Manchester Unspun: Pop, Property and Power in the Original Modern City: How a City Got High on Music

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Manchester unspun sorts the truth from the spin of the city’s stories to reveal a remarkable journey, describing the hubris,scandal, money and politics which played out during its remarkable reinvention.

He became entranced by the possibilities of Smithfield Buildings, an entire city block further up Oldham Street, and its potential for characterful apartments. This is a fabulous, compelling book with a cast of larger-than-life characters - Tony Wilson, Alex Ferguson, Mick Hucknall, Tom Bloxham, Carol Ainscow, Howard Bernstein, Caroline Aherne and Gary Neville among them. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. After establishing his own PR firm, he became involved in some of the city’s major building projects, and witnessed overblown design disasters such as the ill-conceived Urbis building play out at first-hand. The Haçienda in 1989: ‘Gave the kiss of life to a dying city and sparked a chain reaction of hubris, scandal, money and power politics still playing out today.It’s also a memoir of my experiences working with the famous personalities in music, football, business and politics who made Manchester the most headline grabbing city in the UK. The “24-hour party people” celebrated in Michael Winterbottom’s film homage to Wilson, says Spinoza, created the aura and cachet that helped them sell Manchester around the world and earn the right to host events such as the Commonwealth Games. Whichever format you pick, the sample is from Kindle, where the print is larger and the photos clearer, which makes it hard to judge.

Given the people he’s rubbed shoulders with along the way there’s a surprising lack of ego as Spinoza recounts a string of personal encounters and anecdotes over five decades. It starts in a monochrome world of bomb sites and derelict warehouses and gradually turns from sepia into the full technicolour wonderland it presents today. Elegantly interweaving his own biography with that of the city, Spinoza narrates with panache the story of how the place once known as Cottonopolis has reinvented itself. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. The views from St Peter’s Square through Castlefield to the Lowry Centre were, and still are, a brilliant 20 minutes’ advertisement for the resurgent urban centre.Neville is only one of a vast cast of characters populating Manchester Unspun, as it traces four decades of urban transformation that have not delighted everyone. Another notable clash of sensibilities occurs when the Haçienda hosts a 1996 seminar on situationism – the philosophical touchstone for the Factory way of doing things. Welcome to Manchester, or “Manc-hattan”, as some now like to describe it with a certain degree of ambivalence. Arriving in Manchester as a wide-eyed student in 1979, Andy Spinoza went on to establish the arts magazine City Life before working for the Manchester Evening News and creating his own PR firm. He is someone who not only had a seat at the table throughout most of the events he recounts, but was responsible for writing the press release.