The Wedding Present + more across Manchester Academy.
The Inspiral Carpets keyboard player has spent decades right in the middle of the city’s musical life, and his new book is all the better for refusing to pretend it is an exhaustive history. Instead, Boon tells the story as he experienced it — from punk and post-punk through indie, psychedelia, Madchester, rave and Britpop.
That makes this less a conventional history and more a collection of memories from somebody who was actually in the room.
And what rooms they were.
Buzzcocks, Joy Division, The Fall, New Order, The Smiths, James, The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Elbow and Oasis all wander through the story, sometimes before anybody really knew what they would become. Boon captures that particular Manchester quality whereby bands, roadies, DJs, promoters and assorted characters all seemed to occupy the same small musical universe before some of them suddenly became enormous.
There are great rock ’n’ roll reversals too. Few stories sum up the madness better than Boon finding himself on Top of the Pops one week and signing on the dole the next, while former Inspiral Carpets roadie Noel Gallagher was beginning his own journey into pop history.
There is also the darker chaos of life in a touring band, including a near-fatal bus crash, alongside the absurdity, graft and accidental comedy that tends to disappear when musical eras are polished into mythology.
The crucial ingredient is Boon himself. He writes with the same warmth and enthusiasm with which he talks. There is little sense of somebody standing outside the story trying to construct a grand theory of Manchester. Instead, he remembers people, places, conversations, gigs and moments.
That matters because Manchester’s musical history can sometimes feel over-familiar. Factory, the Haçienda, Madchester and Oasis have become such enormous cultural landmarks that the human stories underneath can get lost.
Boon puts those stories back in.
The Manchester Chronicles is funny, affectionate and packed with the kind of detail that comes from actually having been there. More importantly, it captures Manchester music as a continuing community rather than a sequence of museum-piece eras.
A hugely enjoyable trip through thirty extraordinary years of music, madness and mayhem.
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