I have an uncle who famously hates olives. Thinks tapenade is the devil’s work. Won’t eat anything an olive has touched. Won’t have olive oil on his salad or even eat pizza. But about once a year he’ll look at the olives on someone else’s plate and ask if he can try one, “just to see if I still don’t like them”. Usually you don’t notice rules too much so I try to remember the olives whenever one becomes apparent. Just because something stood the tests of a year, or ten, or even a hundred, doesn’t necessarily make it an eternal truth.
on the bbc last night they said that, based on gym and other exercise data, research revealed manchester as the healthiest place in britain, with london in the bottom three. my southern friends were horrified, ‘but you lot eat pies and chips and gravy and do unspeakable things to peas’. that’s as maybe, thought i, but it’s all about appearance; it’s what people think is true that’s important.
growing up i assumed everywhere was the same, and to an extent it is - we all think (are told from little by our community at large) that where we come from is special. but where i come from we don’t think it, we practice it. that place is the north west of england and even writing that feels odd because we don’t really consider ourselves to be from the north west except to make sure outsiders aren’t confused. it’s just the north. yorkshire is yorkshire, cumbria is cumbria and so on, and very nice to visit they may be, but we are “the north”, end of. it says so on the motorway if you’re coming up from “the south”.
and when mark e smith wrote ‘the north will rise again’ and ‘hit the north’ he was talking about us.
our north is itself subdivided into rivalries that go back forever, spearheaded by our glorious cities which are fed by the hundreds of towns and villages smattered across our lovely land. manchester is cock o’t north, liverpool the melancholy artists who brought rock n roll to england, not through the beatles but through the americans sailing into albert dock (yes, that albert dock, where richard & judy used to be).
from the lakeland poets and painters (a sizeable portion of the lakes belonged to us before the regions got endlessly re-jigged) to l.s. lowry (salford, lancs just so you know) we keep our legends alive and push them endlessly forward. in my lifetime, the chief storytellers have been musicians and the world that surrounds them. and ahead of them all was tony wilson.
left to right, peter saville, tony wilson, alan erasmus
while he was alive, nobody understood or believed in the myths and legends of the north quite so much. before his death he’d been working hard to re-brand a beautiful but neglected fag-end bit of our country from east lancs to pennine lancashire. now, i ask you, who having visited the pennines, wouldn’t want to invest in that?
everyone knows about tony wilson. well, everyone from the north or those who have seen ‘24 hour party people’ do (i can’t watch it myself). as one of our own, sometimes we loved him, sometimes we felt he needed taking down a peg or two (but only cos we loved him). but he was our champion and it’s a damn shame that he’s gone, not just for the north but for the world. and if you think that’s too big a claim then consider the music, the art, the way of clubbing that he was involved with bringing to life. no, he didn’t do it alone, couldn’t do it alone, but he understood and stage managed the building of the myths and legends that have become common knowledge around the world.
this coming friday, anton corbijn’s film, ‘control‘, about ian curtis and joy division opens in cinemas. i’m too young to have seen joy division but the ian curtis legend loomed large over the lancashire i grew up in. inextricably linked with the architecture of the cities, our countryside and our weather. in my mind he’d passed on to live alongside shelagh delaney as 20th century poet and commentator on life. myths and legends survive only if people buy into them. it might all be melodramatic rubbish to a lot of people, but i’ve bought my ticket.
a few weeks back i got a call from laura in the education department at D&AD. would i like to judge the student awards? hell yes. ‘it’s a lovely brief’, she said, ‘for eurostar’. brilliant. which category? ‘integrated communications.’ [shudder]
well, serves me right for banging on about loving a challenge. integrated comms is one of the toughest categories to crack in the professional awards, would the students do any better? well…no, not really. we saw some smart thinking, witty one-liners, great ad campaigns, clever guerilla activity, polished pieces of design, impressive strategy, and one particularly beautiful bit of craft. but nobody quite managed to tie it all together with one killer idea growing across the media.
but, like i said, integrated is tough (is it even studied in most schools?), the overall standard was impressive, and i even wanted to steal one piece and bring it back with me, so that’s pretty good in my books.
the ceremony isn’t until the end of june so i’m secret squirrel until then on who made it into the book or if we awarded any stubby pencils etc.
