Manchester Unspun: Pop, Property and Power in the Original Modern City: How a City Got High on Music

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R eaders will enjoy the joyous mix of the author’s encounters with a who’s who of famous Mancunians, from Morrissey to Bernard Manning, Shaun Ryder to Sir Alex Ferguson, Frank Sidebottom to Andy Burnham, with walk-on parts from Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Anna Friel, Lemn Sissay, Caroline Aherne, Mick Hucknall and Jonathan Ross.

Andy is a journalist and PR guru who has written a warts-and-all exposé of the city’s recent renaissance. In the spirit of Braudel, who asserts that ‘the Mediterranean speaks with many voices; it is a sum of individual histories’, this book endeavours to allow the people of the early modern Mediterranean to be heard more than one can find in any other study till now, and strives to cast all its major themes in a new light. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall).Spinoza, a latter day Mancunian Pepys, has obviously relied upon a considerable amount of personal notes, contacts, memories and archive materials in putting this impressive account together but that’s what makes it such an engaging and essential read. He then found himself occupying a front-row seat for the epic regeneration story that played out over the next four decades. Finally, explorations of medieval and modern Islamic sharia, Christian moral theology and Jewish halakhah all highlight how such traditions develop complex meta-rules – rules about rules – for managing the tensions and dilemmas that the use of rules can entail. First as observer, then as participant, Andy has enjoyed a ring-side seat in the renaissance and development of Britain's most exciting city.

Abandoning the notion of pursuing municipal socialism in a Tory-dominated country, Manchester’s two most powerful politicians spent the 80s and 90s controversially opening the city up to private investment on the most favourable of terms. And, with his rackety entourage in tow, he was a generous setter up of tabs in the Haçienda cocktail bar and the other nightspots along Whitworth Street like the Venue and the Brickhouse.

manchesterhive requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books or journals - to see content that you/your institution should have access to, please log in through your library system or with your personal username and password. Ethical systems characterised by detailed rules – Islamic sharia and Christian casuistry are notable examples – have often been dismissed as empty formalism or as the instrument of social control.

Nor does he take sides (although there will probably be some names in there smarting) and mercifully avoids the nostalgia and over-sentimentality associated with certain bandwagoning ‘I was there’ accounts of the city (thankfully for the reader, the author hadn’t yet arrived in Manchester when the Sex Pistols played the Lesser Free Trade Hall).Shaun Ryder and Liam Gallagher respectively stand up for more traditional Mancunian values by throwing a bottle at the mirror behind the bar and smashing an upmarket vase. He came to study at Manchester University in 1983 and was soon selling posters in the student union’s markets.