Hit Factories: How the industrial cities of Britain gave birth to extraordinary pop music

Hit Factories: A Journey Through the Industrial Cities of British Pop

Author: Karl Whitney

ISBN-13: 978-1474607407

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Guideline Price: £20

“Most of all, I love Manchester,” declared the late Factory Records founder, Tony Wilson. “The crumbling warehouses, the railway arches, the cheap abundant drugs. That’s what did it in the end. Not the money, not the music, not even the guns. That is my heroic flaw: my excess of civic pride.”

Karl Whitney’s second book, Hit Factories: A Journey Through the Industrial Cities of British Pop, explores how 11 urban centres gave birth to extraordinary music, starting in Tony Wilson’s Manchester.

The idea came to him after visiting a former vinyl pressing plant in a remote corner of Washington, a new town built between Sunderland and Gateshead in the 1960s, which David Bowie had visited. Afterwards, Whitney began to fixate on the hidden musical infrastructure lurking in Britain’s industrial heartlands.

“The terrain of pop that I was in the process of sketching closely mirrored the map of cities that were central to British industry,” Whitney writes. “The coalfields of the North East, the shipyards of Glasgow and Belfast, the steel factories of Sheffield, the foundries of Birmingham, the car plants of Coventry, the ports of Hull, Bristol and Liverpool, the mills of Manchester and Leeds.”

Whitney muses that pop is in so many ways an extractable industry just like mining with performance as its raw material

The industrial city looms large in modern music. In Jon Savage’s brilliant recent book, This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else: Joy Division: The Oral History, Bernard Sumner claims his Salford childhood was so starkly industrial that he didn’t see a tree until he was at least nine.

Whitney fuses a field trip to a city with a meticulously researched and lively overview of its particular scene and participants. His first book, Hidden City – Adventures and Explorations in Dublin, published by Penguin in 2014, introduced a Dubliner with a curious mind traversing his native city and compiling stories of underground rivers, rambles around the city’s margins and quixotic adventures, such as visiting each of James Joyce’s 20 childhood homes in a single day.

Laughing but serious

Since then, Whitney moved to Sunderland. His writing excels in covering familiar ground with a delightfully fresh perspective. Manchester’s musical heritage has been done to absolute death in countless books, films and documentaries, but Whitney cleverly weaves stories about the usual suspects with tales of long forgotten contenders like World of Twist.

The writer visits the aforementioned Tony Wilson’s grave, which is inscribed with its own Factory catalogue number, and laughs at the tombstone’s inscription; “Anthony H Wilson. Broadcaster. Cultural catalyst”, noting how it raises a laugh while simultaneously being completely serious, exactly like Wilson himself, who Mancunians now regard as a secular saint.

In Liverpool, Whitney visits hallowed ground associated with The Beatles, who are undeniably the most over-documented band of all time. Again, he breathes fresh perspective into the subject through psychogeography, while also exploring the dynamic social mobility of post-war Britain.

For example, Bryan Ferry grew in Washington, a stone’s throw from the disused vinyl pressing plant Whitney visits in his prologue. Ferry ended up becoming a prime example of the maximal social mobility pop could ignite. Whitney muses that pop is in so many ways an extractable industry just like mining with performance as its raw material.

Yet musicians and artists such as Ferry, The Animals and The Beatles all eventually moved to London. The chapter on Glasgow is an inspiring exploration of how the Scottish city remained staunchly independent thanks to an unrivalled collaborative network of resourceful musicians and a sophisticated cultural infrastructure of venues, record shops, rehearsal spaces, studios and records labels.

This simply doesn’t exist in most cities, and certainly to a much lesser degree in Dublin, despite its greater size, capital status and several successful bands. Irish readers should savour a chapter about how Belfast’s music became a powerful antidote to sectarianism.

What are the implications for our own indigenous scenes? How will we incubate and nurture talent in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick, Derry, Sligo, and beyond?

Hit Factories comes with its own soundtrack, via a terrific Spotify playlist of more than 60 songs curated by the author that includes music as thrillingly diverse as Black Sabbath and Massive Attack. Any reminder of the stone-cold genius of Everything Flows by Teenage Fanclub can only be a good thing.

It also raises some important questions. In today’s cultural climate of generic high streets and hyper-gentrification, how can new talent emerge with such a scarcity of record stores, rehearsal spaces and venues? Will such spectacular social mobility, as enjoyed by Bryan Ferry and Paul McCartney, become a thing of the past?

While Whitney focuses on the industrial cities of northern England, what are the implications for our own indigenous scenes? How will we incubate and nurture talent in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick, Derry, Sligo, and beyond? The internet and cheap technology have radically liberated the artist, but they still badly need dedicated spaces to develop and thrive.

Music boom

Music writing is enjoying a publication boom, which predictably leans on scenes from major global cities. Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011, is the closest to an almost definitive oral history of how New York, and especially Williamsburg, Brooklyn, became the place to be in the wake of The Strokes and LCD Soundsystem.

There still hasn’t been a better London music book written since Jon Savage’s classic 1993 tome, England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, rigorously chronicled how punk’s seismic shock wave emanated from its streets and suburbs.

In joining the dots between Belfast, Bristol, Glasgow, Coventry, Liverpool, Hull, Newcastle, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds, Karl Whitney has penned an extremely important addition to modern music writing. Whether these hit factories will be open for business in our brave new post-Brexit world remains to be seen.