GUY MANKOWSKI

When my novel, How I Left The National Grid, was accepted for publication a scene that I considered important didn't make it into the book for contractual reasons. In it, the journalist Sam walks from the Hulme Estate, along the side of the motorway and into the heart of Manchester. It’s a perilous journey that I took myself on a wet Manchester afternoon to research this chapter. Two characters, both trying to ‘find’ the vanished singer Robert Wardner in their different ways, undertake a journey that takes them past the historical layers of the city. Their conversation covers topics as diverse as A Clockwork Orange,  Margaret  Thatcher, Brutalist architecture, the history of the synth and New Order. I’ve mentioned this scene in a few talks and lectures, and having had very kind feedback for it from some of the post-punk musicians I interviewed whilst working on the book I thought this might be the place for it- 13 The morning sky was the kind that Sam could im...

When I started this blog in 2011 I posted an entry reflecting on the work of Warp Records artist Lonelady, aka Julie Campbell. In 2015, during the course of researching my novel 'How I Left The National Grid', we were introduced and we began corresponding. Our work at the time shared a psychic terrain. This terrain contained preoccupations with Manchester and Factory Records. With how the legacies of both inform the haunting aspects of the city's interzones, concrete flyovers, and tower blocks. The conversation itself teetered on the margins of semantics and terminology. Both of us have tried to make sense of these concerns using walking and words, and the brittle aesthetics of post-punk. She has also used synthesisers, guitars and other forms of music which crackle and twitch like a frightened metropolis. This interview with Pop Matters is a sanitised (believe it or not) version of the chats we had which covered this hinterland. Quite why both of us, at this point in ...