Manchester bands dominate NME's list of greatest tracks

To celebrate its 60th birthday the NME recently released its list of the 100 greatest tracks of its lifetime. Whilst such a list can never be taken entirely seriously, it does offer an interesting insight into current zeitgeists. What's most striking about this particular list is the dominance of Manchester bands in the top ten. Tony Wilson described Joy Division/New Order, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, The Happy Mondays and Oasis as the five 'great' Manchester bands. Of these, the Mondays are the only band who don't make the top twenty. Here is a list of the top ten, with the Manchester bands in bold:


1. Joy Division – 'Love Will Tear Us Apart'
2. Pulp – 'Common People'
3. David Bowie – '"Heroes"'
4. The Beach Boys – 'Good Vibratons'
5. New Order – 'Blue Monday'
6. The Stone Roses – 'She Bangs The Drums'
7. The Smiths – 'There Is A Light That Never Goes Out'
8. The Specials – 'Ghost Town'
9. Dizzee Rascal – 'Fix Up, Look Sharp'
10. Oasis – 'Wonderwall'


The five tracks provide a useful timeline of the development of Manchester music during its golden age. Love Will Tear Us Apart was released in April 1980; Blue Monday was released March 1983; There is a Light features on the Smiths' third album The Queen is Dead which was released in June 1986; She Bangs the Drums was released in July 1989; and Wonderwall was released in October 1995. The obvious markers for this period are the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Tony Blair in 1997, it all took place during this 18-year period of Conservative government in a city that was always defiantly Labour.

Another defining aspect of this period was the City of Liverpool's footballing dominance. In 1976, Liverpool pulled away from Arsenal to become the most successful team in England, with nine league titles. It was a position they would go on to consolidate, winning another nine titles over the next 14 years. When Manchester United won their eighth title in 1993, Liverpool responded (perhaps a touch hubristically) by saying "Come back when you've won 18." The rivalry between the two cities not makes for a fascinating contest in terms of the two football teams but also in terms of its bands, with the Beatles having been made such a huge impact in the 1960s. I've argued previously that whilst we should admire the band's success and respect their links with the city, the Beatles belong to Liverpool in the same way George Best belongs to Belfast. We can see the similarities in the way both the Beatles and Best (the 'fifth Beatle') invested their earnings in their adopted cities of London and Manchester, the Beatles with Apple Records and Best with his nightclubs and fashion boutiques. In 2002, Liverpool Airport was re-named Liverpool John Lennon. In 2006, Belfast City Airport was re-named after George Best.

Manchester music has received renewed attention with the re-formation of the Stone Roses, who play their massive homecoming gigs at Heaton Park this weekend. Along with the Smiths, the Happy Mondays and and Oasis, all these bands are closely associated with Manchester (not to mention the Buzzcocks, the Fall, John Cooper Clarke, Simply Red, 808 State, A Guy Called Gerald, James, the Ruthless Rap Assassins and a lengthy list of others). But perhaps the most important contribution came from Joy Division/New Order who, unlike the Beatles, invested their profits back into their home city, through projects like Factory Records and the Hacienda, raising Manchester's profile and preparing the ground for two ambitious Olympic bids and its subsequent marketing as a 'global city'. The five tracks above provide the soundtrack for a difficult period in the city's history, but one from which it emerged with a positive outlook thanks in part to the band(s) whose songs the NME now considers the greatest and the fifth greatest.

Would Liverpool make a better capital of the North West?

The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (whose book The Age of Revolution provides a great introduction to the history of Manchester) once said  that 'the imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people'. It's with this in mind that I've suggested Amos, Simpson, Baines, Jagielka, Kelly, Jones, Osman, Rodwell, Gerrard, Welbeck and Rooney as my starting eleven to represent the imagined community of around 6.5m that is the North West of England. If New Labour had had their way then we may have had a directly elected regional assembly along the lines of the ones in Scotland (pop. 5m), Wales (pop. 3m) and Northern Ireland (pop. 2m). Their mistake was to assume that the North East was the best place to put this idea to a referendum (with 700,000 voting against, 200,000 voting in favour).


The sticking point for any discussion of regionalism in the North West will always be around where to have the 'capital'. The diplomatic solution (to avoid any entanglement in the Manchester-Liverpool rivalry) would be to have it in Warrington or Preston - but then when it came to marketing the North West to the rest of the world, we would struggle to make the case for connecting the regional capital with regional identity. A better solution would be to opt for one of the two and make it very clear from the start why.


In order to make regionalism work, it has to be decentralised. It wouldn't make sense to put the capital in Manchester because Manchester doesn't need the extra investment (we have the top two football teams in England, the BBC's MediaCity development and Manchester Airport already). Manchester is the economic heart of the North West and its financial capital. One of the main obstacles towards gaining support for regional devolution would probably be trying to persuade people that it wouldn't just benefit Manchester at everyone else's expense. This is why Liverpool would be the smarter choice. Not only is it by far the grandest-looking city in the whole of the North (really only rivalled by London and Edinburgh in the rest of the UK) but it could also do with the extra investment. An iconic North West Parliament Building overlooking the Mersey would make sense in terms of selling the idea of the North West to the rest of the world. Just as Scotland has Edinburgh and Glasgow, the US has Washington DC and New York, with Liverpool and Manchester both on board, we would be able to make the idea of regional devolution work. Along with the football team, this would be a fitting way to mark the region's proud history of economic independence as the centre of the global cotton trade in the hundred years from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the beginning of the First World War. In order to succeed where others have failed, it would require a radical effort on the part of politicians in Greater Manchester to push for devolution from London to Liverpool.

If the North West had a football team...

This is my tribute to the late Tony Wilson, who will be remembered for many things, not least his commitment to the unfashionable and even much-derrided idea of elected regional assemblies. It links with the role of the North West of England as the birthplace of modern football. It was when legislation was passed in parliament limiting working hours (something the Manchester Guardian, as the voice of the mill-owning liberal establishment, strongly opposed) that Saturday afternoons were freed up for the enjoyment of whatever it was the workers decided to spend their wages on. Previously ‘lesuire’ had been an aristocratic or middle class luxury, with association football (‘soccer’) originating in the playing fields of boarding schools. Now the Factory Acts cleared the way for mass spectator sports and it was in the milltowns of Lancashire that the football boom began, alongside other industrial towns and cities throughout the north of England, Scotland and the Midlands.

The history of football in Lancashire deserves more space to itself, but what is clear that this was (and arguably remains) the spiritual home of the game in England. Of the twelve founding members of the Football League, six were from the county: Accrington, Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Burnley, Everton and Preston North End (the winners of the first two league titles in 1889 and 1890). Today, the two most successful clubs in terms of league titles are Manchester United with 19 and Liverpool with 18. Between them, the North West’s two major clubs (just 30 miles apart) have won 8 European Cups, which puts them just behind Real Madrid with 9 and the two Milan clubs with a combined total of 10. As I’ve written previously, the Manchester derby is the second biggest in Europe based on combined average attendances of all games throughout the 2010-11 season.

With England’s Euro 2012 campaign about to get underway, I’ve decided to post my dream North West Eleven, a team I’d find it much easier to support. Because the regions don’t have the same criteria for citizenship, etc., the most straightforward way to define eligibility is by place of birth – therefore Ryan Giggs (born in Cardiff, moved to Swinton aged six) doesn’t make the team. I’ve gone for a young team so Phil Neville, Paul Scholes and Jaime Carragher would all start on the bench. They would have to play their home games at the biggest, most easily accesible ‘neutral’ venue, which would have to be 23,400 capacity Deepdale (though this is small consolation for the re-location of the National Football Museum to Manchester). For a region with a population of around 6.5m, we have a strong team – weighted slightly more towards Merseyside, it has to be said. Better than Scotland or Wales? Unfortunately, we will probably never find out.

Ben Amos, 22, Macclesfield

Danny Simpson, 25, Salford

Leighton Baines, 27, Kirkby

Martin Kelly, 22, Whiston

Phil Jagielka, 29, Sale

Phil Jones, 20, Preston

Leon Osman, 31, Wigan

Jack Rodwell, 21, Southport

Steven Gerrard, 32, Whiston

Wayne Rooney, 26, Croxteth

Danny Welbeck, 21, Longsight