Assemblage

The Fall before they became The Fall; Warsaw before Joy Division, the Devoto-fronted Buzzcocks: why is it I’m interested in those transitional moments before a band is able to harden itself into the style for which they would become famous? Because they are part of a collective ferment, the trembling of a whole city? Manchester 1976, 1977. Manchester of the first and second Sex Pistols gigs, reviewed at the time as receiving an ecstatic welcome.

Why? The crowd were ‘sussed’, said a contemporary reviewer, yet they were wild. The band were an out of tune heavy metal band doing an Alice Cooper imitation. But the singer! Johnny Rotten was everything. And Buzzcocks, supporting? Mark E. Smith, 16 years old, thought he could do better. And wasn’t that what saw The Fall make their way to the first gig, at the musicians collective? And didn’t Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner recruit Ian Curtis and then, later, the metronomic Stephen Morris after seeing Johnny Rotten sing?

Hadn’t punk already reached Manchester? But it reached it again; it happened again. Event that happens the second time – Lenin after Marx, Paul after Jesus: postpunk was punk – punk was out of synch with itself; North Mancunions, said Mark E. Smith, thought The Velvet Underground already passe. Was it truckers’ songs he was listening to instead? Can and Krautrock? Stockhausen? Devoto would revert, with Magazine, to his Eno-like ambitions, said Mark E. Smith. Pete Shelley took Buzzcocks towards the charts. And The Fall? Masterpieces, one after another – just like Joy Division.

But more interesting to me was the simmering over of the pot of Manchester that happened just as punk broke. Manchester – and Leeds – and Sheffield. Simon Reynolds covers each ‘scene’ admirably. Scenes – no, these were assemblages. Marvellous comings-together, crystallising along lines of flight. Marvellous flashings of bands for whom the city withdrew itself just enough to – what? To make, to create – what? Psychogeographic city. Phantasmagoric Manchester. Ballard’s crystal world along Deansgate.