Welcome to subscribers, old and new...
Some recommended reading
A surge in subscriber numbers recently, so here’s a quick post to guide you through some of the previous articles, including the most popular, and a couple of my other favourites
It was never my intention to post quick takes on events of the day - I follow and admire Substackers who do exactly that, and there’s a bit of that in my archive - but most of the posts are the result of some lengthy research over time, a step back or two, a few travels into the past. My hope is that I’m creating a library of articles to browse.
Here are some recommended posts:
Many years ago I saw a striking photograph taken by Daniel Meadows of two lads in Moss Side in 1972. I was so curious about them, trying to imagine their lives. In the Summer of 2023 I tracked one of them down and visited his home and heard his story. It was quite a tale, and it’s the most read and shared post to date...
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I’ve written a fair amount about Sylvia Plath in the last five years in various places but here I posted an account of Plath during Christmas 1959 when she and Ted Hughes spent an evening in a Yorkshire pub; sixty-five years on, I went to the same pub, to explore the significance of this episode in Plath’s life
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I enjoyed writing this piece about the early days of the Smiths, specifically about how Johnny Marr became friends with the future Smiths manager Joe Moss, and the role Joe played in getting the Smiths on their way.
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A post that struck a chord with people was my piece about how I’ve ended-up with boxes of things kept by the previous generation or three. What do I do with it all? Letters, documents, photographs?
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Another of the most popular posts was a quick take on events; a reaction to the arrival of Chanel, and their heavily hyped launch of new products in Manchester. There was a huge fanfare locally but I had several questions about what the sycophancy said about the mindset of the city.
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Paid subscribers get full access to the whole archive, plus other posts that are behind the paywall; this includes interviews with Sonic Youth, Viv Albertine of the Slits, the writer Andrew O’Hagan, Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens, and Mark E Smith.
This Substack is where I get to write about my passions and interests. My next post will be uploaded in about two weeks; it’s an in-depth look at one of the works by the great Salford-born writer Shelagh Delaney. Not A Taste of Honey, but the short story that became a film; The White Bus
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