The North Will Rise Again: In Search of the Future in Northern Heartlands

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Just to note the under-reported Southmead estate riots which took place a couple of days later in Bristol: You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. I think if there has been a classic North East temperament when it comes to music it has tended to be quite maximalist, “heavy” and, if you like, bent on being world-conquering. Partly there’s a heavy industry element here I think, whereas the North West, for example, has a slightly different culture more oriented around textiles. Sting is a really interesting example because his dad was a shipbuilder, and I think that if you look at the astonishingly dramatic pictures of ships being built in Wallsend in the industrial period, you can kind of see how that might have found its way into his music – if only in the sense of a massively far-reaching ambitiousness. The centrality of the blues – versus melody and psychedelia in Manchester and Liverpool – is another factor.

The North Will Rise Again - Tribune The North Will Rise Again - Tribune

Like many modern works surrounding regional identity, The North Will Rise Again is not really any one thing. Part memoir, part literary analysis, part cultural history and part pop-sociology text, the book swerves from one topic to another. While some aspects of the book – particularly those exploring Niven’s favourite literary and musical artefacts – are well written and researched, much of it feels like a nostalgia trip for a time Niven himself didn’t live in and much of the historical information could easily be found, better written, elsewhere. Interview with Alex Niven “A sort of fierce, buried idealism and soulfulness is at the heart of northern culture” The festival will be split across two days, with the 27 th March being live-streamed from Liverpool’s iconic Invisible Wind Factory. The Charlatans will headline, preceded by Red Rum Club and Zuzu. On 28th March, the festival will stream from Manchester’s recently-saved Gorilla, where The Lightning Seeds will top the bill, after performances by Ist Ist and LIINES. If it had an animating spirit, Samuel wrote, it was not a progressive modernity but a “radical conservatism.” This was a movement “of the known against the unknown, the local and the familiar against the remote and the gigantesque.” As one woman in the Welsh mining town of Maerdy told researchers: “We just want to keep what we’ve got!” Here was a movement for survival against the anonymous and modernizing forces of capital, yet one that was no less progressive for its conservatism.

While the southern half of the nation was aristocratic, traditional, conservative, ancient, and rural — a land of “deeply ingrained traditionalism” and entrenched and unshifting privilege — the North was revolutionary, modern, dynamic, forceful, progressive. Against the accounts of those other great modern capitals — Paris, London, or New York — the cities of the North of England “were the real capitals of modernity,” Niven claims, exhibiting a “rebel commitment to modernism and progressive change.”

The North Will Rise Again Alex Niven interview

Wiener’s book was published at a propitious moment. Only a few months earlier, Margaret Thatcher had won a hard-fought general election, and on taking office she was determined to clear away the detritus of British industry anatomized by Wiener. Her closest political ally, Sir Keith Joseph, even went so far as to distribute copies of the book to every member of her cabinet. Fuzzy Lines Turning then to The Times of 3 July 1980 (Court Circular, p.16), I find this report of the previous day (still lots of Edinburgh activity from the Queen etc): sorry to harp on about accidents of birth etc - but I'm a strict contemporary (geographically, too, though we never met) and sometimes odd details emerge as 'obvious' can be linked to real-world events that MES would have observed. Following The Fall gig in Edinburgh on Sunday 29th June, MES could indeed have spent a couple of days wandering Edinburgh before the Queen Mother hit town on Wednesday 2nd July. If Niven’s book aspires to be a cultural history of the North, then it is a selective one. Rarely does he venture beyond its northern-most outpost of his native Newcastle. Merseyside gets little mention beyond the Beatles, and Cumbria is no more than a side note to its eastern cousin Northumbria. Cheshire, my own northern citadel, is treated no less unkindly as a posh southern redoubt — hardly true of Crewe or Winsford, even if it is apt for Frodsham and Wilmslow. If Alex Niven’s book aspires to be a cultural history of the North, then it is a selective one.

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And Dan reports there is a 1978 book (about America) by Jeremy Rifkin and Randy Barber entitled The North Will Rise Again: Pensions, Politics and Power in the 1980s.The title of the book is clearly a play on "The South Will Rise Again." Straight outta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Compton-Burnett - The Mighty and Their Fall - first broadcast 16th Feb 1962 https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/0db8b6352b2440fc9955f6a926417c39