EG meets… Andy Spinoza

Andy Spinoza set up Manchester’s City Life magazine in the early 1980s, was a gossip columnist for the Manchester Evening News and ran his own PR company promoting real estate in and around the city. His book, Manchester Unspun: How a City Got High on Music, is published by Manchester University Press. In the book you ask: “If artists are shaped by the built environment, how will the transformation of Manchester’s centre affect the culture it produces?” What’s your answer as we sit here at the start of 2024? The starting point was: could Joy Division’s music have come from any other city, any other place and time? It’s very specifically influenced by the built environment. If you look at Manchester now, you’ve got music talent coming from all over the world to live in Manchester. We have got Radio 6 Music. We have a live music scene. But it’s only made viable by the fact there are tens of thousands of young people living in the centre. Word has spread around the world that Manchester is the place to be. What’s the music of Manchester going to sound like going forward? It will probably sound like the music of the world. Without it being a value judgment, music will probably lose that specificity, that Manchester-ness that you can almost caricature. That is the past, because Manchester is, in many ways, like lots of global cities, with lots of people coming in to create great art. You can flip it the other way. The built environment shapes the art coming out of Manchester, and in turn that art reshapes the built environment in terms of facilities and amenities. It goes round in a cycle, right? Totally. As a PR, I’ve launched so many clubs and gig venues that came and went within a year or 18 months because there weren’t the people in Manchester. Well, there were 3m people in the conurbation, but they were never viable. Now so many people live close by that you have got this ecosystem of live music venues. That’s a very tangible way of showing that kind of loop of one thing impacting the other. The book starts in 1979, when you arrive in the city. What would that Andy make of the ways it has changed? When you are 18 you’re a bit of a blank page. I wanted to be in a city and do something in a city where I could make a mark and I have done that in my own space in media. I was able to play a part in building something, in the transformation of the city. I’d be chuffed that I managed to play that role and be part of a communal enterprise in bringing positive change. Probably the political side of me would feel that the 62-year-old Andy has made many compromises that you would never have foreseen. Maybe that’s just part of growing up. You reference a thought experiment: no Factory-Haçienda, no new Manchester. To what extent can you make the argument and to what extent is it maybe a little too simple? There was nothing going on in 1982 in the centre. [Factory Records and Haçienda co-founder Tony] Wilson said, “we’re in a position” – basically because of Joy Division royalties – “to put something back into Manchester and to help revive this city”. They were gutted, really, at how low Manchester had fallen. Look at what the Haçienda became, which was first a financial disaster, then globally notorious for a wild music scene which became a carnival of crime. The authorities would have shut it down, but Manchester City Council took the view that this place has got us on the cover of Newsweek magazine in America, we have got business delegations coming asking to see the Haçienda. It led to the Manchester International Festival, which led to the Aviva Studios and that crazy chain reaction of culture and property development. Manchester would have developed. But it gave Manchester a charisma that other cities didn’t have. What is your best Haçienda memory that is fit for print? Or maybe not fit for print? We can do either. There was one really rocking New Year’s Eve, I think it might have been 1990, that goes down with me as the best New Year’s Eve ever. There was the 10th anniversary birthday party, where they put a fairground in the wasteland next to the club. It was a beautifully hot night in May. Then there were memorable occasions, some of the stuff in the book: the undercover drugs bust that took place right in front of my eyes. Gangsters trying to kill each other after the [filming of] The Hitman & Her. Street Feast founder Jonathan ‘JD’ Downey has said the Haçienda changed his life, but he also tweeted: ‘It would be great (one day PLEASE GOD) to read an article about Manchester’s nightlife that doesn’t mention The Haçienda.’ When you’ve got something in the past that is as iconic as that club was, it presents a challenge, doesn’t it, to celebrate that past and still move forward? Yeah, it becomes a cliché. It becomes this edifice. In many ways I am as bored of it as he is, even though I’ve written this book. There’s a whole industry that wants to recycle memories. But my point is this: people say Manchester celebrates the Haçienda like Liverpool does The Beatles. The difference is that the Beatles left Liverpool. They were forced to go to London. The Haçienda was a gift to the city from people who loved the city. That gift has been totalled at an £18m loss over a 15-year period, and that is an investment in the city that should be celebrated. It has become fashionable to scoff at the Haçienda because it has become this kind of cartoon caricature of Shaun and Bez [of the Happy Mondays] larking around like Shaggy and Scooby-Doo, instead of that more serious city-building purpose that was at the heart of it. With your PR hat on, what do you think real estate as an industry needs to do better in telling its story? Place and the way people feel about their city is very important. Real estate projects that seem to take no notice of local and regional sentiment are always going to find hostility or challenge. If the Manchester story tells us anything, it is that culture responds to place. Developers need to be sensitive to that. Not just to what people want in the locality, but to the culture and history of a place. To send feedback, e-mail tim.burke@eg.co.uk or tweet @_tim_burke or @EGPropertyNews