Christina McDermott is a gobby tattooed Mancunian twenty-something who was once told by a careers advisor that she should give up on the idea of becoming an Entertainment Journalist, and think about becoming an English teacher instead.
This is advice she has been soundly ignoring for the past 10 years, and in that time she has written scathing diatribes on the world around her and the modern music scene for the Morning Star, BBC Manchester, The Guardian, and the Manchester Evening News amongst others.
When she's not drinking tea and listening to Fall records in her attic flat, she can be found blagging gigs, buying records and propping up bars across the North West.
Perverted By Language is her thoughts on the much beloved city of her birth, and the things within it that you can find if you choose to look hard enough.
Blogs. They're bloody everywhere at the moment aren't they? It often feels like every man and their dog is going around thinking that everyone with an internet connection needs to know the contents of their brain, so you'd be forgiven for wondering why this one is going to be so radically different from the norm, and why you should invest your time in reading it when you could be doing something exciting (like reading, dancing or eating a bacon sandwich, to name just a few activities) instead.
Well, seeing as it looks as though this is going to be my internet soap box for the foreseeable future, it’s probably best that I start off being honest. This blog probably isn’t going to change the world, make people rise up in the streets in an attempt to overthrow global capitalism or even get readers so worked up that they start penning angry letters to my editor in green ink.
But what I am intending it to do is to ask questions, form opinions, poke fingers in uncomfortable places, and maybe convince people to start looking at Manchester, its culture and its recent history, in an entirely new way. Why am I bothering to do this? Well, probably because I firmly believe that for a person to understand their present, they need to understand and question the past – even if at times this can prove to be an uncomfortable process.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve long felt that there is a kind of cultural imperialism that is endemic within this city. It's ok to go on and on and on about Factory Records and the Hacienda, like the formation of those was like some kind of musical Year Zero. But no one ever mentions the things which were going on at that time outside of these places. It’s almost as though polite society, comprising of a pre-determined artistic intelligentsia have conspired to photoshop their own vision of Manchester in the late 1980s and early 90s, which – arguably – never really existed.
These are the things I find interesting about the city I live in. Why does one version of the past have more cultural significance than the other? Why do we only ever cherry-pick the bits of Manchester's past that we can flog to tourists? And, indeed, am I going to be able to write about all of these things in an erudite way which doesn’t make me come across like some kind of condescending female version of Melvin Bragg? Well, I aim to do my best. Here’s hoping you’ll stick around and let me know how I’m doing. So pull up a chair. I’m looking forward to getting to know you….
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