Manchester Unspun: Pop, Property and Power in the Original Modern City: How a City Got High on Music
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Manchester Unspun: Pop, Property and Power in the Original Modern City: How a City Got High on Music
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Description
Andy Spinoza has lived in Manchester since 1979, as a student, entrepreneur, publisher, journalist, gossip columnist and PR supremo. Elegantly interweaving his own biography with that of the city, Spinoza narrates with panache the story of how the place once known as Cottonopolis has reinvented itself. Spinoza’s engaging thesis is that the quixotic cultural revolution led by the co-founder of Factory Records in the 1980s paved the way for an economic renaissance. As someone who grew up in Manchester, and being about the same age as Andy, this book really resonates with me. He has had a front row seat for over forty years on how pop culture, property development and politics converge in the UK's fastest-growing urban centre.
Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. The Haçienda in 1989: ‘Gave the kiss of life to a dying city and sparked a chain reaction of hubris, scandal, money and power politics still playing out today. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall).
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Realising that most of the available posters were old hippy images, he started selling Manchester music album covers. Coolly analytical, exceptionally well-informed and hugely entertaining, Manchester Unspun does justice to it. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. He was one of the people who set up City Life, Manchester’s slightly edgier version of Time Out magazine. He is someone who not only had a seat at the table throughout most of the events he recounts, but was responsible for writing the press release.
Andy Spinoza's book is readable and informative account of the changes that Manchester has undergone over the last forty years. Working as a journalist, a publisher and a ‘PR supremo’, he has observed the vast changes wrought by local councils, national governments, quangos and institutions, as well as the people of Manchester – and Salford – themselves. As boss of his own PR company, he promoted the dynamic post-industrial Manchester throughout the 2000s and 2010s. The event was in a tent in the newly opened Festival Square, as part the Manchester International Festival. years after the legendary Hacienda’s launch, this new, exciting book by Andy Spinoza explains how Manchester’s leaders harnessed its founders’ radical anarchic visions to create the nation’s fastest-growing city.
Back at Civic Engineers’ reception last week it was appropriate that we should be talking about the book because it includes the origin story of the practice. In his 1999 landmark Urban Task Force Report, Lord Richard Rogers praised Urban Splash for pioneering urban living in the Northwest. That journey of evolution is enmeshed with tales of the movers and shakers, who all helped shape this wonderful city. He would leave the practice not long after, and his fellow directors, Stephen O’Malley, Julian Broster and Paul Morris rebranded as Civic Engineers.He founded alternative magazine City Life in 1983, before ten years as gossip columnist at the Manchester Evening News.
All blokes, and all part of a tight knit group that didn’t lack in confidence or brook dissent, but who changed the city forever. The owners were bust and the mortgage bank in possession was bust – and that was the time for gut feeling and decisive action.There's so much in this book to savour, that I can honestly see scholars of history and architecture studying it in decades to come. After university, he founded the arts and listings magazine City Life, before becoming a hyperactively connected diary editor for the Manchester Evening News. Over the past forty years, the most culturally significant period in Manchester's history, Spinoza has been witness to and chronicler of the rise and rise of this city.
- Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
- EAN: 764486781913
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