As in so many other cultural arenas, the UK punches way above its weight in pop music. And, drilling down a level, Manchester is the country’s greatest music city. Please: don’t @ me; just accept it.
With his bowl haircut, loping gait, and Doors-inflected organ sounds, Clint Boon was one of the driving forces behind whimsical Madchester collective the Inspiral Carpets. As such, his story runs through the late 20th century Manchester music scene like the crease down a king-size Rizla paper. He knows everyone who’s anyone in the city, and has hilarious anecdotes to share about all of them.
Most famously, a young scallywag from Burnage named Noel Gallagher, having failed an audition to sing for Boon’s band, was given the consolation prize of a job as roadie, gofer, guitar tech, and joint roller. It was this apprenticeship that allowed Noel to build up the industry nous, and hone the songcraft, that would later take Oasis supersonic. One of Boon’s closest friends was the late Gary "Mani" Mounfield, the universally beloved bassist who played briefly with an early incarnation of the Inspirals before joining the Stone Roses.
We’re treated to a fly-on-the-wall view of an endless succession of Mancunian high jinks. Bez and Shaun Ryder use LSD as a performance-enhancing drug as they take to the Hacienda stage. Boon speeds down Princess Street in Manchester while Tim Booth plays a demo cassette of the latest James album (Strip-Mine) on his car stereo. Peter Hook tells Boon his haircut makes him look “like Joanna fuckin’ Lumley!” Johnny Marr joins him to sell copies of the Big Issue outside Marks & Spencer. Ryder takes umbrage at some harmless quote Boon gives to a newspaper, telling a mate of Boon’s “If you see him, tell him I’m looking for him and I’ve got a knife!"
Boon parties hard in LA with the Happy Mondays, Terry Christian, Johnny Marr, the Pixies, and Depeche Mode. A putative label deal with Geffen Records collapses when Inspirals drummer Craig alienates David Geffen by “taking his trainers off and picking at his athlete’s foot infestation”.
Boon was clearly in the music business for the love of music, rather than to make money. His genuine enthusiasm is unmistakable. He’s no hipper-than-thou musical snob, either: he’s happy to acknowledge enjoying Showaddywaddy and The Carpenters, alongside 808 State and De La Soul. He takes an admirably modest and realistic view of his band’s abilities: “We knew our strengths and our weaknesses. We weren’t Dire Straits or Led Zeppelin. We were Oldham’s version of The Velvet Underground. T’Velvets, if you like!”
Boon rightly lauds the importance of the Stone Roses and how entwined their music was with the zeitgeist:
“By the summer of 1989 things had gone crazy in Manchester. It felt like the city was the centre of the world. John Squire from the Roses summed it up when he said, 'It all came together – the people I was hanging about with, the clothes we were wearing, the records we were buying, the drugs we were doing'.”
The Roses went straight to people’s hearts in part because people felt they embodied the trajectory of the times: in summary, away from the stultifying, mean-spirited Thatcherite Eighties, towards a happier, more progressive and inclusive future. “We were on the cusp of a new decade, and the future suddenly looked bright”, says Boon.
Does he occasionally go a little too far? Depending on how vigorously your cynicism gland is pumping, you might balk at Boon’s claim that Oldham Street in 1989 was “what I imagined Haight-Ashbury had been like in 1967”, invoking Wordsworth’s “Bliss it was” to describe how it felt “to be right at the heart of that beautiful hurricane of love and energy.” Then again, as Boon points out, “The lemons on the cover” of the Stone Roses’ debut album “were a reference to the Paris riots of 1968, when students used lemons to counteract the effects of tear gas”. You don’t get that sort of thing with Oasis.
People were expecting the Stone Roses to be the next Beatles, but they imploded due to a delayed and disappointing second album, a series of missed or disastrous festival shows, byzantine legal woes, artistic differences and (some might say) too much cocaine. Today their story is seen as a tragic one. They flew too high and crashed back down to Earth: Icarus in 24 inch flares.
Oasis, many felt, got lucky with timing and scooped up the success that the Stone Roses should have had - despite not being a patch on the Roses or the Mondays, let alone New Order. Factory supremo Tony Wilson said Manchester kids have the best record collections - something you can hear in the dank, Manc funk of the Mondays, but would never know from Oasis’s atavistic tabloid rock. Supermarket own-brand Prosecco to the Roses’ vintage Champagne, Oasis obscured their chronic lack of substance behind a wall of screaming guitars. And they had a frontman with a strong voice and even stronger sense of self-belief. Which worked fine for the first album but soon got old.
Liam Gallagher started wildly exaggerating his mannerisms. The simian Ian Brown swagger became so pronounced he looked like an anorak-clad Weeble; the Manc accent got ramped up into self-caricature: he began sounding like a distorted wah-wah pedal. The coke got to them, too. Their second album was a bloated, boring mess - and it was all downhill from there.
The period Boon documents has seen a huge surge in Manchester’s economic development. “The skyline of the city is unrecognisable from the one I got to know as a young punk in the mid-1970s” he says. The downside is that creatives have been priced out. The only thing Satanic about all those Northern mills today is the rent they charge. The Hacienda was demolished and replaced with an ugly block of boujee apartments, marketed with the slogan, "Now the party’s over, you can come home!" Fuck off.
Boon’s own story isn’t all one long party, either. In a chapter gripping enough for a thriller, he puts us in the front seat beside him as the huge Mercedes tour bus he’s driving suffers double tyre malfunctions, skids off the road, flips over, and leaves him suspended upside down by his seatbelt watching his friends and bandmates bleed all over the M6. No less harrowing is his tale of bringing Mark E Smith down to London for his first (and, inevitably, last) appearance on TOTP. Smith even managed to terrorise Boon’s infant daughter Harley:
“Mark leaned over, blew out a big cloud of smoke, pointed his cigarette at her, ash dropping onto her lap, and snarled, ‘Uncle Mark’s gonna get ya!!’ I thought, ‘Fuck me! That nappy’s gonna need changin’!”
After the Mute label dropped the Inspiral Carpets, Boon’s personal situation deteriorated to the point where he was reduced to signing on, enduring a sneer from the oik behind the DHSS desk, who tells him qualifications such as having appeared on Top of the Pops seven times, don’t translate well into mainstream employability. As Oasis gleefully ride a tidal wave of success, Boon finds himself in his local shop, with his “milk tokens discreetly hidden in the palm of my hand” so his neighbours couldn’t see them. “All the while, Noel and Liam were laughing down at me from the news shelves. I was proper chuffed for them all but, at times, the irony crushed me.”
Boon bounces back, though. He finds success as a DJ, and as a songwriter for the Engie Benjy kids’ TV show, alongside his old mucker Shaun Ryder. Eventually, in true TV movie style, he even gets the band back together. He remains clear-eyed about the retro appeal of such manoeuvres, though: the success of the recent Oasis reunion tour “is about more than just Oasis: it’s about the love and affection that people have for the 1990s. It was a much more optimistic time. Things feel a lot more fractured now, and people are desperate to feel that optimism again, even if it’s just for one night.”
Shaun Ryder provides the book’s brief, surreal foreword, ensuring we only have to wait for the third word in the text before we encounter an expletive. And so it goes. "People like me and Clint are real”, writes Ryder. “Kids these days can’t even close the fuckin’ cupboard doors in the kitchen.” True dat.
Boon certainly won’t make any enemies with this book. It’s less “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again”, more “Every musician in this city owes you a spliff”. He doesn’t have a bad word to say about anyone, and is even capable of taking a “c’est la vie” attitude to the tantalising possibility that his band could have been as big as Oasis if they hadn’t knocked back Noel Gallagher’s offer to join them. His book is a breezy read, bursting with local colour, and with more outlandish stories than you could shake a maraca at. There’s no bitterness, no axe grinding. It’s a full-throated celebration of not just the music, but the great city Boon calls home. Manchester. So much to answer for. But such a lot to be proud of, too.
- The Manchester Chronicles is published by Hachette, in hardback, at £25
- More book reviews on theartsdesk
