I've been back up north this weekend. It's weird because I can't say 'back home' as home (as in the place where I'm from/grew up) is Birmingham which I suppose only southerners count as north. A friend at uni was always eager to show off his sociological knowledge whenever I said I wasn't a northerner and remind me that Birmingham was 'socially and economically north', but anyway.
Leeds is an important place to me because I spent six years of my life there between the ages of 18 and 24, obviously things changed massively for me in those six years and Leeds will always have a fond place in my heart. Plus it's a really awesome city, as is Manchester where I used to visit regularly. I still remember many times knocking back cheeky vimtos (WKD Blue and Port) in Poptastic Manchester till 2am then scouring the streets with friends for still-open drinking establishments (including many an uber depressing casino) and then getting the 5am train back home to Leeds. These days I don't think I'd have the energy to do that as often as I used to. Though to be honest the night buses in London can be much more of an ordeal.
Also I spent a lot of time in Todmorden and Hebden Bridge (towns which famously pull in lots of hippies and lesbians, Sylvia Plath is buried in the latter). I have a friend who lives in Todmorden, she made me make peace with the countryside, which I used to associate with dull arse weekends with my parents, wondering why I didn't have any friends. Boo hoo. The further north you go the more exciting and wild the countryside becomes. South it's all too flat.
On my return north at the weekend I spent a lot of time thinking about the pros and cons of Leeds/Mancs/Todmorden in comparison to London...
PROS
NOTICEABLY MORE FRIENDLY/MORE RELAXED. I always forget this and then am pleasantly surprised when I arrive in Leeds and people actually talk to you and look at you and smile at you. You can instantly feel the shift in attitude. Because London is bigger and it takes years to get anywhere, other people become not people but obstacles in the way of a person's daily progress. If you go to some event or other in Leeds there is more chance people will talk to you than in the South, or that they're talking to you because they're genuinely interested in you. Which brings us on to...
LESS HIPSTERS/HIPSTER ATTITUDES. Now don't get me wrong, plenty of hipsters in Leeds/Manchester (maybe not Todmorden though!) but down south it's a whole new breed. When I was at uni I was shocked when around 2002 the Leeds alternative scene suddenly started getting 'cool'. NME deigned that Leeds was the coolest place for music in the UK, if you lived in Leeds you could rub two sticks together, call yourself a band and all these music journalists would wank over you. There were the Long Blondes, Kaiser Chiefs, Forward Russia, Hadouken, etc. Most of them weren't very good to be honest but they were very in. But the 'alternative hipster' thing all felt so sudden to me. Like I was at a gig at Joseph's Well in Leeds one night and suddenly I was surrounded by all these girls in 'high fashion' fluffy boots and all these boys with their hair straightened wearing £300 worth of 'vintage' clothing which looked kind of pseudo glam rock mixed with a metrosexual expensive Pulp look (of course Pulp looked better). My girlfriend of the time had told me about all these hipsters in Leeds but I hadn't believed her, now they were everywhere. The hipster Leeds thing was epitomized by a night called Pigs which ran at a venue I forget the name of near the Corn Exchange. Hi Fi maybe? To be honest it was often quite fun, much as my friends and I liked to slag it off.
In Manchester I witnessed the hipster thing when electro first started getting very popular (or was having a resurgence and rebranded as electro), again around the time I was at uni. Ladytron, Peaches, etc were all the rage, fair enough they were good. I once went to a faux warehouse party in Manchester with some friends that was total hipsterville. We made the mistake of taking loads of magic mushrooms pre party and when we got there everything became like a computer game or slow-mo/fast forward. What I noticed most was the Pencils: pale, anorexically skinny girls with those immaculate hipster black fringes. They looked just like pencils with tiny skinny little hands coming out of them like bits of string. The mushrooms sped up the Pencils' voices so they sounded like they were on fast forward, squeaky like chipmunks and their little hands, they were on fast forward too. One moment, going so fast like the propellors of an airoplane, then the next they'd be slow motion. That's when I learnt mushrooms and night clubs are an unhappy marriage.
I don't think hipsters are inherently bad, though they're easy to mock. To some people I am a hipster so I'd better not be too self-righteous, it's all relative after all. The problem I have really is the bad attitude that sometimes goes with being a hipster. Maybe that wasn't so apparent in Leeds but when I got to London, my god! ...
I used to come down to London a fair bit when I was living in Leeds to visit my mate Bob who I was also in a band with. We'd often go to Unskinny Bop before it became trendy (ha ha cos we're so cool), when it was still full of freaks and queer misfits. I thought the atmosphere was so nice and welcoming. I would also go to queer squat parties where I'd feel kind of socially awkward but it was generally welcoming-ish. So then I went to Soho, to Trash Palace, hardly the heart of the hipster world, but I was shocked by the unfriendliness and the cheekbones. I perhaps just went on an off day, but I couldn't believe all the glares. Then I got to Shoreditch and every one was a hipster and the cold disinterest that often went with this was so strange to behold. I remember when me and Bob first started playing gigs in London, people just didn't show much emotion/reaction to us. Maybe because there were a plethora of queer/shoreditch dickheads who couldn't really play their instruments and wore silly clothes or lack thereof, but I was still disturbed by the lack of any sort of reaction. Even a heckle. When we played in squats/things like nomocrime we generally got more of a warm response. Or heckled, but at least that's *something*.
I actually think in London you have to make yourself feel less than in other places cos everything's harder work and you just can't give the emotional energy to people that you can in smaller places.
MUSIC ASIA/BOOZE 4 U/DRIVING SCHOOL - in Harehills, Leeds! It's all one shop! I just love the fact that they thought it would be a good idea to combine a driving school and an off license. Maybe you have to see it.
WATERFALLS - Even if you live in Leeds or Manchester you can get the train to Hebden/Tod and jump in waterfalls in Summer, and in no more time than it takes to get from Peckham to Hampstead Heath. No waterfalls in London.
LS6 - a bit of a double edged sword this one. LS6 is the area of Leeds also known as Hyde Park. It's mega popular with students, so it's kind of got a reputation of (majority white, middle class) studentville. It's also full of musicians and supposedly has the densest population of musicians than any other area in the world apart from somewhere in Texas. Of course I have my doubts that the collector of this information actually went everywhere in the world and counted, but there are indeed a lot. Most are probably crap, some are good, a few are amazing. It's a good place to be if you want to be in a band anyway and frankly who doesn't?
LS6 is also home to a lot of working class Asian families. There is obviously the gentrification issue but to be honest I can't comment a lot on how Hyde Park has changed because when I got there in 2001 it was already mega studenty and had been for many years, which is not to say I wasn't contributing to the continuing gentrification cos I'm sure I was. One thing I did notice was that every year the rents went up which is mega shit. Apparently 90% of students at Leeds University come from families in the top pay bracket so there are obviously some big discrepencies with who can afford to pay the rising rates. Another thing that happened when I was in LS6 which was pretty heartbreaking was the local primary school got shut down, it was mostly refugee and migrant kids whose first language was not English. I remember one of the governers very publically stating that funding had been cut because the local authorities did not deem the kids who went there as important.
Fireworks night in Hyde Park was always terrifying. I guess maybe there was some resentment of students in the area, or there was just a very lax attitude to twelve year olds buying fireworks. As early as September there were a couple of streets where you'd have to be nimble and dodge the fireworks. I don't know if it's still like that now. I don't think anyone ever lost an eye. Touch wood.
Other great things about Hyde Park are the Brudenell Social Club where I saw many an amazing gig, The Hyde Park Picture House which is an amazing independent cinema. There was also the abundance of cheap samosas in practically every small shop. I had a bit of an addiction.
Overall I think Hyde Park is a Pro, even if some of the students are wankers. Don't leave your window open when you go out though, someone might be trying to climb through! I soon learnt.
CONS
LACK OF FRESH BLOOD - this was a big reason I left Leeds. Like it or lump it, London is like a big swirling vortex sucking in people from all over the country and the world, new arrivals every day. Leeds is not. What you do get is a new intake of students each year, who every year are younger and younger and younger than you. I'm afraid I rarely go for the young ones.
SMALL TOWN RACISM - I'm thinking here of towns like Todmorden and Hebden Bridge. Not saying there isn't a problem with racism in Leeds, Manchester or even London (see below) or that the working class populous of small northern towns are all racist hicks, but Todmorden and Hebden Bridge are very white places compared with much of the country and I've heard of people of colour being fobbed off with some bullshit in certain pubs about how they're not serving food or whatever, only to walk by half an hour later and find this is a lie. In Tod the other day, a friend pointed out a chip shop which was sometimes a popular haunt of fascists. Whilst there is a hippy, liberal, green, somewhat gay element to these towns, the BNP are also quite popular. It's also not automatically cool to be a homo everywhere in town, one new year's me and a friend got started on for snogging in a pub. Also some of the hebden lesbians are somewhat old skool in their views. Once I walked past the Hebden Bridge Wimmin's Christmas Fair to find a polite notice on the door stating it was for Women Born Women only. It's a fucking Christmas Fair!
FOOTBALL DAYS - this is perhaps more prevelant in Leeds and Manchester. I'm sure there's football violence in London too and I've just been shielded from it, but actually what gave me the idea to write this was walking past the pub in Leeds where I used to work at near the station and seeing a big line of police outside. That means it's a football day. Around the corner there's another pub with an enormous England flag outside similarly flanked by police. Most days working at the pub was fine (apart from me being naturally lazy and the pay being shit), I even started the trend of gays working there, so despite it being quite a hetero old man's pub, about 60% of the bar staff were homos at one point which was nice.
Match days were pretty horrible, I knew one Liverpudlian Socialist guy who was a regular, but on match days he didn't come in and occasionally you'd get pretty nasty right wing elements. If that was obvious I'd just walk off without serving them, but even with people who wouldn't have put themselves in the right wing camp there was so much grumbling about 'the immigrants', though nobody could agree on whether they'd 'taken our jobs' or 'taken our benefits'. This isn't just a northern attitude obviously. If you take a glance at the popular press you'll see 'Immigrant' is often used in the same kind of tone 'Pedophile' is used in.
I actually felt sorry for some of the guys who would come in and talk this shit cos they would tell me about dead end towns they'd come from where there were no job prospects. It's unfortunate that instead of wanting to fight against a fucked up system of global capitalist exploitation they blamed 'the immigrants' (poor non-white/non-western immigrants was really who they meant) who had also been severely fucked over by, often even moreso, by capitalism and imperialism. I would argue till I was blue in the face that 'the immigrants' were a scapegoat and most of the resources available in the UK came from fucking over the rest of the world but the pub guys had seen the figures in the Metro and I was just some privileged student hippy.
OK, that went off on a huge and depressing tangent and the attitudes witnessed at my old place of work are I'm sure just as evident in the south...so that's not really a comparison just a tangential rant.
Next week: Birmingham!
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