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Day: 19 January 2016

Preview: Mancunion Live

During the first week back this term The Mancunion, in association with the Manchester Media Group, is hosting the first-ever Mancunion Live event on Wednesday, February the 3rd. The event will be held from 7pm in the University of Manchester Students’ Union Council Chambers.

The event will be an opportunity to meet the students who represent each political party on campus, and for the first time witness them go head to head in what will no doubt be a lively debate. It will also be a rare chance to put your questions to them, and learn about how they are working within the national political frame at a student level.

Representatives from all the student political societies will go head to head to debate the key issues facing society and young people today.  The panel members will be from Conservative Future, Manchester Labour Students, UKIP Students, Young Greens and Liberal Youth Manchester.

The event, the first of its kind for the The Mancunion, will follow the style of BBC’s Question Time, with the role of Dimbleby being taken on by our two Features Editors Joe Evans and Liam Kelly.

The panel will tackle the main political issues which have dominated student politics in recent months such as safe space, maintenance grants and junior doctors. They will then also open the discussion up to the topics shaping national political debate such as the EU referendum, responses to terrorism, the housing crisis, intervention in Syria, refugees and each political party’s response to IS.

Students will also have a chance to question the representatives of each student political society in an audience-led question and answer session. The floor will be open to students to respond to anything discussed in the panel debate or for them to raise their own issues, not addressed already by the panel.

In order to secure a place in the audience students should email [email protected] with their name, age, university, course, the political party you would vote for in the event of a general election tomorrow and finally two questions you would like to see addressed by the panel.

You have until January the 28th to apply to join the audience and successful applicants will be contacted after this date.

Fuse TV will be filming the whole event and the footage will be available to view after the night on their YouTube channel.

Full coverage and analysis of the event will also be available on our website and within the following print issue of The Mancunion so be sure to pick up a copy.

Transformer: Bowie the producer

David Bowie was, from his ascension to the starrier heights of fame with 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars to his seismic death only days ago, one of the musical world’s most mythical citizens. His influence on so many artists who succeeded him was huge, to the extent that to even state as much is to risk drowning in the tepid pond of cliché, and his achievements earned him the respect of innumerable artists who themselves are well worth eulogizing about.

His Archduke of rock ‘n’ roll stature lent him a suitable measure of power, too, evinced most banally by those stories in which all shades of up-and-comings are approached at haute showbiz soirées by some slightly smug Bowie aide and told that “David would like to meet you”; of course, David always did. More noteworthy are the equally numerous instances where Bowie used his considerable heft to further worthy causes, be it in the form of championing bands like The Pixies and Arcade Fire (wise bets), or haranguing MTV on their short-changing of black artists in the early 80s.

But it was perhaps Bowie’s lending of his musical talents which best exemplifies this generosity, and which had some of the most artistically significant ramifications. In 1972, Bowie, along with Spiders of Mars guitarist Mick Ronson, mucked in with a slightly nowhere Lou Reed to produce Transformer, Reed’s first and weightiest solo success after the ignominious dissolution of The Velvet Underground.

Bowie and Ronson, unlike practically everyone else at the time, had longed admired Reed and the Velvets (our Dave really knew how to pick a winning horse; how right was he, how wrong was the world…), and so it was only fair that they give back as much as they’d been given by New York’s Finest and help Lou to the success he’d always deserved.

Later Bowie did the same for another inspiration and eventual friend, Iggy Pop. Having done a perfunctory EQ job on The Stooges’ 1973 release Raw Power, Bowie later collaborated properly with Iggy on his two 1977 solo efforts The Idiot and Lust For Life. Both albums featured both artists combining their creative clout, with Iggy invariably handling the lyrics and Bowie manning the music, with some give and take each way.

The Idiot could slot into Bowie’s Berlin trilogy without much fuss, while the generally rougher Lust For Life still bares its Bowie-tinged soul on such special songs as ‘Tonight’, a ‘Let’s Dance’-anticipating jive replete with coked-up-choir backing vocals straight from the glorious wail of ‘Heroes”s final surge and Iggy’s best Thin White Duke karaoke job. The pair are widely regarded as Iggy’s best solo efforts; not to detract from him or Reed, but there’s a pattern emerging here…

Bowie’s personal and professional relationships with both Reed and Pop were indicative of the respect his talent demanded and of the loyalty and love that his character invited. Iggy, on the day of David’s death, stated that Bowie’s friendship was the light of his life. With Reed himself having not long passed on, I’d point to one of my favourite interview snippets with the old grouch as supporting evidence of Bowie’s effect on him.

Asked about Bowie’s contribution to Transformer, Reed slides into an uncharacteristically reverent tribute to Bowie’s backing vocals on ‘Satellite of Love’. Reed fiddles at the soundboard as the song’s outro pounds proudly into the studio, paring down the tracks until just Bowie’s overlaid voice parts remain. Reed keeps his comments down to droll “ain’t that great?”, and then he sits and lets it play for another 30 seconds or so, as his silence shows just how sincerely he meant it.

Giving everything away: Blackstar revisited

In the muted wisdom of his august years, David Bowie had relaxed his propensity for the artist-as-art subtext which had always accompanied his music (or was it the other way around?) and instead adopted an antithetical reclusiveness, whereby new releases were casually and unexpectedly slid under the door like an apologetically late Christmas present. It was in this slightly bewildering manner that 2013’s The Next Day was delivered, and, well, just kind of left at that (tour the album? Ha. Pull the other one). It seemed that, having long ago been relieved by generational turnover of the responsibilities of progress and relevance, Bowie was happy to forgo all the time-honoured publicly-lived rockstar nonsense and just play in the corner, grooming his genius for nobody’s benefit or pleasure but his own. Thankfully, we still, every now and then, were deigned to merit a peek at what he’d been up to; unfortunately, his latest creation, Blackstar, has turned out to be his last.

Blackstar, in contrast with the relatively straightforward musicality of The Next Day, is as free as fire and weird as hell. While The Next Day was a thrilling reminder that Bowie could still rock hard and write great tunes, the darker Blackstar cuts straight back to the Bowie bread-and-butter of being disconcertingly original. The title track, which opens the album, is a ten-minute tumble through modal tricks and unsettlingly obscure lyrics that makes ‘The Pyramid Song’ sound like ‘Frere Jacques’, and the supposedly redeeming groove which lurches forth midway through is unable to resist the corrupting influence of the song’s dark gravity, and it ends more perverse than it began, which was pretty damn perverse indeed.

The rest of the album doesn’t dilute the peculiarity of this precedent, and the subsequent six songs strike equally disorienting tones. ”Tis a Pity She’s a Whore’ and ‘Lazarus’ leer unpleasantly, the former with a fervent psychosis and the latter with a depressive languor, and ‘Sue (Or In a Season of Crime)’ and ‘Girl Loves Me’ only deepen the madness. The album’s final two tracks almost don’t manage to restore a semblance of sanity, but the fundamental elegiac sweetness of ‘Dollar Days’ and ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’ ensure that you’re never completely alienated by the delirium which precedes them.

Indeed, alienation seems to be the overriding effect of the album. The music is a bizarre stylistic stew, the lyrics are sad, lewd, or both, when they aren’t incomprehensible, and Bowie twists and moulds his voice like he hadn’t in years. But no matter how uncomfortable Blackstar makes you feel, ultimately the songs are too engrossing, too morosely fascinating to reject, never mind too artfully wrought. And now, in the context of Bowie’s death, which, as we now know, he knew was coming soon, all this exploratory darkness seems insuperably more brave, more astounding, more heartbreaking.

The previously mysterious lyrics of ‘Lazarus’ are now tragically clear in their morbid meaning, and ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’, the last song of his last album, seems to lament the dreadful totality of Bowie’s final, most daring artistic project: To die. Insist though he may that he couldn’t give everything away, the world that he’s left infinitely richer behind him will beg to differ.