Review: What If Women Ruled the World?, Manchester International Festival

Premiering in the week that North Korea claimed a successful intercontinental missile test, and the columnist Owen Jones sparked a social media row by suggesting the British people should present large-scale public resistance if the President of the United States visited the UK, What If Women Ruled the World? feels scarily prescient and necessary for an art performance.

Rather than a hackneyed invitation to smash the patriarchy – although the need to replace established hierarchies is, unsurprisingly, a recurrent theme – What If Women Ruled the World? uses a creative platform to imagine a situation in which humanity is forced to start anew, and to learn the lessons of the past (and the present).

Israeli artist Yael Bartana’s commission for Manchester International Festival takes the ambiguous end point of Stanley Kubrick’s classic film Dr Strangelove as its starting point, positing a female-led world in which women outnumber men ten to one and asking what would happen next if the slate was wiped clean and we could start again – with women in charge.

To start with, the piece has an air of amateur dramatics about it – think stick-on-moustaches, exaggerated accents, women in drag and ‘survival kits’ containing lipstick and nylons alongside sustenance and weapons – but the piece convincingly navigates between fact and storytelling, entertainment and debate, information and polemic. It’s both historically grounded and contemporary, incorporating possibly the first literary reference to ‘covfefe’, to knowing audience laughter.

What If Women Ruled the World? comes into its own when the five actors in the war room are brought together with five women who are real-life international experts in their fields, ranging from economics and development to archaeology and feminism. The women discuss major and recognisable challenges facing the world outside – from climate change, the threat of nuclear war, pandemics and the depletion of natural resources to ongoing conflict and systemised violence against women. Behind them the Doomsday Clock ticks away, offering archival glimpses into natural and manmade disasters, with both personal and global impacts, as a rapidly deteriorating post-bomb landscape is alluded to, building a very real sense of urgency.

What If Women Ruled the World? is an invitation to imagine things done differently, and to ask questions of our actions and priorities as individuals, as city dwellers, and as British, European and global citizens. It starts with a lighthearted premise, exploring serious issues with personality and humour, but it’s a simplistic title for a piece that suggests not just overthrowing the patriarchy, but our entire economic, social and political systems and fundamentally rethinking the way we relate to each other and to the planet. At a time when socialist ideas such as equitable taxation and economic redistribution are apparently back in vogue, much of the discussion captures the zeitgeist, but ultimately, it serves as a warning about bigger dangers such as the power of individuals and the cult of personality. It poses not just the titular question, but asks who should be allowed a seat at the table of power, whose knowledge and expertise we take on board, and what measures we need to take to ensure those voices are heard.

What If Women Ruled the World? is at Mayfield, Manchester, until Saturday 8 July as part of Manchester International Festival. To book visit http://mif.co.uk/mif17-events/what-if-women-ruled-the-world.

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 Manchester Bees documentary: Shrieking Violet interview

I enjoyed being interviewed for an excellent radio documentary about the history and presence of the bee symbol in Manchester, past and present, from the industrial revolution to co-operatives and co-operation to the annual Manchester Day Parade, by Salford University student Matthew Beckwith, alongside other Manchester writers, photographers and tour guides among others. Listen online:
 

Interview with Huw Wahl, director, To Hell With Culture (free screening at Federation House, Thursday May 1, 7pm)

From poet, novelist and critic to anarchist, educational theorist and co-founder of the ICA, Herbert Read was known as many different things at different times. From the First World War until his death in the late-1960s Read was responsible for a prolific outpouring of books and essays, with many of his ideas pervading the way art, culture and education were seen in relation to society after the Second World War. However, despite being a towering figure at the time, today Read is far from being a household name. A new film by Manchester-based filmmaker Huw Wahl, which premiered at the ICA earlier this month, offers a portrait of that re-presents some of Read's ideas and invites the viewer to consider what currency they might still have today.

While Read wrote on everything from child art and industrial design to existentialism and Jungian psychology, Wahl's film, entitled To Hell With Culture, takes as its starting point Read's 1941 essay of the same name, which launched a searing critique of an elitist notion of 'culture' as something which is rarified and separate from the rest of society. Another equally rousing assertion, 'to hell with the artist', derides the concept of an artist as a special person who stands above other types of workers. Read's message, says Wahl,  “seems quite complicated but can be very simple”: culture isn't something to be collected and set aside to be accessed in museums, but it's there everyday, as an integral part of life, and every person has the capacity for creativity.

It was Read's take on creativity, and the direct terms in which it was stated, which attracted Wahl to the essay. “'To hell with the artist' is a wonderful thing to say,” he says. “It's a very powerful statement. I liked that a very meek and mild man wrote a very strong essay about how culture should be something you shouldn't really have to talk about, saying 'it's just there'.” He adds: “One interviewee in the film said 'he writes very good English', and the the way he writes about creativity is very vibrant and direct. He allows contradictions in what he's saying, but there's also some kind of continuity. It's different from a lot of writing today. A lot of writing now is very embedded in the institution and critical theory, post-modernism, structuralism, etc, whereas Read's was a very modernist, vital, loving way of writing.”

More than seventy years after To Hell With Culture was written, the film presents Read's ideas in aesthetic form, as a visual essay which draws a line from modernism to the present-day. Wahl went back through Read's archives at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, which houses correspondence and manuscripts, and his library, which is now held at the University of Leeds where Read studied, to get closer to the man and his ideas. A shy, bookish figure emerges, who was completely absorbed in his work and avoided the limelight; very little footage of Read exists. “He was a poet so he knew how to communicate, which was probably a good thing as he wasn't a charismatic man by today's standards of mouthy celebrities,” explains Wahl. “Although he has a lovely presence on film, gentle and deeply thoughtful, he wouldn't have been on the Culture Show. He was lucky to be around at the time of men of letters.”

Although Wahl is a member of the Manchester-based Castles Built in Sand collective, which takes an anthropological approach to film-making and culture, To Hell With Culture is his first solo venture into full-length film-making. Wahl embarked on the film at the start of 2013, shortly after finishing an MA in photography at the University of Central Lancashire. As well as interviewing members of Read's family, including his son, the art critic Benedict Read, Wahl spoke with artists who were directly influenced by Read. Among these were Canadian artist Luis Jacob, as well as Wahl's father Ken Turner, a painter, performance artist and co-founder of radical environmental art collective Action Space, which took art out of the gallery and into everyday life; Turner read and was inspired by Read's work in the 1950s.

Something else which comes across strongly in the film is Read's connection with the Yorkshire landscape, and his ideas about the authenticity of nature. “He was very patriotic as a Yorkshireman,” explains Wahl. “He was very rooted to that land and to nature.” The voices in the film are also punctuated by Read's poetry, including a reading by the Mersey Sound poet Brian Patten of 'My Company', a love poem about Read leading his company into battle at a young age during the First World War. “I've never really been into poetry,” admits Wahl, “but I really got it. I was really touched.”

Although Wahl acknowledges that “many of Read's ideas have been carried out”, and he by no means agrees with everything Read had to say, he believes To Hell With Culture can still pose important questions about the way culture and creativity are viewed in society today. “I was told that 10/15 years ago people would laugh at you if you started talking about Herbert Read, but now people are going back to modernism because they want something a bit more solid again,” he observes. “In some ways society is a lot more free but in other ways there are a lot of restrictions. Systems are a lot more closed now.”

At the time Read was writing, and in the years immediately following the Second World War, there was concern that craftsmanship and British culture was under threat from cheap, mass-produced items and imported cultural forms. Educators and critics placed a strong emphasis on fostering skills of 'discrimination', promoting sincerity and honesty in design and attempting to 'improve' public taste. “Read was talking about beauty,” summarises Wahl, and though this type of discourse can seem naïve, paternalistic even, today, post-modern society has seen the culmination of the idea of culture as commodity that Read cautioned against, with creativity recognised insofar as it can be packaged and sold back to us. “We live in a disposable, consumer culture where culture is dictated to us and everything we're surrounded by is ugly,” says Wahl. “There is still a sense that some people know better than others – we place some people on pedestals and say others are scum. Culture is controlled as a commodity and it's all about the free market and what can benefit the market. The artists who do well are those who have a brand or who can shock. It's the opposite of what creativity's about: it's not about being successful or competitive. There is something very basic and human about being creative but it's been corrupted by the idea that money is a good exchange for creativity. Read was saying that culture should be there within society and that a very different society can be created through education and art.”

Wahl considers the three tenets of a natural society Read identified in To Hell With Culture – all production should be for use and not for profit, each should give according to his ability and each receive according to his needs, and that the workers in each industry should collectively own and control that industry – to be “very simple and incredibly relevant”. He also finds the idea of everyone being a special kind of artist to be “still such a strong and important thing to say”, and has been encountering present-day parallels in Ken Robinson's ideas that creativity is “something that is there to work on and something everyone should be given the opportunity for”.

To Hell With Culture has been kept deliberately short – it clocks in at just under an hour – so that space could be left for discussions afterwards where people can create their own conclusions and ideas. As Wahl says, the film is a way to “remember the person but take the ideas”. He explains: “Artists are always questioned about what they are trying to do and their purpose. It is useful for artists to think about what an artist is in society, what they do and what they might be aiming for.”

To Hell With Culture will be shown at Filmonik, 3rd Floor, Federation House, Balloon Street, Manchester, on Thursday May 1, 7pm for a 7.30pm start, free, followed by a Q&A with director Huw Wahl, art historian Danielle Child (who appears in the film) and Castlefield Gallery director Kwong Lee.

Keep an eye on Huw Wahl's blog for screenings around the country this year, as well as at Leeds International Film Festival.

Huw Wahl and art historian Dani Child are organising a screening and accompanying one-day symposium, 'To Hell with Culture? Re-examining the commodification of culture in contemporary capitalism', at Manchester School of Art on Thursday October 30 as an opportunity to discuss some of the ideas raised by the essay and the film further in a contemporary context.

Swandown DVD review

I was recently asked by the Cornerhouse if I would be interested in reviewing the DVD release of Swandown, which was one of my favourite films of last year (it premiered at the Cornerhouse as part of Abandon Normal Devices festival). As a big fan of both canals and director Andrew Kötting, I was happy to take up the chance to watch the film again.

Swandown review

In autumn 2011, writer Iain Sinclair and film-maker Andrew Kötting set off on a 160 mile voyage from the seaside town of Hastings, East Sussex, to inner-city Hackney in east London, site of the 2012 Olympics. Neither are strangers to the ripe themes of English coastal towns or epic journeys: Kötting previously directed the experimental coastal travelogue Gallivant, whilst Sinclair, who resides partly in Hackney, partly in St Leonards-on-Sea (next to Hastings), is perhaps best known for his book London Orbital, a pyschogeographic exploration of London's M25 motorway. What made the journey remarkable was that it was made by the two men in a cartoonishly oversized craft, a swan pedalo named Edith in honour of poet Edith Sitwell, liberated from Hastings' seashore-facing 'Swan Lake' in the name of 'releasing a trapped soul of the sea'. The resulting film, Swandown, is a dreamlike, fragmentary evocation of their unlikely, ambitious journey and the two men's friendship, as seen from 'silly little canals and creeks and horrible English muddy places' (Sinclair) in the closing light of an Indian summer.

The film-makers admit that Swandown is the 'black swan in the tradition of narrative cinema', and the film offers an impressionistic rather than linear depiction of their adventure. Jem Finer's ethereal score floats hazily over the film amid fragments of loosely connected archive film and voiceovers by Sinclair and Kötting musing on the mythology of the swan. The pair bob up and down, 'awash and reckless', on the English Channel (a journey that almost fails to start), glide up canals and rivers encountering fishermen, cows, dog walkers, paddlers and pleasure craft – the 'invisibles' not normally revealed in officially-sanctioned or popular imagery of the waterways – and, absurdly, get a lift up the River Thames on a tug. The film is a reminder of how much of a presence water is in the English landscape, from calm, bucolic rivers shaded by trees to the industrial waterscape of the Thames, a workaday, working river where boat traffic is overlooked by fast-flowing cars on the Dartford Bridge, and the ubiquitous inner-city canal confetti of bottles, cartons and balloons. Waterways are presented as being ripe for exploration, backwater viewing points into the secret lives of English towns and cities.

As Edith makes her way towards her destination, however, there is a growing sense of unease and a sense of the impending curtailment of physical and creative freedom. Not only are Sinclair and Kötting running out of time as Iain has to abandon Edith for the plane, a faster and more practical form of transport, needing to reach an appointment in America, but the journey is increasingly fraught with potential danger and obstacles, from health and safety to the tight security of the Olympic site, sealed off from canal craft by a vicious-looking fence. During the journey Sinclair expresses the hopelessness he feels when contemplating the huge enclosures of the Olympic site and, indeed, the whole project is positioned as an antidote to the pomp and excess of the Olympics. Hauling the pedalo up riverbanks and over muddy fields, spending a whole month in the same clothes and being able to wet themselves whenever they want to, an image of personal sacrifice akin to the more-celebrated figure of the marathon runner, Swandown is as much a spectacle of physical impossibility as the athletic feats which go on in crowd-lined sporting arenas.

Released in the year of the Olympics, as part of the so-called Cultural Olympiad, yet existing in a parallel universe to the competitive, corporate nature of the games, Swandown puts poetry back into the act of endurance, a timely, touching and irreverent acknowledgement that perseverance, as much as inspiration, is integral to the act of creativity – and vice versa.

To purchase the film on DVD visit www.cornerhouse.org/bookstore/product/swandown-film-dvd.

Photos copyright of Anonymous Bosch.

Interview with Castles Built in Sand, directors of Helpyourself Manchester (screening at Victoria Baths on Sunday May 5)

Helpyourself Manchester, a recent film telling the story of Manchester’s unsung DIY music promoters, will be screening at this year's Victoria Baths Fanzine Fair (Sunday May 5), accompanied by an exhibition of original fliers from gigs featured in the film. The documentary focuses on a group of friends who found new and creative means of organising and promoting gigs in the mid- to late years of the previous decade, featuring bands such as Burnst, Cat on Form, the Enablers and McWat. From living rooms to basements, the promoters shown in the film put exciting and unheard bands on not for financial reward, but because they loved the music. The film, which makes uses of animation, photography, interviews and archive footage in a cut-and-paste style appropriate to the subject matter, is the work of Castles Built in Sand, a Manchester-based documentary film collective working on a DIY, not-for-profit and copyleft basis. The Shrieking Violet spoke to Castles Built in Sand to find out more about how they formed as a group and their collaborative approach to film-making.

SV: Tell me a bit about Castles Built in Sand – who are you and how did you come together as a collective? 

CBIS: We are a group of visual anthropologists, artists and musicians. Paddy, Huw, Insa, Yas and Birgitta met through their studies (some of us did an MA of Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester). Simon joined us later.

SV: Why did you decide to start a film-making collective? 

CBIS: After our graduation we all wanted to continue making films and to improve our skills. That's why we decided to start working together as a collective – to share skills, equipment and to motivate each other.

SV: You've also collaborated with some of the participants in your films. What do you gain from working collaboratively, both within the collective and with other groups of people such as interviewees, that you don't get working alone? 

CBIS: Working collaboratively allows us to gain different perspectives on the topics we are working on. It also ensures that everyone feels engaged and represented. This is especially important for us in regards to the people we are working with. We want to ensure they feel like they had a say and are portrayed in a way that leaves them empowered. Filmmaking for us is a mutual process, a give and take and learning from each other.

SV: How does the filmmaking process work – how do you set the theme and direction of where your projects are going? Is every project a joint project, or are there some films where certain people take the lead based on their interests or choose to adopt a lesser role?

CBIS: If we work on a project together there is a lot of discussion involved. We are never quite sure what exactly a project will end up as, because of the collaborative approach, everyone has an input which means a project can change quite a bit in the process of making. For our next project we are going to define our roles a bit more, which will be an interesting new approach for us.

However, we are also not always all working together on a project. Sometimes some of us decide not to be engaged in a project due to time constraints or varying interests or because it doesn't make sense to have too many people involved.

SV: How do you choose your subjects? Is there anything that ties all your projects together, either thematically or in the approach taken to filmmaking? 

CBIS: Our projects are not necessary linked in any way, we choose them according to what we are interested in or think is an important topic to portray.

SV: How did Helpyourself Manchester come about? What's your involvement with that scene, why did the film need to be made and why make the film now – in retrospect? 

CBIS: The idea to make a film about Helpyourself Manchester and this part of Manchester's DIY scene came out of conversations Paddy had with Lee, one of our friends who was involved with Helpyourself Manchester. Huw was around for the last few gigs, whereas Insa and Paddy came to Manchester in 2009, a few years after Helpyourself. We wanted to look at the way people had used space in Manchester to organise culture outside of the mainstream. With all the government cuts and the current debates about gentrification it seemed like a topic that is actually quite timeless and important to discuss.

SV: How did you go about making the film and how long did it take? 

CBIS: From start to finish it took us about one and a half years to complete the film. We collected material on the way, interviewed our friends and tried to get as much info as possible. Then we edited separate sequences which we thought should be in the film and which we joined up eventually. Once we had a first watchable version of the fllm (which at the time was about two hours long) we showed it to the people who we had filmed and to friends who hadn't heard about Helpyourself Manchester before. These sessions provided us with a lot of different opinions as to what would work and what wouldn't and suggestions for changes. In the end we cut the film down to 54 minutes.

SV: Your projects seem to have a political dimension running through them to do with power, voice and representation. Do you consciously try to make films from that perspective?

CBIS: It's less a conscious choice to make films which might be considered political, but it rather comes out of our interests and ways of looking at the things going on around us. So it happens naturally rather than us trying to provide a political stance.

SV: Whether focusing on DIY promoters, the residents of a temporary care home, protestors or young people affected by cuts to education, your films quite often depict the type of subjects and people that might not normally have a film made about them. What do the subjects get out of being part of the filmmaking process – and what do we get out of it as viewers? 

CBIS: It is important to show what wouldn't be shown otherwise and to make people conscious of what is going on around them. Film, photography and sound are powerful tools which offer people outside the media focus a way to express themselves. The collaborative way in which we are working hopefully leaves the people we are working with with a feeling of actually having had a possibility to say what they wanted to say.

SV: You've collaborated with bands like Levenshulme Bicycle Orchestra and Tubers in the past; can you explain the importance of sound in your work?

CBIS: Sound lets us see things differently. When the sound is good, the images seem more powerful and engaging.

SV: There is also a really strong sense of place in your films. How would you describe your approach to representing and describing place? 

CBIS: We try to engage with the place or space we portray – you could almost say we let it speak to us. Using different media is very important for this approach. We don't confine ourselves to one medium but use whatever medium we think best conveys a sense of the place. That's where sound is also very important – if we listen we discover different aspects of what contributes to our notion of a place.

SV: Your webpage has quite a few texts as well as films, which seem to stand together – what is the relationship between the texts and the films, and do you find it to be a useful process to write about the processes of making and conceiving films?

CBIS: What we tend to forget is that each medium has its own qualities and its own place in the context of representing a topic. We try to use different methods and media depending on their usefulness to portray a topic as complete and from as many perspectives as possible. Film can't express or explain everything but it gives a good sense of place and people's personalities. Sound lets us experience place from another standpoint. And texts can help us putting everything into a greater context or to deconstruct the images we present. It is important to question different methods of representation and using mixed media allows us to bear the construction of these representations in mind.

SV: What are you working on at the moment and what are you planning to do next? 

CBIS: We have just started working on a trailer for our next project, which will be an apocalyptic photo essay film. This should keep us busy for a while.

SV: Where can people see your work? 

CBIS: We have a blog which we update as regularly as possible. There you can also find a list of upcoming screenings, the next one being Helpyourself Manchester at Victoria Baths on 5 May, as part of the Victoria Baths Fanzine Fair (12-14pm).

Helpyourself Manchester trailer:

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Things I enjoyed in 2012

Music 

Big Star Third, Barbican, London 

Big Star are my favourite ever band, and I have my dad to thank for getting me into them when I was a teenager. Whilst I love individual songs on #1 Record and Radio City, for me their final album Third/Sister Lovers works best as a complete piece of work, with its surprise mix of rocking pop songs, strange, otherworldly clanging and heart wrenching string and horn arrangements – it's one of those records I used to spend hours listening to in the dark trying to work out how the arrangements fitted together and how all the sounds the record were achieved. In 2008, my dad offered to take me to see their singer, Alex Chilton, at Shepherd's Bush Empire, but I decided to move house that weekend instead. I came to regret this a lot, as Chilton died a year and a half later at the age of 59, of a heart attack, so I never got to see him. When I heard about an event at the Barbican with a guest cast of musicians playing Big Star's third album in its entirety with the original string and horn arrangements, a few weeks after my dad's 50th birthday, therefore, it seemed like the perfect present. We decided to make a day of it in London, but my dad was in an unbelievably grumpy mood and barely spoke to me all day, and I was worried the gig wasn't going to interest him either. I've never seen someone perk up so suddenly, though. The revolving cast of musicians from bands like REM, Yo La Tengo and Teenage Fanclub really worked (with the exception of John Bramwell from I Am Kloot, whose nasal whining was completely out of place) and my dad was on the edge of his seat throughout the gig, smiling broadly – not least when Ray Davies was brought out as a surprise guest to rock the stage at the end. The Barbican concert hall is beautiful too – all wooden inside with really clear acoustics.

Chain and the Gang, Kraak Gallery, Manchester

I went to this gig as all girl punk band Trash Kit, one of my favourite bands of recent years, were on the bill, not knowing anything about headline band Chain and the Gang. In between bands, my friend excitably said 'There's Ian Svenonius, shall we go and have our photo taken with him?', to which I replied 'Who's that?'. Turns out Chain and the Gang singer Ian Svenius is a bit of an indie hero, having played in several cult bands over the years. It suddenly made sense why the audience was noticeably older than the usual crowd at this type of gig, and John Robb jumped up on stage to introduce them (possibly the only time I have ever been at the same gig as John Robb). Whilst Chain and the Gang are indisputably punk rock, their music is classy, stylish, musically slick and, most of all, fun, with front man Svenonius and front woman Katie Alice Greer dancing around the stage and playing off one other. 

Evan Dando and Juliana Hatfield , Academy 2, Manchester

No surprises here – Dando and Hatfield duetted on classic Lemonheads tracks and took it in turn to play their own songs – except I'd never realised what a strong singer, guitarist and songwriter Hatfield is in her own right.

Trust Fund/Two White Cranes, my garden, Manchester

The last gig I'll ever have in my canal-side garden (I'm moving house soon) was a good one: Roxy Brennan, formerly of the Mountain Parade, writes sweet, simple folk songs as Two White Cranes, whilst Ellis Jones, formerly of the Bumblebees, sings falsetto over a Casio keyboard and sparse guitar under the name Trust Fund.

Dan Deacon, Islington Mill, Salford 

I maintain that Dan Deacon provides the most fun you can have at a gig – including dance-offs, a strobe light app for iPhones and making the audience create a tunnel with their hands then run through it to come out outside the building and then do the same again to go back inside. The music – euphoric dance – isn't bad either.

ATP, Minehead

I admit the appeal of ATP isn't really about the music – watching bands is always going to come second to wandering around charity shops, and exploring up and down hills and along the beaches in Minehead itself, interspersed with trips to Butlins' cinema and wave pool, but it was also great to see Minutemen, Young Marble Giants and Apples in Stereo, who were as fun as I'd hoped they would be. 

Wake Up Dead, Wim Wams, Irma Vep, the Hipshakes, Hotspur House, Manchester 

Top floor punk party with a view over the rooftops and train tracks of Manchester, in one of my favourite spaces in the city.

Honourable mentions go also to Francois and the Atlas Mountains, Rozi Plain and Being There, all at the Castle in Manchester.

Art 

Jane and Louise Wilson, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester 

The best exhibition I've seen in Manchester in a while, Jane and Louise Wilson's photos, videos and sculptural installations show both the human and environmental impact of the Chernobyl disaster (and, elsewhere in the exhibition, recreate the scene of the murder of a Dubai businessman), in an exhibition that exposes the limits of human planning, surveillance and control. Read my review of the exhibition for Corridor8 here.

Martin Creed, All the Bells

Martin Creed's Work No 1197, a mass artwork which involved trying to get all the bells in the country to ring as loudly and quickly as possible for three minutes as a wake-up call heralding the start of the Olympics, was definitely the event I was most looking forward to during the Olympic year – although I found it frustratingly hard to find other people who shared my enthusiasm for getting up at 8.12am to make a noise. Other towns, villages and cities had organised All the Bells events; Manchester had none, and I had visions of being reduced to standing outside ringing my doorbell by myself for three minutes. However, I borrowed an agogô bell from the samba band I play with just in case, and at the last minute joined up with Alison Kershaw to ring some bells at St Luke's art project in the Longsight suburb of Manchester. St Luke's is based in a modern church on busy Stockport Road – one of the main roads into Manchester – and, it turns out, the church does not have physical bells but uses old cassette recordings of peals which are blasted out ahead of services and events. Calls to worship are on one side of the tape, weddings and funerals on the other; the church would be stuck if it lost the tape, said Alison! Alison had downloaded the special ringtone Martin Creed had created for the event (I couldn't, as it was only available for smartphones), and we stood, smiles on faces, banging away outside the church, church bells ringing in the background, as local residents came to their doors and windows in bewilderment. Admittedly, these were the only bells we we heard in Manchester, and some wags started the Twitter hashtag '#noneofthebells'.

Mark Leckey, Manchester Art Gallery

For this show, Leckey faced off a huge speaker stack against a giant, metallic piece of industrial machinery formerly used in a factory. On the opening night, Leckey's DJing made the room reverberate with sheer, bone-shaking noise, contrasting with the monumental solemnity of the two pieces of redundant equipment during usual exhibition hours, facing each other in silence, and the frantic activity of his youth culture film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore.

Victoria Lucas, Untitled Gallery, Manchester

The best use of birds in an art gallery since Birds on Guitars (the Barbican, 2010), this simple yet lovely installation transformed tiny Untitled Gallery into an aviary by projecting a film of the gallery, temporarily populated by small, brightly coloured birds, onto the back wall, placing the viewer in a mirror image of the space. Watching the birds fly around the room was strangely captivating in itself, but what really made the film was the accidental presence of a strange figure (supposedly a bird expert) wandering in and out of the frame, failing over and over again to catch the birds with his hands and line them up on a low wire strung across the gallery.

Seven Sites, various locations, Manchester/Salford

Laura Mansfield and Swen Steinhauser's series of artistic interventions into everyday sites across the two cities, from a church to a curry house.

Hans Haacke, Reina Sofia, Madrid 

Fun but thought-provoking installations that make you look again at the art world and art's relationship with power, money and prestige.

Tracy Emin, Turner Contemporary, Margate 

I went to this exhibition expecting to be underwhelmed, but found Emin's personal, confessional drawings on the subject of sex, and her self-portraits, moving and affecting. It's rarely that I feel I can relate to a feminine topic, writer or artist just on the basis that I am a woman and am therefore supposed to have some kind of shared, woman-specific outlook on life, but I did feel a connection with Emin's work and experiences. She may not be the most subtle of artists, but I also thought her tapestries were really quite beautiful. We were there on the opening weekend, when the artist herself was wondering the building amid the crowds gathered to see this solo show in her home-town.

Michael Dean, Henry Moore Institute Leeds

One of several exhibitions I saw in Leeds in 2012, and Henry Moore Institute is another small gallery whose exhibitions always impress. Michael Dean fundamentally transformed the visitor experience, from creating sculptural door handles to carpeting the gallery's floor spaces, placing gallery assistants on the floor and filling the space with huge, tactile objects, some of which were so large they had to be made in situ.

The Humble Market, FACT, Liverpool

Part of Abandon Normal Devices festival, Brazilian/UK theatre collective Zecora Ura led viewers on a group tour through several scenarios, forcing the viewer to reevaulate their relationship to the artworks, as well their relationship with other members of the audience.

I've also really enjoyed all the exhibitions I've seen at Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, which I feel really punches above its size. The venues impressed more than much of the art at Liverpool Biennial this year – with the exception of John Akomfrah's video installation The Unfinished Conversation at the Bluecoat, which refracted memories through snippets of archive film to explore the ideas and life of Stuart Hall. In a rare (at least in my experience) occurrence for a gallery, members of the public sat still for forty odd minutes to watch the film in its entirety instead of hovering uncertainly at the back or wandering in and out. In Manchester, I enjoyed small solo shows by Daniel Fogarty and Mary Griffiths at Bureau Gallery.

Books 

Whilst neither of these books were published in 2012 (or, indeed, recently), they are both among the best books I have ever read and had me engrossed during 2012.

Waterlog, Roger Deakin 

The type of book you wish you could carry with you all the time for inspiration, guidance and a bit of comfort on bad days, Deakin uses a uniquely beautiful turn of words as he swims his way around the country's waterways, evoking the sense of freedom, excitement and spontaneity that swimming al fresco brings.

Our Band Could Be Your Life, Michael Azzerad

I wish I'd read this book, about the bands, record labels and publications that spread the DIY spirit across America, ten years ago: it should be compulsory reading for anyone with ambitions for forming a band, putting gigs on or releasing records (skip the Mudhoney chapter, but the Minor Threat, Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Fugazi and Beat Happening chapters are particularly inspiring amidst the fights, drugs and decadence).

Film 

Lawrence of Belgravia 

One of the most honest and least contrived 'rockumentaries' I've ever seen, Lawrence of Belgravia follows Felt/Go-Kart Mozart frontman Lawrence over a period of years in a warts and all, fly on the wall journey into the life of a pop star. Sometimes frustrating but mainly just heartwarming, the film makes you cross your fingers for Lawrence to get his big break, snag Kate Moss, and become an indie superstar. If anyone deserves it, he does.

Make Your Own Damn Art 

A documentary following the life and work of artist Bob and Roberta Smith. I found Smith's ethos, attitude and approach to making art refreshing and inspiring. From creating a gallery in his garden shed (anyone can make a gallery, he suggests) to selling affordable artworks at art car boot fairs and playing in a middle aged punk rock band, if Smith had a manifesto it would be 'Make your own damn art: don't expect me to make it for you', something which resonates with the Shrieking Violet. It's an important message for anyone who's ever wanted to make an artwork, a piece of music or even a zine but not known where to begin, so never quite got round to it.

Utopia London 

Utopia London pays homage to twentieth century town planning and the city in which its director, Tom Cordell, grew up. Comprising interviews with some of the key architects in the rebuilding of a city left ravaged by the Second World War, the film shows the ideals and aspirations of those behind the Modernist movement, demonstrating how they aimed to build a better, more equal world by fusing design with artistic and scientific innovation. Many of the architects are now in their eighties, yet still full of spirit and idealism, and some of the film's most moving movements are when they are taken back to the sites of their buildings to see how they fared. Utopia London is thought-provoking, inspiring and uplifting: a must-see for anyone who has ever looked around and wondered: how did our towns and cities get to be the way they are?

Bata-ville: we are not afraid of the future

On the list of things I want to achieve before I die is making a documentary film. Bata-ville, in which a coach full of (mostly elderly) former employees of paternalistic shoe company Bata is taken by two lively artists on a pilgrimage from Bata's now defunct factory in East Tilbury to the company's Moravian hometown, is surreal, funny and subversive in its attitude towards history and the meaning of memories. Bata-ville is the type of film I would love to be able to call my own.

Swandown

Whilst I find Iain Sinclair's writing difficult to read, he made for good entertainment in this travelogue with a difference. Swandown follows Sinclair and Andrew Kötting (director of the wonderful, poignant coastal odyssey Gallivant) on an unlikely, intrepid adventure by swan pedalo, which begins with the pair bobbing up and down on the sea off Hastings and culminates inland in the waterways of London, with plenty of laughs along the way as well as opportunities for reflection.

Nostalgia for the Light

Beautifully filmed and soundtracked yet devastatingly sad documentary which intertwines the wonders of Chile's observatory centre in the Atacama desert with the search by groups of women for the remains of loved ones missing, presumed dead, under the Pinochet regime. Nostalgia for the Light captures the grandeur, emptiness and openendedness of both the landscape and human existence, in which there sometimes are no answers, only mysteries.

TV 

I know he's a nasty man, but Michael Portillo is still my favourite TV present (his genial nature and colourful outfits make me smile), so I was pleased that the year started with another series of Great British Railway Journeys and ended with a new spin on the concept, Great Continental Railway Journeys, which saw the episodes extended into hour-long explorations of various European destinations.

Also worth a mention is the Jeremy Deller Culture Show special (for roughly the same reasons I enjoyed the Bob and Roberta Smith film).

Theatre

The Royal Exchange never disappoints, and the costumes and music are always particularly impressive. I saw a swinging production of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and a tense take on Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending there.

Radio 

2012 was the year in which I finally started listening to 99% Invisible's short podcasts on architecture, urbanism and design; recent highlights have included instalments on Buckminster Fuller, Kowloon Walled City and dazzle ships. As well as covering diverse subjects in a diverse, engaging way, Roman Mars has my favourite voice on the radio.