Fear And Loathing in Lancashire (Part 2): Any metaphor to escape reality
Part two of my trip to Rebellion festival which inevitably becomes an essay about decline and a review of a Neil Diamond impersonator.
Previously:
Fear and loathing in Lancashire, part one: A weekend at and in Rebellion
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A skint writer can and will find a metaphor in anything. As my associate and I trudge through the rain toward Blackpool Pleasure Beach – beach guaranteed, pleasure, well… your mileage may vary – we pass a shuttered Yates wine lodge, surrounded by fencing that is falling apart and scorched by a long-ago fire. ‘Is this Brexit Britain?’, my whisky and sleep deprivation-addled brain asked. No, it is a pub left to rot.
Hours later, in a venue garlanded with sectarian adornments – a Glasgow Rangers enclave to balance out the Celtic pub hidden behind a crumbling Beatles-themed facade that we frequented by accident earlier in the day – a Neil Diamond tribute performs a heartbreaking rendition of I Am, I Said to an audience of about 15.
I say ‘heartbreaking’ not out of some patronising desire to give the guy something as he manly fights indifference and an ageing PA system, but because it is. I don’t think I’m just too tired. His Neil Diamond voice is spot on and in a place that doesn’t seem to have been cleaned since the late-90s, sitting among people who are desperate to have fun no matter what, it’s hard not to be affected.
Blackpool is a town that bends over backwards to have fun. In one of several branches of Ma Kelly’s – a chain that has singers and club acts on at all times of the day – we watch a group of women out on a hen do perform Proud Mary, a song battered into noisy meaningless by X Factor show repetition, but it’s fun; only a grump or a scold could deny it. Ma Kelly’s is aggressively geared for the kind of forced fun that blights New Year’s Eve; it is always New Year’s Eve in Ma Kelly’s (and three times on Sundays).
The Galleon – a rock pub with an addiction to red neon signs – is much more insouciant about its fun. If you want it, it has it, but it’s fucked if it’s going to hand it to you on a plate. My associate and I wander in on our first day in Blackpool and visit several times across the four days that follow. On Friday afternoon, waiting to wander back up to the Winter Gardens to see the strident Henry Rollins put the world to rights at the Rebellion punk festival, we meet a group of guys who have been friends since school – 50 years and change ago (“It’ll happen to you,” they say, which is optimistic given our alcohol intake on this trip).
In between chatting about what’s going wrong and right in Blackpool, why I should come back for the magicians’ convention in February – I might – and the ongoing glory of The Stranglers, I’m just taken by the persistence of friendship: These lads made friends when they were boys and are still going even as the world gives them reasons – of geography, logistics, and ageing – for those bonds to fray. Persistence is a very Blackpool quality, often in the face of obvious odds. The hack’s desire for metaphor continues unabated.
My associate likes casinos – his quest to become a casino critic for some broadsheet or other continues (call him!) – and we visit two in Blackpool. Casinos are strange and liminal spaces. “They used to not have any clocks in here,” says the pint-sized – yes, yes, how appropriate – barmaid when I ask her if the permanent nighttime of the inner part of the casino that lurks by the Pleasure Beach makes you lose track of where she is in her shift. “They didn’t want people to realise how long they were gambling.” She’s worked in one casino or other for 30 years and talks about how bleak that can be in the winter: “We’ve got our regulars, but…”
In the casino of public spending and attention, Blackpool has won in the short-term – so-called ‘levelling up’ money (bribery with a sheen of public policy justification) has flowed to the town – but it hardly touches the sides. When you’ve been deprived and dejected for so long a few treats are not going to help. Like so many seaside towns, Blackpool has the bony hands of drug addiction firmly around its throat and mental health services are stretched beyond the point of snapping back into shape.
You don’t need to read the stats on health outcomes in Blackpool to know this is a town that is deeply, deeply unwell and, behind the illuminations, a lot of people are looking green at the gills. Life expectancy in Blackpool is 74.1 years for men and 79 for women – both below the national average of 79.4 for men and 83.1 for women – making it the lowest in the UK. A report by the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment for Blackpool (JSNA), an NHS and the local authority, concluded:
Blackpool faces major health challenges. Not only do people in Blackpool live shorter lives, but they also spend a smaller proportion of their lifespan in good health and without disability. The largest difference in life expectancy between the most and least deprived communities for males is due to deaths from external causes; that is, death from injuries, poisonings, and suicide, which account for 30.4 percent. For females, it is circulatory diseases (including coronary heart disease and stroke) (27.3 percent) and cancer (20.9 percent).
On Friday night, I slip away from Rebellion’s main events to Scream & Shake, a horror-themed cafe not far from the Winter Gardens, where a fringe gig with bands both foreign and domestic is going on. It is the most intensely punk moment of the whole weekend – for me, at least – with the strikingly named Hot Pink Sewage (a powerfully ramshackle outfit of joyfully chaotic punks in a range of costumes that run from a PVC priest’s outfit to a leather dog mask and tiny shorts) being the best of a brilliant bill.
For the metaphor hunter, Hot Pink Sewage offer an easy hit. Having a beach where you can swim away your troubles used to be a key quality of Blackpool; the laissez-faire view of water regulation – shared by the Tory government and supine Labour opposition – has put paid to that. In June 2023, E.Coli was found in seawater on Blackpool beach after raw sewage discharge overflow; the Blackpool Gazette reported the findings of the charity Surfers Against Sewage. The Manchester Evening News, expanded on the story, noting that a burst pipe at a wastewater treatment facility had led to no swim warnings all across Blackpool, including on beaches that had won awards just a year previously.
The shit is not a metaphor. The shit is in the waters and the shits are in government. The leader of Blackpool Council, Lynn Williams (Labour), used an appearance on BBC Radio 4, to reply to Nick Robinson’s comment that the sewage discharges “could not be more serious for Blackpool”, saying:
We’re just at the start or our summer season with some glorious weather and we’re faced with having to put out advisory notices telling people not to go into the sea because of the discharges of sewage; it’s appalling.
She continued:
United Utilities are not obliged to say [how much sewage has been discharged]; only to say how many times and for how long. It’s a torrid stage of affairs for a company that last year paid out £300 m to its shareholders.
United Utilities told the Today programme that work was ongoing to restore the fractured pipe to full capacity and claimed that the damage did not directly contribute to the release of sewage or treated wastewater into the sea. The release of toxic garbage into the system is not just confined to broken United Utilities pipes; the approach spills into press releases.
Flowery metaphors or even shitty ones will not help Blackpool much. It needs real action now and for a long time consistently. It’s still a great place to visit but it’s killing people who live there. In a modern and nominally advanced nation like the UK, how can any of us justify a population that, on average, dies years and years before richer citizens? We can’t.
But the politicians will keep finding ways to do just that; the sewage – not the hot pink kind – keeps flowing and we are expected to gladly swim it in.
30 years ago I used to work in events and conference, and often worked in Blackpool, mainly the Winter Gardens or the Imperial Hotel. However, the crew usually stayed in the Norbreck Castle Hotel.Possibly the most disgusting place I ever slept in. Conversely, I always felt an anticipatory thrill when arriving in the town. Anything could happen.
Excellent Mic. I live in the North West myself and went into Blackpool for the ‘nightlife’ in my teens. I was young then and everything seemed shiny and new even if it wasn’t.