The voice of the fans: Salford Lads Club, a community project and the Mancunian pop band The Smiths

Kid: Why do you call yourselves “The Smiths”? 

Morrissey: Because it was the most ordinary name 

and I think it's time the ordinary folk of the world show their faces. 

– Morrissey and Johnny Marr interviewed by kids, 1984, 

https://youtu.be/M6VbSEm8nY0. 

Salford is a city just across the centre of Manchester; bus 50 takes you past the River Irwell to the University of Salford in less than 15 minutes. A little longer and you’ll arrive at one of Greater Manchester’s most ambitious and expensive building complexes: Salford Quay’s Media City, home of the BBC North and iTV. In the trajectory you’ll notice the contrast between the bustle of the highly populated centre of Manchester, with its contrast of Victorian architecture and new, ultra-modern developments, such as the Beetham Tower. Salford is quiet in comparison, even slightly desolated.

Walk away from the main roads, into the city, and you’ll notice this is the part of town where the sustainability discourse hasn’t reached; a place where the old toxic industrial fumes from the Manchester of the 1800s are still running, their black smoke directed towards the sky, their buzz vibrating. You’ll walk past homogeneous Victorian style houses with the orange-red of their bricks, and about ten blocks from the University you’ll arrive at the Salford Lads Club.

You’ll recognize it because it will be full of tourists taking pictures at the door and until late 2016, some of them arriving in groups as part of the Manchester Music Tours* that makes an unavoidable stop here, while the neighbours, chatting and drinking on the sidewalks, look at you with the bored expression someone too familiar with the visitors.

Once in, the main hall has an informative panel with the history of the place; medals and photographs of the founders and the members hang on the walls. One of the administrators will greet you in a thick Mancunian accent, and will tell you about the century old project that has been gathering people together around cultural activities, especially youngsters from poor areas. He will tell you the founder later established the Scouts, and will let you know a detailed story of each member whose photograph hangs on the hall.



As you realize the pride and affection the people have for this place, your attention will divert to the groups of tourists who gather at the door of a tiny room by the basketball hall. It’s the room-museum dedicated to The Smiths, the pop group from the 1980s that made this club famous until this day via their visual and lyrical imagery. Starting with the band’s photograph in the insert of their 1986 LP The Queen Is Dead, a picture that also illustrates the band’s main entry on their Wikipedia page, their video Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before, from their 1987 album Strangeways, Here We Come, pays the type of homage to the city of Salford and its Lads Club that it soon turned into legend among the group’s fans, who pay a visit from all over the world. This video shows Morrissey leading a team of his look-alike fans from the centre of Manchester to the streets of Salford, all of them riding bicycles and wandering around on a typical cloudy day.

The Queen Is Dead insert, 1986 

The main room dedicated to The Smiths is a messy display of fans expressing their love for the band in various forms, mostly written or drawn: posters, photographs, newspaper clippings and post-its form a colourful wallpaper that covers the four walls, as well as the ceiling. The messages are endearing: people remembering when they bought their first Smiths record, the gigs they attended, the mixtapes recorded for their valentines or friends. And then there are the messages directed to Morrissey, the only member of the Smiths who reached wide international success until this day, after the band disintegrated in 1987.

Salford Lads Club, The Smiths Room, Photo by Nayma Gonzalez ©

Salford Lads Club, The Smiths Room, Photo by Nayma Gonzalez ©

But what’s the story of this community centre? Opened in 1903 as a boys club, it’s served for more than a century as a gathering spot for vulnerable youth in what was one of the poorest areas of Northern England during the economic recession that hit the United Kingdom during the Margaret Thatcher government, and the antisocial programs of this administration that caused high levels of unemployment and poverty.

The great paradox of this era is that it was also one of the most fertile moments for artistic expressions; music in particular empowered “ordinary folk” to express themselves. This is how the punk movement, as well as post-punk and the new wave originated. The Smiths is one of the many bands formed by working-class people who took the stage and the microphone only to inspire generations of others to do the same.

It makes sense that the stories written by Morrissey, all inspired by real life and an angst against all types of authority, found a rich source of inspiration in what was happening at Salford Lads Club during those times, and how this place saved the lives of many youngsters. Until this day, Morrissey donates a substantial quantity of money to this club.

The stories of the fans within the story of The Smiths, related to the story of the Salford Lads Club and the greater narrative of this city in the Thatcher era of the 1980s, are intertwined stories of great sociocultural interest as well as deeply personal stories moved by a band whose legacy is no other than having given a voice to the voiceless. 

Visit: https://salfordladsclub.org.uk/ 
http://www.manchestermusictours.com/ 
https://www.morrissey-solo.com/ (Morrissey fan site designed by him as his official site). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SckD99B51IA Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before.

* Founded and operated by the Craig Gill (drummer with 1980s Manchester band Inspiral Carpets) until his death in November 2016. Manchester Music Tours is now operated by his daughter.

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Manchester Day 2016: a celebration of one of Europe’s most progressive and innovative cities

June 19th was the Manchester celebration day, choosing the Archimedes famous old exclamation Eureka as a slogan and parade theme for the festivities, which were closely related with the city’s penchant for discovery, technology and science, in an environment of fun for both children and adults.

The parade stopped at the city’s main points of reference, such as Albert Square, St Ann’s Square, Exchange Square and the Great Northern Square. In each of them there were activities such as circus acts, bands and artists playing jazz, folk, swing and opera, photography competitions, as well as science-based activities sponsored by the Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Manchester and the University of Salford-Manchester.

As the Multicultural city it is, a band of locals dove into the tropical rhythms of Brazilian samba to the delight of an audience that didn’t mind the incessant rain. Arabian sounds were present too at the Great Northern Square, for the recognition and the delight of the vast Arabic population living in the city. Carousels full of children and the elderly taken care of by their grandchildren, joined together for the festivities that included various culinary dishes, as well as barrels of delicious ales.

Recently named “European City of Science for 2016”, Manchester is a somewhat small but incredibly significant city with plenty of reasons to feel proud of and celebrate. One of the centres of the Industrial Revolution, it’s known worldwide for its contributions in the foundation of various industries that changed the world since the 19th century: engineering, textiles, communications… you name it.

The establishment of Manchester as a nucleus for industrial production turned it into one of the most polluted and toxic cities of the 19th century. A few years later, when Britain was at war and most of its cities were destroyed by the German offensive, there was not another option but to reconstruct. Manchester in the 1960s saw a surge of utopian visions of a futuristic city that never came to be, such as the plans for a subway network and the few family complexes that were built with disastrous results, like the Hulme Crescents development that was demolished in the 1990s.

The crisis of the mid 1970s until the last years of the Thatcher era turned the city into a grim place to live, polluted, with no jobs and plenty of violence, conditions that ironically were the fuel for a resurgence of a cultural resistance in the fields of art and specifically, music, because an undisputable source of Mancunian pride is its history of seminal rock bands that redefined the genre in one of the darkest political periods of the country. The Buzzcocks, Joy Division and the whole roster of Factory Records, New Order, The Smiths, The Stone Roses and later Oasis, are all expressions of a disenchanted youth that reclaimed their city from hopelessness.

Aware of its place in modernity, the city promotes its history in various museums that are free for visitors, such as the Museum of Science and Industry, which displays in two redesigned buildings some of the first machines built for mass production, or the early vapour locomotive machines that changed forever the mercantile relationships in the modern world.

The People’s History Museum celebrates another type of progressive agenda: the conquer of rights since the 19th century, such as the female vote, the workers unions and other types of organizations that at the time were considered so clandestine and dangerous, that protesters were massacred simply for gathering and demanding rights that we take for granted nowadays.

More recently, the museum shows the conquest of human rights by the LGBT collective, one that has a large and significant presence in the city, with its own officially recognised Gay Village area of museums, bars, cafés and night clubs that promote the inclusion of all people, regardless of their sexual orientation. The city is so tolerant and diversity-affirming that it officially promotes the adoption of children by same-sex couples:

Moss Lane East, Manchester. Caption reads: "Complete your family. Adopt with Manchester. manchester.gov.uk/adoption". Billboard sponsored by the city. Photo: Nayma Gonzalez.

Proud of its history in the field of innovation, Manchester, through its two main universities, is leading some of the most important scientific research taking place in the world, such as the treatment of graphene as the material of the future (it’s been called “the wonder material”), for its amazing properties that have the potential to revolutionize, again, most of the industries of our time.

Take for example the ultra-modern The National Graphene Institute, a building at the University of Manchester, advertised as “Manchester’s Revolutionary 2D Material”, and built after many years of research led by physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who won the 2010 Nobel prize for isolating this material. The building cost 61 million pounds, funded by the UK government and the European Union via the European Regional Development Fund, which is also funding the revitalisation of the central avenue of the universities zone, Oxford Road.

Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net)., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47757711

Local investment can be found in other massive projects: The Media City in Salford (approximate cost: 1 billion pounds), only 30 minutes from the centre of Manchester, and now home to the country’s most important media corporations, such as the BBC and ITV. 

MediaCityUK. Photo: Nayma Gonzalez.

The already completed Birley Fields campus of the Manchester Metropolitan University in the Hulme area of the city. This ultra-modern and sustainable building cost around 150 million pound and was designed by Sheppard Robson, an UK architecture firm that was influential in the 1950s and 1960s, and now champions sustainable architecture:

Source: http://www.sir-robert-mcalpine.com/projects/?id=64115

A work in progress is the University of Manchester Engineering campus, a 350 million pound large complex that will open in 2020 and is being built by Dutch firm Mecanoo. In front of the Graphene Institute and next to the Manchester Aquatics Centre, the Engineering campus will be a five stories building, with an extension of about 78,000m2 that will connect the universities zones with the centre of Manchester. If the renders are completed, this building will probably have one the largest horizontal roof gardens in any ultra-modern building.
More information:
http://manchesterday.co.uk/manchester-day/
More photos of the Birley campus:
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/business/revealed-new-140m-manchester-metropolitan-7866638

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