where there’s music and there’s people who are young and alive

So, as fred baby has already mentioned, we have all kinds of unreported trip details that keep sabotaging our blogging. He has chosen a tactic consisting mainly of avoidance for the time being, but of course I’m too anal to follow that example, so I’ve just put off the update.

Until now. When, to my credit, I have made the decidedly NOT-anal decision to relate said trip details in a nonlinear fashion. I’m going to begin with the Manchester leg of the trip, even though it took place in the middle of the vacation.

Whoa. Crazy.

Except, of course, for the fact that, from a certain point of view, this storytelling order actually makes perfect sense. And that is because Manchester was spiritually, emotionally, and grammatically the true heart and soul of the trip. The linchpin. The pivot of the seesaw. We were there—we were in England at all, really—because Morrissey was there.

That�s right. Moz. In concert. In his hometown. OH MY GOD. I really love David Byrne, and I want him to know that I totally meant it about the 150 miles, but this was Morrissey. For Morrissey—Morrissey in Manchester—we went 4,000 miles.

First things first, though. First, we have to get to Manchester. From London. By car. Because I am incompetent/unsafe/frightened/frightening behind the wheel, this is automatically fred baby’s domain. In our typically organized manner, we choose a rental car location, nearly at random, and head in that direction much too late in the afternoon. We head roughly in that direction. Already somewhat tired, we trudge approximately 219 miles down Edgware Road, which I believe must be London’s longest, straightest street, past at least 438 Middle Eastern restaurants. The density of veils grows exponentially greater as we trudge, and I feel more and more underdressed. At last we arrive at the Enterprise office. The CLOSED Enterprise office. Fuck.

Trudge trudge trudge. I vaguely recall seeing a Hertz office some leagues back, so we successfully negotiate a big red double-decker bus ride and straggle in. What? You’re out of cars? But you have one at Heathrow, a mere hour and a half away? Perfect!! We’ll take it!!!

I don’t think it’s really necessary for me to discuss all the details of driving on the left (or in my case, riding on the left). If anyone deserves to cover the topic in depth, it’s the driver himself. Suffice it to say, fred baby adapts quite quickly while I continue almost ceaselessly to mention his proximity to the left-hand curb. Despite my efforts to remain as cool and calm about it as possible, I detect my pitch rising at a rate inversely proportional to his actual distance from the curb.

By the time we finally stumble into our hotel, we are very late, rumpled, and starving. I immediately ascertain that we are nowhere near hip enough to be here. We are as far away from adequately hip as we were close to that curb. Hip-sounding music swaggers up from the out-of-sight but clearly hip basement bar. Eclectic, oddly shaped, brightly colored furniture lounges hiply around us. Smiling, black-clothed male mannequins lean at us with all kinds of hiptitude. And the clerk behind the understated, barely-there, “I’m not really something as boringly administrative as a front desk” front desk is a handsome, stylish young man, perfectly coifed, impeccably dressed in one of those adorable tight button-up shirts, and looking remarkably—and appealingly—like Jai from Queer Eye. Oh yes, and he’s also hip. Just to cement our lack of suavity, I stage-whisper to fred baby, “We are totally not hip enough to be here.” Not-Jai must hear me, but his glossy eyebrows don’t betray even a flicker of disdain.

Instead, not-Jai welcomes us with great charm, checks us in, and makes the friendly suggestion that we’ll probably want to come back down to the bar or head elsewhere for a drink, “unless you’re totally shattered.” We agree, thinking to ourselves that this plan seems perfectly achievable. Then not-Jai asks us if we want a wake-up call. In response, we stand gape-mouthed and stuttering for some moments as he advises us to “go easy on ourselves” as it’s a Sunday. We remain utterly unable to come up with anything coherent. He wisely gives up and sends us on our way to the room.

The room is AWESOME. I want to live there. It has great tall ceilings and almost a whole wall of great tall warehousey white multi-paned windows that open to the street below. It has a swanky couple of chairs and a very IKEA-esque shelving/closet/desk system. It has an enormous bed, across which we throw ourselves. It has room service, which we call and from which (whom?) we order wine and two pizzas. Yes, two. Delivered by not-Jai himself. We sit on massive floor pillows and shovel in pizza and wine while watching a wonderfully snarky show that seems to be Entertainment Tonight’s wittier British cousin. As it nears four o’clock, we realize that milky early-morning light is already coming in through the windowpanes. We pull the heavy floor-to-ceiling curtains and fall into the big giant bed.

The next day we oversleep in the big giant bed and take a big giant time getting our asses out of the wonderful room. We ask about record-shopping at the front non-desk and are directed to the Northern Quarter. Armed with a couple of very colorful maps, we head out.

The Northern Quarter is exactly as you picture Manchester, if you bother to picture it at all. It’s a bit grimy, a bit gritty, a bit unrelentingly grey. It displays an oddly satisfying number of broken windows and decrepit, nearly-crumbling brick buildings, and it appears to be peopled primarily with skinny, denim-clad, quietly-desperate looking young men who prowl the record shops while conversing rapidly and urgently in an accent far more musical and alive than London’s clipped speech.

And then, after the dusty rummaging through LPs, some aimless browsing through CD bins bearing genre labels I’d never heard of, a good dinner at the hotel’s (very hip) restaurant, there was the concert.

As I’ve just recently posted a concert review, and as this entry is already obscenely long, I’ll try to keep this decently short. Let’s go with a highlights format:

—Ice cream bought from one of the festival vendors. (England has, perhaps, the highest density of ice cream stands I’ve ever encountered.)
—Many, many more Smiths and Morrissey t-shirts in one place than I’ve ever seen. I am very glad that I’ve armed myself with these.
—Morrissey’s name spelled out in large red bulbs, taking up the width of the stage, behind which shimmers a big sequiny curtain.
—The moment Morrissey himself emerges on stage, natty and gorgeous in a dark suitcoat and bright blue shirt. The surge forward that this moment occasions, as we all feel the overwhelming need to get a little nearer to His Mozness.
—The quiff. (Which spell-check tries to change to “quaff.” Consider it added.)
—Morrissey’s between-songs banter, made up largely of “history lessons” about his Manchester childhood.
—There Is a Light That Never Goes Out. Everyday Is Like Sunday. I Have Forgiven Jesus. And pretty much every other song on the set list. Morrissey’s clearly choreographed but utterly satisfying gestures and movements.
—The sound of thousands of Mancunians singing along at the top of their lungs, to every word, of every song. With feeling. Real feeling. Being one of them, sort of.
—The small, passionate, quite possibly crazy white-haired and black-eyebrowed man who solemnly declares to fred baby (again, with real feeling) that Morrissey is the last icon. Who later turns around, leans back against the crowd, and stares wide-eyed up at the sky, singing.
—Walking home to the hotel, a 45-minute walk that leaves my feet aching badly but is accompanied, for much of the way, by fellow concert-goers, all of us drifting along through the cool night, and all abuzz. Getting to our room and collapsing, once more, into the big giant bed.