OH: It may be because I’m a Mancunian myself that I enjoyed your book so much, but for those who don’t have the connection, who wouldn’t know the difference between Chorlton and Gorton, or who never danced badly in the Hacienda, can you explain why the city is more than a footnote on a footnote in Ginsberg’s biography?
Photo of Allen Ginsberg outside the GNR warehouse in Manchester, August 1973. Courtesy Jonathan Williams photographs, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
RB: As I acknowledge in my book, Manchester is indeed something of a footnote in Ginsberg’s biography, yet the point is that Ginsberg has become woven into several Manchester stories. His presence is more of a subtle perfume than an explicit aesthetic such as the Madchester-predominant image, just to take one example.
For Alan Wise, the music promoter and impresario from Salford, the Beat ethos wasn’t just an influence; in my book I argue that, for him, it was a blueprint for living. He wrote his first letter to Ginsberg, five days after his twenty-fourth birthday. He spent his life trying to recreate that Beat sensibility, promoting not just music but a way of being in the world. Wise, who managed and promoted artists such as John Cooper Clarke, Donovan, New Order, Blue Orchids, and Nico, was, at heart, a Beat pilgrim.
For Steven Taylor, born in Gorton, the connection was more direct and more profound. Twenty years travelling with Ginsberg, hundreds of performances, keeper of his confessions, guardian of his harmonium. Manchester shaped his early years; Ginsberg shaped everything that followed. Steven, whom I have met a couple of times (in my book I write about our trip back to his home patch in Gorton), is an unassuming man and has not yet written an autobiography (though I’m sure he’s had encouragement from others). I wanted to honour his story at least to some small degree. It’s a great story of a working-class lad and musician that could inspire others.
For Lama Jampa Thaye (spiritual director of the Dechen organisation of Tibetan Buddhist Centres), the 1979 Library Theatre reading that included Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Anne Waldman and Steven Taylor, closed a circle that began when he first encountered Buddhism through Beat literature as a Manchester schoolboy in the 1960s. Jampa Thaye has one of his Centres still in Chorlton. In my book is a little-known photo, by well-known rock photographer Kevin Cummins, of Ginsberg in a terraced house in Chorlton that was an early base for Jampa Thaye’s group. Jack Kerouac (despite ending up more of an alcoholic Catholic than a sober Buddhist) indirectly influenced the socio-religious demographic of Manchester.
I didn’t stress it in my book, but I could argue that, in the context of Ginsberg studies, Manchester is a metaphor for all the unpublished adventures Ginsberg had in the UK, outside of London. I gave a pre-release copy of my Ginsberg & Manchester to Miles (Ginsberg biographer Barry Miles). He enjoyed it and commented, ‘There is not a lot of documentation of Allen’s visits to Britain even though he was here about a dozen times and this is a valuable contribution.’ A lot of Allen Ginsberg’s life is well documented. He kept extensive journals and took thousands of photographs on his travels. But I have to admit I was irritated at the omissions of his UK excursions outside the capital city in all the major biographies (e.g. Barry Miles, Michael Schumacher, Bill Morgan). Outside the USA, England was the country Ginsberg visited the most in his lifetime, with (by my reckoning) eleven excursions between his first visit in 1958 and his last in 1996. (He also visited Scotland once, Wales once, and Northern Ireland once).
Ginsberg’s 1973 visit included an eight-week tour taking in Bath, Cambridge, Newcastle, Northumbria (with Basil Bunting and Tom Pickard), Glasgow, Iona, the Tibetan Buddhist retreat centre Samye Ling in Eskdalemuir, Carlisle, Wordsworth’s cottage and grave in Grasmere, Dentdale, Manchester and London. My book covers the last stages of that trip, but the rest of the trip (Ginsberg’s longest stay in the UK) is skimmed over in the existing biographies.
OH: Although you document the actual visits of Ginsberg to Manchester, you also weave into the story a series of interconnections with other people and places—like Morecambe, which prompts a delirious comment from Anne Waldman, that the light in the bay reminds her of Greece (really!), or Dove Cottage in Grasmere, where Ginsberg makes a pilgrimage. To some, this might seem a way to pad out your story, but I get the sense your approach is to trace lines of connection radiating out from the intersection of Ginsberg and Manchester. Can you say something about your aesthetic?
RB: I haven’t thought much about my writing in terms of aesthetics. So it’s a good question. You correctly pick up on the interconnected themes in my book, so the aesthetic is possibly arachnid. I like webs and nets. How a spider senses the tiniest vibration of an insect on the furthest thread. The narrative of my book obviously has Manchester at the centre, but a city is never ultimately an isolated entity. Ginsberg doesn’t simply manifest in Albert Square, or The Grapes pub on Little Quay Street or the Britannia Hotel in Didsbury. The spider web is texture for the narrative.
His connection with Jonathan Williams, founder of the avant-garde Jargon Press, goes back to the 1950s (when Williams turned down an option to publish Howl). They corresponded extensively over the years leading eventually to Ginsberg’s invite to Williams’ home in Dentdale and a day trip to Manchester in 1973.
The thread that leads to Morecambe is via Steven Taylor, whose relatives came over from the seaside resort to the Manchester Library Theatre reading in 1979 and invited Ginsberg and Co. to visit the next day. Anne Waldman’s comments made me smile. I read them as an expression of a travelling poet with an open mind. Despite travelling the world, she probably perceives an exotic light in Morecambe that most Brits simply can’t see! She’s on the road with Ginsberg; she’s seeing the particulars of the northwest landscape; the promenade on the sea front likely feels refreshing after a long trip from London via Manchester.
There’s an aesthetic symmetry to the Dove Cottage pilgrimage in 1979. Ginsberg, a passionate reader of the Romantic poets, had previously visited Wordsworth’s home and grave on the way to Manchester for his 1973 visit with Jonathan Williams.
OH: From the sources you quote and the references in notes, it’s clear that for a little book—only 100 pages in small format—you actually did a lot of research. Since the process is often a crucial part of the product, how did it proceed from Point A onwards?
RB: Yes – a lot of research condensed! I should point out that I’m not an academic, so my research is motivated by a personal maven-like curiosity. ‘Point A’ goes a long way back. I was disillusioned by my school education, which narrowed my options to a rather dull set of science A levels. I realised (probably at the same time that I discovered guitars and rock music) that most things I was interested in fell outside the frames of reference of a conservative schooling. So, I’ve always just followed my interests and pursued interconnected lines of meaning.
When I was seventeen, I saw Patti Smith at Reading Rock Festival. She opened my eyes to the fact that rock music could be both pleasurable and intelligent. Patti Smith, of course, leads to Rimbaud. Rimbaud isn’t far from the spirit of the Beat poets – or Reading Festival – literally.
In 1874, needing to get out of London, Rimbaud found a short period of employment in a new language school run by Camille Le Clair and his wife Elize, on Kings Road, Reading. It’s about a thirty-minute walk from King’s Road to the Richfield Avenue site of Reading Festival, where in 1978 Patti Smith was singing Rimbaud’s praises and evoking his spirit for my unformed teenage self lying on his back dreaming of life. Of course, as I found out later, Smith was a good friend of Ginsberg’s, even being with him in his dying days. She gets a mention in my book as Ginsberg’s long-serving guitarist, Manchester-born Steven Taylor, was once her backing guitarist for a fundraising gig. One thread leads to another.
In 2015, Simon Warner and I hosted a full-day programme called ‘Still Howling’ at the Wonder Inn, on Shudehill in Manchester. It was an extraordinary Beat-style meeting in a chilly yet characterful venue, celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’. (I should note for readers that Simon was ill on the day and my interviewer here, Oliver Harris, kindly stepped in at the last minute to fulfil his interviewing responsibilities). In preparation for ‘Still Howling’, I researched further links between the Beats and Manchester. I was delighted to discover that Ginsberg had read at the Manchester Library Theatre and amazed that his guitarist, Steven Taylor, was born in Gorton, in east Manchester. Steven flew over to the Still Howling event, and I was able to take him back to his childhood patch in Gorton, providing material for a chapter of the book.
But, of course, the Ginsberg Archive at Stanford University is a primary resource, especially for some of the rare photos that are reproduced in my book. I looked closely at the contact sheets from the dates Ginsberg was in the UK or dates relating to his Manchester visits. There were some delightful surprises. In 1984, Alan Wise, the Manchester music promoter and manager, had organised a reading for Ginsberg and Salford poet John Cooper Clarke at the Neptune Theatre in Liverpool. I discovered a set of photos from an after-gig meal, including photos taken by Ginsberg of Cooper Clarke and his mother, and a photo of Nico. When I pointed out the Nico photo to Peter Hale, director of the Ginsberg Estate, he was astonished that he had never spotted it before. At the time, Nico was living in Manchester and managed by Alan Wise. She had known Ginsberg since the factory days in New York. Wise is a key figure in my book. His aversion to record-keeping and tendency to keep on the fringes of fame means he has been somewhat overlooked in the cultural history of Manchester. My book makes the case that Wise was more influenced by the Beat ethos than most people knew. I uncovered letters from Wise to Ginsberg going back to Wise’s twenties and tell the story of their connection from the 1980s to the 90s.
I wrote up my findings, which were published as three articles in Beat Scene magazine between 2018 and 2022. As the centenary of Ginsberg’s birth approached, I decided that the articles could be developed into a small book. I approached local publisher Tim Shearer of Confingo Publishing, and he was enthusiastic about the project.
So, what I’m saying is – there is more than one ‘Point A’! Maybe ‘A’ stands for ‘arachnid’, or ‘archival interconnectedness.’
John Cooper Clarke, his mother Hilda Clarke, Philip Rainford. Post-reading meal, Liverpool, 19 April 1984. Photo by Allen Ginsberg, courtesy Allen Ginsberg Estate / Stanford University Libraries.
OH: Although I visit Manchester at least once a month, I no longer have a sense of its culture. I detect a certain nostalgia for the days when Ginsberg could turn up at and fill the house, or when musicians and poets were brewing an alternative scene from cheap bedsits in a post-industrial wasteland. Has the brute commercial identity of the city reasserted itself? I’m thinking that run-down but creative places like The Wonder Inn—where you and I both co-organised Beat events a decade ago—have gone now. Is ‘hipster’ just a branding term these days, or does a Beat spirit live on in different forms?
RB: It’s a complex cultural landscape. I’m not sure if I’m qualified to answer in any insightful way. I have on my reading list Andy Spinoza’s Manchester Unspun. He is probably a better source. However, I’ve lived in Manchester for twenty years and have seen the changes. I have the privilege of living in Ancoats, once the densely populated heart of Manchester’s cotton mills. For years it was a derelict and dodgy part of the city, but it provided studio spaces for artists and musicians. Beehive Mill is just round the corner from where I live. Pre-Smiths Johnny Marr rehearsed with his band Freak Party in one of the cheaply available units there. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was one of the first demo songs made by the prototype Smiths. They recorded it at Decibelle Studios, Beehive Mill, in August 1982. Beehive Mill no longer houses a recording studio. In recent years, it was redeveloped into small business and office spaces. Alongside trendy small businesses, I rent a desk in a co-working attic space at Beehive Mill. Is that part of the ‘brute commercial identity of the city’? I’m not sure. But I do miss places such as The Wonder Inn, where artists could explore, exhibit, and experiment in an affordable, non-judgmental, and communally friendly context.
The word ‘hipster’ nowadays probably does signify more of a superficial fashion identity. But even that label, or all contemporary identity labels, are increasingly fluid as far as I can see. The label is redundant as there aren’t any cohesive institutional containers to carry its meaning. I joke with my friends that I’m a ‘hipster’, but I don’t really identify in that way in either the present or past sense of the word. I think it would be hard to argue that the Beat spirit lives on in this hyper-political, digitally fragmented era. Aspects of the Beat influence are probably still alive but not in any explicit way. The city has its alternative scene: Antwerp Mansion, The White Hotel, Rogue Studios and, importantly, Islington Mill. I’ve only been in it once, but NIAMOS, based in an old Edwardian Theatre in Hulme, is probably the most radical community hub I’m aware of.
I was recently honoured to give a pre-release copy of my book to Thurston Moore, of Sonic Youth. A big Beat aficionado and collaborator with Beat artists, he has a good connection with Manchester and has done workshops at Islington Mill. Maybe his influence filters through.
As an aside: She’s not a Manchester artist, but I was intrigued to note that the video for a new song by Charli xcx, ‘No One Lasts Forever’, features a clip of William Burroughs (with a voice-over by David Cronenberg). (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyEFDYzRYRg see: 39:51, [ed.])
OH: Finally, I know some material didn’t make the final cut of your book, including more about Ginsberg’s 1985 visit to St John’s College, Oxford. You note that it took place outside in the quad, for example, and I know—because I was there!—that the plan was for him to speak in a common room, but more and more people kept turning up so he had no choice but to perform outdoors, and the quad was packed, absolutely packed. Can you say more about that particular occasion?
RB: Readers might wonder why Oxford crops up in a book about Allen Ginsberg and Manchester. It was an unexpected direction to take. The book is called Ginsberg and Manchester, not Ginsberg in Manchester, for a good reason. It’s that arachnid thing again; the connective web to and from Manchester.
I thought my book would end in 1984, when Manchester music promoter Alan Wise finally meets Ginsberg in person and sets up the reading at the Neptune Theatre in Liverpool. That story originates from James Young’s entertaining book Songs They Never Play on the Radio: Nico the Last Bohemian. Alan Wise was Nico’s manager, and Young was Nico’s keyboard player in the last phase of her life when she was living in Manchester.
But when I contacted James Young, he told me that he and Alan Wise had also gone to see Ginsberg in Oxford the following year. Back in 1981 Young had dropped out of his philosophy degree at Oxford to tour and record with Nico, but he had kept his flat and connections in Oxford. His flat provided a brief crash pad for Ginsberg on the Oxford trip in 1985.
The photographs in the Stanford Archive confirm what you say about the Quad at St. John’s College being packed. I cover the story in my book. Vincent Katz was the student organiser and stood in for Steven Taylor as backing guitarist. (Taylor was in the UK with Ginsberg, but didn’t make the Oxford trip). I was really pleased to discover photos of the after-reading meal in a local restaurant. In the photos (some of which are reproduced in Ginsberg & Manchester) are Sawang Mukpo, son of Chögyam Trungpa, one of Ginsberg’s Tibetan Buddhist teachers; Tom Pickard; James Young; Alan Wise; and English literature graduate and poet Mark Ford.
I contacted Mark Ford (now Professor of English at University College London), but unfortunately there was an email mix-up, and Mark’s generous reply didn’t get to me until it was too late to make additions to the text. I had assumed that Mark either didn’t get my email or didn’t have the time to reply. Then I was listening to a recent BBC Sounds programme, ‘Allen Ginsberg’s Last Soup.’ Mark was one of the presenters, and he mentioned the photograph at the restaurant with Ginsberg in 1985. I contacted him again after the programme, mentioning that I was the one who discovered the photograph. He got back to me immediately, apologising that his original email to me had gone astray and forwarding his memories of the Oxford event. He filled me in on the details of the day.
Ford met Ginsberg at BBC’s Oxford Radio studios in the morning – having arranged to interview him at some point in the day for the magazine Oxford Poetry. Ginsberg’s Collected Poems had recently been published by Penguin, and Ford said ‘it was part of his intention to present himself as somehow part of the poetry establishment rather than as a renegade – so he was dressed in suit and tie. But he was still pretty renegade!’ He went on to say:
‘In the taxi back to St John’s College, where the interview was to take place in the rooms of Vincent Katz, son of the painter Alex Katz, I showed him the last issue of the magazine Oxford Poetry, which happened to have in it the first poem I had ever published, called ‘A Swimming Pool Full of Peanuts’. To my intense dismay, he began reading this aloud in the taxi, interrupting to say that he too had recently been using long lines in recent poems. But when he got to line 7, where the eponymous swimming pool is introduced, he curtly said, ‘Then it gets silly …’ and handed me back the magazine. This was pretty crushing. Recording the interview in Vince’s room was a nightmare – or rather like any scene from Don’t Look Back or No Direction Home – I had rather academic questions prepared like, ‘Are you still as political now, Allen, as you were in the 1960s? blah blah’ – but had more joy when asking him what it was like to be on the Rolling Thunder Tour – or at least I remember his reply, ‘It was a lotta fun!’ Vince was strumming a guitar as I recall; also there was Ollie Harris, who may be in that picture [he’s not]; he was writing a PhD on William Burroughs, and is indeed England’s major Burroughs scholar… Then Nico showed up! I couldn’t believe this, being as fanatical about the Velvet Underground as I was about Dylan … and also Tom Pickard. It was the middle of the miners’ strike, and I think you can see on the photo a badge Tom Pickard is wearing – it would have been a Support the Miners badge.’
Ford goes on to say:
‘The ‘reading’ in St John’s quad took place in the late afternoon. Allen had his squeeze box, and Vince backed him on guitar. We all sat on the lawn, and Nico actually trod on my hand as she strode through the crowd. She didn’t perform, I don’t think – I’d actually seen her on a recent tour not that long before, and in the course of the concert she had leaned back from her organ, tipped over, and had to be hoisted to her feet by the guitarist – I think this happened during a rendition of Deutschland über alles! Or could have been Bowie’s Heroes. Tom Pickard was prevailed upon to open the reading – he did some fierce pro-miner poems which contrasted neatly with lush early summer quad of the second richest college in Oxford. Then Allen sang some Blake songs, accompanying himself on his squeeze box – Merrileee – merrilee – I remember him chanting, and read some poems. It was a glorious warm day and having abandoned my commission and hope of getting a proper interview (I’d never interviewed anyone before) I at last began to relax.’
The link to the artist Alex Katz is intriguing. Ginsberg had known Vincent Katz’s father since the 1950s as part of the Manhattan avant-garde scene. Alex Katz painted and created multi-part aluminium cut-out portraits of Ginsberg in November 1985, a few months after the Oxford reading.
Tom Pickard (in front of door), Mark Ford (at front smiling at the camera), James Young, Alan Wise, Malcolm Poulton (seated in the far right corner table). Post-reading meal. Indian Restaurant, Walton Road, Oxford. 30 April, 1985. Photo by Allen Ginsberg, courtesy Allen Ginsberg Estate / Stanford University Libraries.
Ginsberg & Manchester by Roger Bygott is published by Confingo Publishing, Manchester, 2026. £9 Publication date: 3rd September 2026.
Orders: https://www.confingopublishing.uk/product-page/ginsberg-manchester
Roger Bygott will be reading from his book and in conversation with Rachel Connor at Seesaw, in Manchester, on Friday 16th October, 7.00 pm. Free event, but book via: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/creativecouragewithrachelconnor/2318659