The North of England is regarded as a region economically and culturally lagging behind the South of England. However, this situation does not refer to popular music in which the North has had an influence which is comparable to that of London. Many bands and performers coming from the North, including the Beatles, the Animals, Herman’s Hermit, the Smiths, the Happy Mondays, the Fall, Joy Division, New Order, Pulp and Oasis belong to most popular and influential pop-rock musicians in the world. The North has also been the home to some particular dance scenes including Northern Soul, the ‘Madchester’ acid house, rave scenes and hip hop and grime scenes. This collection presents some of the less well known facets of popular music in the North of England, examining how popular music reflected on various aspects of the North, such as its economy and architecture and how it impacted on self- and external perception of the North. It assumes that understanding of the English North vary and its geography has more to do with imagined rather than empirical communities. The North can be seen as being defined against an England epitomised by London and as an area reflecting the most salient features of England as a whole. Specific chapters discuss topics such as the music scenes in Manchester, Liverpool, Hull and Sheffield, music festivals and careers of some musicians connected with the North such as MC Tunes and Bugzy Malone. Written in a jargon-free language, it should be of interest to everybody interested in music of the North.

Since 2015 Liverpool has been designated a UNESCO ‘City of Music’. Not so its neighbour Manchester, which has nonetheless been hailed in the press as the ‘capital city of music’. They remain globally valued as two of the chief cities identified with the development of popular music in the second half of the twentieth century. As de-industrialised centres seeking new engines of growth, they have invested in these cultural reputations in order to attract for themselves tourists, university students, the conference trade and foreign business. Yet across the past decade numerous claims have been made in a range of journalistic outputs that Liverpool and Manchester are cultural rivals. These claims appear to be predicated principally on sport and music, key meeting points of commerce and leisure. There are certainly differences between the two conurbations – the industrial site of Manchester grew at the interstices of three rivers while Liverpool evolved as an Atlantic port. Yet the major transport initiatives in the area (the 1830 Manchester-Liverpool Railway, the 1894 Manchester Ship Canal, the 1934 East Lancs Road, the 1976 M62) were constructed in order to accelerate connections between the two cities. Most recently urban strategists such as Andreas Schulz-Baing have fused the diarchy by describing them as a potential polynuclear metropolitan zone, a megalopolis. From this the businessman Lord O’Neill has popularized the union as ‘Manpool’. Taking this as its cue to correct the music history of the ‘adversary’ cities, this chapter examines three diverse examples of musical figures associated with one city who played in vital, but forgotten, part in life of the other. Firstly, Tony Wilson (1950-2007) who was associated with Factory Records and the building of the Haçienda nightclub in Manchester, but started his career in Liverpool (the 1979 festival ‘Zoo Meets Factory Halfway’ will be referred to). Secondly, Roger Eagle (1942-99) who was associated with Liverpool post-punk club Eric’s but also Manchester’s Twisted Wheel (1960s) and The International (1980s); Eagle played a leading role in converting post-punk Frantic Elevators into soul-based Simply Red. Thirdly, the Griffiths brothers (The Real People, Liverpool, 1988–), the Gallagher brothers (Oasis, Manchester, 1992-2001), and the formation of 1990s ‘laddism’. Other cases are cited. A critique of contemporary and historical literature, on the music scenes of the region, is offered. Examples of co-operation, reciprocation and solidarity remain hidden when ethnographic assumptions about separate ‘scenes’ are not tested by examining the common patterns of behaviour between sites of activity. Actors and events that are vital to the stories of both cities get consigned to one. Where the cohesive factor is music, there is a tendency to underestimate the extent of the patterns of interactions. The problem is that of the spatial relations between the administrative frame and the functional terrain of flows and exchanges. This chapter challenges that ethnography which cannot see the wood for the trees.

Un-convention was established in 2007 in Manchester, England. It was conceived as an informal sideline to In the City, itself an annual industry event founded by Tony Wilson of Factory Records, and described by the Daily Telegraph as ‘the biggest music gathering of its kind in Britain’, involving ‘decision-makers and opinion-formers from the London-centric music industry’. By contrast, Un-convention’s co-founder Geoff Thompson records the qualities of his event: ‘it was a very small-scale idea […] a couple of the Manchester labels had started talking about getting together to discuss the current climate. We thought it would just be an afternoon in the pub having a chat.’ Thompson has said that the prompt for Un-convention came from his experience of running a label in Manchester, and a sense that the local industry was rather fragmented. This sense was compounded by the London-centric nature of the music business although he also envied the dynamism of the capital’s scene. He suggests that locally, ‘it feels like we constantly have to reinvent the wheel up here, so we wanted to try and get people together […] to share ideas and experience.’ While Un-convention’s organisers and associates might have looked admiringly on the strength of the Metropolis and with envy at its resources, the organisation continues to evince a priority for music culture over commercial dictates, echoing a local lineage of independent labels and alternative musical expression. Un-convention thus works with a sense of mutual self help within the ‘grassroots’ music industry, for those ‘involved with music that genuinely do it for the love [who] if they break even, then that’s real success for them.’ Regular activities at Un-convention events include discussion panels and performances and it has extended its practices to events in other British cities and networks across the globe. It has organized events in places such as Uganda, Columbia and Venezuela, locations outside of the global economic and political centre and certainly at the periphery of the world’s music business. In this paper, we explore how the practices of Un-convention, whatever its reach, are firmly anchored in a sense of a Mancunian Northern-English identity. Its original tagline promised events including ‘Music and Pies’, while Thompson’s own label is ‘Fat Northerner’, underlining the self-deprecating and homely DIY ethos. Likewise, Un-convention events are structured around the informalities of ‘unconferencing’ or ‘open space’ practices. Nonetheless, the identity of Un-convention is also imbued with a sharp entrepreneurial spirit derived from its local sensibility and history. As Fionn MacKillop (2012) suggests ‘Manchester was always about ‘making it happen’ […] displaying a ‘can do’ attitude that goes beyond the usual civic pride that can be witnessed in other cities.’ This attitude played a role in the city’s prosperity during the industrial revolution and in coping with de-industrialisation. Now it informs the creative industries of the city, emphasising a sense of local exceptionality and identity. Here, to connect Un-convention with contemporary discourses of creativity and cultural policy is useful in exploring its character. Kate Oakley (2015) for instance has written of how in spite of the rhetorical support for creative industries, policy makers have neglected popular cultural forms when it comes to support, kept at arms length from both High Culture and all that which falls under community engagement and so on. The address and practices of Un-convention sit precisely in this neglected space and thus, one of the ways of making sense of the missionary zeal and enterprise of the organisers, is to understand them as cultural intermediaries. David Wright (2005) comments that ‘As the making of things is replaced with the making of meaning about things in late-modernity, the cultural intermediary is a pivotal generator of meaning, not just about art and literature, but about ways of being.’ While there is a tendency to dismiss the new cultural intermediaries as the agents of neo-liberalism (O’Connor, 2015), after Perry et al (2015), we explore the extent to which the ‘motivations and values, practices […] subjectivities and identities [of] these cultural workers are not simply reproducing economic values but mediating between multiple and often conflicting ones’. This paper draws upon interviews, organizational analysis and reflexive participation (Collins has been a board member and organizer since 2007). It suggests then that Un-convention is an organization whose practices prompt a range of reflections about the relationship of the ecology of music cultures, place and the particular associations of Northern identity. While so much about music, identity and Manchester is often narrated around familiar set of actors and tropes, Un-convention, draws upon the city’s heritage while forging new music innovations, alliances and exploring new identities.

Sheffield competes only with London, Glasgow and Birmingham for the intensity of its transformation in the immediate post-war decades. Under an effective Labour one-party state, the city embarked on a massive programme of rebuilding, which had extremely melodramatic architectural results. Rather than being designed by volume builders or engineers, Sheffield’s housing schemes were produced by the city architect’s department, and placed quite deliberately on the city’s hillside peaks, as if to announce the city and its priorities from a distance – an effect described in Jonathan Coe’s novel What a Carve Up as a socialist citadel, independent and hostile to the capital – the ‘socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’, as it was only half-jokingly described. This paper attempts to answer the question of whether there is a reason for the fact that Sheffield had this hugely ambitious programme, and the fact that it developed between the late 70s and the early 90s the most consistently interesting, original and developed music scene outside of London, Glasgow and Manchester, to a degree that far outweighs the city’s size, or its influence on national politics or culture before (or, in many respects, since). That influence is hard to quantify – certainly, there is no evidence of it affecting the city’s popular culture or popular music to any significant degree before the late ’70s. At that point, however, various Sheffield bands deliberately evoked, described, sometimes celebrated and sometimes critiqued the city’s architecture and planning. At the end of the 1970s, Sheffield’s overwhelming post-war architecture and car-centred planning was obliquely referenced in the artwork and some of the songs on Comsat Angels’s Waiting for a Miracle, as a rather glamorously oppressive space, on the model of Joy Division’s Manchester. On the other hand, The Human League evoked it in a much more positive fashion, referencing the ‘streets in the sky’ housing schemes in lyrics and videos, and writing optimistically about ‘high-rise living’ (‘not so bad’, Phil Oakey informs us). Over a decade later, Pulp’s presentation of the city is much more explicit, naming streets, particular modernist schemes (Kelvin, Park Hill, Castle Market) in a manner that oscillates between utopian possibility and a grim reality. Meanwhile, the city council’s policy of letting post-industrial space at tiny or nonexistent rents encouraged an important techno scene around groups like Forgemasters, with a clearly modernist aesthetic. Recent years have seen the marketing of privatised parts of this ‘socialist citadel’ via an appeal to its popular music history. Sheffield’s modern architecture and pop music is perhaps now another kind of heritage culture, linked in the covers of Richard Hawley’s records in a fond, slightly rueful nostalgia. However, the Sheffield experience is perhaps most valuable for complicating the tendency to read modernism and pop, state planning and small-time enterprise, as intrinsically opposed.

Many narratives concerning the transatlantic cultural exchange which carried blues music and blues culture from the United States to the United Kingdom focus on the Southern cities of the UK, particularly London and the South East. This chapter argues that the music producers, consumers and cultural workers of the Northern United Kingdom, especially Manchester, but also Leeds, Newcastle and Liverpool, were equally significant as part of the cultural convection currents which precipitated and sustained the blues boom of the 1960s. Further, this chapter argues that the construction of blackness undertaken by performers, cultural workers and consumers during the 1950s and 1960s in the North of England was a fundamental strand in the discourse of authenticity which surrounded African American music, such as it was presented in the United Kingdom during the beat era and blues boom. Broadly, the presentation of early blues performers in the UK of singing guitarists Josh White and Big Bill Broonzy to secondary audiences in the United Kingdom during the early 1950s was at odds with the reality of blues music and blues culture as presented by Muddy Waters and Otis Spann at Leeds in 1958, and by the musicians who took part in the subsequent American Folk Blues Tours of the early 1960s. Additionally, the performances televised by Manchester-based Granada Television also problematized the understanding of blues music and blues culture, whilst contributing to its spread beyond the United States. Manchester’s Twisted Wheel Club and Free Trade Hall also provided an opportunity for a predominantly white British audience to engage first-hand with the live performance of African American artists. This chapter explores and indicates how the blues was developed from a music of the African American rural poor to a style which emphasised personal authenticity, providing a source of communion and creativity across racial barriers in circumstances geographically removed from the United States. With specific reference to Manchester’s Twisted Wheel club and Free Trade Hall, the American Folk and Blues Festival Tours (1962-1966), and the televised Granada performance at Chorlton Station, Manchester which featured leading lights of the American blues scene (1963), this chapter explores the enculturative and acculturative musical practices and sociological contexts that placed young, white musicians in the society and influence of blues music’s African American progenitors. The problematic issues of race and cultural dissonance are raised and contextualised against a system of demographic othering characterised as the North/South divide and a societal antipathy toward emerging youth culture, in order to illustrate diachronic processes of technological mediation and cultural development in both blues music and the emerging counterculture and blues revival of the 1960s.

In this chapter I apply the concept of the urban soundscape developed by Thompson and by Long and Collins in an analysis of the impact musicians from Hull had on the evolution of David Bowie’s seminal 1972 work The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. I argue that the performance of Ziggy Stardust, both on record and on stage, is doubly coded in relation to place and space. The ‘concept’ of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars as a musical, a fictional story with songs performed on stage, and an accompanying album of recorded songs, initially appears to be heavily associated with London: Bowie is from London, he sings in an affected cockney accent in this work, and the cover of the LP is set in a Soho street. The format of the concept – which the writer described as theatre, rather than a rock and roll show – is derived from Bowie’s experience growing up in London in the 1950s and 1960s, a time of great change in the entertainment world, and in society and culture, in England. England’s cultural revolution of 1956 to 1969 largely occurred in London, the industries that benefitted from it commercially were based there, and Bowie immersed himself in the vibrant London arts, music and fashion scene and absorbed its influences and its soundscape. Auslander suggests that Bowie critiques the 1960s counter-culture with Ziggy Stardust, the stage presentation demonstrating discontinuity with the ideological tradition in rock of ‘associating commitment and personal expression with authenticity’. With the work, Bowie challenges the ‘us and them’ mentality of the counter-culture as the protagonist avoided the consistent countercultural persona demanded by the culture of psychedelic rock. As Long and Collins note, sound is ‘to be accounted for not only as a matter of what we hear’, but also ‘as those practices that produce, use and make sense of it’ and I suggest that Bowie’s creation of Ziggy Stardust is partly dependent on his interaction with, what I term the ‘elaborated soundscape’ of London. However I argue that the Ziggy Stardust performance, and its continuing significance, rests on the authenticity of the supporting musicians in the project. Bowie had been playing music with members of a rock band from Hull named The Rats for nearly two years before the Ziggy Stardust project. Hull is a port town in north east England and the musicians were subject to different influences, and a different soundscape, to those Bowie experienced. I argue that The Rats gave Bowie an authentic, urban rock sound, symbolic of the provincial adoption of the rock / rhythm and blues format, one deriving from the Hull soundscape. This was an environment distanced from the London hegemony and shaped by its secondary status whereby local musicians are influenced by the purchase of product (records and live performance) which are supplied from the primary source: the London entertainments industry. Thus two soundscapes are juxtaposed in the dressy Ziggy Stardust concept: cultured, elaborated, primary London and the more primitive, secondary Hull. The transgressive rise of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars is conceptually supported by the notion that this authentic band of provincial musicians from Hull are doing just that: rising to stardom under the leadership of the cultured Bowie. Thus, in the double-coding of the project: on one hand it was a contrived, cosmetic, hyperbolic spectacle with pretensions to being high art; on the other, the band’s rock sound was gritty and authentic. It consequently mirrored the fashion for a return to simplicity in pop / rock music, but also, in its conceptuality, transcended rock’s ideology of authenticity and autobiographical representation and exposed the fabrication inherent in the genre’s processes of delivery, engagement and performance.

In 1979 the Leeds based music promoter John Keenan announced Futurama: The World’s First Science Fiction Music Festival. This event would take place in Keenan’s home city, at the disintegrating Leeds Queens Hall. The venue switched to general entertainment in 1961, following a minimal makeover from its original purpose as a transport depot. It retained a cold and unwelcoming atmosphere, etching its character of bleakness into local folklore. Queens Hall witnessed Christmas indoor fun fairs in the 1960s, northern soul all-nighters in the 1970s, and large gigs in the 1980s. As a musical statement Futurama gathered the post-punk micro-scenes that were congealing in many cities in the north and beyond. These scenes built upon a vaguely coherent common strand of moving beyond punk, by adding a sense of industrial angst and futuristic ambiguity. It was a festival without an equal at the time, as large festivals emerging from the hippie and rock scenes, documented in McKay (2015) and Clarke (1982), had settled with events like Glastonbury and Reading and catered for audiences within those scenes. In turn, Futurama eschewed a vision of hope and celebration, settling for anxiety and claustrophobia, the brittle and spittle of deviant punk in grim cities. Futurama would take place over a weekend in September, with punters allowed to simply sleep on the dirty, concrete floor between each day. There was no invitation or opportunity to get in touch with nature, with spirits, with yourself… The event was repeated in 1980 at the same venue, and then taken out to a couple of significantly odd venues for 1981 (Stafford Bingley Hall) and 1982 (Deeside Leisure Centre). A final Futurama 5 saw the festival return to Leeds Queens Hall in 1983. This chapter will provide the first academic documentation of the five Futurama festivals (and a small number of spin-off events) through a multiple set of interpretations. Firstly I consider the festival lineage in the age of post-war subcultures and punk’s resistance to such celebratory gatherings. Secondly, by drawing on Reynolds (2006) and Crossley (2015), I document the post-punk vernacular as a regional phenomenon. Thirdly, I turn attention to the north and the post-punk scenes, considering Leeds as a lacuna of identity compared to Sheffield, Manchester and Liverpool. This is unpacked against the violent, intimidating and terrorising nature of the fabric of life around Leeds at the time: a city crippled by the serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, a violent football culture and a community divided by racial antagonism, fear and hatred. In addition, the theme of sci-fi (an initial branding for the Futurama festival) is addressed, and finally the representation of the north in popular culture is considered in regard to Futurama, with particular attention to the work of author David Peace (see Shaw 2011). Drawing on recorded testimony of the Futurama events I propose an inversion of the open space and fresh air ideology of festivals and a celebration of architectural other-directedness (Sandvoss 2005) offered by the cold and dark spaces of the Queens Hall. From this sense of resistance to a dark life outside, to a new sense of absurdly embracing a dark life inside, the goth subcultural identity is established in Leeds and West Yorkshire. This situates the region as kind of ironic morass, allaying any optimism of a misconstrued hyperboreanism.

The discourse of ‘edgelands’ has become a common one in literary, cultural and geographic studies, one concretised in Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’ Edgelands (2011). While this often now refers to areas of scrub, common land, or simply the ‘undeveloped’ terrains at the margins of urban or suburban conurbations, the economic marginality of the ‘edgeland’ is pointed out by Farley and Symmons Roberts from the very first chapter, ‘Cars’. While ‘cars are a defining characteristic of the edgelands’, in part because you have to automobile to arrive there, this geographical zone is ‘also a graveyard for cars. […] [M]aybe we see our own demise foreshadowed in theirs, our own future, cannibalised for parts, broken open, cast aside’. The scrapyard is a place where value is reconstituted, where no-longer-utile goods are collected and returned into the system of commodity exchange. These places form part of a hidden or ‘invisible’ economy, at the margins of the legitimate economy, and are constructed by distinct social and gender codes. This chapter will consider the work of the contemporary punk/hip-hop band Sleaford Mods in articulating the subject-positions of what Imogen Tyler calls ‘revolting subjects’, economically and socially-marginalised people who are subject to forces of social abjection within neo-liberal capital. In particular, the chapter will investigate the film Invisible Britain (2015), directed by Nathan Hannawin and Paul Sng, which is ‘part band doc, part look at the state of the nation, [which] follows the band on a tour of the UK that visits places which probably don’t even exist in the minds of many – the neglected, broken down and boarded up parts of the country that many would prefer to ignore’. The directors claim an influence of Patrick Keiller, Iain Sinclair and JG Ballard, in presenting an investigation of Britain’s social and economic edgelands; this chapter will consider the presentation of ‘invisible’ Britain in comparison with Keiller’s Robinson trilogy, and in particular its representations of the de-industrialisation in the North of England and its socio-cultural consequences. However, taking its cue from the work of Sleaford Mods, the emphasis will be upon resistance and ‘revolt’ rather than a lament among the ruins. Crucial to this analysis will be a consideration of voice and language in both the film and the music of Sleaford Mods, which presents white working-class male subjectivity and experience in contemporary Britain, something with which singer and lyricist Jason Williamson himself finds uncomfortable. Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism, in a review of the Sleaford Mods last album Divide and Exit (2014), reads the Sleaford Mods, and Williamson’s performance in particular, in terms of an abjection theorised by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror (1982), whereupon the subject is constructed through the expulsion of tabooed and repugnant matter, excrement, waste fluids, filth. Fisher writes that ‘piss and shit course through Williamson’s rhymes, as if all the – psychic and physical – effluent abjected by Cameron’s England can no longer be contained’. The verbal obscenity of Williamson’s lyrics marks the social, cultural and economic obscenity or abjection of certain people, groups and locations: from the East Midlands from which Williamson comes to communities in Northern England. Although Fisher argues that it is the particular local texture of Williamson’s voice that is crucial – ‘lacking any urban glamour, lilting lyricism or rustic romanticism, the East Midlands accent is one of the most unloved in England. It is so rarely heard in popular media that it isn’t recognised enough even to be disdained’ – this chapter will work through the marginality of the East and particularly North Midlands as the edge of the North, a mobile conception of displacement and resistance which attempts to make visible the ‘invisible’ edgelands and organize politically resistance to neoliberal formations.

When one considers music culture in Manchester during the 1980s and 1990s, Hip Hop is not an obvious cultural arena for discussion. However, amidst the spectacle of The Haçienda, the pop boom of Factory Records and the evolution of rave subculture and form of dance music which produced the pop cultural phenomenon of Madchester; in the space of music between The Fall and The Charlatans where brief stardom was found by Inspiral Carpets, Northside and Candyflip, Mancunian Hip Hop was also evolving a cultural position of its own. During the decade between 1984 and 1994, the year The Stone Roses formed and the year Definitely Maybe by Oasis was released, Hip Hop in Manchester established itself as an organic counter-narrative to two cultural positions- firstly the very local yet nationally explosive position of The Haçienda and Madchester and secondly the position of Hip Hop in London which was growing an international presence with seriousness, professionalism and rigour. To the rest of the UK, the Manchester indie scene and the London Hip Hop scene overshadowed Mancunian Hip Hop via the contemporary music press and media coverage of the time. London Hip Hop groups were gathering momentum as challengers to American Hip Hop crews, and the buzz surrounding artists such as London Posse, Demon Boyz and Hijack was reaching a feverous state in the UK, and also made solid impact stateside. Concurrently The Haçienda, Madchester and rave subculture seduced a generation, but what of Mancunian Hip Hop? This chapter investigates the key developments in Hip Hop in Manchester and starting in 1984 with Broken Glass, a Mancunian breakdancing crew, and concluding with Ruf Beats and the Jeep Beat Collective in 1994, explores the cultural triggers responsible for underground Hip Hop in the locale and wider territories. Three interrelated questions are framed and examined within this chapter: To what extent did the evolution of Mancunian Hip Hop coexist, compliment or oppose the cultural dynamics of The Haçienda, Madchester and rave subculture? What was the relationship between Hip Hop in Manchester and London in terms of cultural representation, identity and value; and finally, is there a particular honesty in Mancunian Hip Hop that differentiates it from the gravity of London Hip Hop and the spectacle of Madchester? In order to support the interrogation of these questions, this chapter draws on interviews with Broken Glass, MC Lady Tame, Krispy 3 and Dave Ruf. Broken Glass are important as the first established Manchester crew who released their only record on Morgan Khan’s London based Streetwave label (Style of the Street, 1984), and additionally MC Lady Tame and Krispy 3 also had deals with well-regarded London independent labels Music Of Life (1990) and Kold Sweat (1993-94) respectively, but subsequently their debut records being released on Manchester based private presses. Finally, Dave Ruf’s later contribution during the early to mid-1990s extends past the artist vinyl release, and under the guise of Jeep Beat Collective and Ruf Beats released compilation albums, mixtapes, held club nights and mini-festivals and ran a mail order record shop. These interviews are framed within a theoretical context by means of Pierre Bourdieu’s exploration of cultural consumption (Distinction, 2010 edition). Bourdieu critiques the notion of value, taste and practice, primarily through the lens of the bourgeoisie, and it is these concepts that ground the exploration of the questions posed here. In conclusion, this chapter affirms the position that whilst Mancunian Hip Hop culture did not achieve the reverence of its counter-part in London or the financial success of Madchester, it bred a rich culture of artists, practitioners, producers and consumers that has led to a regional stability and sustainability of Hip Hop culture.

MC Tunes (born Nicholas William Dennis Hodgson, 1970) is a British rapper from Manchester, who achieved commercial and artistic success, while fronting a British electronic music group, 808 State. He played a significant role in the Madchester music scene during the 1980s and 1990s, yet failed to achieve global success or even sustain a national fame, as demonstrated by the fact that his second record, to be released by ZTT Records in the early 1990s, was rejected by the label and only released in 2015 in a limited edition format. The career of MC Tunes plays into two well established narratives; the first is of the working class artist, entertainer or sports star who finds success, but then cannot cope with sudden wealth and celebrity. The second is of the northern working class artist who is ‘discovered’ by the London based music industry and then exploited commercially before being discarded. Neither of these narratives provides a complete or satisfactory description of a career which was shaped by a complex set of specific circumstances. This chapter, drawing on interviews with MC Tunes, conducted by the authors, a documentary by Howard Walmsley and the existing research on music industry in Manchester during the period of Madchester and beyond, will try to examine the factors in MC Tunes’ meteoric fame and its decline. We will draw attention to three types of factors. One is the weakness of the music industry in the North, as demonstrated also by Tony Wilson’s failure to sustain his project of creating a commercially successful popular music industry in Manchester. The second is the specificity of the genres with which MC Tunes was identified, namely rap. Finally we will draw attention to personal factors in MC Tunes’ decline, most importantly his rock star lifestyle. Our second objective is to account for the recent attempts to preserve and disseminate MC Tunes’ work, as demonstrated by the release of his second record, and the role played in it by various individuals and institutions based in the North, such as the University of Central Lancashire. We argue that the factors affecting the recent interest in MC Tunes are also complex. One factor is the development of commercial entertainment and tourism opportunities based around the heritage of the Manchester music scene of the 1980s and 1990s. Another factor may be the commercial success of grime. The early work of MC Tunes has much in common with grime including use of rap over electronic beats and samples and a lyrical content that often deals with the darker side of urban life; the gritty reality of the daily lives of young people on the housing estates of the inner cities (his 1990 song Own Worst Enemy is a good example). One key difference between grime and the work of MC Tunes is the style of vocal delivery. In the 1980s MC Tunes rapped in an American accent, copying the black US rap style in the same way that in the 1960s bands like the Rolling Stones copied the singing styles of black Rhythm and Blues artists. However, while most rock and pop music is now delivered in a ‘transatlantic’ style of delivery, within grime and other forms of UK music, the use of local and regional accents has become the norm. As a result the vocal style of MC Tunes in his early work may be seen as ‘inauthentic’ and this may be a reason why he is not more often cited as an influence on the current scene.

My chapter will analyse the career trajectory of Manchester rapper Bugzy Malone, the highest charting grime artists to date, discussing his position within the Manchester urban music scene and wider UK grime scene. Bugzy invites his debut EP Walk With Me to be understood as a one-on-one psychotherapy session with his audience with the artist declaring on lead track ‘M.E.N’ ‘let me confide in you,’ and on ‘Pain’ ‘it’s not physical pain, it’s psychological pain.’ not to mention the confession of relating to serial killers, with his EP centred around fantasies of violence towards the men who have let him down, namely his dad and step dad, a style of songwriting in rap music previously deployed by artists such as Eminem. Bugzy creates internal narratives he presents as his history which in psychoanalytic theory is often believed to help patients deal with past experiences, stay happy or ‘grow’. It is around the notion of the morality of creating and the deployment of personal narratives that I will examine Bugzy’s rise to chart success against a backdrop of Manchester’s current musical climate. I will look at the culture and history of self-help, Eva Illouz’s idea that since the 60s health and self-realisation are viewed one and the same; that people who have un-self-realised lives are in need of care and therapy and Adam Curtis’ argument that those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy, posing the question, does Bugzy owe his success to upholding the dominant ideology through focusing on his own story? Looking at the wider UK grime scene, with reference to its history as presented in books such as Simon Wheatley’s definitive Don’t Call Me Urban!: The Time of Grime as well as print and online music publications and relevant YouTube channels, I will discuss Bugzy’s place in the current trend for themes of intellectual personal growth deployed by artists of prominence in grime’s second wave such as oldtimers Wiley, Skepta and JME and new arrivals to the scene such as Novelist and Stormzy. However, I would argue that Bugzy’s unique delivery, especially evident on lead track ‘M.E.N’ whose volume is considerably lower in comparison to other tracks on the EP, accenting the confessional style of the song, posits Bugzy as a new role model for the until recently taboo topic of mental illness amongst young men and has been the key to his staggering success against a backdrop of no media coverage. As Bugzy continues to rise in popularity, it must be noted that he refuses to celebrate any sense of community through uncharacteristically for grime, not being a member of a crew, posing a question about the ramifications of such an isolation within a small urban scene such as Manchester’s. Moreover, Bugzy attributes Manchester’s rise to prominence on the UK urban scene solely to himself declaring that he ‘put Manny on the map’, appearing alone on the cover of his EP with his picture surrounded by a large border of negative space, suggesting that aside from him there is nothing of interest in the city, as well as appearing in many scenes in his videos by himself too. Using sources such as media coverage of his EP and interviews with Bugzy and other Manchester artists, I will investigate what effect this has had on the urban music scene in the North and ask whether Bugzy has singlehandedly obliterated Manchester’s Marxist sensibility of togetherness and support, and in doing so, has Manchester joined London in its neoliberal ideal of individualism and success at any cost?

The North of England is regarded as a region economically and culturally lagging behind the South of England. However, this situation does not refer to popular music in which the North has had an influence which is comparable to that of London. Many bands and performers coming from the North, including the Beatles, the Animals, Herman’s Hermit, the Smiths, the Happy Mondays, the Fall, Joy Division, New Order, Pulp and Oasis belong to most popular and influential pop-rock musicians in the world. The North has also been the home to some particular dance scenes including Northern Soul, the ‘Madchester’ acid house, rave scenes and hip hop and grime scenes. This collection presents some of the less well known facets of popular music in the North of England, examining how popular music reflected on various aspects of the North, such as its economy and architecture and how it impacted on self- and external perception of the North. It assumes that understandings of the English North vary and its geography has more to do with imagined rather than empirical communities. The North can be seen as being defined against an England epitomised by London and as an area reflecting the most salient features of England as a whole. Specific chapters discuss topics such as the music scenes in Manchester, Liverpool, Hull and Sheffield, music festivals and careers of some musicians connected with the North such as MC Tunes and Bugzy Malone. Written in a jargon-free language, it should be of interest to everybody interested in music of the North.