Last year the launch of our own international festival shone a very bright, very welcome light on Manchester. But in 2008 the focus shifts to Liverpool – beginning tonight when it kicks off its year as Capital of Culture.

I’ve had a scan over this PDF guide to the year ahead and spotted a few early highlights…

• Turner Prize at Tate Liverpool – This weekend is the last chance to catch the entries for last year’s prize [Tate]
• Fresh Festival (last week, sadly) – A three-day music event based around Hope Street – included Polar Bear and Manchester’s own Cortina Deluxx* [eFestivals]
• The Twentieth Century: How it looked and how it felt (until April) – A varied exhibition of the Tate Collection at Tate Liverpool [PDF]
• The Taverner Requiem (February) – John Taverner’s newly commissioned work addresses warring religions – hosted by possibly Liverpool’s strangest-looking building

If you want a comprehensive blog view of what’s going on, however, check out the Guardian’s recent Blogger’s guide to the Pool. It’s particularly good to see that Ian Jackson and his ever-reliable Liverpool Art and Culture blog is featured.

The city’s perfect for a day trip – trains run roughly every 10 minutes on a Saturday, with the last one back at 11.33pm – though I’d advise avoiding it like the plague… which is what you may well catch onboard. The fare’s reasonable too: £8.90 return, or £5.60 with a rail card.

In 2007 I visited our biggest North Westerly neighbour just once – for the Chapman Brothers retrospective – so my aim is to at least double that tally this year…

** The Banksy stencil featured above was produced for the Liverpool Biennial in 2004. It has since been stolen (is it possible to steal street art?) and the building it was attached to demolished, so says the photographer, new folder. Coincidentally, another of Banksy’s works in Liverpool has been in the news lately.

It compares the city’s respective histories – Liverpool’s finance and shipping versus Manchester’s cotton mills – as well as deprivation, regeneration, architecture, sport and, of course, music. The pieces concludes that – outside the football world – a Manchester-Liverpool rivalry is little more than unfriendly banter.

The feature also includes a public poll on ‘which is your favourite city’. At the moment Manchester is winning – if that’s the word – with 54 per cent of the 13,000 votes. Just so you know, Manchester and Liverpool’s respective populations (ignoring surrounding areas) are 441,200 and 447,500.

I think it easily qualifies as one of the best exhibitions I’ve seen. The retrospective crammed in as much work as possible. Their series of comic-style sketches, for example, were stuck haphazardly to the walls, almost as an afterthought.

The Guardian and The Telegraph have been, with the former at pains to point out how unsuitable the exhibition is for children. Or even squeamish adults, one would imagine.

Check out the Guardian’s slideshow for a taster, but I’d say it’s well worth a visit. It runs until March 4. The Patrick Caulfield exhibition is great too, and makes the trip even more worthwhile.

The thought of 130,000 frantic bargain-hunters raiding the Trafford Centre’s Superdrug is more than enough to keep me away. I visited Preston briefly where only Riverisland attracted anything constituting a queue.

I was also drawn to that other annual feature of Boxing Day: a festive, freezing football match.

Blackburn Rovers’ 1-0 win over Liverpool was the game of choice. The ticket cost £39, which works out at 43p per minute of football (excluding injury time).

Or, according to current rates, 12.2 ounces of gold, which is probably how much the ticket and program (£3) weighed.

In the short video he mentions Britons Protection, where he first performed, Manchester City, Piccadilly Records, Chorlton and, of course, the Bee Gees. He also admits that, like most Mancunians, he doesn’t know much about the city’s history.

The Scene is asking viewers to contribute their own insider tips for Manchester. Magazines 69-247 and Time Out are both mentioned, as is Mancubist’s Google Maps mashup to track the www Sabi Rock guy. He’s gone awfully quiet of late, hasn’t he?

CNN have really put the effort in with Manchester. You can also find an overview of Manchester, a decent city guide (Killing Fantasy, Earth Cafe etc) and an extended Q&A interview with Badly Drawn Boy, all by Linnie Rawlinson.

The generous ‘week’ runs from November 4 until November 13 and features 220 acts playing at 16 venues. Last year 18,000 people attended and this week they’re expecting 26,000.

If I lived in Liverpool or could afford the train fare, I’d give serious consideration to seeing festival openers Shack tomorrow night. Tramp Attack (who are splitting up) would also feature highly on my to-see list.

LMW is spilling over into Manchester too, with The Maybes? playing Akoustik Anarkhy tomorrow night and Peter & The Wolf and Eugene McGuinness doing an EP launch at Big Hands on Tuesday.

It ain’t over yet.

By Tony Parrish on 09.11.06 6:09 pm

Also commenting on that post is “information gatherer” Tori Blare, who runs two blogs on Liverpool Council and the ‘Liverpool Evil Cabal investigation’:

liverpoolcityacollectionofinformation.blogspot.com

toriblareliverpool.blogspot.com

There may also be some connection to Blondie’s Liverpool corruption blog, letmeoffthecorporatebus.blogspot.com.

Updated by someone using the guise Tony Parrish – “occupation: whistle-blower, interests: victory” – the website contained speculation about the running of the council. Here’s Tony’s own introduction:

The ‘evil cabal’ comes from the description given by former council Leader, Mike Storey to the wicked triumvirate that ran the council.

The blog, like many political and campaigning blogs, proved popular, too:

Statcounter tell me that this weblog has been visited by no less than 563 people in the two weeks since it first started. Which is a hell of a lot more people than I originally expected.

A couple of weeks after launch, the Liverpool Echo cottoned on and noted that anyone at the town hall had mysteriously blocked from viewing the site.

This didn’t stop Tony from publishing more allegations, however – see an example here.

The Daily Post and Echo archive provides a timeline of what happened next:

- Aug 10 – Council leader fumes as ‘evil-cabal’ site is blocked
- Aug 11 – ‘Evil Cabal’ website does not break law, say police
- Aug 14 – ‘Evil cabal’ website closes down after inquiry pledge
- Aug 15 – Was the council right to block Evil-Cabal website?
- Aug 15 – Campaigner calls for ‘evil cabal’ website inquiry
- Aug 22 – Suspended media chief quizzed over council blog
- Aug 23 – Blogger to face legal action

The latest twist, as spotted by Rob at Artisan Marketing, is the appearance of badges bearing the phrase “I am Tony Parrish” around Liverpool.And some enterprising person has also put tshirts up for sale:

It usually falls on a conventional weekend (Fri/Sat/Sun), but this year there’s a Labour Party Conference in town.

I’ve been involved with every ITC since coming to Manchester – from watching 30 bands in three days in 2003, to reporting on the conference itself last year. This year I hope to be promoting ITC events myself – more to follow on that.

The beauty of the festival is the buzz generated by one-man myth-making machine Anthony H Wilson. He’s curated the festival with his partner, former Miss England, Yvette Livesey since 1992. Nice hair, Tony:

Back in 1999 the festival moved to Liverpool – to a Holiday Inn no less. Sensibly, the conference returned to Manchester, and has been hosted at The Midland Hotel for some years now.

ITC success stories – if you can call them that – include Coldplay and The Darkness being signed following performances before the dozens of A&R men who dared to venture north.

And while they played conventional music venues, it’s the more unusual gig venues such as One Central Street and Teasers that are often worth a visit.

This year expect XFM Manchester to get in on the act – it may well replace ITC’s in-house radio station and begin broadcasting some unsigned gigs.

Nice to see ITC HQ is using Flickr to share its photos, by the way.

Here’s what The Independent says of the Time Out franchise founder, Tony Elliott:

“His interest in Manchester took off last year after the Guardian Media Group took the decision to close down the city’s much-loved and well-established listings magazine City Life.”

“There’s one potential hitch to the venture. ‘Frankly, we need to raise about a million pounds to make sure it’s got proper finance and can happily have at least a three-year window to make it work. We would like to find somebody who wanted to be our financial partner.’”

I’ll give the Bank Manager a call then…

Interestingly, Elliott goes on to talk about Time Out’s web service:

“It’s a database that you dip in and out of, whereas with a magazine you get a whole package. That also goes to the heart of why I don’t think sales of the magazine will drop dramatically.”

He has a very good point.

Though the article is sadly lacking in detail about the two potential launches, it’s good news indeed for anyone desperate to know what’s happening in their city.

Let’s just hope Time Out in the North West, which was launched by Elliott and Jeremy Beadle (no, seriously) in 1970s but folded after just nine issues, doesn’t prove to be any kind of omen:

“Beadle’s original suggestion was to do Time Out in Brighton, but that didn’t happen. Then we tried Time Out in the North West. That was a dire concept. As I recall it was originally going to be Time Out in Liverpool, then somebody said ‘Bloody hell, Manchester’s only twelve miles from Liverpool or however far it is, so why don’t we do it for both’.”

UPDATE: From the Press Gazette:

“A one-off publication, planned for mid-September and edited by Mirror columnist and former Loaded journalist Bill Borrows will be the company’s first foray into Manchester, timed to coincide with the Labour Party Conference.”