Skip to main content

Day: 18 October 2011

Madchester innit?

Written by danielle middleton on . Posted in Arts.

For the newbies you may not have seen Manchester in the daylight hours yet: it’s grey drizzly with a splash of colour graffittied to the walls every few metres.

Manchester is famously nicknamed the Rainy City, and when you first arrive it’s hard to see anything but the concrete blandness, especially if you’ve moved here from a more glorious and green setting. However, ask anyone who’s been here a year or more and they’ll probably describe the city with the love a fondness of an old friend.

The Rainy City has an incredible history of music and culture that has left an imprint on the city, its inhabitants and thus everyone who comes here.

“For Manchester is the place where people do things… ‘Don’t talk about what you’re going to do, do it.’ That is the Manchester habit. And in the past through the manifestation of this quality the word Manchester became a synonym for energy and freedom and the right to do and to think without shackles.” From “What the Judge Saw” by Judge Parry, 1912.

Yes that quote was from a billion years ago but it still applies, Kevin Cummins uses it in his pictography, Manchester: Looking for the Light through the Pouring Rain. Cummins is famous for his close relationship with bands as a music photographer for NME through Manchester’s musical glory years from the 70’s to the 90’s.

The quote does aptly sum up the mindset of Mancunians, the natives and those who adopt ‘Madchester’ as their home.

In 2011, Manchester is a different place to the one that spawned The Smiths, The Happy Mondays, Joy Division, Oasis, The Stone Roses and so many others, the bands that we now know to have influenced  not only music but the way a whole generation saw the world. The Happy Mondays gave us baggy clothes, extra-curricular substances, Bez, and music to fill the Hacienda, a venue that made Manchester an epicentre of music and rave culture in 90’s.

Now Manchester has Sankeys, The Warehouse Project and Canal Street at the helm of its musical frontier. Instead of the raw nature that comes with bands, its grime comes with a heavier beat, crop tops and peaked hats, but the music is still influencing the culture of a generation. Canal Street aka The Village is a world of its own and its influence goes way beyond this city, the culture of its few streets has given way to a whole new way of life.

This is Manchester 2011, let it sweep you off your intoxicated feet.

Frisky and Mannish

Written by danielle middleton on . Posted in Arts.

If you haven’t heard of/seen the Edinburgh Fringe Festival Force of comedy-cabaret sauciness, your ears have not lived. On 20th October Frisky and Mannish are making their way to our humble-land (Frisky’s home-town), for the Manchester Comedy Festival and performing at The Lowry.

Their production, School of Pop, taught its audiences Tudor history using the lyrucal stylings of TLC’s No Scrubs, and literature via Wuthering Heights ft Kate Nash.

This year’s veritable feast of comic cabaret delicacies, takes to the stage under the title of Pop Centre Plus; careers advice for pop hopefuls a la Frisky and Mannish.

Thus following a swift praising of Frisky and Mannish’s achievements, combined and as individuals, the questions about what makes the two tick rolled on.

Dani: What is your favourite song that you guys do?

Frisky: Favourite song that we do, it’s hard because we do so much and we’ve been doing them over years and years, they go in and out of enjoyment for different reasons.

One thing that we do is Rhianna’s Rude Boy, and we demonstrate that, obviously we all know it was originally by the Bee Gees, so we do the Bee Gees original and that basically came from loving the song Ride Boy so much.

We put the Bee Gees version on, and when we make ourselves laugh so much that we fall off the sofa then we know it’s good and we really loved it.

Dani: Your coloured hair, is it real?

Frisky: It is real! I actually walk around with bright red hair, I do cheat though I have to say, sometimes I don’t have time to get the straighteners out or make it look really pretty and nice, so I have to admit occasionally I will chuck a wig on.

Dani: Really?!

Frisky: Yeah, it’s literally ridiculous it’s a wig of exactly my hair.

Dani: Did you have to have it specially made?

Frisky: No it’s actually quite a bargain one! It is from New York, which sounds quite fancy, but it’s the New York equivalent of Angels Dress-Up shop or something really crappy, it just so happens that they have really good wigs!

 

Jimeoin aka Eyebrow Man

Written by danielle middleton on . Posted in Arts.

Jimeoin aka Eyebrow Man, lovely Irish chap who moved to the sunnier climes of Australia years ago, is coming to the Manchester Comedy Festival 2011 on 18th October and performing at The Comedy Store.

At 1pm on 17th October I had a quick chat with him before he scarpered off for more interviews, about stand-up, eyebrows and other unrelated topics.

If you’ve not seen Jimeoin before I suggest you venture to The Comedy Store to take in the spectacle, and if you’re a good-looking guy or gal, try and stick together please. According to Jimeoin when asked who were his favourite audiences: good-looking guys and good-looking girls when they sit near each other because they all get rather giggley.

Friday audiences on t’other hand get ahead of themselves, understandably, give him a Sunday audience with any variety of person because easy-going and hungover people make for happy comedians.

If you’re wondering about the eyebrow comments, don’t worry so was he. It’s a bit, a gag rather, about eyebrows, and never has simple eyebrow wiggling been so piss-pants funny.

Post-eyebrow mention, Jimeoin casually referred to himself as Eyebrow-Man, “Who are you seeing at The Comedy Festival? Eyebrow Man? I’ve heard he’s good”.

Although Eyebrow-Man’s Manchester visits are fleeting, his observation of the inside of The Comedy Store can’t be faulted, stating “I love looking at the arches, make sure you have a look they’re amazing!”.

To budding student-stand-ups he simply said “Take no advice, work it out for yourself. That’s my advice.”

So what’ve we learnt about the Irish comedian who lives in Australia with big eyebrows? Go forth: if you’re good-looking sit together, be easy like a Sunday morning and or hungover, he likes the arches, and will answer to Eyebrow Man. Wonderful stuff.

 

Graphene to be used in ‘next generation of computer chips’

Written by Duncan Jaycock on . Posted in News.

Scientists at the University of Manchester say they are on their way to creating the next generation of computer chips using the Nobel prize-winning material graphene.

The Manchester University team have created a device which could be vital for replacing the silicon chip in computers. By surrounding two sheets of graphene with boron nitrate, the team have also enabled scientists to see how graphene behaves when unaffected by its environment.

In their journal Nature Physics, the team have shown for the very first time how graphene inside electronic circuits will probably look in the future.

Dr Leonid Ponomarenko, the leading author of Nature Physics, said, “Creating the multilayer structure has allowed us to isolate graphene from negative influence of the environment and control graphene’s electronic properties in a way it was impossible to before.

“So far people have never seen graphene as an insulator unless it has been purposefully damaged, but here high-quality graphene becomes an insulator for the first time.”

Professor Andre Geim, who discovered the material along with Professor Kostya Novosolev, said, “We are constantly looking at new ways of demonstrating and improving the remarkable properties of graphene.

“Leaving the new physics we report aside, technologically important is our demonstration that graphene encapsulated within boron nitride offers the best and most advanced platform for future graphene electronics. It solves several nasty issues about graphene’s stability and quality that were hanging for a long time as dark clouds over the future road for graphene electronics.

“We did this on a small scale but the experience shows that everything with graphene can be scaled up.

“It could be only a matter of several months before we have encapsulated graphene transistors with characteristics better than previously demonstrated.”

These developments come after George Osborne pledged £50m for investment in the material.

Academics at the Manchester Enterprise Centre have developed a unit to take advantage of graphene’s business potential. Launched this year, the unit helps teach 30 PhD students researching graphene and nano-technology to commercialise the material.

Dr Martin Henery, one of the group tutors on the new unit, said, “A great deal of work will be required to drill down from a huge global opportunity to identifying a customer that will pay to have a real problem solved, developing the technology so that it can do that job while at the same time generating intellectual property that can be protected, and finally acquiring the right mix of people, money and resources that can take this technology to market.

“In a few years from now we might not only have Manchester University’s graphene technology being at the centre of an exciting new range of products, but some of our student’s may have started up and be leading the companies taking those products to market.”