Tomorrow evening, Headingley stadium will be packed full of passionate Leeds fans. This wouldn’t be unusual, only the rugby league season doesn’t start for another month. But rather than cheering on a sports team — which, whether rugby or football, is something that has always come very naturally to people from Leeds like me — the crowd will be cheering on the city itself at The Awakening, a showcase spectacle that will launch the Leeds 2023 Year of Culture.
It will feature, among other things, performances by the orchestra and chorus of Opera North, the singer Corinne Bailey Rae and the poet laureate Simon Armitage. I’ve seen poetry on the pitch at Headingley plenty of times. But it has generally involved the footwork and running of Rob Burrow and Danny McGuire, and never an actual, like . . . y’know . . . poet.
This very public celebration of my city’s culture is of intense personal interest: not just for its own sake, but because of what it says about the changing nature of what you might call Leeds’ civic psychology.
When Brexit meant that the city’s bid to become European Capital of Culture was torpedoed, a decision was made to unilaterally plough ahead with a year-long cultural programme anyway, “an act of defiance” in the words of the Leeds 2023 creative director and chief executive, Kully Thiarai.
The city council provided the funding that would have been used for the European Capital of Culture bid, and so, thanks to some collective stubbornness, Yorkshire’s biggest city is about to aim the spotlight on itself.
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However, Leeds does not do this. Or at least, not historically. Manchester? Liverpool? They live for this kind of stuff: all-singing, all-dancing jazz-hand cities engaged, it always appeared from my side of the Pennines at least, in perpetual, almost monomaniacal, self-promotion.
Yes, Oasis, the Smiths, the Stone Roses. Yes, the Beatles, Cilla Black, Atomic Kitten. Well done. We get it. When it comes to cultural output, Leeds has never really had this particular mix of bolshiness and sentimentality.
I would argue that this is a natural reflection of the city region and its people. We do not care to elevate people or performers. Temperamentally, we tend towards self-possessed but watchful, more comfortable as observers of the world than as grab-the-mike conquerors of it.
And, to be fair, we do produce excellent observers of the world: Alan Bennett, Tony Harrison, Barbara Hepworth, Kay Mellor, David Peace. Kaiser Chiefs’ I Predict a Riot — which details the Hogarthian horrors of Leeds city centre at chucking-out time — is the least sentimental song about a city to have been universally adopted by that same city as an unofficial anthem. About the time that song came out, you could buy Kaiser Chiefs T-shirts that just said “Everything is Brilliant in Leeds”. The fact that so many people found it funny probably says quite a lot about us.
It’s not that people from Leeds aren’t proud of their city. It’s just that this pride has never really been contingent on the approval or admiration of others. Perhaps this is a defence mechanism.
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When Dickens visited in 1866, he described Leeds as an “odious place”, after which point we possibly gave up on caring — or claiming to care — about what people from elsewhere thought. A well-known and, frankly, beloved piece of local defacement once involved a big sign saying “Welcome to Leeds”, to which someone with a spray can added the addendum “Now f*** off. Thank you”.
It warmed hearts, yet this attitude hasn’t always worked to our advantage. As a kid, my mum and dad would take me to the Leeds Art Gallery, where there was a model of Antony Gormley’s Brick Man, which during the 1980s had been proposed as a 100ft high statue in the city.
Apparently, the story goes, the council was keen. Until, that is, art critics from London began to gush about how wonderful and marvellous this would be for the city. Taking umbrage at this rank patronisation, the council changed its mind. No cool monumental artwork for us. A decade or so later, Gateshead had the Angel of the North and we had . . . well . . . we still had a model of Brick Man.
Which is why I am genuinely, sincerely excited about Leeds 2023 and The Awakening, a ceremony named to reflect the fact that, for my city, a chance for a new way of thinking is at hand. We’re not in competition with anywhere else, but for a long time we’ve been at odds with ourselves in a way that hasn’t always helped.
For the next 12 months there will be installations, screenings, gigs, concerts, poetry competitions, the lot. And I’d love it if people came. And I’d love it if they thought as well of the place as I do, and always have. Everything is brilliant in Leeds. Honestly, it is.
