Stockport, breadcrumbs, Neil Sedaka, and baked beans

Abundance: Sunday 8 March 2026

In June 1967, a Canadair C-4 Argonaut passenger aircraft crashed in the centre of Stockport. The victim of a structural fault that was common to all aircraft of this kind, two of the engines, starved of fuel, failed. 72 of the 84 on board died. Mercifully, no-one on the ground was injured, thanks - it seems - to the actions of the pilot, who survived, steering a largely out of control plane to a small clearing between buildings.

A few months later, perhaps influenced by the disaster a few yards away, 3 Waterloo Road, Stockport, was sold to Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas’ former road manager Peter Tattersall, who invited one (Eric Stewart), then two friends (Graham Gouldman) to join him in turning the former warehouse into a recording studio. The two friends were joined by Kevin Godley and Lol Creme in a partnership writing songs for other recording artists. Gouldman bumped into Neil Sedaka (a very nice man, according to Rosie Millard) in New York, who realised Gouldman had written a song he liked the production on, and a few months later, Sedaka came to this most un-New York road in Stockport to record what would become many of his most well known songs. The experience galvanised Stewart, Gouldman, Godley and Creme to form 10CC.

For a good while, Strawberry Studios was largely 10CCs place to rehearse and record, though others, including McCartney, used it too. In 1975, 10CC recorded I’m Not In Love, a song so at odds with the music of the day that it still sounds unusual. If nothing else, it kept Windsor Davies and Don Estelle’s Whispering Grass off the top spot. Months later, another song in its vein: Bohemian Rhapsody. I’m not sure the latter happens without the former drilling the pilot hole. Both songs in their different ways owed much to the peak of prog rock at the time, and both might claim to be parents of Radiohead’s emergence from their rockier beginnings in the mid 90s.

A year after I’m Not In Love, the Sex Pistols played the Free Trade Hall in Manchester to an audience of 40 people. Of those few, it seems almost all went on to form bands that were hugely successful and influential: Joy Division, New Order, Buzzcocks, The Fall, Simply Red, The Smiths, Magazine, John Cooper Clarke and so on. If you were looking for an antidote to Whispering Grass, Showaddywaddy and Gary Glitter, Holidays In The Sun was the medicine you needed.

Of those forty, four working class lads from Salford and Macclesfield formed Warsaw, learning to play their instruments as they went. They were perfectly ordinary. A name change to Joy Division and at some point something clicked. As their bass player said, ‘the first time we played Transmission everyone in the whole place literally stopped what they were doing to listen and to turn round and watch us. It was an absolutely bizarre moment. It really made the hair on your arms stand up and shivers down your spine.’

In April 1979, over 3 successive weekends (they all had full time jobs), Joy Division recorded their debut album, Unknown Pleasures, releasing it just two months later. A few months after that, in May 1980, having recorded a second album, and on the eve of leaving for their tour of the States, Joy Division’s singer Ian Curtis, took his own life. Beginning to end, their whole recorded output was done in 11 months. A few weeks after Curtis died, Love Will Tear Us Apart was released, a single as perfect as any. The album they’d just finished was released a few weeks after that. I played it endlessly. It had a peculiar beauty that I couldn’t quite get my head around.

From their ashes, New Order. The remaining band members joined by the drummer’s girlfriend did much to strangle the backside out of new wave until it coughed up dance music.

By this time, I had left home. For reasons unknown, a landlord allowed one student, one employed person and two that were signing on to take on the lease of a house on the banks of the river Exe. It might be the most expensive house I’ll ever call home.

Let me make clear, I was perfectly content being unemployed. I had seen enough of the world to know that exchanging most days of most years for someone else’s gain was the last thing my teenage brain could handle. I played records, subsisted on Beanfeasts and Vesta curries, went to gigs, and talked rubbish with my oldest friend. I remain very hard to beat at pool.

Music was more than important to us all. It was one of the few things that gave me a light into the world, that calmed a sense of formless fizzy anxiety. As good as things were day to day, I felt lost in a world not made for me, for the unambitious, who wanted no part in the usual business of working 48 weeks so that I might frazzle for 4. The release of a new record, of a blinding piece of genius cutting through the ordinariness of Thatcher’s Britain was a rope by which I felt better tied to the side. I was not alone in this: my oldest friend, similarly blessed with a semi-detached dad, felt the same. It is a story as common as cheese.

Those two, three and four chord songs, themselves the result of a hot night in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, had many children of their own. To those too young for 1976 Sex Pistols, Joy Division and New Order showed you you could do it: I mean, I could teach the dog the bass line to Transmission, but simple is so often perfect.

One random Saturday, in a music shop in Exeter, the owner asked if there was anything I was looking for. A Shergold 6 string bass, I jokily replied - there were very few of these 70s obscurities still around. He smiled and raised a single finger towards the ceiling. I looked up. There in pieces awaiting a respray, a Shergold 6 string bass, just like the one Peter Hook of New Order played. The owner was looking to sell it. £155. My friend leant me the money. Two months later - a two months existing on baked beans on toast - I had repaid the money, the guitar was ready, and more importantly it was mine.

I spent idle days recreating its unique twang, learning the parts on Blue Monday¹, This Time of Night, and more besides. I realised - like those at the Free Trade Hall - that it wasn’t that hard to make music.

In 1986, 10 years after that Sex Pistols gig that kickstarted so much, that friend and I (along with a good handful of others) squeezed into a transit van - 3 in the front, 11 loose in the back - driven by the only one of us with a licence and by some distance the best looking, to make the long long journey from Devon to Manchester for an all day festival to celebrate those who had come from that night in 1976.

If you have read Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies or seen the TV adaptation, this was the same gig around which that story centred.

£13 got us New Order and The Smiths at the peak of their powers, A Certain Ratio, The Fall, OMD, John Cale of the Velvet Underground, Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks, John Cooper Clarke, Howard Devoto of Buzzcocks and Magazine, Cabaret Voltaire and Sandie Shaw.

I still have the ticket, which proves that the impossible - that I was once so young and so idle. You can spend £13 on a couple of crap coffees and a stale bun, or you can also spend it on one of the days of your life.

We returned full of cider and touched by something great.

Last week, forty years after we were there, my oldest friend and I stood outside that beautiful arched venue - what was GMEX, and before it Manchester’s Central train station. Apart from a glassy monstrosity added to the front, it was largely unchanged.

What we didn’t know then, was that the Free Trade Hall - the spark for it all - was just 43 seconds walk to GMEX: the apple falling no distance from the tree.

We took an unplanned train to Stockport. There was a piece of jigsaw between 1976 Free Trade Hall and 1986 GMEX that needed slotting in place.

A handful of minutes outside Manchester, and a couple of minutes walk from the station at which Bowie - after a gig in 1970 - slept the night, we were stood outside Strawberry studios, now the home of numerous office businesses.

In those few rooms, part way down a remarkable unremarkable road in Stockport, This Charming Man, Love Will Tear Us Apart, Unknown Pleasures, The Smiths first album, I’m Not In Love, and a whole lot more were recorded. That I am stood here, with some kind of direction and idea about how I’d like to spend my life owes much to the sounds that came from inside those four walls.

There are those who believe Joy Division would have gone on to be huge. It seems initially unlikely given their often dark intensity. And yet here we are, 50 years from their similarly dark beginnings and The Cure are enormous and more loved than ever. And it was to Strawberry Studios that a young U2 came to observe the recording of Love Will Tear Us Apart, Joy Division being their favourite band, and subsequently inviting its producer Martin Hannett to produce their next single. He would’ve gone on to produce their first album had he not been bereft at Curtis’ death.

You might argue that these songs would’ve seen the light of day elsewhere, and that is possible, but recording studios and producers have - and impart - a personality²:

At Strawberry, producer Martin Hannett somehow captured the bleakness of a 70s Manchester still in decline after being heavily bombed in WW2, and wove the sounds of the studio (including the sound of the lift) to make what we know of Joy Division’s sound. In Ian Curtis they had a singer who left nothing in the tank at the end of a song, and - in a stroke of genius - he was encouraged to sing like Sinatra when recording Love Will Tear Us Apart, and as unlikely as it sounds, it worked. It was at Strawberry where so much magic occurred, and without Joy Division and The Smiths, a very great deal of the music that is made now simply wouldn’t exist³.

Standing opposite that studio, we googled photos of Joy Division at Strawberry Studios and after some backwards and forwardsing managed to line up a few of those photos with the much changed backdrop of today. The blocked up garages over stripy-shirted Steven Morris’ right shoulder, a distant building and above it the peaks of the church on the far skyline the only anchors. It was only later that we learned of the air crash on the treed area just behind them in the far right of the photo 12 years before those Joy Division pictures were taken and 59 years before today.

Why do they look like they’ve just finished a shift at a fairly dull job? Because this was not instaland: they were skint, and those were the clothes they had for work and as well as when they kicked about. These were times, as Ian Curtis sang, ‘when routine bites hard, and ambitions are low’.

When I stood on a bank opposite to take that picture of Strawberry Studios, I discovered a plaque indicating that where my feet were planted was once a building called the Tabernacle Club, a venue where Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Sly and the Family Stone, The Small Faces, The Temptations, Pink Floyd and more played at the same time that the building over the road was being turned into a recording studio.

All of this going on at the crossroads of ordinary roads running through a northern town, a very few yards from where in the most terrible fluke a plane came to a disastrous rest.

I’m writing about all this partly as that’s where I’ve been and it’s filling my head - four ordinary lads who, for once, left the pub to go to the Free Trade Hall for less than an hour, had their lives changed, and as a result changed so many others - and partly as I’m deeply fascinated by the breadcrumbs that take each of us past sliding doors, along right angled turns, towards whatever awaits.

Without that peculiar string of events, I have no idea what my life would’ve looked like. I imagine it very unlikely I would be here writing this. I wouldn’t be surprised if you have a similar line of unlikely dominos, musical or otherwise, that toppled just so.

I’m also lightly tickled that Neil Sedaka’s Love Will Keep Us Together and Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart were recorded at the same place, seven years apart. And that maybe, without Neil Sedaka there would be no 10CC, and therefore no Radiohead, and maybe no Joy Division or Stone Roses and all that jazz.

And yes, if you were wondering, forty years later, I do still have that bass.

Don’t worry, I’ll get back to the usual territory next week, promise.

Devon spiced beans

A year ago, I came up with a version of Boston spiced beans and today it feels the most appropriate thing to be eating, being as I subsisted on the tinned version of the very most ordinary kind for those long weeks paying off that bass. I hope it helps you through greyer days as we head into the light.

Serves 4 on toast

240g can of borlotti beans, drained
2 tbsp olive oil, plus a little to drizzle
1 large onion, finely chopped
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
½ tsp ground cloves
1 lantern or 3 strands of mace, or a very generous scratching of nutmeg
1 tbsp yellow mustard seeds
1 bay leaf
a few sprigs of thyme
400g tin chopped tomatoes
about 7 sloshes of Worcestershire sauce
½ tsp chipotle chilli flakes
2 tsp chipotle paste
2½ tbsp maple syrup
sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
juice of half a lemon
Parmesan, optional
a sprinkling of chopped coriander

In a large pan, fry the onion in the olive oil over a medium heat until soft and translucent. Stir in the garlic, cloves and mustard and cook for a minute. Add the bay, thyme and tomatoes and simmer for 5 minutes or so.

Slosh with Worcestershire sauce, stir in the mace, chipotle flakes and paste, and season well. Simmer for another 10 minutes or so, adding a dash of water if it gets too thick. Add the beans and simmer for 5 minutes to warmth beans through.

From this point, it’s all about tasting and tweaking: stir in the maple syrup, season more if needed, add as much of the lemon juice as you need to brighten the whole.

Eat in front of a lively blaze, on toast, swizzed with a little olive oil, sprinkled with coriander and a generous snowfall of Parmesan.

1. Impossibly, Blue Monday was release 43 years and 1 day ago.; 43 years before that it was 1940 and people were doing the jitterbug.

2. It’s impossible to imagine The Beatles without Abbey Road and George Martin. A few years ago, I wrote this about Trinity studios in London, and what might be the most influential, important musical instrument in history.

3. If you are even vaguely interested about the power of music, even to regenerate a city and the generations that follow, you really might enjoy this.