Clint Boon: The Manchester Chronicles

Some guests you prep for. Others you’ve been half-preparing for since you first heard This Is How It Feels on the radio.

Clint Boon, keyboard player with the Inspiral Carpets, joined me on Drive Time this week to talk about his new book, The Manchester Chronicles: True Tales of Music, Madness and Mayhem 1976–2006, and it was every bit the conversation I hoped it would be.

From the Sex Pistols to the Inspiral Carpets

The book starts with a 17-year-old Clint watching the Sex Pistols in Manchester in December 1976. That night, he says, “music was my mission.”

He’d have written it years ago, but between DJing, the band, being a dad and 20-odd years presenting on the radio, he never had the time. It was only after he retired from broadcasting at the end of 2023 that he finally sat down to write.

What makes it more than a memoir is that it’s just as much about the city. Clint watched Manchester go from “a dusty, smoky city” in the mid-’70s to a world-class one by the early 2000s, and the book follows both journeys side by side.

Shaun Ryder, Mark E. Smith and Tony Wilson all feature heavily, and a lot of it is written from the point of view of a fan of the Mondays and the Charlatans as much as a member of a band.

He’s also kept diaries since the ’70s, not essays but lists of records bought, records played and mates he’s since lost touch with. In one old art college notebook from Rochdale he found a line he’d scribbled as a teenager: “I want to be a rock star. I want to go places, stand on the stage, see all the faces.” He got there.

Why Does Manchester Produce So Much Great Music?

I had to ask, and I’ll admit some northwest bias in the question. Tony Wilson’s answer was the weather: kids stuck indoors with records and guitars. Clint reckons geography plays its part too.

Manchester sits right in the middle of the country, with a seaport and an airport bringing music in from around the world since the ’50s. “There’s a bloodline of music obsessives,” he told me.

He’s not claiming Manchester is better than anywhere else, just more prolific. And he was generous to our neighbours down the M62: Scousers, he says, seem born to make music, whereas he’s “had to work hard to make it look like I can.” Listen to The La’s or The Coral and it’s hard to argue.

Grafters, Not Party Animals

The Madchester era usually gets painted as one long party. Clint remembers it as “one of the happiest and most colourful times of my life,” with Oldham Street, Afflecks and the Dry Bar at the centre of it. But the Inspirals were always the workmanlike ones.

As he puts it in the book, they weren’t 24-hour party people. “We were more like seven-hour party people. Eight on a good night.”

Coming from working-class backgrounds, several of them with real jobs behind them, they looked after what they’d built. That graft is still paying off today, with crowds singing back songs that soundtracked their lives.

The Roadie Who Became Noel Gallagher

One of the book’s key characters is Noel Gallagher. He auditioned to be the Inspirals’ singer in December 1988. He could sing, but they wanted a bigger, deeper voice, so they took him on as a roadie instead.

He’d play them songs from his bedroom on cassette, none of which ever became Oasis songs, but they always knew he’d go off and do his own thing.

Nobody, Noel included, saw how big it would get. Clint’s word for what Oasis have become now? Liam’s favourite: “biblical.” And Noel has said publicly that his four years with the Inspirals were the happiest of his working life, before all that weight landed on his shoulders.

New Album, a Musical Film and Advice for Cheshire Bands

There’s plenty still to come. The Inspirals’ new album, Burn Like The Sun, is out on 29 January 2027, and they’re currently on tour with The Wonder Stuff. Clint is also developing Bickershaw (possibly Bickershaw ’72) with Steve Cowen of The Mock Turtles. It’s a full-scale musical film, not a documentary, set around the 1972 festival near Wigan, with 14 or 15 songs written by Clint. They’re now approaching directors.

His advice for young bands in Cheshire is simple: get out there.

In the ’80s it was fanzines and cassettes from Boots, posted through letterboxes or slipped into Peter Hook’s pocket at a gig. Plenty of his mates were better musicians, he says, but they sat at home waiting for Richard Branson to ring. Today it’s business cards, links and QR codes. “Knock on doors, talk to people. If you do it enough, it works.”

Great advice from a man who clearly took it himself. The Manchester Chronicles is out now.

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