On Saturday 27 April 2019 Jon Savage gave a talk at the Home arts centre in Manchester on his new book, Joy Division: an oral history, after showing a rare video which he produced of the band playing live at the Manchester Apollo in 1979. He is a music journalist who moved to Manchester in the 1970s to cover ‘the scene’.

Lessons:

The Manchester music scene in 1970s-1990s worked because:

– all the corporates were is London and Manchester ‘only’ had independent labels. They weren’t perfect, not many talented female musicians thrived in the blokey culture, but it did sustain bands such as Joy Division. Had JD gone to a London corporate, Ian Curtis would have been peeled away from the rest of the band as a solo artist, and expected to make a hit single every three months and an album every year.

– there were basically semi-derelict spaces within the city for affordable living, where new communities could grow and flourish. JS felt that this was no longer the case for Manchester, but was still possible in Glasgow, and maybe in parts of Birmingham. This is the tension within place-making, where artists create desirability, but then rising values which attract investors but push away creative clusters. The knack of doing urban regeneration based on sustainable communities remains a lesson mostly unlearnt since the 1980s because of short-term capital pressures.

I agree with JS and I liked his talk because it matched my taste in music, but also matched with my interest in genuine urban regeneration based on sustainable communities. Useful lessons I feel that work across cultural and arts sectors generally, eg screen, theatre, music.