Manchester, so much to answer for

I've just finished reading Morrissey's Autobiography, published in Penguin Classics (a bit of fun that some journalists have oh so predictably misunderstood).

Autobiography is as elegantly written and witty as you'd expect from the lyricist of The Smiths. There are lots of moments when I laughed, just as I often do listening to supposedly downbeat Smiths and Morrissey songs like this.

Morrissey, Manchester and miserabilism

I've just booked tickets for Morrissey's gig in Manchester at the end of July.

Since I became a fan of The Smiths as a teenager in the mid-80's, I've become used to the charge that their music - and subsequently that of Morrissey - is miserable and depressing (good practice for a few years later when I got into blues).

I've always thought preconceptions about The Smiths and Morrissey's music are a product of London-based journalists misunderstanding them, sometimes deliberately.  Beyond song titles like Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now, Still Ill, Girlfriend in a Coma and Cemetry Gates [sic] and lyrics such as "The rain falls hard on a humdrum town" lies a combination of wry, working-class Mancunian-Irish humour and the joyousness exemplified by Johnny Marr's jangly guitar lines.

If you don't believe me, just listen to this performance of Every Day is like Sunday at Old Trafford Cricket Ground in 2004 (I'm in that crowd somewhere). "This is the coastal town that they forgot to close down" always reminds me of Morecambe.

From the North

Like many people born in Manchester in the 1970's, I first heard of Shelagh Delaney as a teenager when The Smiths put her on one of their single covers (left) and lead singer Morrissey championed her work in interviews.

Delaney, who has died aged 71, is best known for her play A Taste of Honey, later made into a film by Tony Richardson. Apparently she wrote it while on two weeks holiday from Metro Vicks, the massive engineering factory in Trafford Park where most of my family also worked in the 1950's and 1960's.

Delaney was part of the British New Wave realist film movement in the early 60's, many of whose leading lights were like her Northern and working-class: fellow Salfordian Albert Finney and Bolton's Shirley Ann Field (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), Hull's Tom Courtenay (Billy Liar, written by Keith Waterhouse from Leeds) and writers Stan Barstow (A Kind of Loving) and David Storey (This Sporting Life), both from Wakefield and respectively a miner's son and ex-rugby league player. It also coincided with the start of Coronation Street on TV.

Here's a homage to Delaney by another member of Manchester and Salford's Irish diaspora: