Dave Haslam: From Engels to Elbow: The History of Manchester Being Heard at Manchester Histories Festival Saturday March 21

The highlight of the absurdly overcrowded Manchester Histories Festival at the weekend - apart from being inside the Town Hall, amidst its nooks and crannies, mosaics, stained glass windows and Ford Madox Brown murals - was a talk by the former Hacienda DJ, XFM presenter, lecturer and writer Dave Haslam, based on his book Manchester, England.

I haven’t read the book - which Haslam describes as a “biography” of the city, Manchester in his mind being akin to a person with its own “psyche” and “personality traits” - but I’d like to.

Haslam describes Manchester as a “hybrid city”, its population constantly changing and absorbing immigrants throughout the centuries, from those seeking work and better life during the industrial revolution to the annual influx of students. Haslam himself moved to Manchester relatively late, but exudes a love of the city.

The most important of Manchester’s character traits, says Haslam, is its famed “self-assertiveness”. This can be seen in its history of producing radical thinkers, social movements and, in the latter half of the twentieth century, popular culture that has spoken out as a voice for change.

Perhaps because of its second city status, Haslam suggests Manchester has always attracted the ‘other’, been a "location for the alternative", and it’s this sense of “distance and difference”, its autonomy from London and the fact that it’s a long way from the locus of political power and the media centre, that allows countercultures to thrive. That’s why Manchester has historically had a strong DIY element - you make your own entertainment.

Although the talk is wittily entitled ‘From Engels to Elbow’, this seems to be mainly an alliterative device as Engels is more dwelled upon than Elbow. Haslam has a knack for catchy sound bites, also helpfully reducing the theme of his lecture to the link between "chart hits and Chartists".

For Haslam, "pop culture is a necessity”. The fact the talk takes place in the council chamber of the town hall, underneath the Manchester coat of arms and Concilio et Labore motto, shows how much pop culture has become part of the establishment. Haslam is trying to ensure pop sociology is accorded the same importance as what we normally think of as worthy of inclusion in the history books.

His talk draws the not often made link between Victorian Manchester and the music scene that culminated in Madchester which, it seems, are more similar than you might think. He tells us Victorians “lived their lives on the streets”, debating on street corners, pamphleteering and registering protest through strikes. Victorian Manchester was “awash with ideas”.

Reading out Engels’s description of a hedonistic Saturday night on the streets of Manchester, Haslam notes that the excesses of today’s Saturday nights wouldn’t have been out of place in Victorian times - it seems the Victorians, too, were 24 hour party people. Surprisingly, Haslam considers that the Victorians would have valued nightclubs as a place for “interaction”, as opposed to our society’s “retreat into the private realm”.

Manchester was a birthplace of the punk movement, which Haslam sums up as the “desire to be heard”. We need rebel yells, he says, because “the alternative to being heard is silence”. Haslam isn’t so much claiming that Manchester is an inherently musical city, though, with sounds rising spontaneously from its city fabric, more that the famous art it came to be associated with arose out of its many problems. From the overcrowding of Ancoats to the failed Utopianism of the Hulme crescents, out of alienation came creativity. To Haslam, pop music is so important because it allowed the unlikely alliance of “arty weirdo types and tough kids” .

Often, those whose art has become associated with Manchester and Salford wrote as a criticism, from the authors Anthony Burgess and Elizabeth Gaskell - whose novel Mary Barton is an expose of the conditions of the working classes - to the sparse music of Magazine. Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 play Taste of Honey, which on its release was the subject of front page outrage at its honest depiction of Salford life, is cast as a precursor to punk rock with its "no barriers", “back to basics" depiction of reality.

Some of the audience react with shock when Haslam compares the formation of Factory Records to the foundation of the Anti Corn League, but you can kind of see his point. Tony Wilson is described as “an enablist, a propagandist and a conduit”, and that’s it - Factory records may not have made great political statements, but it was the Manchester music scene and Hacienda that put Manchester back in people’s minds and attracted people to return to the city during the bleak Thatcher years, despite Thatcher's best efforts to marginalise the city.

When asked by a member of the audience what the next big thing might be, Haslam acknowledges the absurdity of a 47 year old presuming to predict the future of pop music. Another listener asks how Haslam thinks the recession will affect the Manchester scene. Haslam is critical of contemporary Manchester, which is “property developed to death” and “neutered by big business”. If the message of the talk is that great art arises from an admission that things are “not perfect”, and the need for something to “rebel against” and “escape from”, it seems likely the next big thing will arise through the cracks of the consumer dream.

www.davehaslam.com

Taste of Honey, Royal Exchange Theatre, Monday 17 November

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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