Moodymanc & Development Music: City Views - Manchester

In the start of a new series on Pulse we get some of our favorite people in the scene to tell us what they love about their city. Kicking things off are Development and Moodymanc on Manchester.

Moodymanc
I'm not a big fan of blind regionalism on any scale. It's ugly and boring. I recognize that where I'm from is not the most fantastic city on the planet by any stretch...in fact I could easily moan for days about it inthe true style and tradition of all Mancunians, but since you ask, here are five things that I do love.

 - The music and the musicians. Manchester is a great place to live as a musician; big enough to feel truly cosmopolitan yet small enough to constantly bump into people you know. The scene here is diverse and ever thriving. The level of musicianship is extremely high-it's hard to watch music programmes on tv without seeing bands or Musicians from manchester performimg on a multinational level, and yet you'll find a lot of these same artists working and playing with each other on smaller gigs around town or collaborating on other projects, or even just out partying together. Musicians here mix. The rent's still relatively cheap which allows musicians to focus a lot more on their craft and allows originality; there is a deep rooted and successful culture here of doing your own thing musically and if you live here you're constantly immersed in that.

 - The people. I feel very lucky to have travelled worldwide with music, which is a great way to gain insight into a lot of places even if you don't neccessarily spend a lot of time in them. As a result I've become a lot more aware and appreciative of various aspects of my hometown culture.
Manchester, for all it's by no means the utopian dream, is one of the most ethnically and cuturally diverse and intergrated cities I have been to. There is a huge ammount of tolerance, and socializing is a lot less drawn by cultural or racial lines than it is in most big cities. Again this is very much reflected in our musical culture which has long reflected its deeply multiethnicity. I'm also proud to say that we have a big and well established Gay Village in Manchester and a well intergrated community.

 -  Our politics. Manchester has a rich and proud political history. Along with the industrial revolution (which led to all kinds of innovation and ultimately the invention of the computer!) this was the birthplace of modern socialism, trade unionism, the suffragette movement, the co-operative movement. There is a healthy culture of dissent here stretching way back. May we never forget it and long may it live!

 - The weather. It rains, a lot of the time it's grey; but that keeps us inside, creative, on our toes and hungry to get out! When it's sunny it's like an explosion. A wave of happiness surges through the city. I of course have a love/hate relationship with it, as any Mancunian must, in order to survive it, but I've come to respect that it is a massive part of what does make this city great. I think it's probably an impotant contributing factor to our unique brand of humour. We are in desperate need of a laugh and mancunians love to take the piss!!!

 - The football. It's an amazing thing to travel throughout the world and be instantly known and loved for Manchester United  Despite the politics. Despite being a red I'm glad to see the recent success of Manchester City too. It's a great thing for the city (even though I do say it through gritted teeth!!).

Tom and Mike at Development Music.
 - Independent thinking - Manchester has always felt like the home of independent thought. If somewhere else is doing something, then we’ve never really been massively interested. We have our own humour, our own fashion and our own art, and that’s certainly true about music. There’s so much talent in the city and we’ve been blessed with working with some of the best of that talent on this next release. To have Jamie and Danny collaborating on this sort of song is exactly what we’ve always been about; taking soul music and giving it some mancunian edge! Mr Scruff is a household name all over the world too, so to have him contributing to the project was the perfect compliment. And we all live within a mile of each other so it’s an environmentally friendly record too.

- Record shops - We’ve lost some great ones but we’ve maintained some great ones too. Despite all the morbid ‘vinyl is dead’ talk, we still boast a couple of the best record shops the world over. A lot of our friends around the UK now mailorder their hard-earned wax from Piccadilly Records and Vinyl Exchange still exists as a mecca of digging and sifting for classics and collectables. Vinyl might be dead but we’re doing our bit with the resuscitator machines.

 - Clubs - Manchester is in rude health at the moment in terms of its night life. Nights like Content, HoyaHoya, Cutloose, Wet Play, Bohemian Groove and meandyou are some of the best in the country and cover the full musical spectrum. The promoters are part of a generation of people who were more influenced by the likes of Fat City and the Electric Chair than the Hacienda. This generation are keen to cement Manchester's place as a forward thinking musical utopia rather than a City fuelled solely by Hac related nostalgia.

 - Forward thinking - everyone knows about the city's rich history but there's a new generation of producers, DJ's and bands based in the city creating forward thinking music that's getting recognised around the globe. Artists such as Trus'me, IllumSphere, Lone, Be, Krsytal Klear are all fresh young producers who wont be tied down to one genre of music. We've had the pleasure to work with one of the leaders of this multi-genre mentality, Zed Bias on a couple of releases andhe's put out two killer albums in the last 12 months. Manchester's rich heritage is in safe hands.

 - Winning - Mancunian sports fans have never had it so good with United winning the league, City winning their first trophy in years and Lancashire finally winning the first cricket championship in 70 years. When all our sides win every weekend it just helps to boost the feel good factor in the city, although that'll probably go out of the window on Derby Day. 

Moodymanc Vs Jamie Finaly - People Circulate is forthcoming on Development Music

Listen to Moodymanc on Pulse Radio