Small Prophets (2026)

 

An Evangel of Unrest: The Life Story of Bonar Thompson by Bonar Thompson ( (Marble Arch, W.l. 1926)

From the commencement of the conflict until my arrest in 1916, I spoke against it, in various parts of London, particularly in Finsbury Park—the scene of many a deed and vow.

The "Daily Herald" League, from whose platform I hurled the challenge to every warmonger in London, was a magnificent band of rebels who carried the war against war into the enemy’s camp with unrelenting vigour and audacity, contesting the ground inch by inch without qualification or reservation.

* * *

The campaign of “rounding up,” "roping in” and "combing out” was prosecuted by the enemy with the utmost determination. Every art and artifice, every dodge and device, by which to lure the young men into the war-trap, was employed by an unscrupulous and unprincipled governing class.

Touts and informers were lurking at every street corner on the look out for any poor devil who might not care to offer his carcase as a bullet stopper. Such as these were dubbed ”shirkers" and ”slackers,” and no effort was spared to land them in the net. I had many an encounter with the harpies and hirelings who lay in wait for the likely recruit, the following dialogue invariably taking place :—

Question: ”Why aren’t you in khaki?”

Answer: "Because there's a war on."

Question : ”What would you do if the Germans came here ?”

Answer: "Volunteer for foreign service.”

With the Recruiting Officer a similar interchange occurred :—

R. O. : " Well, lad, have you thought about it?” 

B. T. : ” Yes.”

R. O. : ” Going to join up?”

B. T.: “No!”

R. O. : ” How’s that?”

B. T. : ”I’ve thought about it.”

The Fleet Street Scribblers were working overtime in their lie-foundries manufacturing elaborate fabrications for the delectation of a gullible population. German spies, plots, atrocity stories, children’s hands cut off, corpse factories, and a hundred likely and unlikely stories festering in the fevered fancy of the rabble rousers of the reptile Press.

The ordinary Englishman had an impression in his head at the beginning of the war that the German people were neither better nor worse than anybody else.

This illusion had to be destroyed. All such errors must be swept from his mind. The Germans were not ordinary human beings. They were fiends in human form, vermin who must be destroyed like rats.

As one eminent Churchman, Father Bernard Vaughan, so veil put it: "There are two classes in the world to-day— human beings and Germans. The duty of every Christian is to kill Germans, and go on killing Germans."

These noble words rang out like a clarion call to the nation, rousing the laggards from their lethargy, opening men’s eyes to a realisation of the situation.

Very soon the whole population—with the exception of a negligible number of morbid and dangerous fanatics—was in the grip of the gospel of Hun-hating, waves of patriotic enthusiasm sweeping them along on their holy mission.

Some brave fellows, itching to do their bit in the sacred cause of ”right against might,” could not wait until they got to France to show their patriotism, and commenced operations on the Home Front by raiding shops kept by poor German shopkeepers in the East End, many a deathless deed of devotion and heroism being recorded in the great onslaught on those poor German pork butchers' establishments.

24 Hour Party People (2002)

 

Shameless (2012)

 

Shameless (2011)

 

Shameless (2010)

 

Shameless (2009)

 

Shameless (2008)

 

Shameless (2006)

 

Shameless (2005)

 

Shameless (2004)

 

The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club by Peter Hook (Simon & Schuster 2010)

 

I went to the opening with Iris, my girlfriend at the time. We got an invite in the post like everybody else.

As for the night’s entertainment, Hewan Clarke – a lovely bloke who had a trademark lisp – was the DJ. Because of his speech impediment, we teased him by saying, ‘The Hathienda mutht be built.’ He’d stick with us for years. He was a nice, quiet guy. I don’t remember much about his musical tastes, but my memories of him are all good. The cult of the DJ hadn’t yet begun. On the opening night he DJed between acts but nobody paid any attention to what records he was playing.

Bernard Manning was the compère for the evening. Manning was a comedian who owned the World Famous Embassy Club on Rochdale Road in Manchester (which has outlasted even him and us), near where I used to live in Moston. Rob and Tony thought it was ironic, having him do a spot on the opening night. To them he represented the sort of old-school, working-men’s club environment the Haçienda meant to replace. The crowd were bemused, quite rightly. As for Manning, he took one look at the Haçienda and sussed out it was run by idiots. He laughed his balls off as we tried to pay him. He turned to Rob, Tony and me and said, ‘Keep it. You’ve never run a club before, have you?’

We stared at him, puzzled. What did he mean?

‘Fucking stick to your day jobs, lads, ’cause you’re not cut out for clubs. Give up now while you’ve got the chance.’ Then he walked off.

We chuckled, thinking, ‘We’ll show him.'

Substance: Inside New Order by Peter Hook (Simon and Schuster 2016)

 

There was only one thing for it.

One of us lot would have to be the singer. To work it out, Rob thought it would be a good idea to put us in the studio with Martin Hannett, with Hannett in the Simon Cowell role and the three of us auditioning like a kind of post-punk X-Factor. It was a terrible idea, though. Martin had idolised Ian. Of everybody in the Factory family he was hit the hardest, and we entered the studio to find him medicating his depression in the usual way, with dope and coke. It didn’t exactly help matters that he’d always had a fairly low opinion of me, Steve and Barney anyway: ‘One genius and three Manchester United supporters’ was what he’d called Joy Division. Even though that’s not strictly speaking true, because Steve supported Macclesfield Town, but you knew what he meant. Being Martin Hannett, he wasn’t exactly backward when it came to telling us what a poor substitute we made for Ian’s genius.

A Taste of Honey (1961)

 

I Swear I Was There: Sex Pistols, Manchester and the Gig That Changed the World by David Nolan (Music Press Books 2006)

STEVE DIGGLE: They say all these people were there. I don’t remember any of them being there. But then I wouldn’t have known Morrissey from fucking Adam. I never saw Wilson either – but I was short-sighted in those days…

HOWARD DEVOTO: The only people, apart from Pete Shelley, myself, Steve Diggle and all the Pistols crew that I’d be reasonably certain were there were Paul Morley and Morrissey.

The Fallen: Life In and Out of Britain's Most Insane Group by Dave Simpson (Canongate 2008)

Like any classic long-running British soap opera, The Fall has minor characters and major characters, although even the latter can suddenly disappear and the saga just rolls on. In the bewildering Fall cast, few characters have made as much impact with their appearance and disappearance as Marc Riley – who has since gone on to other prominent roles but during his time in The Fall (June 1978 to December 1982) loomed as large over events and music as Ken Barlow in Coronation Street.

What I know about Riley is this: he joined after hanging around with The Fall and becoming one of their sporadic road crew. Thus, Riley replaced Eric the Ferret, who replaced Jonnie Brown, who replaced Tony Friel. He became the eleventh disciple to join in the first two years, his reign predating but outlasting Steve Davies. In the month he signed up, cricketer Ian Botham became the first man in the history of the game to score a century and take eight wickets in one innings of a Test match. Albums lining up against The Fall’s 1979 Live at the Witch Trials debut at the time included Prince’s debut For You, Dire Straits’ first eponymous album, Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town and X-Ray Spex’s punky, saxophoney Germfree Adolescents. Margaret Thatcher was in power. It seems a world away.

As does December 1982, the month he left, when Thatcher still had years ahead of her, but the pop landscape was changing. Manchester greats like The Smiths and New Order were edging towards Top of the Pops. Neil Kinnock was elected Labour leader and Michael Jackson’s Thriller rapidly became the biggest-selling album of all time. Riley’s five-year stint was a relative lifetime in The Wonderful and Frightening World but coincides with the beginnings of The Fall’s noble ascent from indie cultdom to national institution

Ruthless by Cath Staincliffe (Corgi 2014)

Closer to the blaze, the stench of the fire filled the air and she could see fire tenders at the scene, three of them, as she walked up the road. Uniformed officers were keeping the crowd away from the site. The Old Chapel, she realized, now belching clouds of acrid smoke into the air, the inferno roaring. Hoses were spraying water but bright flames were still visible through the holes in the roof and the windows where the shutters had burned away.

Fire always drew a crowd, a spectacle and free at that. It hadn’t been a chapel for ages. Probably closed back in the seventies and she remembered it was a carpet place for a while then that went bust. Rachel had no idea what it was  used for now, if anything. The state of the grounds, neglected and overgrown behind the wire fencing, and the holes in the roof suggested it was derelict. Just begging for some fire-starter to come along and set light to it.

She looked at the crowd. Whole families, mum with a pram and a bunch of kids around. Teenagers, some of them filming with their phones. A few older people too; one man had made it with his Zimmer, determined to be at the party. A lad on a BMX bike, stunt pegs on the rear wheel. Dom had wanted one of them, their dad had played along but they all knew the only way it would happen was if it was robbed. So it never happened. Rachel had found an old racing bike at the tip and dragged it home and Sean had begged new tyres off a cousin and they’d done it up for Dominic. Never had working brakes but Dom was made up.

All we need is an ice cream van, she thought, or toffee apples. A loud cracking sound and the crowd responded, oohing and aahing, as part of the roof collapsed and fell inside the building sending fresh flames and sparks heavenwards. Rachel shivered, damp from her run and not near enough to the heat from the fire.

Dead To Me by Cath Staincliffe (Corgi 2012)

Rachel Bailey stood, freezing her tits off, on a crime-scene cordon in north Manchester. From her vantage point, at the edge of the recreation ground, she had a view across the rows of rooftops that rippled down the hillside, punctuated here and there by the bulk of a mill rising from the streets built in the same red brick as everything else. One she could see had its name picked out in white brick on the square mill tower: Heron. Rachel had been brought up in streets like this; well, dragged herself up, more like. A couple of miles to the west. Sunny Langley. Manchester didn’t really stop, Rachel thought; there were boundaries of course, but you couldn’t see the join. The city bled into the satellite towns that ringed the plain: Oldham, Rochdale, Ashton and on to even higher ground. The houses gradually changing from these brick mill terraces to stone-built weaver’s cottages, getting smaller and sparser as the developments petered out on the foothills of the Pennines. The place looked tired and mucky this time of year, the brick dull, trees bare, the grass on the field yellow and scrubby.

Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews by Simon Reynolds (Soft Skull Press 2009)

Simon Reynolds: Thinking about the city’s post-punk scene, it struck me that none of the Manchester bands inspired into existence by punk were particularly political. Certainly there was no protest punk, no agitprop.

Tony Wilson: I always thought the Pistols were the greatest band because they weren’t really agitprop. The more overtly agitprop lines were thrown in by Jamie Reid. None of real punk was Red Wedge. That would be too reasonable. Agitprop is socialist, but the whole background to punk is situationist. Punk was more simple and brutal, which is why post-punk had to happen. One of my only regrets is that Bernard in New Order is clever, and that so fucked me off. So, 1990, Radio One, I’m listening to a programme on the Joy Division/New Order story, and Bernie says, ‘Punk was wonderful, it got rid of all the shite. You can’t really remember how bad music was in the early seventies. It was diabolical, a total wasteland. Punk was an explosion that blew it all away, but it was simple and simplistic. All it could say was, “I’m bored.” Sooner or later someone was going to use the simplicity of punk to express more complex emotions.’ I was like, ‘Fucking hell, the bastard’s right again!’ My reworking of Bernie’s comment is, ‘Punk was wonderful, but all it could say was this one simple emotion: “Fuck you.”’ Sooner or later someone was going to have to use that music to say, ‘I’m fucked.’ And that was Joy Division.

I see Joy Division as the first band of post-punk and U2 as the second. Sure, they can be soap boxy and sermonizing.

Simon Reynolds: Oh yeah, you can hear PiL’s ‘Public Image’ in the early U2 sound. Talking about PiL, there’s a story about the Factory people driving around Manchester at night, stoned, listening to the first PiL album.

Tony Wilson: We loved PiL. We loved them so much, I rang them up and said, ‘Will you do a number on Granada Reports?’ This is early PiL. They came to Manchester and did some songs on the show. And then at 3.40 in the afternoon, John turns to me and says, ‘You still do that fucking club of yours?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ John says, ‘While we’re up here might as well do a fucking gig. Organize it.’ I asked Keith Levene, ‘Is he serious?’ and he says, ‘Yeah.’ So I called Alan Erasmus and asked if he could open the club that night. We’re running around like idiots. Got the news on Radio Piccadilly. At 7.30 in the evening I got A Certain Ratio out of bed to support them, and that night was Manchester’s first PiL gig. Fucking great. Another big band in Manchester was Suicide. Manchester loved Suicide. They played the Factory club at the Russell twice. When they supported The Clash, in every other city in Britain they got booed. But in Manchester it was ‘Fuck The Clash, we’re here for Suicide.’

But back to post-punk – I always think of Joy Division and U2. Two months after Ian died, U2 still hadn’t broken. There was this wonderful kid who was a radio DJ and plugger, and he used to bring U2 to every radio station and every TV station in the north of England every three months to break his beloved U2, whom no one cared about then. I remember him bringing Bono into my office, and Bono sat on the desk and said to me how incredibly sorry he was about Ian’s death. How it had really hurt him. How Ian was the number-one performer of his generation and he knew he was always going to be number two. And he made some statement – it didn’t sound as silly as ‘Now he’s gone, I promise you I’ll do it for him,’ it wasn’t as awful as that, but it was something like that. I thought, ‘Yes, thanks a fucking lot, fuck off.’ Until the afternoon of Live Aid. I was watching, so angry because all the dinosaurs at Wembley were playing and going out to the world, and they were all utter shite. And then U2 came on and they were good. And then a girl fainted, and Bono began to move off the stage to help her. I actually leapt out of my seat and said, ‘All right, I give in! You did it, you did it for Ian! God bless you.’ So God bless U2. They were fantastic at the Superbowl. Edge’s guitar was unbelievable.

The great line about U2 is Bernard’s again. It’s Rapido in 1989, and he’s asked whether as a pop star you can take yourself too seriously. And Bernard says, ‘Yeah, you can. You can get a bit above yourself. Like that guy, what’s his name . . . Bongo.’

24 Hour Party People (2002)