just Morrissey's voice speeded up.

6: Strangeways, Southall Street
Although it's not officially been called Strangeways for years, HM Manchester Prison is still known by the name it lent to Strangeways Here We Come, the Smiths' final studio album, which was released in 1987. Morrissey's lyrics are often preoccupied with the city's most notorious criminals, notably the Moors Murders on Suffer Little Children from the band's eponymous first album.

7: Platt Fields Park, Mabfield Road
The Smiths' song Rusholme Ruffians, which is found on their 1985 album Meat is Murder, made the titular phrase famous, as well as the funfair that still takes place there. Morrissey's lyrics often focus on the mundane and everyday aspects of life, and the words to Rusholme Ruffians are typically bleak: by the big wheel generator on the last night of the fair, “a boy is stabbed and his money is grabbed and the air hangs heavy like a dulling wine”.

Incidentally, Rusholme is situated in south Manchester student heartland, which might well boast the highest concentration of Smiths fans in the city.

8: Salford Lads' Club, Saint Ignatius Walk
This redbrick social club is often the first port of call for many visiting Smiths fans, because it features on the inner sleeve of the iconic Smiths' album The Queen is Dead. It now has a Smiths room dedicated to the band. At the time, however, the club's committee were unhappy with its association with the group, fearing Morrissey's lyrics would lead young boys astray.

Two decades on, it seems the band have been embraced by the establishment. After revealing a fondness for the Smiths, Conservative leader David Cameron attempted to pose outside the club on a visit to Manchester last year. He was thwarted by local Labour MP Hazel Blears and protesters bearing placards saying 'Salford Lads not Eton Snobs' and 'Oi! Dave - Eton lads' is 300 miles'. Determined Dave got his picture in the end, even though a gloating Blears assured him “Not on my watch you won't, Dave” after an unsuccessful first attempt.

The club has been cash-stricken in recent years, and has benefited from Smiths-related fund raising activities aiming to get together money for repairs.

9: Southern Cemetery, Barlow Moor RoadMorrissey's bookish nature is evident on Cemetery Gates, from The Queen Is Dead, which takes place on a “dreaded sunny day” in Southern cemetery and name checks Keats, Yates and Wilde. Morrissey often borrowed phrases from films, books and plays, including Shenagh Delaney's Salford play A Taste of Honey. Pretty Girls Make Graves, from the Smiths' self-titled debut album, is a line from Beat author Jack Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums.

Morrissey's lyrics in turn went on to influence popular culture worldwide, a cult American punk band that formed in 2001 taking the song title Pretty Girls Make Graves as their name. Likewise Canadian author Douglas Coupland named a book Girlfriend In a Coma in tribute to the Smiths song of the same title.

10: The Free Trade Hall, Peter Street
The Smiths played at the site of the Peterloo Massacre twice, the first time in 1984 whilst promoting their debut album. It's here that the Smiths story comes to an end - their last ever Manchester gig was held at the Free Trade Hall in October 1986.

Taste of Honey, Royal Exchange Theatre, Monday 17 November

Unless you can afford the best seats, an evening at the theatre often involves sitting up in the gods peering down at the tiny players on stage below. A new production of Shelagh Delaney's slice of life play Taste of Honey, however, throws the conventional theatrical experience out onto the cold Salford wind.

DJ Jon Winstanley, who's providing a live soundtrack to the show, plays Northern Soul while we wait for the play to start, so it feels more like going to see a film at the cinema, complete with pre-movie muzak, than a formal trip to the theatre. By the time of the interval, I want to get up and dance.

My 'seat' is a doorstep, an extension of the set. My feet touch the smooth, green-blue slabs of the Salford street below, which are wet with glossy patches of rainwater. Other audience members sit on a sofa, and a dilapidated brick wall on the edge of the stage. I can see the grain of the floorboards, worn smooth at the edges, and the glow of the cellar lights going down into the street. I can make out the patterns of the wallpaper and curtains, as well as the broken banister and the frayed carpet that doesn't quite cover the floor. I'm in the thick of things before the play even starts.

When the players run on to the loud, brash blare of the Ting Tings, carrying their whole material lives in a wheelbarrow, the tenement comes alive, crackling with sexual tension and claustrophobia.

We can taste the weak coffee and feel the coldness of the two room flat. We smell the smoke of the cigars and cigarettes Helen's boyfriend Peter (Paul Popplewell), a shady upstart with an eye-patch, smokes. The dripping ceiling leaks into a bucket like a tinny clock beat of decay, ticking with the regularity of a watery metronome. A lone light bulb flickers. We shiver in solidarity with the characters, feeling the chill of a city where “there are two seasons – winter and winter”.

Sally Lindsay is the curvy, glamorous single mother Helen, a sexually voracious vamp with her blonde hair in rollers. An ageing alcoholic, she provides a contrast to her frumpy 15-year-old daughter, played by Jodie McNee, that would be tragic if it wasn't so humorous. Pinch faced and stick like, the mouthy Jo resembles Quentin Blake's scrawny depiction of Roald Dahl's precocious young girl Matilda.

Helen and Jo are on first name terms, and more like an antagonistic, longsuffering married couple than mother and child. Perpetually chattering Helen barely gives Jo a chance to speak, and they have very few moments of calm in which to really talk.

Taste of Honey is a play about relationships and power. It's almost a play of two bickering married couples; Helen and Jo, and Jo and Geoff. Geoff, a foppish, ginger haired art student played by Adam Gillen, is the play's main source of comedy, but also its main voice of reason. He cares for Jo when she becomes pregnant as the result of a then taboo mixed-race relationship. He steps into the nurturing role Helen should have had in Jo's life.

The play, written when Delaney was 18, may have turned 50 this year, but updating it to include Manchester and Salford pop hits such as the Ting Tings' obnoxious, catchy Shut Up and Let Me Go, demonstrates that teenage attitude and bravado doesn't change over time. Even though Jo's future looks set to recreate Helen's adult life of “work and want”, she's irrepressibly upbeat and boasts “I can do anything when I put my mind to it”.

Nor does the excitement of first love change over the years, providing hope against a backdrop of hardship and poverty. The characters sing and dance out their inner feelings to a cast of Manchester greatest hits that includes Oasis and Inspiral Carpets, Ian Brown, Happy Mondays and Northern Soul. It’s a form of escapist musical soliloquy: the characters can’t talk to each other - they’re too busy to listen. The songs of the Smiths are centre stage, the characters referencing famous lyrics such as 'I dreamt about you last night and I fell out of bed twice', and 'If a double-decker bus crashes into us, to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die'. It's a nod to the influence the play has had on popular culture, not least Morrissey's lyrics.

Sounds of the Other City - the Salford Music Map

SALFORD and Manchester, two cities next to each other but apart. To the rest of the world, Salford and Manchester are indistinguishable. However, in case you didn’t know, Salford is a different city marked out by the River Irwell towards the west of Manchester.

Until the Industrial Revolution, Salford was more powerful than its more famous neighbour. We stole the Industrial Revolution from them, and now, says a new exhibition and map celebrating 50 years of Salford music, we’re taking credit for their music too. “You wouldn’t get Glasgow and Edinburgh mixed up”, says the Salford Music Map’s researcher, David Nolan, so why Manchester and Salford?

Salfordians tend either to try and escape the city or wear their civic pride as a badge of honour. Being from Salford is sometimes seen as a mixed blessing: think of the 'Salford-Cambridge tones of Anthony H Wilson' (as we're reminded of in Mark Garry's BBC commissioned poem St Anthony, which can be listened to in the exhibition).

Nolan, a music author and lecturer at Salford University decided it was time to “address the balance a bit and clear up a few facts” spread by a Manchester Music Map that was created in the 1990s. He says “nearly all the stuff that was on it was actually in Salford.”

Disappointingly, though, the Salford Music Map isn’t really a map but a line of locations - you won’t be able to use it to find your way around Salford or any of the venues.

The ‘map’ is not drawn to scale; it promotes Salford as a tourist destination for visitors from both the UK and abroad, but you’re probably not going to track down all the sites, which are miles apart. Nolan suggests you “invest in a car or a bus ticket”, but admits the Salford Music Map is “more of a thing to put on your wall”.

Smiths fans already have Phil Gatenby’s books, Morrissey’s Manchester and Panic on the Streets, which contain instructions for foot, car and public transport and make for a fun musical tour around Manchester and Salford.

Some of the stories on the map could do with further exploration in the exhibition. Who are the Kersal Massive, and are they really something Salford should be proud of? I was amused to learn that a successful In The City slot at the Kings Arms, probably the nicest venue in the whole of Manchester, let alone Salford, was responsible for letting histrionic glam rockers the Darkness loose on the world, and Mark E Smith could have had a successful career in shipping was it not for The Fall, but both stories are barely referred to in the exhibition. The German singer Nico, who has a section on the map, is virtually unmentioned.

The 3D map on display in the gallery looks like something primary school children would create, with a big, jagged yellow sun peering over it optimistically. A river made of wool winds its way through cut out bits of paper indicating streets and buildings, some of which have already fallen over.

The exhibition is more substantial than the map, however. There are star shaped sunglasses to dress up in, and a stage set up with instruments for future rock stars. There’s a recreation of a record shop complete with posters, fliers and 7”s, as well work by Ray Lowry - Salford-born cartoonist and creator of the iconic cover of London Calling by the Clash - who died recently. You can pick up a telephone and listen to the fuzzy tones of punk poet John Cooper Clarke.

The exhibition is most interesting when it documents the 'development of a dirty northern city', to quote Mike Garry's poem again, and the changing ways we listen to music. Some sites on the map consisted of long-demolished terraced housing, and artefacts include a 1960s reel to reel cassette recorder, jukeboxes, Walkmen and IPODs.

A timeline relates musical occasions to what was going on elsewhere in the world, and there are films of key players for the different decades, as well as a Salford music fan’s Teddy Boy suit.

Bizarrely for an exhibition celebrating Salford, though, there's a big section on the Hacienda, which despite its various locations was never found in Salford. Perhaps because Salford doesn't have a recognisable city centre, Salford bands made a name for themselves playing in Manchester.

It's not just Salford bands Manchester takes credit for, though: it's associated with lots of music that’s not strictly Mancunian. Doves are a Cheshire band, Badly Drawn Boy is from Bolton, Inspiral Carpets are from Oldham. The Charlatans, who the music map claims as Salford’s own, have tenuous claims to being a Manchester band, let alone Salford. Singer Tim Burgess grew up in Cheshire and now lives in LA.

The map aims to find the future sounds of Salford, following the success of the Ting Tings. Bands like the Beep Seals look back to the sixties for their inspiration and are new, but not particularly futuristic. Nor is jaunty, brass heavy ska band The Mekkits.

Salford's annual new music festival Sounds of the Other City is hardly a collection of Salford sounds, either. Fun and commendable as it is, and successful at bringing people into Salford who wouldn't normally go there, bands at this year’s event included the sublime David Thomas Broughton from Leeds, as well as Rozi Plain from Bristol and even a band from New York, Talibam!. For the real 'new' sounds of Greater Manchester in the 21st century, listen to bands like Cats in Paris, Denis Jones or Voice of the Seven Woods, who sometimes even play at venues in Salford like the lovely Sacred Trinity Church.

However, Nolan hopes the exhibition and map will get “people to cross over the river who normally would have just gone to Manchester”.

Quiffs, Riffs and Tiffs will be at Salford Art Gallery, Peel Park Crescent, until 28 October 2009. The Salford Music Map is free and can be ordered from www.vistsalford.info or picked up at the Salford Tourist Information Centre, the Salford Museum and Art Gallery and several of the venues on the map, including The Lowry, The King’s Arms, Salford Lads Club, Islington Mill and Salford University.