Manchester Unspun: Pop, Property and Power in the Original Modern City: How a City Got High on Music

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We also use them to help detect unauthorized access or activity that violate our terms of service, as well as to analyze site traffic and performance for our own site improvement efforts. As his business grew, he took a stand in the city centre’s ‘alternative emporium’ Affleck’s Palace on Oldham Street. Arriving in Manchester as a wide-eyed student in 1979, Andy Spinoza went on to establish the arts magazine 'City Life' before working for the 'Manchester Evening News' and creating his own PR firm. He founded alternative magazine City Life in 1983, before ten years as gossip columnist at the Manchester Evening News. A city of big characters like Tony Wilson, Alex Ferguson, Mick Hucknall (who played a surprisingly important role), Peter Saville, Tom Bloxham, Eamonn Boylan and more recently Andy Burnham.

It is an insider’s tale of deals done, government and corporate decision-making, nightclubs, music and entrepreneurs. As books about Manchester go, there are plenty to choose from, but there are few as well sourced, well written and expansive as this one.Manchester unspun is an account from punk to the pandemic of how the 1982 opening of the Hacienda gave the kiss of life to a dying city centre, and of the chain reaction it began leading to today’s dynamic international city. Hélène (now my wife) and I were mortified, the coop was furious, and it took weeks to undo the damage to our reputation with the city council.

Sources used include the gamut of genres ranging from factual to fictive, from inquisitional records and different sorts of treatises to plays, novels and (auto)biographies, in numerous languages of the Mediterranean. He founded alternative magazine 'City Life' in 1983 and spent ten years as a gossip columnist for the 'Manchester Evening News'.In a forty-year career he has encountered a who's who of Manchester personalities, from cultural icons such as Tony Wilson to Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson and influential council leaders Sir Richard Leese and Sir Howard Bernstein. Spinoza recounts the city’s recent history through his dealings with council leaders Sir Richard Leese and Sir Howard Bernstein, football icons Sir Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola, David Beckham and Gary Neville, developers Tom Bloxham and Carol Ainscow and cultural figures such as Tony Wilson, Peter Saville, Lemn Sissay, Caroline Aherne and Mick Hucknall. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH).

Spinoza’s engaging thesis is that the quixotic cultural revolution led by the co-founder of Factory Records in the 1980s paved the way for an economic renaissance. I bought this for a Mancunian music-mad friend of the right age to appreciate this, and it's had glowing reviews here. Shaun Ryder and Liam Gallagher respectively stand up for more traditional Mancunian values by throwing a bottle at the mirror behind the bar and smashing an upmarket vase. A sympathetic property consultant tells him: “Gary very much values the views of his consultants – as long as they agree with his own.Another notable clash of sensibilities occurs when the Haçienda hosts a 1996 seminar on situationism – the philosophical touchstone for the Factory way of doing things. As the growth strategy acquires an ever more corporate feel (Aviva Studios was originally conceived as “Factory International”), and the future of parts of east Manchester is outsourced to Manchester City’s Abu Dhabi owners, it is sometimes hard not to feel nostalgia for the wilder time when Wilsonian chutzpah was running the show in what locals still refer to as “town”. Nor does he take sides (although there will probably be some names in there smarting) and mercifully avoids the nostalgia and over-sentimentality associated with certain bandwagoning ‘I was there’ accounts of the city (thankfully for the reader, the author hadn’t yet arrived in Manchester when the Sex Pistols played the Lesser Free Trade Hall). Andy Spinoza's participation in Manchester's story from the punk era to the pandemic is set out brilliantly in this masterpiece. From "Madchester" and the Haçienda to United and City, political intrigue and controversial property deals, Andy Spinoza reveals the inside story of modern Manchester.