Mark Steel’s In Town. Mark Steel
have lived through the siege of Leningrad for two years living off earthworms and fighting the Nazis using whittled toenail clippings as weapons, only to lag in the queue for a medal behind a banjolele player from Wigan. The story of the medal was an exaggeration, but there was something about Formby that was the embodiment of Wigan, not just working-class but unashamedly so. Otherwise how could he have sung a song called ‘The Wigan Express’ that went ‘She got some shocks in her signal box’?
In 1946, when he toured pre-apartheid South Africa, he upset his hosts by refusing to play segregated venues. As a result a black member of one audience presented Formby’s wife Beryl with a box of chocolates, and George gave the man a hug. National Party leader Daniel François Malan, who would introduce apartheid two years later, heard about this and phoned Beryl to complain, to which she replied, ‘Why don’t you piss off, you horrible little man?’
At first the idea of George Formby and his wife as radical anti-apartheid activists seems as surreal as finding out that Bobby Davro spent five years as a guerrilla fighting with Che Guevara, but in a way it symbolises Wigan’s history as an apparently jolly working-class town getting by without complaining, but with a calm commitment to rebellion underneath. In 1779 cotton workers in Wigan staged one of Britain’s first riots against unemployment. It lasted for several days, until the militia was brought in from Liverpool. The area was at the centre of the Lancashire Luddite riots, and in 1842 a strike of spinners ended up in a battle with two companies of riflemen.
The first miners’ strike of the twentieth century was in Wigan, in 1921 Wigan miners rioted until dispersed by the 16th Hussars, and the local pits were influential in every national strike. It feels as if a Wigan historian might say, ‘Ee, I’ll not call it proper decade if we’ve not been fired on by yeomen or suchlike.’
All this may make Wigan an unlikely setting for a vegan pagan café run by warlocks and called the Coven, but it was right opposite the main station. The warlocks greeted you with the most unsettling behaviour warlocks could manage, by being disconcertingly normal. ‘Hello love, right windy today, isn’t it? How about a piping-hot mug of elderflower-and-nettle tea to warm them bones up?’ one of them said.
The place was cluttered with sticks of incense, dream catchers and models of black cats, and there was a cheery sign informing you they’d cast a spell for you if you liked, in that chirpy lettering that looks as if it’s been written by a neat ten-year-old to be put on the classroom wall. But somehow warlocks seem palatable when they’re working-class and from Wigan. They were warm and neighbourly warlocks, always likely to nip in to see old Elsie on the way home, as she’s getting on and can be a bit forgetful, and one night when she’d forgotten to get any food for her cat, the friendly warlock turned it into stone until the morning so it wouldn’t get hungry.
Sometimes they were disappointingly normal, just bringing you a coffee when you were hoping they’d break into a naked fertility dance. But one Saturday afternoon in the Coven, with my daughter and her friend, we were waiting for our drinks by the upstairs window while flicking through a folder of common hexes. Suddenly the girls said, ‘Wow, look at that!’ A group of men had rushed out onto the street from the Wetherspoon’s pub next door. One of them was on crutches, and he made four agile bounds before deftly swinging them onto the back of someone he must have had a disagreement with on some issue. The street quickly became a battlefield. ‘Someone should do something,’ said the owner of the café. Presumably he’d run out of the potion that deals with a mass crutch-wielding brawl, or at least shrinks the fighters to the size of mice, so they don’t hold up the traffic.
It was almost as if the fighters were making a statement, that you can sit somewhere fancy and pagan if you like, but you can’t escape the real Wigan.
The place where the real Wigan meets the world of chain-company uniformity head on, where the greatest imagination has been displayed in the quest to eliminate imagination, is King Street, which is made up entirely of nightclubs. This isn’t a seedy quarter with bands playing under railway arches, and shirtless DJs scratching from what was once an office in a converted tinned-pudding warehouse. There are twelve clubs in a row, including Walkabout, Revolution, and a fake Irish place. The road is blocked to traffic, and outside each entrance a pair of bald men in black suits act as sentries, so you feel a sense of relief and smug achievement if you get in at all. At the first one we were told sternly by the bald men that it was open until 6 a.m. This information was conveyed with the sort of chilling menace with which I expect guards at Abu Ghraib said ‘You’ll be in here until 6 a.m.’ to prisoners as they were being shown into a room full of rusty implements.
Then we were looked up and down and searched, and it felt as if we might be taken into a small, bare room to be interviewed by an official while a man in a white shirt stood silently behind us holding an unsettled Alsatian on a short lead.
Eventually they let us pay £2 each and rubbed a blurry inkstain onto the backs of our hands. Triumphant, we marched through the huge wooden doors of a glorious Victorian building, that could have been an embassy if Wigan was ever a country, into the split-level dance floor, past a flashing semi-circular bar and a machine pumping out dry ice. Having looked round thoroughly, it was clear that we were the only people there. After a couple of club mix versions of songs I thought I recognised but probably didn’t, four more people came in, but it turned out they were security.
It was tempting to stay until 6 a.m., but instead we went to a nineties club, where about twenty people danced to ‘Wiggle Wiggle’ and Bobby Brown, including someone dressed in a blue all-body gimp outfit with one hole to breathe through. But the most disturbing thing about the place was the overwhelming stench of cleaning products. Was this a new trend, clubs that are renowned for their excessive cleanliness, with a promise that every surface will be polished with Pledge every seven minutes? At the bar it seemed natural to ask for a pint of Jif with a Toilet Duck chaser, and the carpet oozed the aroma of an office to let that’s been abused with too much Shake ’n’ Vac, which was a mistake, as that was definitely a symbol of the eighties, not the nineties.
The best-known chains seemed to be the most popular. Walkabout was the sweatiest, and unlike our first venue you couldn’t practise chipping golf balls across the room without any fear of irritating someone. But as we strolled up the street past the bare thighs and gelled hair, across the pavement that was ready to receive the night’s vomit, I was sort of jealous. How I would have loved, when I was twenty, to have had a street where you were not only allowed but virtually ordered to drink until any time you liked, with hundreds of women in attendance enabling you to dream that at any moment this week you might have a brief conversation with one of them.
But there’s something lacking in a street that regiments adolescent disorderliness. It’s like a board put up by the council for people to graffiti on. The whole point of drinking and dancing late is to feel slightly seedy, to be aware that you’re gyrating or slumped against a fruit machine while respectable society is fast asleep. Once it’s sanctioned, contained, sanitised and run by chains that have a brand image to convey, it’s lost its edge. It’s predictable, as the Arctic Monkeys say. After all that anticipation, ‘All that happened is you drank a lot.’
Worse than encouraging binge drinking, this is a top-down, orchestrated encouragement of corporate binge drinking, the vodkas and tequila slammers arranged according to the demands of a study group that discussed its findings using a PowerPoint display in a room overlooking the Thames in Reading.
Maybe this is more poignant in the home of northern soul, the scene driven from the bottom up that led thousands to hitch and cajole lifts across the country every week in the 1970s to venues such as the Wigan Casino. There’s no generally accepted theory as to why this started, why a lobby-eating, overwhelmingly white corner of north-west England became the centre of a music scene that originated in the black districts of Detroit. But northern soul became a whole category of music, as much as ska or speed garage, revolving around Wigan and fuelled by the thousands who went there, rather than by the desires of leisure-centre-industry shareholders, and who took drugs and danced and then hitched home to Essex or Devon. The trend faded away in the eighties, but there are still posters in the King Street nightclubs for monthly northern soul sessions that take place, for some reason, in the afternoon, as if it’s a modern version of a