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1 month ago | 
northernsoul.me.uk | Andy Murray |Desmond Bullen
A hunched figure in a tatty suit slouches slowly towards the stage with a suitcase, grumbling and muttering as he goes. Finally he grabs the mic and turns to glare at the audience, his face white as bone. This is Frankie Monroe and, believe it or not, he’s likely to be the funniest thing you’ve seen in a long time.
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1 month ago | 
northernsoul.me.uk | Desmond Bullen |Amy Stone |Fran Yeoman
It starts in flames. Flickering on the screen of an old BlackBerry, its landscape display diminishing them in scale, they could, at first glance, be part of any number of blazing bodies – logs burning with homely warmth in a living room hearth, a bonfire lit in ambiguous celebration of a failed regicide, a beacon to signal an alarm across breadth of an imperilled nation.
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2 months ago | 
northernsoul.me.uk | Desmond Bullen |Helen Nugent
Words have their own particular architecture. A scaffolding of syntax and a skeleton of grammar that both shapes and constrains the sayable. Dance, by way of contrast, has the facility to slip beyond these rigidities, to convey emotion in motion, to hold a kaleidoscope of positions in rapid succession. Figures in Extinction, a four-year, three-part project premiering in its complete form at Manchester’s Aviva Studios, illuminates the truth of this proposition in quite extraordinary fashion.
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2 months ago | 
northernsoul.me.uk | Helen Nugent |Desmond Bullen
Set in 1829, a new children’s book called Wrong Tracks centres on Edward Entwistle, a Lancashire lad from Tyldesley, Wigan, whose claim to fame is driving the famous Rocket steam engine on the railway’s opening day. Author Susan Brownrigg grew up in Wigan and now lives in Skelmersdale. She loves writing historical stories for children aged 8 and over, especially those focusing on Northern people, places and events. Her other books include the Gracie Fairshaw mystery series set in 1930s Blackpool.
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2 months ago | 
northernsoul.me.uk | Fran Yeoman |Desmond Bullen
Not content with dispatching her pop bands forward through the decades to grace us with extensive reunion/nostalgia tours, it would appear that the Goddess of the Noughties is now sending forth her cartoons.
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2 months ago | 
northernsoul.me.uk | Desmond Bullen |Helen Nugent
In his time, Douglas Adams, best known for writingThe Hitchhikers‘ Guide to the Galaxy, was the possessor of an authorial voice. Distinctive in its unabashed knowingness deployed in the services of a comfortable kind of Home Counties social satire, it embedded itself in the interior dialogues of a generation of slightly introverted, somewhat bookish adolescents – the kind that might go on to revere The Smiths (but that, of course, is another story).
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2 months ago | 
northernsoul.me.uk | Helen Nugent |Desmond Bullen
As a Mancunian who has lived in Newcastle and London, I’m used to people making fun of my accent. From mocking my propensity to lose the ‘g’ from words ending in ‘ing’ to catcalls over my inability (and refusal) to insert ‘r’ into bath and grass, my life as a language pariah has been long and proper boring. The thing is, I love my regional identity. Despite years spent in the frozen north and the softy south, I relish my roots.
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
northernsoul.me.uk | Helen Nugent |Desmond Bullen
Not all stepmothers are wicked. What 53two’s Christmas production might lack in the way of pantomime tropes, it more than makes up for in heart and song. Indeed, its tightly-wound circle of a first act is a small miracle of musical storytelling; the grief that burdens Jessie and her father, bereft from the loss of a mother and a wife, is not for one moment diminished, but rather remains as spikily discernible as pine needles beneath the appealing tinsel of comedy.
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Dec 18, 2024 | 
northernsoul.me.uk | Desmond Bullen
The problem with Manchester is that, in its rush to define itself, it can be quick to paper over its cracks, over the contradictions which lend the city its character. This pride in its contrarian reputation, in turn, draws people towards the lights, so that Manchester both swells and displaces, fraying at the seams. Fittingly, Comma Press’s collection of stories set across the city and its satellites is all over the shop – a babble of voices by which it distinguishes itself.
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Dec 18, 2024 | 
northernsoul.me.uk | Desmond Bullen
Talking to Anna Appleby, the creative force behind Norrisette, is a giddy delight. Arguably Manchester’s most distinctive electronic pop artist, her conversational synapses trigger firework connections of illumination and digression. In the best possible way, it’s hard to keep up. There was a time, not too long ago, before Appleby was Norrisette.
