[You can replicate the experience by following this procedure:
- Prepare strong black coffee
- Spread poo over signed photograph of Jack Duckworth
- Get into lotus position
- Place dirty photograph on knee
- Hold breath for three minutes
- Exhale like affected spiritualist
- Quickly drink coffee
- Look up at light bulb (>80w)
- Sneeze
- Do candle/sasquatch milk meditation (see Fig. 1)
- Make up lies about consciousness going to Manchester]
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| Fig. 1 |
There were lots of red brick houses all squashed up into long rows, and each house had a look of defilement on its face, as though it didn't like being touched by the other houses. The roofs of the houses were hippopotamus-grey and seemed to sweat...like hippopotamuses. In the distance, there were tall blocks of flats that looked like strips of yellowing graph paper, complete with rubbed-out pencil marks where someone had messed up the scale for the y-axis more than once.
I floated in for a closer look.
Every flat had a balcony for drying wet Manchester United towels and storing deflated footballs, and people came out and stood on them to shout WANKER at me, even though all I was doing was astral projection and a bit of shimmering. There was a scary pugnacity about the balcony people (see fig. 2), like cheekiness turned sour by repetition. I thought I could identify myself as a friend by shouting out that my favourite player was Dave Beckman, but this only seemed to anger them further.
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| Fig. 2 |
The air was a bit like church air after a long sermon on Satan's minions, and it smelt faintly of burning coal dust. The birds didn't want to fly in it, so they lined up on walls and telephone wires looking slightly irradiated but quite well fed. There was a young boy just staring up at the birds, and that young boy was Bez – a bit of time travel must have happened because Bez isn't a young boy (physiologically) at the time of writing this.
Milkmen were delivering milk, and along with the milkmen there were men delivering bread. Such a thing as a 'bread round' existed, and it was existing right in front of my disembodied eyeballs. Other men delivered pieces of scrap metal for uncles to tinker with. There were a lot of uncles in Manchester, and they all used cologne-scented talcum powder instead of lynx - despite having tried lynx last Christmas when their daughter-in-laws gave them some as part of a festive gift pack that also included shower gel and shampoo. Most of the uncles preferred lynx to talcum powder, but simply had no idea about where one might go to buy it.
Then I possessed a woodlouse and did some spying. What were ostensibly conversations between husband and wife over breakfast were, in fact, two parallel monologues on unrelated matters. The men talked about how much they hated flamboyancy, whilst the women dissected the merits of cheese and onion crisps, why the snack is good, but also bad, but also good, etc. The expressions and phrases used were creative and funny: precise, frank language is reserved only for combat.
Bez's mother comes outside. She's holding a rolling pin with bits of yellow dough stuck to it. 'You have to choose between being introspective or being a brute,' she says. Bez laughs and starts doing the Bez dance. She lets him off, again.
The Smiths are being chased by Oasis down an alleyway. Andy Rourke clatters into some bins, falls. Noel leaps on top of him, straddling Rourke in a way that looks something like the cowgirl sex position. Noel has never actually punched a man before, and he's feeling uneasy about the proximity of the craven bassist's willy to his bum hole.
''it 'im our Kid,' demands Liam in a Mancunian accent because he's from Manchester.
Noel can't do it. Instead he screams like a snapped nerd and rains down a thousand indecisive pats to Rourke's head. It looks like he's playing the fucking bongos, thinks Liam. Rourke thinks it's worse thing that's ever happened.
Morrissey escapes, though, and writes 'This Night Has Opened My Eyes'.
Then I went back to the infinite nothing. It still smelt of a catered holiday to Majorca, but now there was music – Manchester-type music. The musicians had character and humanity and the male ones made it seem okay to be male. They seemed authentic, like blues players who'd decided pop was the real thing, or punk, or post punk, or whatever. Oasis were also playing.
I came back into my body and noticed that the Sasquatch milk had turned into Sasquatch cheese. I had an erection. My mother came in – she sort of knocked and turned the handle at the same time, which was annoying.
'What's all that over your face?' She asked.
I felt my face. It was Sasquatch cheese.
'It's Sasquatch cheese,' I said.
Nothing happened; then something made me look down at my erection. She followed my eyes down and flinched when she saw it.
'Mum, I...'
'Get a job.'
But I didn't get a job: I waited until she'd left the room, then put the radio on. The DJ was using the word 'new' too much. He interviewed a band from (and by 'from' I mean 'living in') Manchester that sounded full of cheery earnestness; they were happy to be alive in a world that was treating them well. They did a song: the singer's voice was all squelchy with sham emotion and the band had used four tonnes of flashing electronic equipment to produce something that sounded like a muzak take on a bad Paul McCartney song. The DJ said 'new' a few more times, then did another little bit of interviewing. The band talked about their new music video, how it was filmed on a beach and had some CGI in it. The drummer seemed to have less soul power than the average deal or no deal audience member. My erection disappeared. It all felt bit like a New Labour party conference, somehow; the psychic landscape was the same.
Then I ate an apple and thought about the backlash.
This is Sir Ian Morgan's inaugural post for The Mancunia - he's positively our favourite non-Mancunian music writer.
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