In St Ann’s Square a busker is in danger of drowning out a piece of sound art called Azan, a specially commissioned installation by Mohammed Fairouz. One of six public bits of listening art spread across the city, it naturally has to compete with the cacophony of city life. But this is amplified, Bluetoothed busking. So one worried festival-goer hurries over to the crooner and explains.
This being Manchester, you expect vowels to fly. Instead, the busker happily takes an intermission, just in time for a small swell of strings to creep out from speakers in the trees: unexpectedly bittersweet and affecting. More strings are thrumming on the first floor of Manchester’s magnificent town hall – a secular church, of sorts, where composer Huang Ruo joins the building in paying tribute to the worker bees of the city’s industrial past.
Is everyone just nicer in the north? Is this just how it is in bee-tattooed, I-heart-Manchester, post-Grande? Or is the idea of worthwhile art coming out of trees (or discreet wooden boxes in the corners of civic buildings, like chi-chi rodent traps) just part of a vibe engendered by the biennial Manchester international festival, now a decade old?
It would not be a stretch to state that 10 years of MIF have helped magnetise this city, attracting funding, talent and monolithic architecture, both exhilarating and carbuncle-like, unimaginable just one life-span ago. In a 2015 interview with former MIF artistic director Alex Poots, Manchester’s Confidentials website lays it all at MIF’s feet. “Before Manchester’s so-called ‘cultural renaissance’, before the £78m Factory, or the £50m revamped Central Library, or the £25m Home arts centre, or the £15m refurbed Whitworth; before the BBC’s move to Salford, or the Hallé St Peters, or the new £34m School of Art, there was MIF,” they wrote.
Forming part of a significant move of arts cash away from the cosseted capital, the Factory will be operated by MIF – now headed by John McGrath, formerly founding artistic director of the National Theatre in Wales. The choice of name is… interesting. It shows something of a lack of imagination, nodding a little too hard, perhaps, to Manchester’s illustrious past, both sonic and industrial. Technically, there’s already a nightclub called the Factory in town, housed in the old offices of Factory Records, the totemic Manchester label that brought the world Joy Division, New Order and more besides.
Factory Records wasn’t just referencing the city’s satanic mills and dehumanising industrial works. It was nodding to Andy Warhol’s New York atelier-cum-den of iniquity. It bears repeating – though you appreciate how Manchester’s young creatives might chafe at this on-going fetishisation – Manchester’s Factory was a scene where graphic art, film and the force of personalities carried equal weight to extraordinary music. It created a peculiarly Mancunian yet internationally inspired body of work, one frottaged once again at MIF17. It is hard now, walking around this metropolis in search of ambient sound, to grasp exactly how much in need of appropriate art the declining cities of the north were, when New Order were growing up.
It’s a situation remedied somewhat by Mark Leckey’s video installation, Dream English Kid 1964-1999. Leckey’s impressionistic YouTube-derived autobiography is set in his native Liverpool, where he saw Joy Division play and was forever changed. But one city’s desolation and sense of threat doubles for the other’s, in its crumbling estates, malevolent underpasses and fear of terrorism.
It is, hands-down, the most unsettling piece of art at the True Faith show at Manchester Art Gallery, in which the celebrated visuals of New Order and Joy Division are exhibited alongside a hotchpotch of works inspired by the two bands. Not far behind is Ian Curtis’s handwritten early draft of Love Will Tear Us Apart, which should have Mona Lisa crowds around it, while Julian Schnabel’s tribute to Ian Curtis is so naff it’s almost enraging.
It is, by contrast, a privilege to be nose-close to the proto-potpourri of A Basket of Roses (1890) by Henri Fantin-Latour, the painting of flowers past their best quoted by Factory visual director Peter Saville on the cover of New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies (1983). (The title of that album was said to have been lifted by New Order vocalist Bernard Sumner from 1981 graffiti by Gerhard Richter on the Cologne Kunsthalle – more art, seeding music, seeding art).
Two songs from that album grace the setlist of New Order’s rewarding show at the Old Granada Studios in the evening, which goes by the très Factory name of ∑(No,12k,Lg,17Mif) ∑(No,12k,Lg,17Mif) – the No being New Order, the 12k being 12 keyboards, and Lg being artist Liam Gillick, creator of the exhilarating stage set. An indication of an acidic pH would not have gone amiss here, reflecting the acrimonious absence of bassist Peter Hook, replaced by Tom Chapman.
Two floors of backlit, Venetian-blinded windows provide the stage backdrop, in the very room where Joy Division made their TV debut in 1978; the effect is a bit Jailhouse Rock, a bit Amsterdam red light district, a bit gameshow – and really quite magnificent. The windows house dancing Royal Northern College of Music students on synths, discreetly conducted by Joe Duddell.
It’s not resting on your laurels if you’re playing deep cuts reorchestrated for 12 synths, and on night three of their run, New Order excel at their most electronic. Power Corruption and Lies’ Ultraviolence is now a layered, polyrhythmic gallop, the wall of synths breached by Sumner’s gnarly guitar.
Kicking off the encore, Your Silent Face is a percolation of keys that salutes Kraftwerk, with Sumner’s melodica solo a very sweet touch. Three Joy Division songs deliver an emotional wallop, with Heart and Soul a standout thanks to Stephen Morris’s spectacular machine drumming.
Really though, this is a rave manqué. With its mix of disco, percussive breakdowns, synth overload and relentless forward momentum, you don’t want Sub-Culture to end.
•True Faith is at Manchester Art Gallery until 3 September
• ∑(No,12k,Lg,17Mif) is at Old Granada Studios on Thursday and Saturday 13 and 15 July
