The Observer - From the Archive - G-Mex Festival of Tenth Summer 27 July 2014

Manchester is united in its regard for punk

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/jul/27/manchester-united-regard-punk-birthday-observer-archive

From the Observer archive, 27 July 1986
The city's greatest bands help the tireless genre celebrate its 10th birthday in its spiritual home
Jon Savage
First published on Sun 27 Jul 2014 00.04 BST

Punk is now a costume on the very clothes rack of youth style it set out to subvert. Its 10th anniversary is turning into one of the media obsessions of the year, yet just as the past is rewritten in the language of the present, then so is a series of complex and contradictory signs (about which no one can agree) reduced into a sludge of nostalgia and style recycling. The fact that nobody can agree about what punk was or is may well be a sign of its continued vitality, or at least nuisance value. One way out of the morass is to see punk as an approach to culture that worked. The speed of the media retrospectives hints at the broad influence that punk has had on the music, fashion and style industries, but fails to address the paradox between punk's intention – to rip up these industries – and its eventual effect – to prop them up.

A week-long series of events in Manchester, the Festival of the Tenth Summer, covered both the breadth of the activity that punk set in motion and the depth of Manchester's own contribution. Punk may have begun as a London style with heavy New York overtones, but it quickly took root in Manchester.

The spirit of the final event, a huge all-day concert in the G-Mex exhibition centre, was catching. Possibly stretching it to have Wayne Fontana proclaim that his Hello Josephine was the "first punk record" in 1963. And having as compere an increasingly erratic Bill Grundy – the man who put the "Pis" into the Sex Pistols – was a good lunch idea that should have been forgotten the next afternoon.

The first Manchester punk group, Buzzcocks, were represented by single sets from a charming Pete Shelley, a disruptive Howard Devoto and an obdurate Steve Diggle. The longest running Manchester punk group, the Fall, refined their demented rockabilly. The great long-lost Manchester punk group the Worst played a few songs that sounded like Suicide. Manchester's present success was summarised by the two headliners, the Smiths and New Order.

The Smiths offer stinging vignettes of loneliness and poetic insult fused with a sense of politics and uplifting music. New Order, on the other hand, have refined their earlier material into a sprung, powerful white hip-hop that acted as a release. The addition of Echo and the Bunnymen singer Ian McCulloch on Ceremony was an emotional moment and a rare display of north-west solidarity.

Any fantasy that the spirit of punk would magically reappear was quickly dashed by a sense of reduced scope and an excess of good taste. Yet the open-ended quality of the festival and its very romanticism reaffirmed a legacy of playfulness, stubbornness and humanity.

This is an edited extract