Review: Louder Than Words festival 2022, Innside, Manchester

Founded by Jill Adam, a former educator who also previously chaired Harrogate International Festivals, and John Robb, music journalist, broadcaster and mainstay of post-punk band Membranes, the three-day event has become a lively forum for musical debate as well as an essential stop-off for authors promoting their latest books.

Its tenth edition, at Innside in Manchester, included one of its strongest line-ups yet with the likes of Martyn Ware of Heaven 17, David Gedge of The Wedding Present, Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne, Miki Berenyi of Lush and Steve Ignorant of Crass rubbing shoulders with veteran NME photographer Kevin Cummins, former Loaded editor James Brown and ABBA expert Carl Magnus Palm.

Among those on Saturday’s bill was PP Arnold, who said she had been guided by the example of Maya Angelou while writing her engagingly frank autobiography, Soul Survivor. “I thought what’s the use in writing the book if I’m not telling the truth?” she said. Conversation spanned her 57-year career as a singer, starting as an Ikette backing Ike and Tina Turner and dipping into her work with the Small Faces with whose singer Steve Marriott she forged a close connection. “He was one of the best British male soul singers in the UK because that guy gave everything like a soul singer is supposed to,” she said.

Signed as a solo artist to Immediate Records, she became a star in her own right with hits such as The First Cut Is The Deepest and Angel of the Morning. She was also a friend of the Rolling Stones and Bee Gee Barry Gibb, who wrote and produced much of her album Turning Tide, which eventually came out in 2017 after a long battle by Arnold to rescue the mastertapes from multiple archives. She gave credit too to Steve Cradock of Ocean Colour Scene, with whom she worked on her 2019 album The New Adventures Of… “The spirit of Steve Marriott brought Steve Cradock and I together,” Arnold said, noting the guitarist’s fondness for the Small Faces.

Despite her many starry connections, Arnold said she wanted to make clear in her book that she was “never a groupie, I was always an artist”. Although her life has not been without its “mistakes and wrong decisions” and was touched by tragedy with the loss of her daughter Debbie in a car accident in the mid-1970s, throughout everything she remains a survivor. “I’m looking to get back into business in 2023,” she said.

Guardian music journalist Dave Simpson’s talk about his new book on the Sex Pistols included some amusing memories of his own teenage attempts to dress like a punk, creating his own home-made Pistols T-shirt with tie-dye and ink. “My mother threw it out,” he recalled. After falling in with a gang of punks from his school in Leeds, he got a pair of combat trousers which “eventually had a Crass logo on the side” and adopted a punk name: ‘Dave Dilapidation’.

Although he never saw the Pistols perform in their prime – having been thwarted by his mother from attending what would turn out to be their last UK date, at Ivanhoes in Huddersfield in December 1977 – while researching his book he did manage to track down several fans who did, in such towns as Keighley, Northallerton and Scarborough. Two years after the Pistols’ demise, he did finally see John Lydon perform with his new group PiL at the Futurama festival in Leeds. “That gig completely changed my life,” he said.

Entering into the fray on which side of the Atlantic punk began, Simpson argued: “I don’t really regard American bands as punk bands in the way that we know them; it was a purely British phenomenon. I think it really starts with the Pistols.”

The day’s biggest draw, Rick Buckler in conversation with Darryl Easlea, proved that 40 years on from their break-up, The Jam retain a die-hard following. Buckler admitted he found it “difficult” to broach the “emotive” subject of the band’s final year for the book The Jam: 1982, a generously illustrated tome which he wrote with Zoe Howe. “It was a very odd year,” he said. “We started off with such optimism because we had finally made it, but it did not finish that way. It did not progress as we had hoped.”

Of Paul Weller’s decision to split up the band at the height of their popularity, he said it “did not make sense to me at the time, (nor) does it make sense now”. Buckler argued that Weller’s formation of The Style Council only months later contradicted his argument at the time that he felt he was on an industry “treadmill”.

A more significant factor in the break-up, he contended, was “bad management” from John Weller, Paul’s late father, who although “good in the early days” at getting bookings for the band in Surrey and spending weekends driving them to and fro gigs, was, he said, “out of his depth” from the moment they signed to Polydor Records.

Forty years on, Buckler clearly remains proud of The Jam’s achievements, in particular their close relationship with their fans. He also said he had “no axe to grind” with Paul Weller and that if they were to meet now, he thought they would be “fine”, quipping: “I’m not going to walk up to him and give him grief – not for the first ten minutes anyway.”

It was standing room only too for Karl Bartos, whose insights into his 26 years in Kraftwerk proved engrossing. Trained at the Robert Schumann Conservatory in Düsseldorf, he brought a classical sensibility to the band’s experiments with electronic pop. “If you study music you are in contact with 350 years of composers,” he explained.

He cited the influence of Minimalist composers such as Steve Reich on his approach to drumming, which he saw as embedded in the overall sound, adding: “To me, music is an organic whole – that’s what they do in an orchestra, combine many instruments into one sound: the European sound.” A more unlikely influence, on the drum pattern of Computer World, he revealed was Cliff Richard and The Shadows’ Do You Want To Dance.

Fondly recalling Kraftwerk’s first visit to America in the mid-1970s, Bartos said: “It was the best time you could imagine in the world. New York at that time looked exactly like it did in (Martin Scorsese’s film) Taxi Driver.”

Although they used electronic instruments, Bartos was keen to clear up the misconception that Kraftwerk made “machine music”. Rather, they treated technology like an old-fashioned music box. But the act of making music “is so fundamentally human”, he argued. “We were educated by pop music, we inserted our notes with a different meaning and added some lyrics, but at the top of it we were playing with a musical box.”

Kraftwerk’s downfall, he believed, happened when they shifted from analog instruments to employing digital technology on the album The Mix. No longer working together in Kling Klang studio, they began to rely on computers and lost the art of communication. Comparing the process to “rearranging the face of the Mona Lisa”, he said they “got into that trap of technology”. “I had a feeling of tidying up art,” he said. “We quantized ourselves.”

On a happier note, he said collaborating with Bernard Sumner and Johnny Marr in the band Electronic had “saved (his) life”, explaining that “we did not outsource creativity to the computer”.

The essence of music, he said, was “all about the spirit and the emotion”. “Technology is nothing, it will be obsolete soon. In ten years time they will remember the latest update. It’s superfluous.”

All in all, a superb day out. Here’s to Louder Than Words’ next ten years.