John McGrath

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you, John, for taking time to speak with Greg and I this morning. Let’s start with the big question. What really makes Manchester, Manchester from your point of view?

John McGrath

Well, the obvious answer is the people. So maybe a combination of people and rain. And I think in some ways the creativity of the city does also grow out of that combination. I always think of, you know, those amazing bands that in many ways define the city as, you know, growing out of the fact that there were a bunch of teenagers caught up in their bedrooms, not going out that much, you know, starting to talk and rehearse in hidden corners. So it’s not a city like some cities that lives fully in the open and in the public and in big summer days in parks. It feels more that it’s a combination of people gathering often in unexpected places and making things happen together. So yeah, people and rain.

Caitlin Morrissey

Where do you think some of those traits in terms of where people convene and how they relate to the city, where does that come from? Where do we look back to see where some of those traits have emerged? The rain is obviously a given and perhaps if we’d have been speaking a couple of weeks ago, we might not have even said rain because it was so glorious.

John McGrath

I think it’s not a city that’s grown up with a big plan, is it? My hometown is Liverpool. For whatever people might think of that city, if you actually look at it architecturally, it’s got a very grand plan to it. And my city, my family, certainly on my dad’s side, grew up on the Dock Road and in those really rough areas. But there was still a sense of a city that was growing into a grandness wherever the, you know, whatever dodgy places that money had come from. I think with Manchester, you get a sense of a city that was always improvised, that was always kind of thrown together. Even the people who had money were throwing up a building here and a completely different building there and there was that sense of just people making do and as I say, sort of throwing things together on an as needed basis. And that to me remains the energy of the city. Who might pull together to make something happen? Whether that’s here’s a problem, let’s solve it and Manchester I think has historically been really good at solving problems, at experimenting, at trying things out or whether it’s about creativity and who might be in the room to together and make a band or a club or a piece of art happen. So you’ve got, of course, great institutions and amazing buildings in Manchester but there isn’t a big plan to them. It all feels in a way like it’s come together on an as needed basis, and I think that spirit is very endemic to the city and it’s something that I really love about the place.

Caitlin Morrissey

And so where do we see that spirit in the festival? And perhaps obviously coming up this year is MIF 2025. Where are we likely to see the DNA of Manchester in Manchester International Festival?

John McGrath

I think the festival has always had precisely those elements at its heart. It’s unexpected combinations of people or unexpected combinations of people and places, collaborations that nobody had thought of before or occupations of space that no one had thought of before. We’ve got a great history of opening up spaces from Mayfield Depot through to what’s now Albert Hall and reimagining them. This time we’re going to be in the area at the back of Diecast and thinking about that space. So I think that sense of unexpected combinations coming together whether that’s individuals, artists, people, places, audiences. And then that sense of invention. It’s a festival of new things. The invitation to artists at the festival, as it is at our venue Aviva Studios, is what can we help you do that you’ve not had a chance to do before? And that invitation applies as much to an up-and-coming young Manchester artist as it does to a really big, famous artist. And it’s still for those big names, the opportunity that we offer is a unique one. It’s, yeah, what can we help you do that you’ve not done before? And that’s a very Manchester thing, City of Invention. Peter Savile’s famous phrase, the Original Modern City, it still applies. We’re all inventing all of the time.

Caitlin Morrissey

Fabulous, thank you so much, John. And so what do you feel the world needs to know and understand about Manchester? What are some of the misconceptions that you encounter when you’re talking about the city perhaps on a global stage? And what sort of message or story does the festival itself put out about the city?

John McGrath

I think that the city’s done a really great job of talking about itself to the world over the last 20 years. And I think the festival, which is coming up to its 10th edition and at the next festival, it’ll the 20th anniversary, has been a big part of that messaging. I talk to people, certainly in arts and culture all around the world, and they’re like, ‘tell us about Manchester. Why is Manchester such a success? Why are things able to happen there that don’t seem able to happen in a lot of other places?’ Whether that’s getting a new festival started, whether that’s building a big new cultural venue, whether it’s celebrating our grassroots artists. Nobody’s saying we do any of those things perfectly, but we do them and we keep trying to do them better. And that, I think, is the spirit that people really respond to.

So I don’t actually hear loads of misconceptions around the world about Manchester. I hear the sense that it is a city that has faced difficulty and worked its way through and not been afraid of inventive ways to address those issues, that it’s not gotten everything right, that you can look at the landscape of Manchester now and go, no, this isn’t quite right, this isn’t fair, not everybody’s getting an appropriate slice of the pie. We really need to think about how do all of our communities benefit from positives that are happening. But we keep trying and we keep trying solutions. And that sense of going for it and that sense of inventiveness, I think, is widely respected.

I think across the UK, you know, there is still a big North-South divide and however much of a cliché it may seem, it still is a real thing. So I still talk to people who expect me to come to meetings in London at the drop of a hat, who somehow seem to think it’s a terribly long journey to get to Manchester from London. You know, that somehow, we from Manchester can magically transport ourselves down to London very easily, but for them to come here would be a lot more difficult. And fortunately again, the festival I think has had a really good impact though in that, you know, often the offer of the festival has been so exciting and actually there’s something about a festival that you kind of go on an adventure and you know, you’ll make the effort and so people have come here for that. And they’ve realised, oh, my goodness, on a decent day, it really is only a two hour, 10 minute train journey. And you can just bomb here from, actually it’s very central in the UK. You know, it’s a relatively straightforward to get-- place to get to from a lot of places. So I think there is still, you know, assumptions about the-- within the UK about where, where the centre lies. And what is and isn’t difficult that we still need to address. But again, I think the high-profile things that we do, including and particularly actually in art and culture are really important there. And I think that goes across the spectrum. So, you know, recently, you know, this wave of openings from Co-op Live through Aviva Studios, through the Renewed Manchester Museum have all been really important as a spectrum in getting that message across that there’s real critical mass here and there’s loads of stuff really going on.

I think the other thing that I think that again we need to keep addressing and thinking about is how we make the success of Manchester be a regional success that it’s not a city centre success only. That people in the towns of Greater Manchester and the districts of Greater Manchester feel that they’ve got equal shares in that success. And I know that’s something that Andy as mayor has been really engaged with and something that all of us as cultural organisations really want to think about and feels like is really the next and most important step for us to engage with.

Greg Clark

I suppose I’d like to start just by asking you about the audiences. What sort of audience does the Manchester International Festival bring and what does it tell you about the people of Manchester and their appetites and you know, tell us about the audience.

John McGrath

Yeah, the festival historically has had an audience of what the marketing people would call experience seekers. So people who are a little bit adventurous from all sorts of backgrounds, but have a sense of, I want to try something a little bit different maybe. Because it’s often also had some really good familiar names in the festival as well, I think there’s often been those access points for people. And again, that’s something that we’re building on even more with the venue and particularly having a big music program at the venue. You know, that sense of, well, I came here to see Fontaines D.C. or Johnny Marr, you know. So that those connection points through names that people have a real strong affinity with are important.

But I do think the festival has also always had that sense of, you know, I might try something a little bit unusual. I think over recent years, we’ve also done a lot of work to make sure that there’s a real accessible free offer as well. Interestingly, the 2021 festival with COVID was perhaps a real turning point for us. Though, where virtually everything in the festival had to be out on the streets and free. And that was a really wonderful thing that, you know, and actually, everybody had a bit of a sense of adventure then, didn’t they because who knew when you were going to be allowed out of the house again? So you stepped out, and if we’d built this bonkers version of Big Ben in Piccadilly Gardens that you could go inside that was built out of books, everybody gave it a go because it was something exciting to do that people hadn’t had that much. So that was a really interesting and fun turning point for us, I think, in terms of really being something that feels very free and accessible to anybody in the city.

For a number of years, predating that as well, we’d always done opening events that, you know, were a bit bonkers maybe, but were in middle of public space. Yoko Ono encouraging everyone to ring bells, Jeremy Della creating a fashion runway in the middle of Piccadilly Gardens. So I like also the sense that you can stumble across the festival and almost get involved in it by mistake.

The other area that’s become increasingly important to us over the years is Festival Square, not only as a great place to come and hang out and have a drink and a bite to eat, but as a showcase for Manchester talent. So since 2019, we’ve had what we call an open stage at Festival Square where any band or act or artist can put in an application to be put on that stage. They get paid a fee and they get an opportunity to show their work to everyone that turns up. So I think that sense of being a place also where that new energy that’s bubbling up in Manchester can get a bit more of a public showcase is important too.

Greg Clark

John, this is just so inspiring. I don’t know what to say apart from thank you. It’s absolutely brilliant. I wanted to ask you about this central proposition that you described that you come to the Festival to do the thing that you’ve never done. This strikes me as such a brilliant invitation. What have you observed about how that has changed people’s careers or how it’s enabled established artists to do things that they’ve never done before? What are the really noteworthy one’s for you? Because it’s just that it’s the invitation everybody wants, isn’t it?

John McGrath

Yeah, and I think one of the things that we’ve been very good at over the years is building up the teams that can deliver that. And actually one of the things that people don’t know a lot about with the festival and with the venue as well is that we get an awful lot of international money from other festivals and venues around the world contributing to the making of these big projects because of the way that we deliver them. So that people in other places, and I’m talking about big cities, New York, Berlin, Hong Kong are saying, well, we’ll contribute to the cost of you making this big bonkers project with Marina Abramović or whoever it’s going to be, Tom York. Because we know it will be good, we know it will be well delivered.

So I think you see from the very first festival show of Damon Albarn working on Monkey Journey to the West, something that an artist who has so many strings to his bow, but had never done that before. He’d never done an opera with a cast of partly animated characters and a troop of Chinese acrobats. Who had? So from the get-go, we’ve been going on those journeys, really and continuing to see what might people play with.

Just last night we had the press night in the venue of a piece that we made in the 2023 festival with a Manchester artist Benji Reid and in some ways Benji’s a very different prospect to Damon because Benji’s had an international reputation of his own, but not in that kind of pop superstar way that Damon has. And actually, you know, had been making relatively smaller work, predominantly as a photographer. But with Benji, we knew that he had a big imagination and had been trying to make bigger work. And we made a show with him in the 2023 festival called Find Your Eyes, where he made a live mixture of choreography, theatre and photography on stage. Again, nobody else had ever been able to offer him to blend those different practices. We did a piece with him. It got five-star reviews in every single review. It’s now been on tour to New York, Amsterdam, Taipei, all around the world. And we just opened it again in Manchester because there’s such a demand for it.

So whether it’s a big name artist like Damon Albarn or a sort of local treasure like Benji, we’re able to make that same offer. What’s the thing that you might not be able to do without this support? In that sense, I think that’s a very Manchester offer because it’s about the unexpected combinations. It’s about trying out the thing that hasn’t been tried yet. And we’re here as an organisation to make that possible, to facilitate that. There’s many, many other examples of all sorts of artists. I mean, one of the most famous in my first year in the festival was New Order, combining with the artist Liam Gillick and a mass of student synthesiser players to make a piece where there was a wall-sized installation of synthesisers and the band and this artwork all mashed together into a unique, you know, a version of New Order that had never happened before.

So I think it’s consistently that offer to support the inventiveness, to support the idea of the new that we make. And in that sense, I think we really do express the DNA of the city.

Greg Clark

Absolutely brilliant John. I’ve got one more question if I may? You mentioned this objective with yourself and with Andy Burnham to make this genuinely a greater Manchester Festival. I mean what practical forms might that take John and how will you keep it real but also keep it-- but make it broad? What the challenge there?

John McGrath

So we’ve been working on this gently over the last few festivals. With this festival we’re taking the next step. So our opening event in this festival is called The Herds and it involves a journey of a hundred life-size cardboard animal puppets that are travelling all the way from Africa through Manchester and then up towards the North Pole. It’s a real journey they’ve been on. You can actually check the images which are quite extraordinary online of life-size cardboard giraffes crossing rivers in Africa. It’s quite extraordinary. They’re going to turn up in Manchester. Our opening event will be all of these cardboard animals massing on Cathedral Gardens and then running wild in the city. But the next two days, they go to Rochdale, and they go to Wigan. So that sense that our opening isn’t just the Manchester Central Park but is also having an impact in key towns in the region as well. It becomes built into the very idea of the festival. Then in Rochdale we’ve been working with artists from India, Shilpa Gupta, over the last two years to build up a project that’s going to be an expression of the voices of the people of Rochdale and it will be one of the key commissions in the festival. But if you want to go to it in the festival you go to Rochdale to see it. So there will be things that are for the towns and boroughs of Greater Manchester but also encouraging people who come to the festival to go to those towns and boroughs.

That ties up with the work that Andy’s been doing around public transport of course because the more interconnected we are, the more people can go to each other’s areas of the city and enjoy what’s being offered culturally. We also do residencies during the festival of artists where we encourage them to spend time in different areas of Manchester and then propose to us projects that could take place in those areas. We want to do that, yes, in the towns and boroughs and also in the areas of Manchester and the city that are sometimes less well served by arts and culture institutions. So there’s a lot of work for us going on in those ways as well.

One of the other initiatives we have around that, which I really like, a program called the Neighbourhood Organisers Program, where we hire people who live in different neighbourhoods of the city and the region that may or may not have an involvement in the arts but what they do have is an involvement in their local community. We pay them to be our neighbourhood organisers. They help spread the message about opportunities to their networks, they also bring people to the venue or to the festival and they give us feedback about how their communities, what their experience was and what are the things that we could do differently to forever be improving our welcome.

Those are just two of the things that we’re doing and there are many others. But I think the thing that joins them all up is that they need to be in depth and long term. They need to involve a proper commitment and a proper sense of partnership and listening to each other, not just a thing that gets dropped in on a one-off basis.

Caitlin Morrissey

So I’ve just been reflecting as you’ve been talking on the conversations that we also had with Peter and Christine and what they very much said was that this is the Original Modern festival and of course that really chimes with everything that you’re saying as well that the festival is kind of-- or the contract of the festival is that this is your chance to be liberated from convention and to do something that you haven’t had a chance to do before whether you’re an emerging artist or whether you’re a global well-known name. And so how consciously does the festival work to really preserve and cherish that spirit? I guess it’s kind of a strange question because I’m not in the business of organising festivals or sort of keeping alive those values of festival, but is that something that’s consciously preserved or is that just really well understood with everybody that you engage with that that is Manchester International Festival, that is the festival?

John McGrath

I think that being clear in your values and your vision actually is really important and sometimes that can almost sound a little bit corporate but actually underneath it is: do you have a clear expression of what you’re trying to do and how you’re trying to do it? I think being able to talk about that is really important.

We’re just actually going into a five-year planning period so where you take a little bit of time out and look at where you’re trying to get over the next five years and particularly as we’ve now got the festival running alongside our wonderful year-round venue and a bunch of other initiatives including Factory Academy. That is our big training initiative which is again about impacting on people from all areas of Greater Manchester to skill them up to get jobs in the creative industries. I think when you’ve got a whole bunch of other things going on, you do need to take moments where you come back and go what is it that makes these things unique? What is it that the golden thread, as they say, running through them? I think that sense of inventiveness and doing the new has always been really central to us and continues to be why people want to work with us whether that’s a staff member or a community member they’re not coming for the things that other people can do better, they’re coming for that sense of newness and opportunity that we can support. I think continuing to return to that is important.

At the same time, part of that newness is to not get stuck in your own past and not just go, ‘well, this is the way we always do things.’ You actually also have to challenge yourself and go, ‘how might we think differently and what’s needed in the world in which we find ourselves now?’ And we’re in a rapidly changing world. So what are the challenges? Do we need to work differently? Yes, we’ve got our core vision, but what is it to be original, modern now? What is it to be inventive now? And so an openness also needs to sit alongside that, that is ready to learn and ready to hear about different ways of doing things. So I think if we can combine those two, then we’ll be in good stead going forward.

Caitlin Morrissey

It’s really fascinating. Thank you, John. The final question is to ask you, where is Manchester going next and how will its DNA and everything that we have spoken about really shaped that and inform that?

John McGrath

I think that Manchester is becoming a place that young talent wants to be in. You certainly see young artists and creatives that might previously have been leaving the city, not leaving, and also people coming here.

I think there are dangers and challenges with that because housing being affordable to young people and others is one of the reasons that people are coming here, but we need to make sure that people don’t get priced out. But I think if we can solve those issues around housing, making sure that there is enough affordable space, places to rehearse, studios for artists, et cetera, there’s a huge opportunity here to be a place that artists from around the UK and beyond are coming to and being part of. I’ve described it as Manchester should want to be a net importer of artists and a net exporter of art. That we want the creators to come and live here and then we want the work that they do to go all over the world. And in that sense, you are tying into Manchester’s industrial history where people came from around the region and then around the world to make stuff here and then that stuff went from the city globally. And I think there’s that possibility with culture, with entertainment, with art, and with a more general sense of inventiveness and experimentation that can sit at the heart of the future of the city.

In order to achieve that, we’ve got to accept that, you know, we don’t always get everything right first time and we need to keep looking at things and improving them. But I think that is the real potential there. And that’s also why I think, you know, training initiatives like our Factory Academy and like the work that the city and Andy are doing around training opportunities is so important because what we also want to make sure is that as that city grows in those ways, the jobs that are created are accessible to people from all backgrounds from across the city. So providing training opportunities and ways in to those industries is really important as part of that bigger picture.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank so much, John. And the very final question is, is there anything else you would want to say about the DNA of Manchester or the DNA of Manchester in relation to the festival that we haven’t elicited from you from the questions that we’ve asked?

John McGrath

I think those were great questions and I feel that it was a nice opportunity to share my thoughts. So I don’t have anything that I feel we haven’t had a chance to talk about.

Caitlin Morrissey

Wonderful. It’s been such a wide-ranging conversation and so clearly brings together those sort of inherited traits of Manchester as a pioneering inventive city but kind of a liberated, but yet civic conscious place and kind of the challenges of being that first mover and that coming with a sense of imperfection as well and embracing the learnings along the way.

John McGrath

Yeah, and I guess the thing to add to that would be sort of specifically not about the festival, but also to say that as a venue Aviva Studios is also very much an expression of that. We just announced a new show by Marina Abramović, which she has told the world is the most ambitious work she’s ever created. And it is, arguably, certainly one of the most famous artists in the world is coming to Manchester to make their most ambitious work. I think that sense that we’re providing a home now, not just for a period of time every two years, but year-round is so important. There will be lots of learning as we develop a big new initiative like this venue, but that sense of kind of chutzpah about it, that sense of, of course we’re creating a unique space for the best work from around the world and to grow the best work in the city. I think that’s another demonstration really of the spirit of Manchester.

Caitlin Morrissey

Fabulous and so well put. Thank you.