Monday 9 March 2015

Of The North



Chris McDowall, the creator of Into the Odd, recently joked that Liverpool was like the Florence of the Old School Renaissance with both Yoon-Suin and Fire on the Velvet Horizon coming out in such quick succession. Now, first of all humility compels me to demur, but also I live in Newcastle nowadays, and half of the creative energy behind FOTVH comes from New Zealand. So I think making Liverpool the Florence of the OSR is perhaps a little inaccurate. But still, if you include Chris, who lives in Manchester, I think we can make a play for the North of England being at least the Tuscany of the OSR - can't we? Can you at least give us that?

The North of England is seen by the rest of the country as a miserable place. It's like how most Americans seem to view the Deep South. Except whereas the Deep South is slavery, mint juleps, cotton fields, devout Christianity, Walker Evans, and dogs gasping for breath in the summer heat, "Up North" is flat caps, whippets, coal miners, bleak grey skies, unemployment, Roy 'Chubby' Brown, and hen nights in Blackpool featuring "Drunk and Gorgeous" t-shirts and cock-shaped lollipops.

But in spite of this the North of England has always been its creative heart - certainly since the Industrial Revolution. You only have to list the ridiculously large number of world-conquering musicians who've come from the comparatively tiny slice of land that is Liverpool and Manchester, the poets and writers and artists and actors, the sportsmen, the comedians. Factor in Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle, and the innumerable towns lying in their orbits, and you can make a strong case for the North of England being pound-for-pound the most successfully artistically creative area of the world of comparative size since the Second World War.

Why is this? On the one hand the North is a very beautiful place, and large swathes of it are very wealthy; most Southerners imagine it as bleak and impoverished because they never go there. Drive ten minutes from Byker, in Newcastle, which is one of the poorest places in Western Europe, and you're in the Elysian Fields of Ponteland rubbing shoulders with barristers, actuaries and footballers who live in 16th-Century manor houses with packs of Irish wolf hounds and horses. And while the North suffered more than most areas of the country in the 1970s and 80s, most of its cities are now undergoing genuine renaissances (Liverpool in particular is simply unrecognisable to how it was when I was a lad; in the dodgy side streets 5 minutes away from the city centre where you simply couldn't park in 1987 without your radio and hub caps being nicked, there are now trendy gourmet burger restaurants full of blokes in pseudo-Victoriana-wear with moustaches and smoking e-cigarettes, and speakeasy-type bars with blacked out windows which only let cool people in and serve Old Fashioneds with massive ice cubes. There's a set of traffic lights in Toxteth where I vividly remember my mum getting robbed as we pulled to a stop; it's now the heart of student town, full of flocks of girls in leggings and lads with slicked-back hair and their t-shirt sleeves rolled up to show off their gym biceps.)

And yet on the other hand many parts of the North are bad places to live. I didn't grow up in a former pit village in County Durham, or the Clockwork Orange world of Speke or Kirkby, but in the town where I grew up it's safe to say there wasn't much going on. When I tell people I'm from Wallasey I normally get a blank stare: it's the kind of place you only know if you're from there. I usually describe it as being pubs and houses. That's all it really is: 50,000 people and a heck of a lot of beer. "Culture" in Wallasey is getting a Chinese meal-for-two for £10 from Asda. It's nice enough, but if you're a kid growing up there you have to make your own fun.

And that's the key to it really: that's why the North is a hotbed of creative energy. It's because for a lot of kids there's fuck all to do except make music or write poetry or whatever. When you're living in a terraced house where it's always either raining or about to rain, and where the only colours around you are drab browns and greys and colours that look like them, you have to go the extra mile yourself. Your imagination hones itself. Some people turn to football, some turn to pop music, others apparently turn to role playing games. I'm not sure that this is the only reason why I came up with Yoon-Suin (the fact that I fucked off somewhere else in England and then across to the other side of the World may also have something to do with that), but I'm sure it's significant. So if you're looking for somebody to blame for this flowering of OSR stuff... put it down to the rain, economic stagnation, and the alchemy of D&D's effects on a bored kid's brain.

21 comments:

  1. I grew up in the house just to the north of this https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Hallsenna+Moor+National+Nature+Reserve/@54.3921789,-3.4398351,463m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x486335534d1d480f:0xc5973086c395b1c8
    So that seems to match up with your theory

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm a midlander really so I just get the southern ridicule of the North with none of the gritty credibility.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Guilty. As someone who did grow up in a County Durham (former) pit village (and who was no good at fighting) I played D&D, wrote bad poetry and formed a band. Boredom can be a great stimulus.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Interesting real world posts like this make gaming posts seem sooo tedious.

    Birmingham is not in the north but the same principle holds and from there we get: Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, The Moody Blues and Fine Young Cannibals.

    Comedy doesn't fit your notion so well though. The best comedy comes from Cambridge and London.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Upper-middle-class comedy is a Cambridge Footlights thing, since Monty Python. Before working class comedians were ethnically cleansed from British TV, the best comedy tended to be Northern, though - I liked Hale & Pace (Southern working class un-PC comedians) but I would accept that objectively speaking the North produced more comedic talent, and probably better talent.

      Delete
    2. I am not a massive fan of Cambridge Footlights style comedy. Lots of upper middle class people sneering on Radio 4. I find a lot of it pretty trite.

      Delete
    3. I find most comedy as stressful to watch as adverts. Unlike film, tv or music with can be rated out of 10, comedy is more binary - laugh or grind your teeth. The top drawer British stuff though Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Black Adder and The Office and Extras has all been produced by smart educated people, at least to my taste.

      Delete
    4. I absolutely loathe Monty Python. I've never understood why people think it's any good. Which is odd, because I do like things the people involved have done subsequently, like Fawlty Towers, Terry Gilliam's films, Michael Palin's travel stuff, etc.

      Delete
    5. This reminds me of Monty Python's 'Northern Playwright' sketch:

      http://youtu.be/YPSzPGrazPo

      Delete
    6. Yeah that was fun. The sketches are hit and miss but there was so many of them there is plenty of good stuff.

      More toffee nosed English comedic brilliance and one of my favourite novels, Three Men in a Boat: (Palin within)

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9xvrbfyKGQ

      Delete
  6. Seems to me the US equivalent of the North is the Midwest - not much to do there, so they invented D&D! >:)

    ReplyDelete
  7. There's a lovely piece in The Guardian, "In Praise of the North," from 2008. I'll admit that it's a little too self-congratulatory in places -- but I still find myself turning to it, whenever I feel a little nostalgic about where I grew up.

    (Ignore the beginning's dig about the right wing think tank. The rest of the article's not like that, I promise.)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah, that line about how it's a tragedy Northerners aren't still digging coal and building ships is a classic armchair chattering-class leftie remark. From somebody who grew up in wealthy York and now lives in London.... Nice article after him though!

      Delete
    2. Yeah, even as a fully signed up leftie myself (big fan of the work of EP Thompson, Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, etc.), I'll admit that the coal mining remark was a bit ... "uninformed."

      Delete
  8. A link might help, mightn't it?

    http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/aug/14/britishidentity.conservatives

    ReplyDelete
  9. Not sure how much tongue in cheek this post is. Seems pretty goofy. But then I generally think the same thing of any serious discussion about why region/country X is better or whatever. Maybe I would feel different if I were from some region that gets bagged on like Northern England or the Southern US. I am, however, willing to entertain earnest debate about which part of the South has better BBQ (the answer is obviously Kansas City).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It only seems goofy because there are no standards for creativity in gaming as the population is to small and the people too weird. If there were standards they would be concentrated around degrees of incompetence.

      No reasonable person would claim the artistry in Gaming is comparable even to most puerile Rock & Roll.

      Now do you understand?

      Delete
  10. Does this mean I'll have to write something when I come home to the North later this year, after a decade away?

    ReplyDelete