'This Land's Cheerless Marshes': Mancunian heritage and place in its Post-Punk Lyric

When record label owner and producer Tony Wilson described Manchester as ‘the fertile breeding ground, field ready ploughed [...] the perfect punk city’, his allusion to Manchester’s political circumstances in fostering a conducive environment for its 1980 post-punk sub-genre was only peripheral. But Manchester to post-punk lyric matters in the way that Grasmere did to Wordsworth, Hull to Larkin, and London to Shakespeare. When Jonathan Bate described Wordsworth’s ‘firm yoking [of lyric] to location’ – he ‘stamps his personal mark on the lakes and hills’ – he saw place as something the poet responded to, overlooking the inverse possibility: that place actually ‘stamps its mark on’ the poet. Hazlitt got closer to intimating this when he wrote that, even without knowing Wordsworth’s heritage, readers might recognise ‘that [his poetry] was written in a mountainous country, from its bareness, simplicity, loftiness and depth’. Place, to Manchester post-punk lyricists, is not a neutral background to lyric, but directly informs it – and in turn, post-punk lyric directly interrogates it. As Franco Moretti wrote, place is not ‘inert’, but an ‘active force’ that ‘shapes’ poetry.

Although Simon Armitage insisted that Morrissey, one of Manchester’s most eminent post-punk lyricists, ‘isn’t a poet… poets write poems, requiring no backbeat, no melody, and no performance’, Ezra Pound would have disagreed: ‘poets should never be too long out of touch with musicians [... they should] behave as a musician’. Christopher Ricks’ Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2004) further authorises the inclusion of pop lyric within lyric’s intellectual discourse. Ricks constantly pivots Dylan’s ostensible lyrical plainness against its ‘cryptic’ quality: simplicity is ‘far from easy’ – his lyrics are ‘on the face of it both simple and minimal [...] but there are immediate cross-currents’. The same is true of Manchester’s 1980s post-punk lyric: its ‘plainness’ can be intriguing. Songs which panoptically seem banal and churlish – even petulant – when close-read in detail, actually forge a politically-charged, sophisticated poetics of place. 

When Sean Murray claimed that in post-punk lyric, ‘Manchester is romanticised’ he oversimplified its lyricists’ complex combination of shame and pride towards place. In 1988 Morrissey voiced these ostensibly paradoxical modes of feeling: ‘I despise Manchester and yet I still have a deep affection for the place’. Herman’s Hermits, a seminal Mancunian post-punk band, seem to agree in ‘It’s Nice to be Out in the Morning’ (1968). The opportunity for ‘nice[ness]’ is swiftly cast into doubt, rendered conditional: only ‘if you have somewhere to go’. Monotony and dreary ennui are explicitly rendered topographical: ‘Whalley Range [...] seeing the same old faces that make you feel so low’. Place names are listed (‘Ardwick Green [...] Beswick, Hulme and Harpurhey’), a choric intoning of Mancunian place. The effect is as antithetical as Morrissey’s paradoxical feelings towards Manchester – simultaneously dignifying yet sepulchral. The lyricist goes on to acknowledge he will never feel that he ‘has somewhere to go’, but accepts the enervating city as his own: ‘but it’s home’. The possibility of exoticism and change is proffered but belied by negation: ‘it’s not the sights of Rome’. On first glance, ‘It’s Nice to be Out in the Morning’ seems to wryly deride place, but it becomes the opposite, a quietly celebrative affirmation of cultural heritage. A similar choric reiteration of place-names also dignifies Manchester in The Smiths’ ‘The Queen is Dead’ (1986): a chorus sings the wartime song ‘Take me Back to Dear Old Blighty’, soldiers chanting the names of northern industrial powerhouses, ‘Liverpool’, ‘Birmingham’ and ‘Leeds’ – dignified despite, even because of, their resistance to ‘romanticis[ation]’. Mancunian place becomes political, suffused into post-punk’s lyrical forms – its intoning, chanting repetitions seem funeral and dirge-like, but speak to a place to which the writer feels, deeply, inexorably attached. 

The preoccupation with breaking free and escaping Manchester’s turbulent political world is ubiquitous in post-punk lyric. The city is a long-standing crucible of fiery political debate and agitation. Engels’s ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ (1844) expressed horror at the ‘350, 000 working people in Manchester’ consigned to live ‘in wretched, damp, filthy cottages’: Engels had ‘never seen so systematic a shutting out of the working-class [...] as in Manchester’. By the 1980s, there had been little systematic change: post-punk’s lyric, as Wilson intimates, was built out of the political bedrock of Thatcherism, soaring unemployment (20% by 1984) and workers’ unrest (which became incendiary at moments such as the 1981 Moss Side Riot). Tantalisingly set up, but then swiftly discredited, are any opportunities to escape offered by post-punk lyric – exposed as mere extensions of the same oppressive system which demanded circumvention in the first place. Joy Division’s ‘Interzone’ (1979) is the desperate foil to the levity of Herman’s Hermits’ ‘It’s Nice to be Out in the Morning’. Here, the speaker is desperate; just as in The Smiths’ ‘The Queen is Dead’, he feels ‘hemmed in like a boar between arches’ – something wild, untamed and disorderly being forced into ‘order’. Manchester is characterised with an unearthly stasis – ‘children play’ along a warlike ‘wire fence’, illuminated by a ghostly ‘neon light [...] four twelve windows’. He is desperate to escape: ‘trying to find a way to get out’, but immobile: ‘no place to stop, no place to go’. The prospect of leaving, entering the unknown is at loggerheads with the suffocating ennui of staying, locking the speaker into a liminal realm – an intermediate place, an ‘interzone’.

This questioning between socio-political place and escape shares a surprising pattern of thought with the Frankfurt School. Adorno and Horkheimer wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), society is only permitted ‘the freedom to choose what was always the same’. This sense of stasis is certainly felt in post-punk lyric: its speakers struggle with equally spiritually-diminishing options, but suffer from a stagnating inability to leave, free to choose only between options that keep them submissive to oppressive forces. Post-punk lyric has a tendency to whittle down these broader political themes into minute tableaux, before expanding them into a more all-encompassing, universalising chorus. The Smiths’ ‘London’ (1987) expresses the contradictory sway of pride and shame concerning place – and society’s non-existent ‘freedom’ to choose – on a microcosmic scale, picturing a familial tableau of departure. Both the speaker, leaving Manchester, and his relations, yearn to leave and are beset with an awareness of finitude. His ‘girlfriend knows [...] that when he goes, he really goes’. His family ‘grieve’, not for the departure of their prodigal son, but out of ‘jealousy’, they who are consigned to ‘stay behind’. In a 1983 interview, Morrissey expressed his frustration with Mancunian ‘shortsighted[ness]’ on this ‘subject’ of abandonment: ‘they feel if you leave’, ‘you defect [...] you’ve turned your back on the starving thousands on the back-streets of Manchester’. ‘London’’s imagination of a nuclear family’s disintegration is more expansive than it first seems, speaking to Manchester’s wider social and political entropy. 

Inspiral Carpets’ ‘This is How It Feels’ (1990) does the same, but pushes its exploration of the enervating place into an even more universalising space. The speaker lists each individual’s anxieties (‘husband don’t know what he’s done, kids don’t know what’s wrong with mum’). By the chorus, the family’s specific dislocations are tied together through the universalising deictic – ‘this is how it feels’ – creating familiarity and rendering the listener complicit. Yet the overarching sway is one of negation – ‘when your word means nothing at all’ – an acquiescence into gloomy redundancy, even the loss of articulative agency altogether. The homonymic elision of ‘word’ with ‘world’ only strengthens this sense of loss: word and world, mind and matter, devalued entirely, to ‘nothing’. Post-punk’s focalised, often familial, scenes seem aleatory and minute, but are actually connected to their wider contextual, politically-fraught places; and their contradictory pull – to revolutionise or abandon – are irreconcilable possibilities.

A misplaced keenness to revert to an idealistic, nostalgic past configuration of place – the product of its lyrics’ intermingling of territorial pride and shame – characterises much post-punk lyric. Erich Fromm, another Frankfurt School thinker, described how the practice of ‘cling[ing] to a fading conception’ of a non-existent or idealised past renders the idea of ‘revolution’ ‘threatening’, giving way to conservatism: ‘safety comes first [...] a pattern of caution and orthodoxy’. Much post-punk lyric does just this: The Smiths’ ‘Back to the Old House’ simultaneously shrinks from the past (‘too many bad memories’) and expresses a desire to return (‘I would love to go’), before backtracking once more through some inarticulable impossibility: ‘but I never will’. Morrissey’s sadness for a bygone Mancunian identity: ‘the Manchester I knew is slipping sadly away’ is an ironic statement for a lyricist whose early songs had treated the place with unremitting invective – ‘how can you call this a home/ When you know it’s a grave?’ (‘Jeane’). One of The Smiths’ final songs, ‘Paint a Vulgar Picture’ (1987) imagines a ‘record company meeting’’s response to a ‘dead star’. The managers excitedly exploit bereavement for monetary gain: their roster of ‘re-’ prefixes reiterating Adorno and Horkheimer’s account of the endless sameness of ostensible ‘choices’: ‘re-issue, repackage, repackage!’. Ironic self-reflexivity interpolates here, as Morrissey opens up an aperture for escape, telling the deceased singer that ‘you could’ve said no if you’d wanted to’, but his repeated question (‘couldn’t you?’) denotes the impossibility of abandoning the slipstream of one’s predestined course. Escape routes from place and situation, through ‘fame, fame, fatal fame’ (‘Frankly Mr Shankly’) are predetermined only to lead to other damaged places and poles of consumerism. 

In The Smiths’ final album, their earlier political anger (‘Oh Manchester, so much to answer for’, in ‘Suffer Little Children’, a 1984 response to the Moors Murders) becomes neutralised. The speaker refuses to incite change following another ‘death of a disco dancer’ (1987): ‘I’d rather not get involved’. As Fromm said, the notion of ‘revolution’ has become ‘threaten[ing]’. In 1984, in a quintessentially sweeping generalisation, Morrissey claimed that ‘everything modern is quite foul’ – but this statement is a serious testament to post-punk’s fear of the future. This fear is the reason that post-punk, while bemoaning the status quo, consistently fails to create a coherent, radical ideological riposte to Thatcherism and Manchester’s contemporary political conditions. Afterall, once commercially successful through the system as it stands, why push for real change? Adorno’s ‘The Industry of Culture’ asks the same question: in a world where art has come to openly subscribe to the same commodifying laws of production, it can no longer signal genuine reform. Any aperture for escape ‘is destined from the first to lead back to its starting point’: culture provides an escape not from ‘a bad reality’, but from the ‘last thought of resisting that reality’. Post-punk’s formal preoccupation with repetition, contradiction and monotony structurally precludes any ‘escape’ from the ‘order’ ‘impose[d] and enforc[ed]’ upon it. Manchester becomes the subject of the lyricist’s ressentiment, scapegoated as the cause of all trouble – but their paradoxical loyal affection for the formative place is nevertheless persistent.