It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (8 page)

In my defence, I’d like to say that you would have had to have been a fully paid-up piece of pond life
not
to have got the impression that something was profoundly
wrong
with Britain in the mid-eighties. The evidence of impending Bastille-storming upheaval was everywhere – and nowhere more so than in Manchester. When the Home Secretary Leon Brittan visited Manchester University’s Students Union in 1985, thirty-two people were arrested (and others injured) as the police battled protestors blocking the entrance to the building. The resulting debacle made the national news and seemed to us to represent a throwing down of the gauntlet by Manchester Police’s then chief constable, James Anderton, a man who was famously on first-name terms with the Almighty. Unaffectionately nicknamed ‘God’s Copper’,
Anderton made headlines at the height of the AIDS panic with comments about people ‘swirling about in a human cesspit of their own making’ – comments which helped turn him into a near-mythical bogeyman for those of a liberal persuasion. Indeed, anyone drifting even idly toward the radical left needed only to take a cursory glance at Anderton’s more outrageous outpourings to spur them on to man the barricades forthwith.

In my case, the ‘barricades’ were a series of anti-deportation campaigns which centred around Viraj Mendis, a Sri Lankan activist whom the government were attempting to repatriate despite well-supported claims that he would be persecuted for his political beliefs (he was a passionate advocate of the Tamil Tigers) if sent back to his country of origin. Viraj had a lot of support in Manchester, where he had lived for several years, and his campaign to stay in the UK grew in size, importance and popularity throughout the eighties, becoming the focus of numerous similar anti-deportation battles. In December 1986, things cranked up a gear when Viraj went into sanctuary in Hulme’s Church of the Ascension after a deportation order was issued against him by the Home Office. He stayed there for 760 days, publicly defying the authorities who finally ordered the police to batter down the doors of the church and forcibly remove him in the early hours of 18 January 1989.

During the years of Viraj’s ‘voluntary’ incarceration, his support team the Viraj Mendis Defence Campaign (VMDC, of which I was an active member) fought and
won
a number of other anti-deportation cases whilst simultaneously
maintaining a twenty-four-hour vigil at the Church of the Ascension. Once a week, each of us would get to stay up all night in the dingy foyer of that church discussing the inevitable decline of capitalism (thus combining my two favourite obsessions – religion and politics) with Viraj’s comrades in the Revolutionary Communist Group (not to be confused with their sworn rivals the Revolutionary Communist
Party
, or indeed the Judean People’s Popular Front) and in my case writing rude and satirical songs about James Anderton.

Here, for the record, are the lyrics of my best efforts in this area:

James Anderton is big and strong
James Anderton is in this song
James Anderton, his friends call him ‘Jim’
How truly wonderful to be like him
Oh please don’t think I’m faking
But I’m swirling in a cesspit of my own making
For you
Do-be-do-be-do.

You probably had to be there.

One of the acceptable hobbies for a fledging comrade was the writing and publication of articles in newspapers, presumably because this would provide a future opportunity for ‘subverting the mass media from within’. By happy coincidence I had been making inroads into journalism ever since my arrival in Manchester thanks to the open-door
policy of
Mancunion
, an award-winning publication based on the second floor of the Students’ Union. As far as I could tell the paper was pretty much obliged to support any and all budding student journos by printing their submitted copy, no matter how poor – an opportunity which I exploited to the hilt. It was in the pages of
Mancunion
that I made my ‘proper’ newspaper debut, a review of the funk-punk band the Higsons (hark, is that the sound of the system collapsing?) at the Hacienda. As before, this was yet another attempt at sub-
NME
scribery which I spiced up with interview quotes obtained by cornering frontman Charlie Higson backstage armed with a pen, a pad of paper, and the scarily convincing declaration that I was ‘from the local music press, alright?’ By a peculiar twist of fate, Charlie Higson would later go on to present the short-lived Channel 4 film show
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
, making him a far more famous and successful film critic than me and thus the subject of my ongoing envy. He also starred in
The Fast Show
which, for my money, is one of the funniest TV programmes ever.

But I forgive him.

Hot from my ‘page twenty-three, lower-left column’ success with the Higsons review I filed an equally hot-headed account of Orange Juice’s Hacienda show, by which time I began to feel that I had utterly conquered rock journalism. I still wrote with all the style and grace of an idiot fanboy who desperately wanted to be Lester Bangs but was more (as Kurt Vonnegut put it) Philboyd Studge. Yet I had learned two important lessons: firstly, that you should keep and file all your old press cuttings, because nobody else will;
and secondly, that in journalism you can be whoever you want to be as long as you have enough front. And no shame.

Of course, what I
really
wanted to be was a film critic (if I wasn’t going to be a pop star, which I clearly wasn’t and if the revolution wasn’t happening
right now
, which it didn’t seem to be), but there was no chance of that at
Mancunion
. Gig reviews were fine – you just paid to see the show then wrote about it the next morning. But film reviews had to be filed
in advance
and that meant gaining access to
private preview screenings
. figuring out who organised these secretive screenings, and where and when they happened, was difficult enough, let alone getting your name on the mystical ‘list’ which was spoken of only in hushed whispers and overheard asides. You remember all that nonsense that Tom Cruise’s character goes through in his attempts to get into the masked orgy in Stanley Kubrick’s rubbish
Eyes Wide Shit
(sorry,
Shut
) – having to get a piano player drunk to prise the location out of him, then hiring a fancy dress get-up at midnight from some Slavic pimp-cum-costumier, then getting a taxi to drive for hours to the middle of nowhere before enduring hours of awful ‘plink plonk
bong
’ avant-garde atonal piano squonking and failing to get even a blowjob despite being able to produce the password ‘
fidelio
!’ when requested to do so by a man dressed as a chicken? You remember all that? Well, trying to get on to the Manchester film preview screening circuit was
worse
– and a lot less funny.

For a while, I thought you probably had to
kill
someone and eat their still-beating organs in some
Angel Heart
-type twisted satanic ritual before the wanton pleasures of the
preview screening would be revealed to you. Later, I discovered that you just had to be ‘invited’ by someone ‘in the know’ – or to be ‘sent’ by a magazine, which in my case turned out to be
City Life
.

City Life
was a small but thriving Manchester listings magazine which had been set up in 1983 as ‘a cross between
Time Out
and
Private Eye
’. Over the years the magazine had become an admirable thorn in the side of James Anderton, thanks largely to the persistence of news editor Ed Glinert who seemed to have an inside track on the chief constable’s bizarre beliefs. One story had it that a disgruntled copper had actually bugged his boss’ office and was feeding stories to Glinert (who stoically refused to reveal his sources). Whatever the truth,
City Life
was a flag-waver in the war against Anderton, and that made working for it a worthy cause indeed.

Like
City Limits
in London,
City Life
was a workers co-op, which brought numerous benefits including (crucially) assistance from the Manchester Co-operative Development Agency, aka Mancoda. The co-op structure put in place a rigorously egalitarian framework within which everyone did
everything
and everyone was
equal
– at least in theory. In practice, the magazine was run by three quixotic editors: Glinert, Chris Paul and Andy ‘Spin’ Spinoza, all graduates of
Mancunion
, and all of whom would ultimately go on to excel in their various chosen professions.

Spinoza was particularly industrious, becoming the diary editor at the long-running
Manchester Evening News
before setting up the thriving Spin Media agency and establishing
himself as the North-West’s premier public-relations guru. Spin could make a news story out of
anything
. When I completed my PhD thesis in 1991, he got in touch to ask me if I had any ‘interesting’ plans for the future, now that I was officially a ‘Doctor of Horror’. I told him that Linda and I were getting married in Liverpool that same week, after which we were going to travel around America for a fortnight, stopping off briefly at Georgetown in Washington DC so that I could finally see the ‘
Exorcist
steps’. Spin promptly filed a story for the
Evening News
which ran under the splash headline ‘Dr Horror Plans Haunted Honeymoon’. I still have it framed on the mantelpiece, one of a very few genuinely treasured press cuttings. (Spin reckons I got off lightly, pointing out that when a fellow
City Life
r got a PhD in Popular Culture, the
MEN
diary pages dubbed him ‘Dr Disco’.)

‘I edited
City Life
for six years,’ Spin told the
Guardian
when interviewed about his lively career a few years ago, ‘and never earned more than £75 a week. We lived off the thin of the land. But it wasn’t about the money. It was about our independent voice. It was a fun, very creative environment. I interviewed everyone from Alan Bleasdale to Bernard Manning. And we gave the first chance to writers like Jon Ronson and Mark Kermode …’ Reading this made me strangely proud, because it suggested that no matter how piffling my role in
City Life
had been (and believe me it was
really piffling
) I had somehow passed into the annals of its illustrious history – a feat I never
dreamed
could become a reality.

I first joined the (outer) ranks of
City Life
when I answered an ad for an ‘enthusiastic and outgoing’ (ha!) wannabe journalist to sell advertising space in their forthcoming ‘Student Special’ edition. Back in the eighties, Manchester was home to 60,000 students (there are even more now) making it ‘the densest student population in Europe’ – a totally non-ironic phrase which I would repeat down the phone for weeks on end in the desperate attempt to sell some wretched ads. It turned out I was a completely useless salesman, and the amount of ad revenue which I personally managed to raise for that issue was way below par. But by the time the balance sheets were totted up I’d already got my feet under the table and was attending co-op meetings like my life depended on them – which, in a way, it did.

Co-op meetings were fun, if a bit mad. Politics were always high on the agenda, with the inevitable interface between lofty ideals and practical commerce provoking regular sparks. At one meeting we rowed for hours about whether to accept a lucrative full-page ad for Brian De Palma’s new film
Body Double
which depicted a semi-clad (and apparently endangered) Melanie Griffith being leered at through half-opened blinds by a shadowy stalker. In the end, Spinoza and I won the day on right-on points, and the ad was voted in true co-op fashion to be ‘unsuitable’ – to the dismay of the ad team who were having a hard enough time financing the mag, and who shook their heads at the loss of such badly needed income.

Of course, the core
City Life
team were a volatile bunch given to vigorous squabbling for which the co-operative rule-book provided a firm and rigidly egalitarian structure.
I remember more than one meeting in which the agenda of issues for discussion (neatly typed and recorded for posterity) would read something like: ‘ITEM ONE – The frankly unacceptable behaviour of Co-op member X, as proposed by Co-op member Y; ITEM TWO – The frankly unacceptable behaviour of Co-op member Y, as proposed by Co-op member X; ITEM THREE – The frankly unacceptable behaviour of Co-op members X
and
Y as proposed by
everybody else
.’ The exact nature of the ‘frankly unacceptable behaviour’ would vary from week to week, but the key issues remained the same: creative people, crammed together in a small office like Coppola’s colourful
Rumble fish
, needing to blow off steam in the relatively safe environment of a really well-organised row.

Occasionally, the creativity tipped over into madness. Like all my memories of Manchester, everything that happened in the
City Life
offices seemed unbelievably important and prone to controversy – even the simple task of making a cup of tea. I remember my first experience of ‘being mother’ for the assembled masses, proudly scrabbling around the smelly kitchen in search of an old teapot in order to prepare a proper brew – after all, the people who worked here were ‘real journalists’ and frankly I was in awe of them. I diligently took orders for milk and sugar, and produced a tray of steaming teas that duly matched their exacting demands. Everyone was suitably grateful and polite except one
CL
stalwart who made a silent but commanding gesture for me to wait while he tasted the tea which I had brought. I stood, uncertain as to whether this was a joke. It wasn’t. It was
deadly
serious. He lifted the cup to his lips, took a tiny slurp, swilled it around his mouth, considered for a moment, took
another
slurp, exercised his palette some more, and then slammed the teacup down on to the desk, a look of assertive rapture in his eyes. He stared at me, astonished.

‘Number four!’ he said grandly.’Straight in at
number four
!’

I had no idea what he was talking about.

I looked at him. He looked at me.