In the 1970s and 1980s, journalists and TV producers looking to capture the full extent of Britain's industrial and manufacturing decline would go to Manchester in search of empty warehouses, derelict workshops and canals clogged with debris. During the same period of post-industrial ruin, several influential bands formed in the city - The Fall and Joy Division in the late 1970s, The Smiths a few years later - and although they differed greatly in their sound and their ways of seeing the world, in each case it seemed as if the bleakness of the failed landscape around them was seeping into their music.

LRB 3 January 2008 | PDF Download