The Observer, Sunday 20 September 2009
Miranda Sawyer
Kevin Cummins: the Manchester photographs
From the agony of Joy Division, through the ecstasy of the Hacienda to the rabble-rousing of Oasis, Manchester holds an exalted place in music history, and Kevin Cummins was there to document it all. Miranda Sawyer relives the bleakness and the beauty captured in his new book
"I always thought," says Kevin Cummins, in his distinctively light Manc tones, "that Manchester should have a museum of popular culture. I was going to donate all my memorabilia to it, have a Kevin Cummins room."
Instead, Cummins, NME photographer from punk to Oasis and beyond, has collated and edited his photographs, his gig tickets, his past into a beautiful book, a portable monument to his home city of Manchester and its popular culture. Meaning: its bands. Manchester: Looking for the Light through the Pouring Rain might not contain them all, but it comes close enough to satisfy the spoddiest of pop snobs.
Here we find shots not only of the big players – Buzzcocks, Joy Division/New Order, the Fall, the Smiths, Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses, Oasis – but of the less feted, such as Slaughter and the Dogs, A Certain Ratio, Vini Reilly, the Jazz Defectors. There are also essays and interviews by Paul Morley, Gavin Martin, Stuart Maconie and John Harris, the NME writers Cummins worked most closely with during each of the four musical "phases" that this book covers (loosely: punk, indie, Madchester, Britpop). Plus pithy quotes, including this one (my favourite) from Mark Twain: "I would like to live in Manchester. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable."
I like the quote because it's not only witty, it's witty in a Mancunian way, its dark humour barely covering a kind of arrogance. That's Manchester: a city too cynical for Liverpool's sentiment, too sophisticated for Leeds's tek-as-you-find – arty, funny, cocky. And, in the 70s and 80s, very grim. There is, of course, an innate glamour to grimness, which all Mancunians work to their advantage. Bleak is cool, insouciance in the face of bleakness even more so, and Manchester musicians have never been ashamed of looking more than just good, of projecting a vision, whether stark, romantic, violent, creative, that goes beyond the usual stand-in-front-of-a-white-wall-and-scowl rock band cliché.
Cummins, typical Manc, combining art with a good time, a sense of beauty with a take-the-mickey ability to get on with all his subjects, helped many of them achieve this. "I never liked that anodyne studio stuff," he says. "I wanted to put bands where they were comfortable." Which explains the iconic shots of Joy Division on a snow-covered bridge over Princess Parkway, of Shaun Ryder grinning beneath a big E, of the Stone Roses covered in Pollock-like paint, of Liam and Noel in Man City shirts, even that one of Madonna dancing next to one of the Haçienda's striped pillars. All memorable, defining images. There are others too, to satisfy the I-was-there crowd, such as a picture of Andrew Berry and his fellow snippers at Swing, the Haçienda hair salon; of the desolate sweep of the now-demolished council estate in Hulme; the sweaty, bemused Haçienda faithful just after the lights went up.
Not all Cummins's work is in Manchester. But it's all located. "Sometimes the band was almost incidental," he admits. "Like the Joy Division shot. That's an architectural shot with a band in it."
Early in Cummins's career, money was tight. It cost him a tenner to buy and develop a roll of film at a time when the NME only paid £6.50 a shot. So there were no expensive studio shoots and, actually, not too many photographs. Once he became established, however, such parsimony went out of the window and Cummins, a big man with a big personality, gained a reputation for wanting the finest from his foreign trips. "I refused to stay in fleapits," he admits. "But that's because I had 15 grand's worth of equipment, and fleapits don't have anywhere safe to put it."
Still, his high-rolling rep went before him, as did his absolute devotion to Manchester City (his book is a fetchingly appropriate light blue). There's an apocryphal tale that he refused to fly United Airlines. "I said it once as a joke," he protests. "It was for 'My Sad Mate', the back page of 90 Minutes, the football magazine. I've never lived it down. The next time I went to a match, this lad came up to me and said, Nice one. I didn't know those wankers owned an airline."
Cummins might be a funny man, but he's also a talented one, with an eye not only for a band shot but also for the stuff that surrounds us all. The environment you grow up in makes you who you are, which is why this is a book about Manchester and not just about music. It opens with a picture of a patriotic mural for the Queen's Jubilee in 1977: "We were all going to punk gigs, but we were in our own little world," says Cummins. "Everyone else was painting royalist emblems on the side of their houses."
This book shows the ripple effect of those gigs. Thirty-plus years later, the book ends with another union jack mural but this time someone has added the slogan, "There's no future in England's dreaming". Followed by: "John Lydon of I'm A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/sep/20/kevin-cummins-photography-manchester-pop
