Best of 2016

Art

Two of my art highlights of the year came early in 2016. After years of planning to visit, I was finally enticed over to Nottingham Contemporary for Monuments Should Not Be Trusted, a wide-ranging exhibition of art and artefacts from Tito’s Yugoslavia. From dark, Joy Division-esque music videos to punk to dreamy electronica, the exhibition encompassed consumerism, critique, feminism and subcultures. Among the most absurd and surprising were the eccentrically decorated youth batons, as well as the array of bizarre gifts presented to Tito, custom-made to reflect the work of different professions and groups of society. Other highlights included the films of Karpo Godina, particularly the playfully soundtracked Healthy People for Fun.

Another early highlight was a display of large-scale, colourful post-war textiles by Tibor Reich, a Hungarian artist who settled in Britain, at the Whitworth Art Gallery. I went expecting to see textiles, but the exhibition was far more than that: Reich designed his own family home, and incorporated lots of architectural drawings into his fabric patterns. I also loved some of his functional ceramics, such as ashtrays, jugs and salt and pepper shakers, given character and humour by the incorporation of quirky caricatures.

The most compelling exhibition of the year – and the highlight of Home’s programming thus far – was Rachel Maclean’s Wot u :-) About. The central film brings to mind mindfulness and meditation gurus, depicting selfies and desperate grasping for public approval. It’s grotesque and uncomfortable viewing but also topical, contemporary and very much of the now. Elsewhere in the exhibition, the grotesque world she creates steps out from her film in the form of sculpture and installation.

Another unexpected highlight was Vogue 100 at Manchester Art Gallery, which celebrated 100 years of British Vogue by showing cover designs, drawings and illustrations from the Vogue archive, from the magazine’s early years to the classic work of photographers like Cecil Beaton to the present day. Vogue 100 vastly surpassed my expectations: it didn’t just document changing fashions and ideas of beauty but cultural, political, literary, artistic and social change. The exhibition showed portraits of the personalities of the day, from Snowdon’s royals to Thatcher to an impossibly young-looking Posh and Becks to Kate Middleton, as well as the assimilation of movements such as punk into fashion. Highlights included William Klein’s fantastical set designs at Jodrell Bank; Norman Parkinson’s portrait of Jerry Hall astride a giant statue in Armenia in 1976; Lee Miller’s land girls in their Harrods ‘austerity trousers’ (eight vouchers each) and documentation of war damage; Alexander McQueen with a smoking skull, going behind the scenes to offer a portrait of the makers of the fashion; the film-maker John Schlesinger in the studio of David Hockney; Frank Horvat’s aristocratic-looking woman in a tailored wool dress and jacket standing surrounded by children in an alleyway in the wool city of Bradford; and the grunge aesthetic of Stella Tennant’s eyeliner, nose ring and messy crop.

At Liverpool Biennial, the highlight was HFT The Gardener, Suzanne Treister’s beautiful, intricate, colourful quasi-botanical series of drawings at Liverpool John Moores University. Constructing a narrative world involving an amateur botanist/outsider artist, Treister transformed our perceptions of FTSE 100 companies by introducing psychedelic possibilities. The other highlight of Liverpool Biennial was Mark Leckey's video work Dream English Kid at Camp and Furnace, intertwining personal, natural and cultural biography and memory. Also worth seeing were Krzysztof Wodiczko's street installations and interventions at FACT, and Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni's sunset in extreme slow-motion at Open Eye.

At Henry Moore Institute in Leeds I enjoyed A Lesson In Sculpture With John Latham, a show exploring ideas around work, monuments, value and social and natural environments, which displayed Latham’s ‘skoob’ sculptures alongside work by Mary Kelly and strange environmental constructions by Yves Klein bringing to mind the experimental living environments of Buckminster Fuller.

The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery at Leeds University gave an interesting insight into Mitzi Cunliffe, the American-born designer of the Bafta mask and creator of many public artworks in Manchester and the North of England. Cunliffe came across as a stylish and glamorous figure, designing her own dress and accessories for the unveiling of the Man-made Fibres sculpture at Leeds University. Another highlight was seeing the door handles and knockers she created for the Festival of Britain.

Out There: Our Post-war Public Art, at Somerset House, was a comprehensive and well-researched survey of public sculpture in Britain, coinciding with Historic England’s listing of key pieces of public art at the start of 2016. As well as the historical context and aspirations surrounding the commissioning of public art, the exhibition gave an insight into the processes of creating public art, with a number of drawings and maquettes on display.

At Hebden Bridge Arts Festival I stumbled across Simon Ford’s Apocalypse Haywain in an abandoned bowls club in the woods. Apocalypse Haywain brought together a collection of charity shop-purchased and subsequently flood-damaged editions of Constable’s famous painting, each slightly varying from the original in colour, quality and scale. Shown collectively, they raised questions around landscape and human and cultural impact, change/transience, value, preservation and collecting.

Barnaby Festival showed me plenty of places in Macclesfield I would have never visited otherwise, from churches to parks. Bedwyr Williams’ video commission was a fantastical tale set in the town, and I enjoyed climbing the steep, ramshackle stairs of the Print Room to see Hondartza Fraga’s delicate drawings of nearby Jodrell Bank, but the highlight was Liliane Lijn’s Moonmeme in Savage Tower, a cyclical exploration of femininity.

I enjoyed the international range of photos, plans, drawings and videos relating to play on display at The Playground Project at the Baltic, Gateshead, exploring the history of playgrounds and their links with new developments in art, architecture and pedagogy.

A late highlight was John Akomfrah’s split-screen video installation Vertigo Sea at the Turner Contemporary in Margate, which brought together art film, documentary and period drama with nature observation to explore the multiplicity of time, life stories and histories. Using archival film and new footage – including striking aerial views – Akomfrah passes through the seasons to depict nature inland and outlying, through close-up shots of birds and butterflies, as well as showing the ways in which man has used the landscape, past and present, through activities such as work and hunting. The film is both beautiful and horrific, politicised through the inclusion of slavery and migration – Akomfrah uses footage of Vietnamese boat people – and topical: time is subverted by the inclusion of constantly ticking clocks. It can’t help but make you contemplate the horrors that are done to humans by humans – and think about bigger human impacts such as climate change.

2016 was a bittersweet year for the Manchester art scene, as gentrification got real – out goes the ramshackle artists' colony of Rogue Studios, in comes the neon pink-on-chipboard branding of the property developer circling round one of the few remaining undeveloped city centre mills. The end of an era has been marked by artists coming together to respond to the uncertainty of the situation, celebrate the creativity that's been incubated there, and to forge new and overdue collaborations with the small-scale textile producers who also just about cling on – one of the highlights was Sam Meech’s Unique Editions, which created knitted portraiture of the workers at Unique Knitwear, as well as limited edition scarves and jumpers.

Elsewhere in Greater Manchester I enjoyed Castlefield Gallery’s programme, particularly Christian Falsnaes' First, which required the visitors to the gallery to create the artwork, in front of a camera, prompted by a series of requests and questions: it was up to you how much of yourself you put on show. Manchester Left Writers' Launch Pad show, themed around the Northern Powerhouse, was a real challenge but a rewarding experience and an opportunity to try something new and different ways of working and collaborating, including creative writing and performance. The programme at the Holden Gallery also got stronger and stronger in 2016, culminating in From Slow to Stop Stop, a well-chosen collection of photos of videos exploring mobility (or lack of).

I enjoyed Factory at Mirabel and Joe Fletcher Orr’s self-referential show at the International 3, as well as Hannah Leighton Boyce’s installation exploring the sounds of industry at Touchstones in Rochdale, and a screening of Jennet Thomas’s controversial, grotesque and farcical depiction of Thatcher in the Unspeakable Freedom Device at International Anthony Burgess Foundation, organised by the Exhibition Centre for the Life and Use of Books.

I was really impressed by the Bankley Studios open in Levenshulme, particularly Patricia Azevedo and Clare Charnley’s film-work and-and which depicted pairs of hands, challenged to collaborate in a series of seemingly simple everyday activities usually performed with ease by one person. I particularly enjoyed the Manchester School of Art Degree show in 2016, including the drawn installations of Siân Leyson. The textiles section made me want to fill my future home with colourful textiles, and the Mancunian Way magazine, exploring life and history in Manchester, including an issue dedicated to Bradford Colliery, was a thing of beauty.

Film

Room was one of the first films I saw in 2016, and I immediately decided it should win all of the Oscars. The film’s storytelling and performances were exceptionally powerful, making me feel the whole repertoire of human emotions – fear, anger, disgust, sadness, disbelief and despair, but also somehow hope and even a bit of joy.

Room set the standard, but 2016 continued in the same calibre. Icelandic fable Rams, with its portrayal of obstinate and isolated brothers, was another powerful depiction of human relationships, throwing into question individual decisions and moral judgements.

Another tale of obstinacy, deception and betrayal I enjoyed was Australian film The Daughter, with its complication of the already fraught period of growing up and parent-child relationships. Likewise, I thought Julieta was classic Almodóvar, a sophisticated and lingering tale of wrong steps taken and the consequences of decisions made years in the past. Mustang was an eye-opener, combining teenage spirit, sisterly solidarity and tragedy in a patriarchal Turkish family with nascent friendship and desire for freedom.

I, Daniel Blake also had emotional resonance, depicting the futility and pointlessness of the administration of the benefits system, but also the ways in which people pull together for support. In addition to its immediate emotional impact, it’s a reminder that Daniel’s story is just one out of countless private tragedies that take place behind the headlines.

Nostalgia for the Light, by Chilean director Patricio Guzmán, was one of my favourite films of recent years, but I thought its follow-up, The Pearl Button, was even better. The Pearl Button focuses on the Patagonian archipelago and the indigenous tribes who lived alongside the water. It lulls the viewer into a false sense of security with beautiful natural footage, before introducing the oppression that befell them, then following on by discussing Pinochet’s dictatorship and the plight of the desaparecidos and their families. The film is powerful, moving and emotionally charged, and also has space and stars running through it, in reference to Chile’s astronomy programme. Embrace of the Serpent similarly benefited from the spectacular scenery of its Latin American setting, intertwining the history of the people of the Amazon with the story of one man, the explorer and scholar Theo von Martius.

Fire At Sea brought together individual and collective storytelling to explore the impact of the ongoing refugee crisis on the remote Italian island of Lampedusa, focusing on friendship, family, childhood and growing up, as well as the plight of those attempting to cross the Mediterranean.

I absolutely loved Greek film Chevalier’s tense and absurd exploration of masculinity, set around a luxury boat and involving bizarre and pointless tests of one-upmanship. The scene where the underdog character dons a feather boa and unexpectedly breaks into Minnie Riperton’s Loving You in pitch-perfect falsetto was my favourite moment of any film this year. The Coen Brothers’ latest film, Hail, Caesar!, featuring a guest appearance from Herbert Marcuse in a modernist-loving communist secret circle, was also very camp and silly, and made me laugh more than any other film this year.

My favourite animated film was April and the Extraordinary World, a dystopian tale of a girl scientist and her talking cat stuck in a world suspended in the steam age.

I saw lots of documentaries in 2016 but particularly enjoyed In the Company of Joan, a documentary about the theatre director Joan Littlewood shown at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford. The film used interviews and talking heads to give a sense of Littlewood’s strong personality, and her links and friendships with figures ranging from the singer Ewan MacColl in the 1930s to young actors. The film explored Littlewood’s Marxist/communist political convictions, and her mission to take theatre out to the people by touring theatres in working-class industrial areas before setting up a permanent theatre in Stratford in the east end if London. One of the best things about the film was the wide range of activity it conveyed: Littlewood’s impact went far beyond theatre to include involvement in bombsites, fun palaces and avant-garde bubble cities.

Another documentary I enjoyed was Huw Wahl's Action Space, which focused on a 1970s collective who set up travelling inflatable play sculptures, believing in the power of art to educate, inspire and change the world.

I enjoyed Nick Jordan and Jacob Cartwright’s Last Acre, a short documentary about the alternative lifestyles of people living on the edge of the world in Barrow-in-Furness. I also enjoyed Clara Casian’s Bird Song – Stories from Pripyat, which revisited the scene of the nuclear disaster with new interviews and vintage film, plus an evocative and understated score from Dutch Uncles’ Robin Richards.

When We Were B-Boys succeeded in depicting not just the early 1980s breakdancing scene in Nottingham but friendship, resourcefulness, eccentricity and family ties – both by birth and those based around shared culture and community.

Television

If more television was like Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror I might watch far more of it. Like Rachel MacClean’s show at Home, Black Mirror is excruciatingly of the present-day; much of it is set in a future which could conceivably be just around the corner, creating a sense of unease and horror that stays with you.

Featuring six episodes, from the touching San Junipero to the pastel-hued suburbia of Nosedive, that could have each been a feature film in its own right, the series touched on big ethical questions and topics such as war, otherness, social inclusion/exclusion and punishment and retribution. The relatability of much of the narrative and its characters meant the twists were genuinely surprising.

Theatre

Beyond Caring at Home was one of the best pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen. Set in our precarious times, it brought to life the topical issues of zero hour, low-paid contracts and lack of workers’ rights. The small cast were completely convincing in their portrayals of power, desperation and frustration, and small moments of friendship and madness.

I took my dad to see Sunny Afternoon at Manchester Opera House as his fathers’ day present. The musical tells the story of the Kinks, telling tales of fraught family relationships and love stories yet portraying them as simple boys made good. Sometimes sweet and often hilarious, it’s a cautionary tale about the perils of fame.

Cycle rides

I’d long wanted to explore the Middlewood Way, an old railway line running through the green Cheshire countryside that is now a cycle route, having been past it on the train line between Manchester and the Peak District. I took the opportunity to cycle to Macclesfield along the Middlewood Way, getting on it in High Lane, where the outer reaches of Stockport meet the countryside. Although the trail itself is flat, it gives views of the surrounding hills, and quaint villages such as Bollington, as well as local landmark White Nancy in the distance. I cycled back along the Macclesfield Canal, a slightly more windy and muddy route, taking in aqueducts, boats, geese, goslings and ducklings, and offering views of another local folly, the Cage at Lyme Park.

Another old railway line, the Lymm line, gave a welcome traffic-free section of cycling to another Cheshire market town, Northwich, and its famous boat lift. The journey was full of thatched cottages and one of the most picturesque towns I’ve ever seen, Great Budworth, complete with sloping cobbled streets, a well, village churches, leaning houses, a library in a phone box and even a scarecrow competition featuring Tim Peaks in straw form!

Trips and walks

I visited some more British cities for the first time in 2016, including Nottingham, which feels and looks very much like a city of the north. A visit to Nottingham wouldn’t have been complete without a trip to Beeston to see Owen Jones’ vast, modernist Boots factory, but I also enjoyed walking around the city, from the tree-lined sweeping private streets of the Park, a centrally located community of mansions, to Nottingham University’s lakeside campus. I also went inside a Rough Trade record shop for the first time in several years, and found it to be a very different beast to the Rough Trades I visited as a teenager – far from the cramped, underground Rough Trade in Covent Garden, with layers of competing stickers on every surface, Rough Trade nowadays looks more like a lifestyle emporium, selling not just records but coffee, beer, books, DVDs and clothes, and even containing a novelty selfie booth.

Lincoln also felt like a city of the north, both in its geographical distance/isolation from the rest of the country, and in its cultural distance: it felt like stepping back in time several decades. Lincoln cathedral, with its Duncan Grant murals, is wondrous, and it’s pretty around the aptly-named Steep Hill area. However, my favourite thing about Lincoln is Imperial Teas, a purveyor of exotic and unusual loose leaf tea (I took home coconut tea, black tea blended with big flakes of coconut). It wasn’t cheap, but was worth it: Imperial Teas is the only tea shop I’ve been to that rivals my favourite place to buy loose leaf tea, J Atkinson in Lancaster.

Harlow new town was big, vast, traffic-filled and sprawling, like a more run-down, less glamorous and more spread out version of Coventry that was not kind to the pedestrian visitor. I was one of several visitors clutching a map of the public sculptures of Harlow, and saw a large number of sculptures in the centre, the highlight of which was William Mitchell’s Water Gardens fountains. Such was the scale of the town that I didn’t make it to any of the residential estates. I did, however, visit the outskirts of Harlow for architect Frederick Gibberd’s magical, enchanting, riverside garden. Soon after my visit the Twentieth Century Society ran a tour of Harlow by bike, which makes a lot more sense than attempting to see everything on foot.

Model village Silver End, a little island of modernism deep in the Essex countryside, was worth an afternoon’s wander around its estates of flat-rooved, Crittal-windowed houses. The bigger houses had seen much better days. Similarly, Bataville was planned uniformity for workers in Tilbury, a subtle hierarchy apparent in the semi-detached managers’ houses.

I continued my trips to the new campus universities of the 1960s by visiting the famous ziggurats of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, a landscaped campus that comes complete with its own broad and is full of sculptures.

I finally visited Hungarian architect Ernő Goldfinger’s modernist home at 2 Willow Road, Hampstead. Featuring the Goldfingers’ impressive collection of mid-twentieth century artworks (my favourites being Max Ernst’s painted pebbles), it was well worth the wait for a glamorous glimpse of artistic life in 1930s suburban Hampstead, as well giving an idea of Goldfinger’s interests and practice. Unusually for National Trust properties, the experience was surprisingly intimate and his house, which included a nursery and wooden toys, actually felt like a family home.

In complete contrast, I was absolutely fascinated by the Haven plotlands museum, based in the sole remaining plotlands house at Laindon, near Basildon. Intended as temporary holiday dwellings, whole communities and generations decamped from East London to Laindon in the war and lived for decades on small plots of land, growing fruit and vegetables, keeping chickens out the back and cycling to the train station for work. Eventually, the residents were moved out to the new town of Basildon in the late-1970s. The area was retained as a nature reserve, and the houses were allowed to return to nature. A 76-ear-old volunteer who was born and raised in a plotlands house gave a tour, and pointed out details such as the rag walls and rag rugs.

I loved exploring another old railway line in Lancaster, lined with wild raspberries and cherries, and seeing the river curve round dramatically at Crook O’Lune. Nearby is Halton, with its eco-friendly riverside co-housing development, and a mill co-operatively run as a creative space.

The long trek over to Ashington by train, bus and foot was rewarded by seeing the pitmen painters collection at Woodhorn, documenting everyday life, work and leisure in the north east.

I spent some time in 2016 exploring more of the British coastline, from Ravenglass and Grange-over-Sands up in the North West to Newbiggen-by-the-sea in the North East to the estuarine seasides of Southend-on-Sea and Canvey Island, which felt like part of London, with its sea walls with murals depicting natural life in the Thames estuary, as well as local legends Dr Feelgood.

I’d always thought Kent, and in particular Folkestone, was flat, but a walk up the Folkestone Downs made me realise how wrong I was. It took me years and years to get round to visiting, but now it’s one of my favourite places in Folkestone. Also in Kent, I enjoyed walking off into the marshes at Faversham creek.

Hastings is one of the few places on the south coast I could ever imagine living, and its appeal was increased by my discovery of a wooded, cliff-top country park. I spent a very satisfying two hours rambling to the suburban, nondescript village of Fairlight, past reservoirs and with a detour scrambling down a hillside for a brief for a onto a rocky, secluded, nudist beach.

However, my new favourite bit of coastline is between Seawick, Lee-over-Sands and Colne Point on the Essex coast. This open, marshy space is criss-crossed by creeks and accessed by small lanes from the village of St Osyth. It will appeal to anyone for whom Dungeness is too built-up, accessible and touristy. Home to yet another nudist beach, the sea creates large, oozing banks of muddy clay, and the beach is littered with bricks and broken up bits of old buildings. It floods regularly: one of the most recently built dwellings is a cork-covered space pod on stilts, which inspired my favourite piece of writing on architecture this year, by the Guardian's Rowan Moore.

Swims

Swimming in Southend felt like swimming in the Thames, with the traffic of the river going past. Another swim with a spectacular view was at Dovercourt, with its two antique lighthouses, overlooking the huge container boats and cranes of Harwich.

Also in Essex I swam in the muddy, seaweedy sea at Brightlingsea and next to the piped pop music and gaudy rides of the pier at Clacton, underneath an abandoned museum to pirate radio.

In the quiet Kent hop town of Faversham the lido seemed to be the busiest place, with its fake rapids and impromptu diving contest.

The sandy, shallow waters of Pickmere were a welcome break on the cycle ride to Northwich, but down the road I stumbled across my new favourite lido, the elegant, cold pool in the middle of wooded Marbury Park.

Indoors, I visited the shabby, eccentric, wiggle-shaped pool in the basement of Sunlight House, with its mural giving the impression of being on a retro cruiseliner, and pools in old mills/warehouses in Sackville Street and Broadstone Mill, Reddish.

Records

My favourite song of the year was Up to Anything by the Goon Sax, jangly indie-pop that I could just listen to over and over again all day.

Every time I heard Charles Bradley’s world-weary You Think I Don’t Know (But I Do) it made me stop and wonder where I’d heard it before – which I think is the idea. This sounds familiar both in its classic soul sound and the experiences behind it.

David Bowie kept on reinventing himself until the end: I kept hearing Blackstar on the radio and thinking it was by Scott Walker. With its stately, muted, strange, restrained vocal over ethereal, beating, synthy electronica, Blackstar also brings to mind Kid A, Radiohead’s foray into dance-pop.

Hope Sandoval, one of the greatest rock voices of the 1990s, teamed up with one of this decade’s most distinctive voices, Kurt Vile, for Let Me Get There. Sandoval’s smooth, sultry, sexy, frail otherworldliness is placed next to the rough and rasping, down to earth, countrified tones of Kurt Vile, and it works – like all good collaborations, each enhances the other. The swirling organ, tremolo guitar and woozy chord changes of the Warm Inventions makes Let Me Get There feel a little like an updated version of the romantic languor of Neil Young’s Harvest Moon which is, coincidentally, one of my favourite songs of all-time.

I also enjoyed the day-glo powerchord pop of Taco Cat’s I Hate the Weekend, a bratty sentiment I can definitely agree with, Scott and Charlene’s Wedding’s raw, rickety, straightforward, catchy, feel-good punk, and the bouncy, bleepy electronic fun of Go Ahead by Pillow Person.

Requiem by extraordinary Swedish six-piece psych-folk band Goat is a full-on, multi-layered collage of tribal drums, polyrhythms, field recordings, hand claps, reverb, nursery rhyme-esque melodies, flutes and twisty, spindly, bagpipe-esque guitar solos. It’s a complicated, messy noise, but it’s pop. One of the highlights is Union of Sun and Moon, with its chanting and deliberately untuneful (and thus life-affirming) recorder duet.

Whyte Horse’ Pop Or Not is sassy, full-bodied retro-pop in the vein of Broadcast. Highlights are Promise I Do and the French-language La Couleur Originelle.

I enjoyed the portentous, theatrical, flamboyant marching post-punk pop of Tim Presley’s the Wink – and one of its quieter moments, the Big Star-eque Morris.

Gigs

Meilyr Jones played the part of the pop star at Sounds From the Other City in Salford, hiding in and out of the nooks and crannies of beautiful St Philip’s Church.

Electric 50, an eclectic 50th anniversary tribute to Bob Dylan going electric at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, with highlights including Thick Richard, Vampire Dub and Vocal Harum, was a special birthday treat.

Manchester band Pins covered the Bunker in Salford in tinfoil and played Velvet Underground covers in a cage in a tribute to Warhol’s Factory: there was an illicit, underground and very arty feel about it.

Sitting on a tree stump in Range Road Community Garden in Whalley Range on a late spring/early summer’s night, eating home-made chilli, was a perfect venue for the avant-garde folk and country of Joshua Burkett, Crystalline Roses, John Collin and the Gamecock.

On the other hand, the Albert Hall always oversells its gigs, resulting in a venue that is horribly, stressfully crowded. Goat just about made it bearable, with two gold-caped singers jumping around like animals and tall feathered headdresses. With Grace Slick-esque singing, and the use of percussion such as agogo bells, they stay just the right side of prog.

Books

JD Taylor’s travelogue Island Story, an epic journey surveying the country and its inhabitants and trying to understand its political and cultural inclinations, made me want to set out on my bike (read my review for Manchester review of books here).

Nick Dunn’s Dark Matters: A Manifesto for the Nocturnal City, captured the distinct pleasures of urban walking in poetry and prose, rendering the familiar places of Greater Manchester remarkable and the ordinary extraordinary (read my interview with Nick here).

Owen Hatherley’s Ministry of Nostalgia brings together a series of critiques of the ways in which the aesthetics of the post-war period – or a certain nostalgia for it – influences twenty first century culture at a time of austerity. Hatherley shows how history is written to suit our own narratives, portraying Britishness as a powerful composite of imagery and symbols.

I expect I’m similar to many people in that hearing the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy for the first time as a teenager was an arresting, transformative moment that changed what I knew and felt about pop music. Paula Mejia’s Psychocandy is the latest in supremely nerdy series 33 and 1/3, in which writers take on seminal albums in academic detail. Mejia’s in-depth analysis of Psychocandy convincingly sets the scene for the album in the Reid brothers’ home town, bleak Scottish new town East Kilbride, eight miles outside Glasgow yet seemingly of another world, at the same time as drawing out the links between their wall of noise and pop precedents such as the Ronettes. It’s also interesting to read an American’s take on post-war reconstruction and rebuilding, and the political and economic context of Thatcherism and miners’ strikes.

Artist Tirzah Garwood’s autobiography Long Live Great Bardfield, republished by Persephone Books in 2016 more than 60 years after her death with a new introduction by her daughter Anne Ullmann and illustrated with photographs and etchings, is a weighty and satisfying read. Born in 1908 and brought up in an upper-middle-class family in genteel Eastbourne, it’s a glimpse into a different time, when middle-class women’s main role was to marry well. Often snobbish in her descriptions of those she meets, and strange and apparently naïve in some of the ways she looked at the world – for example, Garwood was keen to have children in order to stop the monthly inconveniences of menstruation – at other times Garwood writes about sex and relationships with a surprising frankness, even going as far as to liken the birth of her third child to orgasm. She also writes honestly and maturely about her husband, Eric Ravilious’ love affairs. The book is made poignant not just by Ravilious’ loss in a plane over Iceland in 1942, but by Garwood’s documentation of operations for recurrent breast cancer, from which she eventually died at the age of 43, leaving behind three young children. Though Garwood writes little about her practice as an artist in her own right – she was too busy being a wife, mother and lover – her autobiography places her at the heart of an artistic circle that included the Great Bardfield group of artists in Essex, as well as the friendship group based around Peggy Angus’ country cottage the Furlongs in East Sussex.

I also enjoyed Modern Futures, which brings together personal and creative engagements with modernist architecture and Jonathan Hoskins’ Own De Beauvoir!, a semi-fictional account of gentrification, protest, regeneration, creativity and untold histories in one small area of North East London (read my review for Manchester review of books here).

Radio

I enjoyed Bob Dickinson’s bewildering Three-sided Football on BBC 4, exploring the game’s Situationist roots as well as the teams that still play it today.

Katie Puckrik’s Power Pop on Radio 6 Music played lots of shiny, radio-friendly power-pop hits, playing some of my favourites at the same time as introducing me to lots of previously unknown bands.

The Shrieking Violet interviewed by Mark Reid

I was recently interviewed by playwright Mark Reid for his new project The Rudiment, which has the intention of interviewing a range of creative practitioners in depth. As I feel most contented and comfortable when walking and exploring, I took Mark for a walk along the River Mersey from East Didsbury to Stockport town centre, a route I often walk.

To read the interview, which discusses the practice of writing and interviewing, inspirations and motivations and my engagement with various creative projects, from Manchester Left Writers to Manchester School of Samba, visit http://therudiment.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/meandering-mersey-natalie-bradbury.html.

He’s Leaving Home: The Shrieking Violet Guide to Hearty Vegetarian Cooking On A Budget

I’ve written and designed a new, very limited-edition publication called He’s Leaving Home: The Shrieking Violet Guide to Hearty Vegetarian Cooking On A Budget. It’s a cookbook for my little brother, who recently left home for the first time, and aims to give ideas for cooking and eating for those who live and eat alone, using everyday ingredients.

The emphasis is on the classic, hearty, simple and solid - think potatoes, pulses, pasta, pies and spices - although unfortunately I've had to leave out anything containing mushrooms or sweet and savoury flavour combinations (both of which I love) as he hates them. The book's also lacking in curries as I felt it was too rich an area to do justice to in this volume ...

I was inspired by a remark that my brother (who really enjoys cooking) made a while ago that he would like to eat less meat and cook more vegetarian food, but lacked inspiration. For ages I planned and thought about writing down all the recipes I make on a regular basis as a birthday present for him. I spent the first few months of this year finally doing that, alongside compiling a list of store cupboard staples I always have in to make sure I am never in the position of having nothing to cook! I have no idea if he'll like or use it, but I find the idea of giving and receiving material goods for the sake of it quite problematic, and would much prefer to share and receive time, interest, ideas and experiences.

Writing it has also been quite a therapeutic and cathartic process. A few of the recipes were developed in collaboration with Daniel Fogarty (baked bean pie and peanut butter jam tarts), and he also introduced me to ground rice pie. I spent last year cooking and cooking and experimenting and experimenting and perfecting recipes, as I was so determined that if only I looked after myself well enough (and ate enough spinach!) I could make myself feel better.

Everything I cook is vegan, but I've purposefully called it 'vegetarian' and used generic words such as 'milk' and 'butter' rather than 'soya milk' and 'vegetable margarine' as I know how alarming some people find the idea of vegan cooking ...

Read online:

A paper copy can be found in Salford Zine Library at Nexus Art Cafe. It’s for my brother, but it’s also for anyone else for whom cooking for one is a chore rather than the pleasure it can and should be.

For optimum results, the recipes should be followed whilst listening to the song 'Bedsitter' from the Soft Cell album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, which I have come to regard as one of the high points of 20th century British culture.
BEDSITTER by Soft Cell from paulvernon on Vimeo.

Rotterdam (on living in cities)

Few people, I am sure, would describe Rotterdam as a city that is beautiful or picturesque. Interesting, yes, for its cultural scene and as an example of post-war rebuilding, but nice to look at – no, not really …

Unlike other Dutch cities such as, say, Utrecht, which could be an English cathedral city, on arrival the centre of Rotterdam appears unusually grey and faceless, and has the unrelenting, crammed-in bustle of a big city. It’s dominated by the architecture of corporate power in tower blocks muscling towards the sky. Rotterdam is one of the world’s largest ports, yet the canals and houseboats for which the Netherlands are usually known are less prominent in the layout of the city here. What is prominent are the large rivers that cross the city, particularly the wide Maas, which separates the northern side from the generally poorer southern side, accessible through an art deco tunnel. Like Manchester, there is a marked north-south divide, with many residents of the north seeing no reason to visit (or actively avoiding) the south. Unlike Manchester it is the south of Rotterdam that is perceived as being more run-down, crime-ridden and lacking in investment, although it also offers opportunities for cheaper living and creative spaces. The Dutch people I chatted to (all two of them) mentioned racism, and bureaucracy. They also complained about the high cost of renting and the expense of eating out.

Spend some time in Rotterdam, though, and some sorts of charms reveal themselves. It is the city’s striking multiculturalism, from the people on the streets to the profusion of cuisines evident in its cafes and ethnic grocery stores, which saves it from blandness. Unlike the current fashion for overpriced ‘street food’ in the UK – gourmet snacks sold at restaurant prices – this is street food in the true sense. In central Rotterdam, the air is filled with the smell of doughnuts, batter and Surinamese pastries, with snacks sold from inconspicuous carts. Surinamese cuisine is BIG here. Hailing from the former Dutch colony of Suriname in Central America, it’s very meaty, yet also has much to offer vegetarians, in the form of bread, lentils, spices and vegetables. Imagine a savoury-sweet cross between the spices of Indian cooking and Chinese flavours, textures, stickiness and crunchiness, that also somehow tastes like something you’ve never experienced before.

Rotterdam’s architecture and planning also feels genuinely mixed use, in the way that we can only dream of in many new developments in most English cities. The modernist central shopping area is rather attractive: in the centre, it seems normal to live above shops and the noise of children playing floats down from roof-top playgrounds. In contrast with our English city centres, which remain for the most part places to be passed through, brief stopping places for young, affluent, childless professionals on their trajectory out towards the suburbs or countryside, schools, churches, doctors and other amenities slot seamlessly into the commercial cityscape.

There’s also a sense of fun and inventiveness, perhaps because the city knows it’s not beautiful, and isn’t trying. The best example of this is in the cluster of cube houses, one of which is now a museum with disorientatingly sloping walls and the rest of which include residential dwellings, a hostel and even a laser quest experience.

Public art is abundant, from the big-name pop art and explanatory information boards of the centre to more commemorative and illustrative sculptures which blend into the landscaping in the housing developments of the suburbs. You could be forgiven for failing to notice it, but it contributes to an overall sense of pleasantness.

There may be little in the way of obvious parks or greenery, particularly in the central areas, but the inner residential district of Nieuwe Westen is picturesque, pretty even, a place where you get a sense of the Rotterdam that existed before the city was almost flattened by bombing during the war. Tall, bay fronted, early twentieth century apartment buildings line rows of gently sweeping tree-lined streets, separated by canals populated with swans and geese and crossed by small bridges. It’s idyllic by anybody’s standards. Although each doorway emerges from the pavement into almost impossibly vertiginous, rickety wooden stairs – which you can’t imagine attempting to navigate with a pushchair, let alone a wheelchair, decreased mobility or drunkenness – the paving slabs outside are punctuated with permanent, designed-in, numbered grids for playing hopscotch, and on-street play equipment. Living in such close proximity to your neighbours, noise travels easily from flat to flat. Luxuries such as baths, freezers and even ovens appear to be rare here, and kitchens are on the small side, but it’s compensated for by rooms that are full of light and space.

Also attractive is the city’s municipal brick modernism, particularly in the renovated, sand-coloured Spangen estate, an early example of deck access housing complete with decorative detail and in-built flower boxes. Built around manicured lawns, its centrepiece is a communal washhouse, now converted into contemporary art gallery A Tale of a Tub. It’s also heartening to swim in the warm waters of a restored 1930s pool, the airy Oostelijk Zwembad, where light filters through the glass bricks of an elegantly arched roof.

Reach out towards the edges of the city, and you discover that Rotterdam’s apparent lack of private or public garden space is compensated for, to some degree, by patchworks of holiday plots in areas set aside for weekend visiting. The network of neat, orderly sheds on the banks of canals constitute a city in miniature, a microcosm of Dutch society. Irrigated by waterways, each allotment-esque patch features a home-from-home, a retreat, with space for growing, relaxing or escaping. Something for the weekend. Somewhere for the weekend.

There’s a sense of freedom, too. Notable is the ease with which it’s possible to get around the city, with cars separated from bikes in their separate lanes. Cyclists have priority at roundabouts, and in the main both sides observe the rules of the road. There's still congestion, there's still speeding, cars which jump red lights and fail to stop at pedestrian crossings, but in general there's more politeness. With cycling such a part of life – everyone does it – anyone in Lycra or specialist clothing stands out. Cycling is a different thing here. In Rotterdam, cycling is not about speed, but for getting around. Rather than crouching over the handlebars of a racing bike, ready to be on the defensive, cycling is usually done sitting up and is an altogether more sedate affair: Dutch bikes are wide-framed, heavy, clunky. It’s also striking that children of all ages cross the city by themselves, wandering the streets in pairs or in groups, from an early age. I followed a young boy on a stunt bike, singing to himself and cycling with his arms outstretched, waving like an airplane. He blithely cycled around a motorway roundabout like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Rotterdam strikes me as a city for living in, in a way that makes you feel slightly wistful on your return to the UK. For me, the jewel in Rotterdam’s crown is undoubtedly its large street market, held several times a week and spilling out onto the streets surrounding a glitzy new market building by MDRDV. Whereas the indoor market, surrounded by apartments that face out from giant, lurid images of fruit into a curved atrium, sells artisan produce to those with money to burn, outside you can browse for necessities such as batteries, knock-down toothpaste and fresh produce at the same time as antiques and new shoes, flea-market style.
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This article is based on notes I wrote more than a year ago. I can't claim to know the city intimately, so this content may be wildly off-mark; my last visit to Rotterdam was in April 2015, but it's only now that I have felt well enough to form them into the article I was meaning to write for so long. Although my long-term partner at the time, Daniel Fogarty, moved to Rotterdam to study for a two-year MA at Piet Zwart Institute, it wasn't ever really a consideration that I would move too. I visited him there a couple of times, but whenever I returned to Manchester from Rotterdam it was a huge relief, as ultimately Manchester is where I belong, and where my life is (and, to be honest, it was a relief to be back on my road bike, racing down the A6 side-by-side with the traffic). Other than Dan, there was nothing for me, really, in Rotterdam, but I sometimes wonder whether I could have lived there, and there are certain elements of Rotterdam (particularly the street market) that I certainly wish could be replicated in Manchester.

A belated best of 2015 (and why it’s important)

At the end of 2015 I couldn’t help but feel that I’d lost a year of my life. I entered 2015 with fighting spirit, as it was an important year that I knew was going to be a big challenge. I was going to crack on and write up all the wonderful research I’d done about Pictures for Schools into my PhD thesis, to submit at the end of the year. I was going to write a book chapter about my Woman’s Outlook research, for an edited collection. All fun was going to be cancelled, as I was going to put my head down and knuckle down.

2015 didn’t work out like this, at all. After starting the year with more optimism than I had felt for a while, two weeks into January someone close to me confided that they’d been having some very dark thoughts, which made me feel sadder than I’d ever felt in my life. I advised and empathised, then bottled it up and tried to carry on. By spring, though, I’d become so consumed by worry it felt as if my brain wouldn’t work any more. Trying to read, think or write felt like paddling through treacle. I felt as if everything was going in slow motion, with the result that I became angry and frustrated, both with myself and with those close to me. Over a period of weeks that then turned into months, I woke every day and felt so overwhelmed I cried uncontrollably. I tried to get up and get on with the day but ended up going back to bed, and sleeping, as it seemed the only thing I could do. Gradually, I’d started to withdraw from a lot of the things I’d previously enjoyed doing – reading, listening to music, going to the cinema, writing. I felt like I was no longer producing anything, and was just existing in a state of limbo. Because I wasn’t creating, producing or achieving, it was as if I’d lost all sense of myself, who I was, what I did, and why.

On top of this, my partner and best friend of more than three years had decided, out of the blue, to move to Rotterdam to study, just 18-months after we had set up home together, and wouldn’t tell me if he was ever coming back. Over time, in his absence, I became more and more obsessed with a fantasy vision of our future together, with children and our own home, that made it increasingly impossible to live in the present and was starting to draw me into a dream world. I repeatedly told myself, even though a large part of me knew it was ridiculous, that if I was more creative, more imaginative, more intellectual, more productive, he wouldn’t have left, or that he would have at least had something to come back for. His family, and their kindness towards me, became a life-raft which I was clinging on to desperately, and I was terrified of what would happen if I set myself adrift and let go. In May, however, I decided I needed my life back. I couldn’t continue to wait around for someone who wasn’t prepared to commit to any kind of future with me. I also took official leave of my PhD.

Since then, I’ve removed the pressure on myself to be creative and productive and immersed myself in a series of experiences, visiting all sorts of places I’d long wanted to visit and doing lots of things for the first time I’d long wanted to do. I still might not have produced much in this time, but I’ve been living, doing something, thinking, learning, feeling stimulated, and I’m sure I’ll be able to draw on these experiences in the future. Oh, and I’ve also found a new partner, the type of person I always hoped to meet as a teenager, who shares my love of sixties and seventies American powerpop (as well as all sorts of other music, an enthusiasm for food, picnics, home-made recordings, postcards, hats, day trips, and a willingness to jump into bodies of cold water for an impromptu swim). We've made each other feel like teenagers again.

Towards the end of 2015, I had two long chats with friends about the act of writing, about the challenges it can present, and about their approaches to productivity. In different ways, they both told me that the most important thing is to produce something. Even if it seems inadequate, it’s a starting point, something to build upon and improve. This is the message I am taking into 2016. I have to keep doing something. I have to keep on creating, producing, writing, making, achieving something. I can’t let myself ground to a halt again like last year, because it’s always better to do something than to do nothing.

Looking back over 2015, there have been a lot of experiences, cultural and otherwise, I have enjoyed and in spite of everything I’ve still been out and found a lot of things that have inspired, encouraged and excited me. Here they are.

Art

The big art event of the year was the reopening of the Whitworth Art Gallery. I generally find Cornelia Parker – the headline artist for the reopening – a bit artistically vacuous, so I was surprised by how powerful and poignant I found the engulfing red environment of her ‘War Room’, softly carpeted from floor to ceiling with the wasted bits of paper which from which remembrance poppies are cut. For me, Bedwyr Williams’ more recent, space-inspired installation was more successful, with its offbeat, absurdist and slightly grotesque humour, scale and ethos. I was pleased by the return of Tuesday Talks to the Whitworth, and was delighted to be offered a complimentary glass of gin and tonic at the start of a talk by art historian and curator Lynda Morris. Morris focused on her friendship with the artists Gilbert and George as a young student in London, giving insights into not just the contemporary art and social world at that time, with its personalities, friendships, cliques and rivalries, but the experience of being a young woman in a city, society and profession that was undergoing rapid transformation and modernisation.

The undoubted art highlight of the year was Estonian composer Arvo Pärt's pairing with Gerhard Richter’s paintings at the Whitworth for the Manchester International Festival to create an immersive audiovisual experience that was both subtle and surprising. Members of the Estonian choir Vox Clamantis, and later local community choirs, came out of the crowd and joined together in harmony that filled the room with tightly controlled variations on loudness and quiet, and shades of lightness and dark.

2015 also included some strong shows at the region’s smaller galleries, including Castlefield Gallery, Holden Gallery, the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art and Untitled Gallery, reincarnated as Object/A. The International 3 has gone from strength to strength since its move to Salford, and Totaller, an installation of collaged ephemera a by a collective from Sheffield, was the most enjoyable show I’ve yet seen at Paper. After seeing her work over the years at Rogue Studios, it was great to see old and new pieces by Hilary Jack, on a large and small scale, come together in a solo show at Bury Art Museum.

Despite being ignorant of its existence for many years, I’ve now been to some good exhibitions and events at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Special Collections. I particularly enjoyed We Want People Who Can Draw, which used archival materials – including publications, photographs and posters – to explore the history of dissent in the British art school and its links with movements such as Situationism, feminism and street theatre.

Henry Moore Institute in Leeds remains my favourite gallery. At the start of a year I enjoyed a researcher-led gallery tour focused on newly unearthed archival material relating to the artist couple Trevor Tennant and Dorothy Annan, who were members of the Artists’ International Association and did a lot of post-war artworks for schools; the exhibition included lots of photos of their (now often lost, forgotten or destroyed) work in situ in public places. Towards the end of the year, Romanian artist Paul Neagu’s exhibition Palpable Sculpture pushed the boundaries of sculpture, incorporating edible and performative elements to create an impression of great fun.

Elsewhere in Leeds, I enjoyed questioning the concept of drawing and the form it can take at the Jerwood Drawing Prize at the Tetley. The British Art Show at Leeds Art Gallery was too expansive for a proper look, but it was good to encounter artists who were new to me as well as established names such as Bedwyr Williams, Ryan Gander, Linder, Will Holder, John Akomfrah and Laure Prouvost.

Many of the exhibitions I enjoyed most in 2015 were sculpture-based. One of the best shows of the year consisted the sculptures of Lynda Benglis, exploring form, femininity and feminism, at the excellent Hepworth in Wakefield. I also enjoyed Michael Dean’s solo show at Extra City in Antwerp, where small, rough sculptures filled the space, many strewn across the building at floor level, forcing visitors to renegotiate and renavigate the former industrial space, itself impressive in its size and scale. I also enjoyed Phyllida Barlow’s rough-hewn, large-scale transformation of Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, as well as Bernat Klein’s colourful, textural, almost sculptural textiles at Dovecot Studios.

The Grayson Perry exhibition at Turner Contemporary in Margate showed me an unexpected breadth to his work, encompassing not just his pots and tapestries, but detailed and imaginative drawings and films. It also gave an insight into his inspirations, including the suburban Essex of his upbringing, against which he reacted. Elsewhere in Kent, I enjoyed Eduardo Paolozzi’s collage-style, colourful and slightly surreal lithographs at the Beaney in Canterbury, which presented fascinating juxtapositions of imagery and a snapshot of popular culture and experience at the end of the post-war era.

After many years of wanting to visit the Merzbarn in Cumbria where Kurt Schwitters lived and worked in the late 1940s, I joined a coachload of artists from Manchester and Salford for a weekend in Elterwater coinciding with the anniversary of Schwitters’ birth. Magical seems a trite word, but we awoke in the woods to the sound of the loudest, richest and most varied dawn chorus I’ve ever heard. Later our hosts, Ian Hunter and Celia Larner of Littoral, led a celebratory procession incorporating a rambunctious rendition of Schwitters’ poem 'Ursonata'. Evenings were spent in the company of local musicians sharing food around a fire, and we couldn’t have been made to feel more welcome and encouraged to explore and share in the legacy of Schwitters’ life and work.

Manchester-based artist Lowri Evans’ performance 'I’m Glad You’re Here' was something special: it’s not everyday that you’re met off a train in cold, rainy Preston with a hug, presented with your favourite food and drink (pistachio nuts and Old Rosie in my case) and greeted by your favourite song blaring over the station tannoy (after much deliberation, I chose the Beach Boys’ 'Good Vibrations' – a choice which met with some approval from fellow passengers).

For Museums at Night, the Northern Quarter was filled with peripatetic street performers. New York Brass Band’s street corner rendition of Marvin Gaye’s 'Sexual Healing' didn’t just brighten my evening, but my entire week.

After being disappointed to miss it in previous years, I made a renewed effort to visit Stoke Ceramics Biennial this autumn. The vast, semi-derelict Spode site was a reminder of Stoke’s historic importance as a ceramics centre, as well its decline, but the exhibits themselves demonstrated the innovation and invention in forms and technique that is still going on today. The displays of graduate work were particularly impressive, and I also enjoyed Caroline Tattersall’s burbling clay geysers, along with Bruce McClean’s ongoing and unfinished series of pots and jugs, featuring scrawled and humorous observations about banalities such as food and showing his work in progress as an artist-in-residence.

I finished the year by going to see an exhibition of paintings and 3D constructions by Peter Lanyon at the Courtauld Gallery in London. Based on his experiences of gliding over the Cornish coast, they pushed the notion of landscape towards ‘airscapes’, depicting not just visual scenes but tracking movements through them in rich, dark blues and greens and swirling brush marks, engrossing the viewer in their colours, textures and mood.

The other painting exhibition I enjoyed most was a display of colourful paintings, drawings and prints by artists from the CoBrA movement, including lots of work by Karel Appel, at the Stedelijk Museum in Schiedam. As well as enjoying his images of birds, I thought Constant’s series La Guerre constituted some of the most powerful images of war I have seen.

Film 

Ever since I moved to Manchester, the Cornerhouse was a place of immeasurable importance to me, a home from home where I explored, indulged and nurtured a burgeoning love of film. In my first year in Manchester, one of the films which made the most impact on me, and sparked a passion for British film, was Powell and Pressburger’s gentle 'A Canterbury Tale', which was shown as a Sunday matinee classic film screening, and depicts a wartime England that is both shaped by its past but irrevocably changing. It seems fitting, then, that the last film I saw at the Cornerhouse was Powell and Pressburger’s 1951 epic 'The Tales of Hoffman'. By then, Powell and Pressburger had replaced black and white, everyday whimsy with lavish sets and costumes and full-on, unrelenting spectacle.

I felt privileged to be able to take part in the closing weekend for the Cornerhouse, as a performer with Manchester School in Samba, in Manchester-based artist Humberto Velez’s 'the Storming', a theatrical piece of performance art which led the public into the building one last time. The disco that followed, where I danced until I felt like I couldn’t stand up anymore and then danced some more, made me wonder why the Cornerhouse had never been turned into a nighclub before. It was an occasion of sadness, as the city said goodbye to an institution, but also of celebration, and as I wondered from floor to floor I bumped into familiar faces from different times and places, all of whom had turned out to say farewell to a building that had been far more than the sum of its parts and offered the city’s creatives a place for meeting, discussion, people watching and just observing the world go by.

I got out of the habit of regular cinema-going in 2015, and consequently missed out on a lot of the big releases of 2015. I did try to see Carol Morley’s 'The Falling' at Home, and was evacuated from the building soon after it had started, which was frustrating as the atmosphere the film created, conjuring the simmering tension and frustration caused by strictly observed rules and arbitrarily applied authority, must be familiar to anyone who has attended an all girls school and I was keen to see how the rest of the film turned out. I awoke on the most beautiful sunny morning on May 8 to the shock of the general election result. By the afternoon the weather had, like my mood, gone downhill. I couldn’t bear to be alone any longer, so cycled into Manchester. Dripping wet, I arrived at Home to see what was on, and found 'The Falling' in progress. I explained the situation to the cinema attendant, and they allowed me to sneak in with an hour of the film left to go. I must have seen nearly all of it now, but am still none the wiser about what happened.

I attended a special screening of 'Industrial Soundtrack for the Urban Decay', with Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire DJing afterwards to a room of awkward people who didn’t appear to know what to do with themselves. I’m pleased that two young film-makers have been inspired to make a documentary about industrial music, but it felt like a film made very much for the already initiated. The film did a good job of showing the economic, physical and social environments (and music scenes) that industrial music came out of, but frustratingly it was a bit of a whistlestop tour and by the end I still didn’t feel as aware as I would have liked of the key groups and songs of the genre.

I appreciate Iain Sinclair far more when he is in the company of film-maker Andrew Kotting, so I enjoyed their latest collaboration, 'By Our Selves', an impressionistic film about the poet John Clare and his escape and subsequent walk homewards to Northampton from an asylum in Epping Forest, which blended documentary and academic insights with disorienting dramatisation and tender cameos from Kotting’s daughter, Eden.

'Tangerines', an Estonian-Georgian film made a couple of years ago with an anti-war message, was the most extraordinarily powerful and moving film I saw in 2015. Despite its beauty, all the way through there was an ominous feeling that something horrific was going to happen, yet at no stage did the film become predictable. I went to see 'Tangerines' in the sumptuous surroundings of the recently reopened and refurbished Heaton Moor Savoy (the existence of a neighbourhood cinema was one of the reasons why I moved to Heaton Moor in 2014) as part of its regular Monday foray into ‘arts’ film. I also saw 'The Lobster' there, having really enjoyed Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ previous films. 'The Lobster', which presented a self-enclosed fantasy world with one foot in reality, was everything I would like Wes Anderson films to be – stylish, darkly funny, critical and thought-provoking, making you think about the world we live in now and the ways in which our relationships are formed.

At the Royal Northern College of Music, an organist provided a sufficiently creepy soundtrack for the old-fashioned horror of 'Nosferatu'.

‘I Like Dreaming’ was an evening of varied archive films for LGBT History Month presented at Central Library, depicting different areas and representations of LGBT life and culture, from the personal and the political to the social. The highlight was a documentary in which a deadpan and dapper David Hockney demonstrates his working methods and printing techniques. Also at Central Library was a night themed around the late writer and presenter Ray Gosling, featuring both explorations of British cities in his irreverent style, as well as more hard-hitting and critical films with a campaigning focus.

After the release of 'Pride' in 2014, it was good to see a different take on events in documentary 'Still the Enemy Within', which was shown at the King’s Arms, Salford and followed by a charged discussion led by trade unionists. I also enjoyed the documentary 'Forever Young', made by researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Centre for Youth Studies and screened as part of the always enjoyable Humanities in Public series, which drew together interviews with members of eight different generations who had been young in consecutive decades of the twentieth century. Asking what it is that makes young people tick, it highlighted both how our lives have changed, and what issues, concerns and pleasures remain constant in the lives of young people.

Theatre 

I first set foot inside the Cornerhouse’s shiny new replacement, Home, for a test performance of Salford-based Company Chameleon’s 'Beauty of the Beast', an exploration into masculinity through dance. It wasn’t at all the type of thing I would normally go to see, but I was amazed not just by the dancers’ athleticism but by the potential for expressiveness of the human body.

Similarly, I went to see Jamie XX and Olafur Eliasson’s Manchester International Festival collaboration 'Tree of Codes'. It was the first time I had been to Manchester Opera House, with its vertiginous seats and shabby grandeur, and it seemed an odd place to watch something so aesthetically modern. As an experience, 'Tree of Codes' was better than its constituent parts – at times the music was a little uninspiring, sounding like electronica-by-numbers, and there was a lot of filler between the livelier bits I did enjoy, which referenced gamelan and samba percussion. I have no idea what was going on in terms of narrative or plot – if, indeed there was meant to be any – but Eliasson’s visuals were absolutely beautiful and mesmerising to watch, and striking in their apparent simplicity.

Radio

I might have missed Brian Eno’s John Peel lecture on art and creativity had I not received a rare text from my brother telling me it was on and that it was something I should listen to. Afterwards, I found myself sending the link on to friends and family telling them they must hear it too. Eno’s Peel Lecture was something rare in our mainstream TV and radio nowadays: current, thoughtful, considerate, informed, opinionated and honest. Eno himself was warm and relatable without being distanced, preachy or dumbed-down: exactly the type of presenter, tone and content I’d like much more of.

I also enjoyed the Radio 4 documentary 'Wittgenstein’s Jet', which explored the life and work of Wittgenstein at the same time as attempting to recreate and test his patented, but unbuilt, design for a jet.

Talks/tours

Bristol Festival of the Future City was a stimulating combination of tours, speakers and discussions about cities, and different approaches to writing about place, from William H Whyte to Jane Jacobs and Iain Nairn. Among the highlights were a slightly shambolic coach tour in which Jonathan Meades remembered the Bristol of his childhood, and a later screening of selections of Meades’ hilarious and incisive work on cities and urbanism for TV – much of which you can’t imagine would be made today.

Gigs 

I went to see LoneLady a total of three times in 2015 – at Soup Kitchen, during Future Everything Festival, at Sways Bunker in Salford, a fittingly industrial setting, and at Gorilla. Each time it got better and better, as the band seemed to get more confident and relaxed. I also enjoyed the melodic punk energy of Sacred Paws at Soup Kitchen. The coolest performer I saw must have been Whyte Horses at Night & Day. Singing in a winsome French accent from behind a long fringe and flowing, hippyish clothes, she appeared to be channelling the anarchic, carnivalesque spirit of Os Mutantes. The glamour of Whyte Horses and her band was almost matched by Saint Etienne, who played against a backdrop of retro modernist films at Manchester’s refurbished Albert Hall, a venue that was more cosy and intimate than I expected. I went to Salford’s Sounds from the Other City festival for the first time in several years, on the strength of one song by Sauna Youth, but ended up being mesmerised – along with the rest of the audience, who were stunned into a rapt silence – by a set by Manchester’s mournful balladeer Irma Vep.

Another highlight was a trip to International Pop Overthrow festival in Liverpool to be reunited with my Greek friend Euripidis, who was playing with his Tragedies at the Cavern Pub. I first heard Euripidis and his Tragedies nine years ago at Barcelona's Primavera festival, when as an Erasmus student I was won over by Euripidis' swooning, piano-based songs combining girl group influences with indie-pop. I befriended Euripidis on Myspace, and then at his DJ nights, bonding over a shared love of music and British pop culture. For the Liverpool gig, the band was stripped right down to Euripidis and two Catalan friends, but he still managed to make catchy, perfect pop songs of love and regret.

I usually prefer informal gigs at small venues to large gigs, and I had the pleasure of watching Dublin’s Cian Nugent and local experimental guitarists Tom Settle and Jon Collin at a community garden in Whalley Range on one of those early, advance days which point the way towards spring. In mid-summer, Daniel Voigt, Jon Collin and Flamingo Creatures played out the remaining evening light in an evening gig at Chorlton Meadows, before drawing the assembled crowd together by firelight. I also enjoyed a grungy, folky house gig in the front room of a shared house in Withington by Grubs and King of Cats.

Many of the best gigs involve sitting on the floor drinking cups of tea and eating cake. Nexus Art Café provided the perfect venue for Calvin Johnson – although I was slightly embarrassed to be wearing a beret, and felt that the young, bohemian audience sitting in front of Johnson had probably changed little in style, appearance, dress or music taste from the audiences he played in front of in the 1980s.

For years and years and years I’ve wanted to go to Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, but never known what to see or who to go with. This was the year I finally went, to see veteran experimental group AMM, in a converted church. Combining conventional instruments such as a piano with a stripped down drum kit and transistor radios, it was unlike anything I had ever seen before or will see again. Astonishingly, I had never been to Manchester Jazz Festival before, and rectified that by seeing John Surman in the reading room of Central Library – there couldn’t be a more appropriate venue for the band’s elegant, autumnal string and wind textures – and a lunchtime concert by Norma Winstone's in St Ann’s Church.

By far the most fun gig of the year was WE and Onion Widow, hosted by the Exhibition Centre For the Life and Use of Books in a rambling event space above Fred's Ale House in Levenshulme. WE is the musical side-project of art project Pil and Galia Kollectiv. Part visually inventive performance art, incorporating costumes and mirrors, and part surf-rock meets catchy party-pop, WE reinvent well-known songs by replacing the word 'I' with 'WE', to entertaining and sometimes sinister effect. I was honoured to be invited to DJ between and after bands, on a makeshift pair of decks.

Finally, in September 2015 I celebrated my tenth anniversary of moving to Manchester. One of the first things I did when I arrived was join Manchester School of Samba, and the band celebrated their twentieth birthday in September with an ‘encontro’ at beautiful Sacred Trinity Church in Salford. As well as reaching out to and learning from other samba bands, who made the journey over from Chester, Macclesfield and Buxton, it was a chance to reunite former members from across the years and make a big noise together once again.

Records 

Low may have spent decades doing more or less the same thing, but it sure is a great thing that they do and I, for one, am very glad that they are still doing it. Ones and Sixes is up there with their best albums, combining the fragile desolation of Mimi Parker and Adam Sparhawk’s vocals, drums and guitar with a robust undercurrent of rock and even the occasional pop song. One of the singles from Ones and Sixes, ‘What Part of Me Don’t You Know’, often found its way into my head, and stayed, in 2015.

LoneLady’s Hinterland is tight pop music whose basslines, drum beats and sparse, insistent guitar melodies will make you just want to dance. It draws on the eighties, sure, but it also sounds completely of the here and now.

My favourite record of the year, however, was Six Songs by Trash Kit side project Sacred Paws, a record that managed to be both punk and pretty at the same time and whose gliding female vocals over taut guitar, drums and bass make me melt inside. The dancing colours of the sleeve, by Alexandra Humphreys (who designed the cover of the Shrieking Violet issue 22), make me love it even more.

Clubnights 

If I could have chosen any way to turn 28, it would have probably involved dancing and the Star and Garter. With perfect timing, I did turn 28 on the dancefloor at the Star and Garter, at a special edition of the clubnight Let’s Make This Precious with one of my long-time musical heroes, Kevin Rowland of Dexy’s, DJing. It wasn’t just the music he played – mostly soul, with a bit of reggae thrown in – that made the night so great, but the way that he played it. Rowland seemed genuinely delighted to be there. He danced, and even sang along, karaoke-style, into a mic, to the tracks he was playing.

I feel like my life has become poorer in some way since I stopped going out dancing regularly, so it was a pleasure to welcome back Underachievers Please Try Harder, which I’ve really missed since it wound down a few years ago, for a special one-off Hallowe’en event at the Museum of Science and Industry during Manchester Science Festival. There was one important addition – an adults-only ball-pool, full of indie legs a-flying – which meant that occasionally you had to dig your way out of balls to go and dance to your favourite song!

Books and literature 

Caitlin Davies’ Downstream: A History and Celebration of Swimming the River Thames is a thorough social history of swimming that blends extensive archival trawling with travel, exploration, interviews and in a couple of instances participation. It traces the story of swimming in one of the seemingly most unlikely of places, the river Thames, throughout history to the present day, and from its rural source through central, workaday London to the sea near Southend. The book does a particularly good job of bringing to life the champion swimmers and record attempters of yesteryear, male and female, conveying both their motivations and their obstinacy in overcoming physical, bureaucratic and meteorological hurdles. This book may well make you want to make plans to swim in the Thames immediately – and wonder why it’s not something people do all the time. It will also make you frustrated for all the outdoor swimming opportunities that have been lost in Britain over the years due to lack of upkeep or health and safety, from informal river swimming spots to floating lidos on the Thames.

I hardly ever make it to live literature events in Manchester, as all too often they are on a Wednesday night, which clashes with samba practice. I made an exception for The Real Story at Gullivers in the Northern Quarter to hear Stuart Maconie, a favourite broadcaster and travel writer of mine, read extracts from his books, old and new. Maconie was both insightful and hilarious, and his reminiscences about the letters page of the NME in particular were laugh-out-loud funny. I also loved local writer Kate Feld’s cautionary and evocative story of her schooldays and the blurring of teacher-student boundaries, which was structured around Revolver by the Beatles.

Thankfully, Fallowfield literary night Verbose is on a Monday night, meaning I got to enjoy a rerun of Re/Place, a Chorlton Arts Festival project which I missed the first time round. Four local writers read creative responses to real places and landmarks around Chorlton and Trafford, conjuring new mental pictures of places many of the audience would have known well, which continued to linger and unsettle long after the night was over.

I went to see blogging Huddersfield postman Kevin Boniface read once again at Marble during Chorlton Arts Festival, and found his succinct observations about the characters, places and experiences he encounters on his rounds as fresh, funny, poetic and poignant as ever.

Trips 

I spent my birthday high above the Calder Valley at pretty, cobbled village Hepstonstall and the dramatic wooded, hillside Hardcastle Crags. Heptonstall met with my approval by containing a village museum staffed by local eccentrics, which told stories of civil war, elaborate fraud, clogs and strange games; at least one pub well-stocked with real ale and cider; and the most picturesquely situated row of prefabs in Britain.

Despite being put off by the distance and the cost, I finally visited Portmeirion, accompanied by a big fan of cult TV series the Prisoner. I wasn’t prepared for quite how kitsch and colourful the town itself was, and the contrast with its scenic wooded, watery setting. 

I’d long wanted to visit Barrow-in-Furness, intrigued by its geographical isolation, islands and the way in which it had been shaped by the shipbuilding industry. On arrival, I couldn’t remember why I wanted to visit, and ended up being driven around in circles. Eventually, we drove across a bridge to one of the islands, where the terraces and industrial scenery of the main town, which is dominated by the huge BAE systems shed, changed abruptly in style to more spacious semi-detached housing and villas. It turned out this was Vickerstown, workers’ housing built by Vickers, one of the reasons I had wanted to visit.

After a trip to Sunderland – where I enjoyed a cliff-top walk past gnarled limestone formations – I made the pilgrimage to Peterlee, and picknicked by Victor Pasmore’s concrete, lakeside Apollo Pavilion on the hilariously named Sunny Blunts estate. I was pleased to see that the pavilion was well-populated by local youth, who were not just walking through it, but appeared to be holding meetings and even doing press-ups. True, the sunshine probably meant I saw Peterlee in its best light, but I was struck by how green and spacious it seemed, and the way in which the buildings interacted with the gently undulating landscape.

2015 was also the year I finally visited Coventry, to be overawed by the cathedral and see some 20th century murals in places such as the local Sainsbury’s, the exterior of a pub (William Mitchell) and a shopping centre (Gordon Cullen). Coventry felt to me far more like a northern European, than a British city, in its density and building style.

Inspired by the artists of Great Bardfield, many of whom were involved in the Pictures for Schools exhibitions, I visited chocolate-box pretty Saffron Walden and the small Fry Art Gallery, which houses a lot of the work of the Great Bardfield artists. If ever a place in England lived up to the idea foreign tourists have in their heads – narrow streets, thatched cottages, colourful houses, village greens, etc – this is it. I also finally visited Essex University, one of the purpose-built post-war campuses, which combines interlocking, colour-coded buildings linked with series of steps with wide plazas and open, landscaped grounds containing a lake and sculptures. I had long wanted to visit, not just to see the architecture, but because my parents went to many gigs there when they lived in Colchester. I went to see the Fall there when I was in my mum’s womb and apparently ‘went mad jumping about’ as my dad pogoed into her.

Shrewsbury, meanwhile, struck me as one of the greenest and most genteel cities in Britain. With a river running through the centre, it seemed to me to be a city built around parks, trees and green space.

Swims 

I’ve continued to seek out old, interesting and exciting swimming pools, from Bedminster’s small, friendly and slightly scruffy around the edges neighbourhood pool Bristol South Baths, to Bath’s spectacularly decadent Thermae spa complex, where the roof-top pool provided a place to contemplate the city’s skyline through the rain of a cold November day. I also got the train to Antwerp (en route to Rotterdam) to swim in a restored art deco pool in a multicultural area of the city, contemplated two huge, groovy, tiled poolside murals in Halifax’s modernist municipal pool, where interlinked patterns of fish, butterflies and dragonflies depict life below and on the surface of the water, and swam in a light-filled Olympic-size pool in Coventry. I also experienced the full luxury and relaxation of a Turkish Baths experience in Harrogate.

I also had two of the most bracing and invigorating wild swims I’ve ever had, in green, translucent, sparkling Cumbrian rivers, clambering over rocks to swim near the waterfall at Skelwith Bridge, and being driven over a mountain on high, narrow roads to swim in a gorge at Birks Bridge, near Duddon that was so atmospheric it was almost unreal. By contrast, the clear waters of Hatchmere, surrounded by the trees of Delamere forest, were positively balmy. 

At the other end of the spectrum, the strangest swim I had was at King's Cross Swimming Pond on a grey London day. Despite the incorporation of natural filtration and floating pondlife into the pool, the sensation of swimming in a the middle of a giant building site surrounded by new high-rise flats was difficult to escape.

Cycle rides 

I went on a series of cycle rides in the summer that I’d long wanted to do just to know it was possible. I’d long wanted to cycle through the Cheshire lanes, and decided Tatton Park would be a good place to aim for – along the Mersey, over a bridge to cross the border into Cheshire, through the jumble of estates on the outskirts of the city that are Northenden and Wythenshawe, through leafy Altrincham, and then finally along winding country roads that were much more hilly than I expected.

Many times when I’ve got the train to Rochdale and I’ve seen the canal passing through the fields that break up the former mill towns between Manchester and Rochdale, I’ve wanted to follow it to Rochdale. I finally got the chance one hot June day, following the regenerated canal through Ancoats and onwards through inner-city Manchester, over the M60, along back routes through towns and into the countryside, before coming off at Castleton onto busy roads. I was, kindly, offered a bottle of Lucozade by two men in a van stopped at traffic lights; they said I looked tired.

I’ve often cycled along the Ashton Canal to Ashton before, but long wanted to continue along one of the other canals it meets at Portland Basin. After struggling to pick up the canal, which was dwarfed by a large ASDA, I followed the Huddersfield Narrow Canal as far as Stalybridge.