The beginning of City Life and the end of the alternative

SKV MD Andy Spinoza takes us back in time to the early years of Manchester's City Life magazine - his baby in the 80s - and ponders, amongst other things, how his illustrious team failed to make their fortunes selling it at 30p a pop.

I seem to popping up in walk-on parts in people’s books.

Peter Hook has given me a mention in his How Not To Run a Club, quoting from my 1989 piece in The Face about the Hacienda’s slow death-by-gangland, which also got re-printed in the Jon Savage-edited The Hacienda Must Be Built.

And going back even further in shared histories, there’s Mark Kermode’s It’s Only A Movie, his highly readable biog, an entertaining speed-read through the career of the Radio 5 Live, Culture Show and Observer film critic.

With winning self-deprecation, Dr K (as fans of his Simon Mayo R5 Live spots call him), devotes a chapter to his Manchester years, brimming with radical student politics, busking on his double bass outside the Royal Exchange, and working for peanuts at the wing-and-a-prayer City Life magazine which I founded and edited with two other ex-Manchester University students.

We are talking 1984-85 here, so when Mark took the stage at the University of Manchester’s Whitworth Hall recently, his speech (accepting an Outstanding Alumnus Award) took me right back to the days before blogs and the Net.

Now anyone can publish their views online, but back then DIY publishing meant a xeroxed fanzine or printed fortnightly magazine like ours, selling ads to theatres, nightclubs, bookshops and vegetarian wholefood co-ops as means of funding our own view, for our own readership, on this city. Even the cheapest fanzine could not give content for free; it was the means of publishing the content which cost, and that had to covered.

The City Life worldview meant a default and often aggressive opposition to the mainstream view of Manchester, crystallised for us in the all-powerful MEN.

Mark really does capture the atmos back then in the old City Life offices at 1-3 Stephenson Square, a colourful cast of odd characters inspired by punk ‘n’ hippy radicals, and aspiring journalists just passing through - like Liz McKean, (now on Newsnight), Kathryn Holliday (Telegraph magazine), John Naughton, (The Word/Empire) and Aidan McGurran (saddled with The Sun’s Lenny Lotto persona for a while, before he escaped to The Mirror).

Also hanging out  were music biz media folk who have gone to be even better known for their illustrious and variegated careers - front cover genius photographer Kevin Cummins, the Happy Mondays designers Matt, Pat and Karen Carroll, designer Mick Peek (who later did the MCFC crest), and writers Jon Ronson, Sarah Champion and John Robb. The late artist Ray Lowry used to come in and deliver a fistful of scratchy cartoons, and if we published one we’d send him £7.50.

Mark Kermode’s book details his thrill at getting a review published in a magazine sold on the news stands. Getting each issue out seemed a titanic struggle yet the end product was worth our 60 hour working weeks, because publication felt like power.

Seeing each issue on sale down Oxford Road and Deansgate pegged up alongside ‘proper’ magazines was a rush which even now lives with me. I did a double take when I dug these covers out - yes, we really did sell for just 30p.

City Life was a magazine by, about and for ‘us’, the 20-40s with left-leaning cultural interests.  Something you could hold in your hand, pass around, take to the pub and refer to, and collect. Yet these days no end of online gurus could write yards of Wordpress on ‘communities of interest” about the most niche online forum with a handful of devotees.

Ultimately, ‘us’ turned out to be no more than a few thousand readers, which is why it failed as a business and was bought out of administration by the MEN in 1988. It published the title as a mag until a few years ago, but closed it down. But its brand lives on in the paper’s features pages.

As I heard Mark’s eulogy to mid-80s Manchester to the assembled throng of post-grads and their parents - “whatever you wanted to do, you could make happen in Manchester” - I was reminded of the part we alternative publishers played not only in the life of Mark Kermode and I, but in the life of the city.

When the MEN bought City Life out of administration in 1988, they inherited a collection of City Life mags. I have no idea if that collection is still with them, but I have a pretty intact collection of the first 300 or so issues. They provide a unique picture of a social, cultural and political view of the city from 1983 onwards that you won’t find in the MEN’s own cuttings, or anywhere else.

Can anyone suggest a home for them where they might be useful to those wanting to study a period of the city’s life? It’s an archive of a crucial period of Manchester life, reporting with rough energy and scathing wit on the birth of the alternative Manchester which turned out to be so influential - the Hacienda and Cornerhouse, the rise of the Stringer/Leese/Bernstein council, Madchester, the city centre living and leisure boom, the city’s comedy stars and the growth of the city’s contemporary art scene, etc etc.

Mark Kermode’s award was made at a post-graduate degree ceremony, and was hosted by imposing-looking academic figures in gowns and a range of outlandish headgear. He had to wear one too. There was much chuckling at how unlikely it all seemed that we’ve gone all establishment.

Except, really, what was establishment and alternative has disappeared. The young rebels of the 80s media scene would have boggled at today’s melding of the old battle lines.

The city fathers promote ‘innovation’ and ‘cultural industries.’ Manchester sells itself on its history of rabble-rousing musical roughnecks. And the Prime Minister loves The Smiths.

What used to be called ‘alternative’ media - like the so-called ‘alternative comedians’ - have ceased to exist. Tribal media is vanishing along with tribal politics, with the decline of national newspapers part of that trend.

There is no alternative anything, because there is no need for an alternative when the Net hosts a myriad of communities and possibilities, and the instant means to express them.

Maybe the Facebook generation has no interest in those who came before them. But perhaps when our collective synapses have blown in some mass social meejah TMI overload, people may have the time and space to wonder at just how the city that we take for granted today, actually came to be.

Then some dusty old journals might help the curious, the amnesiac or the scholarly shed some light on what, even now, seems like ancient Manchester history.

Any takers for my collection of old mags?

Andy Spinoza is the MD of PR agency SKV Communications. This piece can also be found on the company's blog. You can follow Andy on Twitter here  http://twitter.com/andyspin

www.skvcommunications.co.uk

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