Issue 16

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MANCHESTER’S STUDENT NEWSPAPER

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19th FEBURARY 2018 / ISSUE 16 Photo: Cameron Broome

Manchester University refuses to compensate students for strike action

Student petitions for reimbursements have amounted to over 3,000 signatures Hannah Vallance National Political Reporter In response to growing pressure from student demand, The University of Manchester has declined to revise its position in regards to refunding students for the loss of contact time as a result of UCU strike action.

The strike, which is scheduled to commence from the 22nd of February to the 16th of March, has been met with severe criticism from University of Manchester students, who have called for “the University to negotiate with the UCU”, or “pay each student a full refund for the contact time missed.”

Last month, a failure to resolve rows over pension cuts, which could see the average lecturer loose £200,000 over the course of their retirement, culminated in the announcement of strike action across 61 British universities.

Speaking to The Mancunion , a spokesperson from the University of Manchester advised that the university “won’t be adding to our previous statement”, which stated that “since we charge a composite fee for our courses, we cannot reimburse for specific elements of missed teaching and assessment.”

This is despite the growing support for two petitions listed on Change.org and iPetitions, launched to “complain about the ludicrous situation that we as students find ourselves in”. The petitions have received 2,700 and 616 signatures respectively.

“These

petitions show... universities that if they operate like a business, we will behave like wronged customers ” Hana Jafar, co-founder of ‘Pay UoM Staff Pensions - Stop The Strikes!’ petition, has told The Mancunion that: “Our demands for refunds are more emblematic than suggesting that all we want is our money back. The petitions show that the demand is there to show universities that if they operate like a business, we will behave like wronged customers.

Reclaim The Night preview

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“What we really want is our education - we want staff to get their pensions, and if we make enough noise, I believe we can draw attention to the bureaucratic nature of the drastic decisions that affect everyone.”

In an open letter to the university, she framed the “gross misconduct of university management” as “absolutely unacceptable”.

Hana also insisted that: “I’m also hoping that the Students’ Union decision to back the strikes and pressure the University to negotiate with the UCU will work.”

This is following a jointstatement released on the 30th January by the National Union of Students and UCU, of which proclaimed a declaration of support for the UCU’s right to strike.

Whilst UCU General Secretary, Sally Hunt, advised that “students could still play a vital role in stopping strikes”, in a statement released on the 13th of February, she delegated that “responsibility ultimately lies with university representatives.”

Hunt described the situation between the UCU and Universities UK (who represent universities), as “taking a turn for the worse” on Monday, as a result of the UKK’s chief executive’s “bizarre piece” that “also ignored the other huge scandal that universities have failed to deal with - excessive salaries for vice-chancellors.

“UUK chose not to acknowledge the strikes, or respond to the many voices demanding they do something to avert them. Frankly, it is insulting to students that our leaders have come up so short.”

Speaking directly to students, Hunt stated: “Thank you for support so far. Thank you for the messages on social media and those to your individual staff – they really do mean so much. And please, keep up the pressure on your vice-chancellor or principal to do all they can to get UUK back to the table with us.”

Welcoming Chinese New Year

Denmark Road students compensated for water outages The figure has not yet been confirmed, but it stands as an improvement on the free pizza that students were initially given

Cameron Broome Head News Editor Students are to be compensated after having their water supplies disrupted for over a week at a privatelyrun University halls of residence.

Initially, students at Denmark Road Sanctuary Students accommodation were left without any water for cooking, cleaning, or washing. They were then given bottled water and subsequently water from a tanker lorry.

The disruption started on Monday the 5th of February. But students were still experiencing problems by Friday the 16th of February, when water supplies were interrupted in the morning without any prior warning from Sanctuary Students or United Utilities.

Sam McMillan, Director of Sanctuary Students, said: “we worked closely with United Utilities and the University of Manchester while the cause of the leak was investigated and kept affected residents fully updated of developments by emailing them directly. In total, 19 emails were sent direct to students

by Sanctuary staff.

“United Utilities provided a tanker on Wednesday 7 February. For the remaining time of the water issues, up to Monday 12 February, Sanctuary Students arranged a rolling programme of water tankers to refill the system manually, ordered pizzas for residents, provided bottled water and offered alternative washing facilities, as well as ensuring additional staff were available 24 hours a day to support students.

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“Residents at the Denmark Road scheme will be receiving a compensation payment and Sanctuary will contact students to provide details in the next few days.

“We will continue to work with United Utilities to investigate this matter and to ensure that our students receive the best possible service in the future.”

Tess Angus, a University of Manchester student and resident who was affected, said: “I’m pleased they’ve recognised how distressing the situation was for us, and have agreed to give us money back for all the water we didn’t receive.”

Students were initially critical of the lack of responsibility taken by the University’s Accommodation office, United Utilities, and Sanctuary Students for the disruption caused, with each organisation claiming the fault lay elsewhere and that they were doing all they could.

Tess echoed this sentiment and said, “I’m waiting to see how much it is before I’m satisfied — they really messed us about with the lack of communication.”

Yvonne Walker, a first year Italian and Spanish student living in Denmark Road, said: “I think Sanctuary Students handled the situation terribly. They didn’t tell us what the problem was for days, just that there was an issue with the water.

“In several of their emails, they made sure to highlight that it was the fault of United Utilities, which I thought was very unnecessary, unhelpful and unprofessional. There were some days when we didn’t get an email until the late afternoon to update us about the issue, even when they had claimed the issue was solved the evening before.”

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Yvonne Walker thought compensation was justified because “water is part of what we are paying more than £20 per day for.”

A student who wished to remain anonymous said: “the communication from the accommodation office was quite bad frankly. The university leases the building from sanctuary students so I felt they were under the obligation to ensure that they themselves took more interest. I emailed the office asking about a few things and they said you need to ask Denmark Road. Do they really expect to just leave themselves out of the communication process?

“United Utilities was the least helpful. When I called them they did not give me any details saying I was not an account holder. Denmark Road took too long to provide us water and arrange for alternative showers. We were under uncertain conditions for around ten days. They arranged for alternative showers in the last three days or so.”

A student living at Denmark Road, who also wished to remain nameless, added that, “the accommodation office has been useless in this matter. They responded to my email fairly promptly, and organised showers in

Whitworth Park, expecting us to go outside in search of a shower, but instead of dealing with my concerns, they simply forwarded my email to the site manager, who informed us we will not be getting a rent reduction, because it was ‘out of their control’.

“We had no water for three days, and massive disruption thereafter, therefore I believe our rent for this week should be adjusted accordingly. We certainly need some form of compensation; this was not simply an ‘inconvenience’, it has seriously affected our wellbeing, distracting from our studies and causing considerable stress/distress. I was genuinely considering what other options I had, other than going home to the South of England.”

Denmark Road hosts University of Manchester students but the building is privately owned and managed by Sanctuary Students.

The halls of residences are one of the most expensive on offer to students, costing £145 per week for a single en-suite room.

A spokesperson for United Utilities said: “The university contacted us to let us know that the Denmark Road accommodation did

not have a water supply. We had already reconfigured the local water network to bypass the burst pipe and restore water pressure in the area so we knew this must be a private issue at the accommodation. Our engineers went to site to assist the university facilities team in their investigations.

“We originally suspected that the poor supply problems must be due to a leak on the university’s pipework. As a goodwill gesture we continued to use a water tanker to keep the university’s supply tank topped up while investigations were ongoing. The problem was finally traced to a blocked filter on a water meter within the building complex, which was cleaned out and the problem was resolved.”

A University spokesperson said: “the University’s Accommodation office is aware of the water issues on Denmark Road at the Sanctuary Student accommodation.

“The halls in question are a private facility owned and run by Sanctuary Students who are working with United Utilities to amend the issues as soon as possible. But if any students are adversely affected by the problem they can contact the accommodation office.”

Students demand divestment BDS, CAATS and People&Planet say “enough is enough”

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Has Marvel surpassed itself?

Rosa Simonet Deputy News Editor These university groups have decided “enough is enough” when it comes to the University’s ongoing investment in fossil fuel companies. The protest is also calling for complete divestment from companies they believe are complicit in Israeli war crimes, such as Caterpillar.

The protest will take place under the Whitworth Arch on Wednesday the 21st of February, 2-4pm, during the next board of governors meeting.

Huda Ammori (BDS) told The Mancunion that she believes that “all of us are paying obscene amounts of tuition fees towards an institution which is profiting from Israel’s illegal occupation, the arms trade and environmental degradation.”

“We all need to come together for the largest divestment protest yet to show our strong objection to the university’s actions and to hold them to account on their own policies.”

The University currently invest £7.5 million in fossil fuel companies such as Glencore, Valero Energy and Rio Tinto.

Lizzy Haughton, member of People & Planet and former Ethical and Environmental Student Officer expressed in her blog how

surprised she was by how “difficult it is to implement change in a University so stuck in its old ways”.

Despite campaigning for three years students had only been told that the University will “review the issue” of their investments in fossil fuels, as noted in a previous article by The Mancunion.

60 universities UK wide, now including the Univesity of Edinburgh, have divested from fossil fuels. The University of Manchester is now substantially behind, with a third of UK campuses being completely free from all gas, oil and coal holdings.

A letter containing a collective statement “representing the consensus view of the Sustainable Consumption Institute, School of Social Sciences” detailed reasons as to why the University should divest from fossil fuel companies.

Reasons include “consistency with the University’s social responsibility agenda; and the economic risks of a continued investment in fossil fuels.”

“Social responsibility is one of the three core strategic goals of the University’s Manchester 2020 strategy and commitment to environmental sustainability is a major aspect of that policy. We suggest continued institutional investment in the fossil fuel

industry is incompatible with a credible commitment to environmental sustainability, and thus social responsibility.”

The University also invest approximately £2,113,435.79 in Caterpillar – according to the no. of shares (24900) invested and the share price ($107.49) at the end of the Fiscal year 2016.

According to BDS and CAAT, these investments are also violations of the University’s “social responsible” investment policy.

A representative from Campaign Against Arms Trade believes that profiting from military regime “aka murder and genocide is not only a moral crime but it also breaks international humanitarian laws and Human Rights.”

“Nancy Rothwells unwillingness to listen to the students she is supposed to be representing, particularly in this context, is disgustingly disrespectful.”

“Between CAAT, BDS and People Planet we are continuing to make a case against these investments and Nancy’s leadership. We are putting together the research so it will be easily accessible for students and academics to access, but creating numbers at the protest is really important for driving the change.”

Manchester University students fined £29k by library last year

Manchester Metropolitan University’s book fines’ income last year was £66,772, more than double Manchester University’s Cameron Broome Head News Editor Students at the University of Manchester (UoM) were issued £29, 557 in library fines during the academic year 2016-2017, a Freedom of Information request has revealed.

A series of Freedom of Information requests indicated that 130 Universities and University colleges collected more than £3.5 million-worth of library fines between September 2016 to August 2017.

The University of Oxford had the highest books fines’ income over the past year, issuing £167,689 of fines, followed by King’s College London (£113,726) and the University of Cambridge (£98,487).

A University of Manchester library spokesperson said: “Fines are currently the most effective way to ensure books are returned promptly to the library and made available for other students. The library only issues fines on overdue books when they are needed — ie another student has reserved the book triggering a recall at the end of the current loan — or the book is part of the High Demand collection (items recommended as essential texts on reading lists by teaching staff).

“The vast majority of our students support the current fines policy, as it works to ensure books that are in demand are returned promptly and available to those who need them.

Fines are not a financial consideration — they are an incentive to return books on time and ensure other students who need the texts are not left frustrated.”

Books can be borrowed from the main collections of the various University of Manchester libraries across campus for a full semester, while items in the High Demand collections

The rise of the Audiobook

may be borrowed for one night.

Items borrowed from the main collections of the library may be subject to early recall, if another customer wishes to borrow the item during its lease. If a standard loan is recalled, students will be notified by email and have seven days in which to return the item, unless the due date is already within 7 days.

Failure to return any books by the return date results in a temporary blocking of customers’ library accounts and a overdue fine of £2 per day, while the daily fine rate for items borrowed from the High Demand section is 50p per hour or part of an hour, not including weekends. Maximum charges per book from any section is £20.

Some institutions do not collect library fines, including the University of Bath and the University of Chichester, while others have an auto-book renewal in order to reduce students’ costs.

The UoM library spokesperson commented: “An autorenewal policy would have no impact on fines - such a policy would not apply to recalled or high demand books, and it is only when these texts are not returned that a fine is issued. If a book is not required by another student, it can be renewed for up to 10 years - the library will issue an email reminder, and the renewal process can be completed quickly and easily on our website.”

Commenting on the revelation, Alex Tayler, General Secretary of the Students’ Union, said: “Whilst I wouldn’t want to encourage the University to take any more money off students than it already does, I think that library fines are a good way of ensuring that students share resources fairly. If

you don’t give your book back in time or lose it then you are preventing another student from accessing the resource.

“Fines encourage people to look after the books properly and return them promptly. I would want to speak with the library to discuss how it fines people and how effective they think it is but I don’t have anything against the fines in principle.”

University of Manchester undergraduate and taught postgraduate students have a loan quota of up to 25 books per semester, while research postgraduate students can borrow up to 40 books per semester.

Full details on the University library’s policies regarding borrowing and returning books can be found on the library’s website.

Image: DPOrman @ Commons Wikimedia

Reclaim the Night comes back to Manchester Hundreds of women will take to the streets to fight for feminism and against violence against women Shivani Kaura Senior Students’ Union Reporter ‘Reclaim the Night’, a yearly women’s march in Manchester, is returning on the 22nd February to allow women to “raise their voices and unite their energies to stand up to street harassment, sexual violence and victim blaming”.

A survey conducted in 2011 suggested that there are an estimated 47,000 rapes a year in Britain, 40,000 attempted rapes and 300,000 sexual assaults, with figures rising to this day.

However, only 5.3 per cent of those accused are convicted, with the rest not reported or not taken to court.

In 2005, More conducted a survey that found that 95 per cent of women in the UK do not feel safe walking on the streets at night, with 73 per cent worried about being raped.

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‘Reclaim the Night’, which has been held in Manchester since 1977, will start at Owen’s Park at seven P.M. and will proceed along Oxford Road until nine P.M., with an after-party in the Students’ Union in Manchester Academy. The event started due to a spate of attacks in Fallowfield in previous years.

Last year, there was a new addition to the campaign with a ‘Muslim Block’. Saffa Mir, the Students’ Union Community Officer in 2016 has inspired Hana Jafar to carry on the additional section once again.

Speaking to The Mancunion, Hana Jafar said: “I decided to lead it this year because being part of it as a Muslim woman was incredibly empowering.

“Minority groups and marginalised women in particular need safe and inclusive spaces to have our voices heard.

With the state of gender based violence and Islamophobia

affecting visibly Muslim women, we need these spaces more than ever.”

A new addition to the march this year will include a ‘pro-choice block’, which follows after the abortion rights campaign which took place in Manchester last year.

Manchester City Council have also placed a ban on antiabortion protests in Fallowfield after deeming them “more aggressive and militant that before.”

Women who choose to participate in the ‘pro-choice block’ at the event will aim to call out on misogynistic oppression and suppress the abuse, sexual harassment and unwanted attention from men. Men are welcome at the event but asked to remain separated from women in order to respect the nature of their protest.

Photo: Students’ Union

Contact us Editor-in-Chief: Kirstie O’Mahony editor@mancunion.com Deputy Editor: Tristan Parsons deputyed@mancunion.com

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NUS Presidential candidates announced

Shakira Martin seeks re-election despite bullying allegations, whilst her opponents offer stronger visions for internal reform Tristan Parsons Deputy Editor-in-Chief

The three candidates for the next National President of the National Union of Students (NUS) have been announced as Momin Saqib, President of King’s College London’s Students’ Union, Sahaya James, activist at the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, and Shakira Martin, the current NUS President.

Martin’s decision to re-stand comes despite several NUS Officers making allegations of bullying against her, and Hareem Ghani, the NUS Women’s Officer, submitting an official complaint to the NUS. Martin’s candidacy announcement on Twitter reads “It’s time to get real. I’m proud to be re-standing.”

All three candidates, particularly James and Saqib, have visions for reforming the NUS. Saqib is the only candidate to explicitly include tackling “all forms of discrimination” in the organisation in his manifesto, saying that, “it is shameful that NUS was deemed as a racist organisation by the Internal Race Audit.” In early 2017, the NUS’ then-President Malia Bouattia, was found guilty of anti-Semitic comments.

One of the allegations against Shakira Martin is that she has thrown out policy motions with which she disagrees. In her manifesto, Sahaya

James has said, “I will… never abuse my position to overrule policy and prevent democratic discussion from taking place — regardless of my own views.”

She proposes to “radically overhaul” the institution and to “[democratise] our structures in order to become a serious campaigning force.” This would involve “prioritising more accessible conferences with more time to discuss motions, engagement beyond cliques of sabbatical officers, and reversing budget cuts to liberation.”

Martin has also pledged to “develop a new way to develop and debate issues and policy constructively.”

Saqib believes that the NUS has become detached from students and individual Students’ Unions, and would provide “strong leadership” to counter internal turmoil and a weak reputation amongst students.

He would aim to re-franchise Unions that have left the NUS, such as Newcastle and Surrey Students’ Unions, and improve the NUS’ ‘Extra’ discount and App services to strengthen its financial position against competition from UniDays.

All three candidates support abolishing tuition fees.

James states that Higher Education should be “democratic and accessible to all, with no price tag at any level.”

She and Martin will be campaigning on the issue of student poverty, with both proposing to campaign for a universal student living income.

James will also organise a “landmark conference” of students, MPs, and sector workers to “develop our vision for a cradle-to-grave National Education Service.”

Saqib has pledged to “stay on top” of the Government’s Tuition Fee Review and has degree value for money at the centre of his campaign.

Additionally, Martin has pleaded to establish a “national student rights framework” and to be “election ready”, claiming that the last UK General Election was timed during University exam and holiday periods to reduce student turnout.

James will “unite with the labour movement to support workers in struggles and to fight inequality and austerity.”

Saqib aims to improve student wellbeing, saying that “it’s time for Universities to put students’ mental health first.”

Voting takes place during the NUS National Conference at the Glasgow SECC between Tuesday the 27th and the Thursday the 29th of March 2018.

Full manifestos can be read on the News section of the NUS Connect website.

Free events offer students chance to learn about Christianity

A diverse range of fun events are taking place across the week which hope to help students engage with Jesus Christ and Christianity Cameron Broome Head News Editor The Christians Unions in Manchester are running a week’s worth of events to engage people with Christianity.

As part of their week-long ‘Story’ programme, people will be sharing stories of how their lives have been transformed by Jesus Christ.

Short talks, followed up by question and answer sessions, will take place at 12PM and 1PM in the Council Chambers of the Univerity of Manchester Students’ Union from the 19th to the 23rd of February, and a free lunch will also be provided.

Jonny Wilkinson, President of the Christians’ Union, said: “Across the Manchester and Salford Unis, the four Christian Unions are together hosting ‘Story’, a week of events to engage students with the gospel of Jesus Christ. We’re looking at the universality, power and significance of stories. In sharing with everyone’s own stories, we will be sharing the pivotal and radical change the story of Jesus has had on ourselves and several other Christians from remarkably widespread backgrounds.

“Each lunchtime in the SU we’ll have shorts talks accompanied by Q+As to explore common objections to the Christian faith. With live music and drinks, the evenings will explore multiple people’s stories of identity, suffering, meaning, freedom and hope, as well as stories of Jesus approaching the same topics.

“The name of Jesus Christ is one almost all people will be aware of, but his significance and universality on other people’s lives may not be. The University Paper even described ‘an air of mystery’ surrounding CUs! This is a brilliant opportunity for students to explore exactly who Jesus Christ was and is – and how he has a profound effect on the stories of those who trust in him to guide their lives.

The Christian Unions’ insist that the events are not just for practising Christians but can be attended by any student from the University.

Jonny said: “‘Story’ is for absolutely every student! The week is to allow every student to engage with the claims of the Christian faith and explore the radical claims Jesus made. We in the CU believe that the gospel is universal, and the greatest true story ever told. We want students to have the chance to explore that story for themselves.”

Students can view the full list of events and find out more about the week on Story Manchester’s Facebook page.

Fallowfield fights back

Image: willowbarbican @ Commons Wikimedia

Photo: James Shuttleworth

Max Brimelow News Reporter Holly Ledger, a second-year Events Management student, is taking steps to combat crime in student areas such as Fallowfield and Withington.

On Wednesday the 14th of March, from 1 to 4 p.m., Sugar Rush Events, which she leads, is hosting ‘Fallow Fights Back’. At this event, University of Manchester security, the councillors of Fallowfield and Withington, and self-defence experts Smart Combat, will come together to educate people about the dangers in these areas and how to tackle them.

Local DJs, face painting, freebies, and copious glitter will also feature during the course of the evening. Holly hopes students will come together in solidarity over this issue and react in unison to what is meant to be an event inspiring positivity, in the face of fear.

Home Office statistics released last October suggested that crime in Greater Manchester in the year July 2016-June 2017 rose by 31 per cent. In particular, violence against a person rose 46 per cent, sexual offences climbed 31 per cent, burglary increased by 14 per cent, and robbery was up 53 per cent on the year before.

The fact that students are one of the most vulnerable groups is no secret. Crime in Fallowfield has been the focus of particular attention. One student told The Mancunion of his encounter with an assailant armed with a gun. Countless burglaries have been reported, as well as regular muggings, stalking, and violent crime.

The rising popularity of the ‘Fallowfield Student Group’ on Facebook has brought the sheer volume of these issues to light. Students have banded together to warn each other of suspicious people, areas to avoid, and raised awareness of crime events.

“It’s an important topic and I just feel there isn’t enough being done,” Holly told The Mancunion.

“We felt that there hasn’t been anything solidly put into place, especially for the mental health effects of it. The effect on mental health of these crimes is being overlooked. We have friends who have been targets of crime – including one friend who was violently beaten up at 6 a.m. and had his nose broken.

“It was hard seeing how it’s really shaken him up and knowing he now has anxiety when having to go outside alone, even in the middle of the day. Uni is supposed to be a safe place. There are so many halls of residence in Fallowfield so it’s such a shame so many people feel so anxious.”

There will be stalls all around University place, with local Labour Councillor Grace Fletcher-Hackwood invited along and others to be confirmed.

“We are in discussion with the Owens Park security team and hoping to have them present on the day, along with some talks about current security in Fallowfield. We also are going to have information about insurance for students and related freebies such as rape whistles.

“Smart Combat is also going to be putting on free self-defence sessions for students who can learn basic skills to help them protect themselves and feel confident. There will be local DJs from different societies throughout the day along with glitter and face painting.

Despite the serious message we wanted this event to be fun and uplifting.”

“The event should be an important and empowering step towards helping students in South Manchester build towards a safer future,” says Holly. “One of the biggest things we have learnt from this is the importance of bringing the community together and working together — so many people are doing some really great things.”

The event will take place March the 14th, from 1 to 4 p.m. in University Place.

Students can get tickets for free from the event’s Facebook page.

Work experience bursaries available

A diverse range of fun events are taking place across the week which hope to help students engage with Jesus Christ and Christianity

Image: UoM Christians Union

Cameron Broome Head News Editor Applications for a scheme which offers University of Manchester students bursaries to cover the financial costs of work experience are now open for the academic year 2017/2018.

Students can apply for up to £250 or £1,000 depending on their circumstances. The funds can be used to cover related travel, accommodation and/or dependent care costs incurred as a result of undertaking work experience.‌ The aim of the Work Experience Bursary Scheme, run by the University of Manchester’s Careers Service, is to support students who wish to carry out work experience that will contribute to their professional and personal development but are finding it difficult to take up the opportunity that they want.

Tammy Goldfeld, Head of The Careers Service said: “We know that many students want to do a summer internship but are worried about not having enough money to cover their costs, especially students from lower-income households who may not want to incur debt.

“This is why we are so pleased to award work experience bursaries to our students. We want them to gain valuable work experience and not let cost be a barrier.”

To apply for a bursary through the scheme, students have to download and complete an application form available on the Careers Service’s website and send it to careersbursary@ manchester.ac.uk with “Work Experience Bursary 2018 application” in the subject line.

Applications are considered on a case-by-case basis by a bursary

panel and students are likely to hear a decision on their application within seven working days of the closing date.

Since the introduction of the Work Experience Bursary Scheme in 2012, 850 students at the University of Manchester have benefited from the scheme to help them cover the costs of undertaking career-related work experience.

The bursaries have funded diverse work experience opportunities for students ranging from work shadowing within public sector organisations in the North West, to work experience in media outlets in London, to careers-related voluntary experience in Asia and Australia.

Issy Dugan, a first-year Geography student who received a bursary through the scheme, said: “I am so grateful for the work experience bursary. It paid for my flights and accommodation during my stay in Jodhpur, India. I have just got back after spending a month in a Woman’s Empowerment Centre there, something I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do without financial help!

“It was the best experience of my life and has inspired me to continue to pursue my passion for NGO work. I also made some strong connections for the future.”

During the bursary scheme of the academic year 2016/2017, over 150 students received a financial contribution to help cover the costs of travel and accommodation during their work experience.

The bursary fund available to students is limited and the Careers Service encourage early applications for the scheme.

Prior to applying for the scheme, students are encouraged to read the scheme’s full terms and conditions available on the Careers Service’s website.

‘Sleepout’ against homelessness to take place this March

Image: Garry knight @ Flickr

Rosa Simonet DeputyNews Editor After being postponed in November 2017, Manchester Raise And Give (RAG) are finally able to stage their annual ‘Sleepout’.

Taking place at St Peter’s House Chaplaincy on the 2nd of March, the event will involve members of the society camping out overnight to put themselves in the shoes of the increasing number of homeless people in Manchester.

Olly Goldsmith, Chair of Manchester RAG told The Mancunion that, “the number of homeless people rose by 30 per cent in Manchester from July 2016-May 2017 and 4,428 people do not have a permanent roof above their heads.”

The event launch follows a recent Manchester Evening News story revealing that “rough sleeping in the city had rocketed 13-fold since 2010.”

In light of these figures, Olly expressed that he didn’t believe students were doing enough.

He said: “most students fail to take any action to address this issue, or support the work of the incredible charities that are vital to live saving work done on the streets of Manchester.”

Ellen Exley, Sleepout coordinator, provides details of the event, stating: “Participants will be involved in a range of activities designed to help them to learn more about homelessness in Manchester and find out about the organisations working to tackle the issue.”

Their is a minumun fundraising target of £60, the “lowest of all RAG’s events” Money raised will be distributed equally amoung three local homeless charities: Manchester Action on Street Health (MASH), Barnabus and The Big Change Fund.

RAG are holding an information session on the 21st of February, 6-6:30pm in SU Room three.

Tickets cost £10 and are available from the Manchester RAG website.

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Science and Tech

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Jacklin Kwan reports on key contributions to science from around the globe

Research at the University of Manchester and the University of Edinburgh have made recent breakthroughs which may alter the way we treat kidney failure and female infertility

Photo: PublicDomainPictures

Patricia Caras Science and TechnologyReporter Recent research carried out at The University of Manchester and The University of Edinburgh has shed new light on how we may develop kidney tissue and grow human eggs to full maturity the need to re-implant the tissue.

The research raises the possibility of personalised kidney transplants and definitive cure for infertility.

University of Manchester scientists, Professor Sue Kimber and Adrian Woolf, have generated human kidney tissue from embryonic stem cells. The research, funded by The Medical Research Council and Kidney Research UK and published in the journal Stem Cell Reports, outlines how kidney glomeruli, tiny structures in the kidney that filter the blood, were generated from stem cells.

The cells were then transplanted into mice, where they filtered the blood and produced a urine-like substance. In future, this technology could be used to produce full organs to provide kidney transplants without the waiting list.

Kidneys are made up of structures, called nephrons, which contain up to 1 million glomeruli that filter the blood to produce a filtrate. Chemicals and water are added to or removed from this fluid depending on the body’s needs, which leads to the production of urine. When the kidneys fail, they can no longer perform important functions like

different cocktails of nutrients, encouraged the eggs to develop from their earliest form to maturity. Of the 48 eggs that reached the penultimate step of the process, nine reached full maturity.

Although various teams have achieved different stages of the process before, this new work is the first time researchers have taken the same human eggs all the way from their earliest stages to the point at which they would be released from the ovaries. Before reaching this level of maturity, eggs cannot be fertilised.

The research could prove useful for girls who have not gone through puberty. At the moment, to preserve their fertility, ovarian tissue is taken before treatment and frozen for later implantation.

“For young women, that is the only option they have to preserve their fertility,” saysProf Evelyn Telfer, co-author of the research from the University of Edinburgh.

But the approach has drawbacks. In the case of reimplanted tissue, “the big worry, and the big risk, is can you put cancer cells back,” says Stuart Lavery, a gynaecologist at Hammersmith Hospital.

Lavery believes this technique could also help women who have passed through puberty, “while these women can have mature eggs collected before treatment, that approach also has problems. With this procedure, you could potentially get thousands or hundreds of eggs.”

The new research, however, cannot be said to have succeeded in providing alternative fertility preservation treatments just yet. The researchers note that the eggs developed faster than they would in the body, while a small cell known as a polar body — ejected in the final stages of the egg’s development when the number of chromosomes is halved — was unusually large, which might suggest abnormal development.

“This latest breakthrough is valuable, but significant further research is now needed to confirm that these eggs are healthy and functioning as they should do,” says Professor Helen Picton, an expert in reproduction and early development from the University of Leeds.

New citizen science project Twitter helps aims to unpick ‘Secrets of understanding of medicine side-effects Happiness’ University of Manchester clinical psychologist, Dr Sara Tai, has started a new collaborative project to unpick what happiness is

Photo: Carmela Nava @ Flickr

Aliya Ismangil Science and Technology Editor The 20 minute online test can be taken by anyone and is a series of questionnaires that delves into the factors that make you happy and what you can do to improve your personal happiness. Dr. Tai is working with Peter Kinderman, a psychology professor at the University of Liverpool, and the BBC programme Tomorrow’s World.

The data from the test will go towards a larger research project that aims to investigate whether our thinking style affects the risk of developing mental health problems. Past research suggests that even small and simple changes can help us feel happier and maintain happiness. This experiment aims to provide personalised tips to do so.

Dr. Tai said: “We know that biological, social, and psychological factors play a role in mental health and wellbeing, but we have little understanding of how these factors interact and lead to specific mental health problems.

“This research will help us to better understand why some people develop difficulties whilst others do not and also enable us to identify where we need to focus our efforts in developing treatments.”

Citizen science is a way for the public to take active roles in conducting scientific research whilst also providing a huge amount of valuable data to researchers. “We need large numbers of people to take part in this study so we have enough data to

answer some complex questions.”

Professor Kinderman, adds: “Mental health is very complicated, with many factors contributing to how we feel. If we want to better understand how these different factors are related, then data from thousands of people is needed.

“By taking part, you will help us to gather data that would be hard to get in other ways that will ultimately help us to improve approaches to mental health in the future. All data is stored securely and anonymously.”

Other examples of citizen science can be found on Zooniverse.org where there is a large variety of research projects to get involved with.

These projects can be anything from classifying distant galaxies, to unearthing the secret life of chimpanzees, or even transcribing Shakespeare’s notes.

“The BBC has run a number of citizen science experiments in the past. But this is the first we’ve attempted in the ‘smartphone’ era. We’re also inviting people to submit data twice, separated by six weeks.”, says Peter Harvey, BBC Producer on the project.

“Gathering two data sets from the same participant, many weeks apart, is of enormous value to scientists. We’re interested to see how many people will complete the second phase, and how effective our reminder methods are at getting people to return.”

You can find out more about the ‘Secrets of Happiness’ test on secretsofhappiness.co.uk.

Research by the University of Manchester of over 20 thousand tweets has shown that patients worry the most about less-serious effects of steroid medecines Sophie Boyd Science and Technology Reporter

The University of Manchester team, led by Professor William Dixon, identified 159,297 tweets mentioning prednisolone, a commonly prescribed steroid used to treat allergies, blood disorders, and skin conditions.

The team used a computer system to identify tweets with the drug name, as well as common side-effects. The computer software also changed lay terms such as “can’t sleep” to the medical term; insomnia. The 159,297 tweets were harvested over a period of 3 years.

20,000 of these tweets mentioned a sideeffect that is attributed to the steroid; with 1,656 stating weight gain, 1,737 about insomnia, and 1,515 reported a bigger appetite. These are side-effects that are commonly recognised and associated with the steroid but are rarely explained to patients when prescribed.

Instead, clinicians focus on more serious sideeffects such as osteoporosis and fractures.

Despite little attention to these ‘less serious’ side-effects by clinicians, this study suggests

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Science and tech news around the world...

Petri dish humans: Breakthroughs in lab grown human tissue cleaning the blood and releasing the hormones that control blood pressure. This can cause symptoms like nausea, fatigue and weakness, and chest pain.

In this study, the scientists generated glomeruli – one of the functional components of a kidney — from human embryonic stem cells grown in laboratory culture dishes with a nutrient broth, known as a culture medium, containing molecules to promote kidney development. These were combined with a gel-like substance, which acted as natural connective tissue, and then injected as a tiny clump under the skin of mice.

After three months, an examination of the tissue revealed that nephrons — which filter waste from blood and produce urine — had formed. The new structures contained most of the constituent parts present in human nephrons.

Tiny human blood vessels, known as capillaries, also developed inside the mice, which nourished the new kidney structures. The team tested the functionality of the new structures with “dextran” — a fluorescent protein which stains the urine-like substance produced when nephrons filter the blood, called glomerular filtrate. The dextran was tracked and detected in the new structures’ tubules, which showed that filtrate was being produced and excreted as urine.

“What is particularly exciting is that the structures are made of human cells which developed an excellent capillary blood supply, becoming linked to the vasculature of the mouse.We have proved beyond any doubt these structures function as kidney cells by filtering blood and producing urine — though we can’t yet say what percentage of function exists,” said Professor Kimber.

However, the scientists noted that the mini-kidneys lacked a large artery, which would severely limit the new organ’s function. Their next aim is to work with surgeons to put in an artery that will bring more blood to the new kidney.

Another major breakthrough in UK biological science this week has seen University of Edinburgh researchers extract and grow human eggs to full maturity without the need to re-implant tissue, a feat which has previously only been accomplished with mouse eggs.

The Researchers took ovarian tissue from 10 women in their late twenties and thirties and, over four steps involving

Science and Tech

that users tend to worry about these side effects more. Therefore social media, such as Twitter, could provide experts with valuable insight into patient concerns with regard to less-discussed medicine side effects. In turn, helping to better doctor and patient discussion of prescriptions.

“Though Insomnia and weight gain were the two most commonly discussed sideeffects, they are not usually highlighted by clinicians when prescribing prednisolone. We believe social media such as Twitter can be used to broaden knowledge about drugs and potential side-effects that patients themselves find troublesome,” says Dr Rikesh Patel, a researcher on the team.

Project lead, Professor Will Dixon, adds: “Our view is that social media sources such as Twitter can be useful because they can illustrate which drug side-effects patients discuss most commonly, even if they are not necessarily the most serious. Social media posts may also give us a future view of how side effects impact on patients’ quality of life.”

This research was recently published in Nature Partner Journals (npj) – Digital Medicine.

Photo: Pexels

European scientists one step closer to predicting solar flares Researchers from CNRS, École Polytechnique, CEA, and INRIA have identified the presence of a ‘magnetic cage’ that confines plasma structures. Their work has featured on the cover of the February 8 issue of Nature magazine, and their article argues that just one phenomenon may underpin all solar flares. Their model tracks the evolution of twisted flux ‘ropes’ in plasma that lash out against a confining magnetic cage, the resistance of which determines the energy of the solar eruption. The research has profound implications in not just astronomy but also nuclear fusion research, which has faced the challenge of containing unstable plasma regimes.

360 million year old fossils in South Africa unveil the first pages of terrestrial life in Gondwana Scientists operating along the Eastern Cape of South Africa have uncovered large quantities of fossils, one of which is a 360 million year old scorpion. This fossil is believed to be the oldest record of Gondwana, an ancient continent made up of the land masses that we now know as South America, Australia, Antarctica, India, and Madagascar. Along with the scorpion, a number of new invertebrates and well-preserved plant fossils have also been discovered and excavated.

People hope that these undocumented life forms will help researchers better understand the development of life in marine coastline environments during the Devonian era (roughly 416 million to 354 million years ago).

3D printing method developed in Tsinghua University is capable of producing embryonic stem cells Researchers from CNRS, École Polytechnique, CEA, and INRIA have identified the presence of a ‘magnetic cage’ that confines plasma structures. Their work has featured on the cover of the February 8 issue of Nature magazine, and their article argues that just one phenomenon may underpin all solar flares. Their model tracks the evolution of twisted flux ‘ropes’ in plasma that lash out against a confining magnetic cage, the resistance of which determines the energy of the solar eruption. The research has profound implications in not just astronomy but also nuclear fusion research, which has faced the challenge of containing unstable plasma regimes.

Researchers make a breakthrough in water filtration in Monash University Research taking place in Monash University has made significant advances in the development of new metal organic frameworks (MOFs). With unique transport properties, these MOFs have the largest internal surface area of any known substance and are capable of capturing, storing, and releasing chemical impurities in drinking water. Currently, 2 billion people live without access to clean drinking water. Reverse osmosis membranes are responsible for the majority of latestage water treatment but need large quantities of energy to maintain. With this breakthrough, researchers hope that the ultrafast selective transport properties of MOFs can open up new avenues in water filtration.

Scientists lobby the UN to protect Chile’s night skies as a World Heritage Site Scientists from the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) have attempted to lobby the UN to protect Chile’s skies from threats such as light pollution by classifying important observatories as World Heritage Sites.

Chile currently has 50% of the world’s observational capacity, and by 2020, it is projected to have 70%. The uniquely dry and clean atmospheres of its more rural, high-altitude areas give unparalleled image quality. Currently, over 15 international telescopes are located in Chile including the E-ELT, Very Large Telescope, and the APEX Observatory.

Astronomy not only forms an integral part of Chile’s scientific landscape, but also has deep and profound roots in its culture and history.

Gender pay gap among Uber drivers Drivers’ experience on the platform, preferences of where and when to work, and driving speed account for difference in pay Michael Bahrami-Hessari Science and Technology Reporter In a recent paper by economists from Stanford University’s National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), University of Chicago and Uber Technologies revealed that male chauffeurs of the ridesharing app earn seven per cent more than female drivers.

Uber is part of the growing labour market dubbed the “gig economy” that offers flexible work hours, transparent compensation, and low barriers of entry. This last factor has led to Uber drivers comprising one per cent of the US workforce, with 27.3 per cent female membership.

The gender pay gap seen in the study is consistent with ones observed in more homogenous, ‘traditional’ jobs like pharmacists, lawyers, and MBAs. This finding is especially striking considering the fact that Uber fares are determined by a gender-blind computer algorithm.

The algorithm considers factors like time of day and demand for rides in certain areas. Data collected from 1.9 million Uber partners (drivers)

in the USA during the period January 2015 to March 2017 found that the Surprisingly, male drivers’ speed was based merely on preference, as pay discrepancy could be attributed to three factors: experience on the surveyed drivers seemed “insensitive to the incentive of driving faster”. platform, preferences of where and when to work, and driving speed.

Interestingly, passengers did not mind who drove them as there was no Nearly one third of the gap is explained by the number of hours spent significant difference between ratings of male and female drivers. driving. On average, male drivers spent 18 hours a week driving versus 15 hours for females. Naturally, more hours spent working equates to more money earned. In addition, more time driving helps increase familiarity with the intricacies of the carpooling app. This leads to knowing when and where to drive in order that fare “surges” are maximised, and when to strategically accept or cancel a trip.

Time and experience are important as drivers with more than 2,500 completed trips earn 14 per cent more per hour than drivers who have completed only a hundred. Unfortunately, women tend to leave Uber before such experience is gained, with six month attrition rates at 76.5 per cent, versus 65 per cent in men.

Finally, nearly half of the salary difference is credited to driving speed: faster cars get more trips per hour. On average, according to the study, males drive at 19.5 miles per hour versus 18.8 mph for females.

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0161 Festival: an interview with the founder of Manchester’s anti-fascist festival Felix Hanif-Banks sits down with Joe, the founder of Manchester’s 0161 Festival, an antifascist cultural festival, approaching it’s 5th anniversary, that seeks to unite communities and break down barriers Felix Hanif-Banks Contributor

communities and help people create new things, create new projects whether that’s art or music, to combat injustice and to move forward,

This week I sat down with Joe, the main organiser and founder of 0161 Festival, an anti-fascist and anti-racist music and cultural festival that is celebrating its 5th anniversary this June. We discussed the birth of the festival, how it’s changed over its lifetime, and what we can expect in the future.

Joe was originally the main organiser for the event. “We started out five years ago now, doing benefit gigs throughout Manchester and then we decided to do the whole thing, a weekend-wide one. Now it’s got bigger there’s a committee of us just organising.”

Joe tells me that the aims and objectives set out for the festival were to “combat injustices as well as racism, fascism and xenophobia in various guises, as well as uniting divided communities.”

There is still more to come though, and Joe believes that the festival has far more to offer in terms of development. “We wouldn’t want to put a limit on ourselves- the aim is just to keep going, encompass as many things as possible. We’ve has a really good past couple of years where a lot of organisations and groups have come to us and been like ‘Yo I wanna do this and do this,’ rather than us all working in our own little circles, we should encompass them all into a bigger circle, and all work together. We want to get our own space, to get our own venues that are run by the people rather than companies or corporations, and to do that across Manchester.”

The 0161 Festival website talks a lot about combatting the ‘cliquey’ nature of anti-fascist events. I was interested in whether Joe believes the festival has been successful in doing this, as well as making a more inclusive event.

“I would hope so, I’d like to think that we have. This year we have two hip hop and drum and bass after parties, and also a night that’s doing old school and reggae and acoustic nights and a lot like that. Being

“regardless of the music you’re into we’re all united under the anti-racist banner”

“It’s about knocking down walls and divisions between cultures and uniting the people”

“We organise groups and events to bring people together and to raise money for antifascist organisations throughout Europe, community organisations, both in the UK and abroad, and specifically over the past couple of years, we’ve tried to engage overall communities and spread what we’re doing, regardless of the music you’re into; whether you like hip hop or drum n bass, punk, hard-core, whatever, then we’re all united under the anti-racist banner and to then further that, to do theatre, sports, poetry, art, all sorts of stuff under the banner of the 0161 Festival.”

I was interested in what specific causes had been supported with the money raised from the festival so far.

“Over the years, we’ve made money for the anti- fascist groups in Manchester, the first couple of years we made a loss, it’s how things work, starting a festival it was something that we dealt with, and what was more important to us than losing money over the last couple of years was to ensure that we had the stepping stones to grow and empower more people.”

“There was a squat that was burned down that we raised some money for, also our friends in Poland and Russia that we gave money to, along with an anti-fascist football club in Belarus, a country where it’s very difficult to be left wing. And the point is now for us to go forward to not only raise money for groups but for us to go into

work more on community action, involving more local kids and encompassing more sport and art, so people think of 0161 Festival as a ‘cultural festival’ rather than just a music festival, where it runs maybe seven or ten days a year but throughout the year, we’re still doing things and the name of 0161 Festival is there.”

Photo: 0161 Festival creating a more free culture for everyone involved.”

Over the last five years the festival has grown considerably. “The first couple of years we had about 300 people turning up which was great, but not too many people are into punk or hardcore music, or the culture surrounding lots of anti-fascist events.”

Joe felt that the festival was essentially just “preaching to the converted”, which a lot of left-wing politics is, “so we realised we needed to attract people with different views, to bring people together and demonstrate how we’re all similar. We’ve realised we need to

anti-fascist should not be weird or out there. It should be a general point of view, and we’re trying to keep the same people involved as well as bringing in young people. I was flyering the other day, and gave one to a couple lads and they were like ‘Woah I’ve never heard of it before’, you can do that to two kids who look completely different but believe in the same thing and get a positive reaction.”

The next big aim for Joe is to bring the festival to a student audience.

“It shouldn’t be a closed, cliquey thing” he says, “being antifascist is a normal thing to be. If you look at Germany Spain and Italy, they have huge mass movements and counter-cultures, especially with young people. Here it’s not as big and it’s about knocking down those walls and divisions between cultures and uniting the people.”

You can buy tickets for the upcoming 0161 Festival, as well as find out more about the lineup and the festival in general, on their website 0161festival.com

Welcoming Chinese New Year

A flash mob marked the beginning of Chinese new year celebrations Lin Ji Contributor With January exams over and the second semester well underway, memories of singing Auld Lang Syne, committing to Dry January, and welcoming in 2018 couldn’t seem further away.

Yet New Year celebrations are far from over as Chinese students around the city prepare to welcome in the year of the penultimate Chinese zodiac - the year of the dog.

While we may be familiar with some of the traditional ways in which our Chinese community celebrates their most important festival, this year has seen a special effort from the University’s Manchester Chinese Business Society (MCBS) in collaboration with Fuse TV to send a warm new year’s greeting to our Chinese community in the form of a flash mob. The flash mob (Saturday 10th February) was broadly based on traditional Chinese culture but was also able to incorporate a modern twist and reflected an innovative way to bring Chinese New Year celebrations to the heart of the city.

Passing through Albert Square on Saturday afternoon, one would have heard the elegant sounds of the Chinese pipa and erhu

Photo: The Manchester Chinese Business Society

juxtaposed with Jay Chou’s new single and been enchanted by traditional Chinese dancing followed by a modern street dancing performance. The flash mob culminated with over sixty dancers from the University, the MCBS, and the Manchester Chinese Primary School dancing together, representing international friendship and a desire to deepen cultural understanding between China and the UK. The flash mob even made it to Manchester Airport where passengers checking-in for flights to Beijing received an unexpected performance.

Despite Saturday’s less than ideal weather conditions, the flash mob was thoroughly enjoyed by many passers-by who were able to experience such a diverse cultural performance. Eddy Newman, Lord Mayor of Manchester, found the performance to be particularly enjoyable and thanked MCBS and Fuse TV for organising the event.

Saturday’s flash mob represents part of a broader project by the MCBS and Fuse TV to release a Chinese New Year video wishing everyone a happy new year. Even if you missed it, you can catch the video on MCBS and Fuse TV’s social media accounts, CCTV, and it will even be shown on the Learning Common’s huge screen - so keep an eye out!

Stand for freedom

Ruth Squires speaks to the UoM students who stood for 24 hours as a protest against modern day slavery Ruth Squires Contributor Perhaps slavery is not an issue that many of us consider to be ‘current’, and many are probably unaware of the extent of the problem. At this moment, however, there are more than 40 million people trapped in slavery.

A group of University of Manchester students stood for 24 hours to raise awareness for modern slavery — an invisible problem that organisers feel we need to make visible again. The event took place from 12am on Friday the 9th to 12 am on Saturday the 10th of February outside St. Peter’s Chaplaincy on Oxford Road.

WRITE FOR US The Mancunion Features Contributors Team 2017/18 Email: features@mancunion.com Meeting time: Mondays 6pm

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Photo: Phil Grant

I went along to the event to talk to the students and organisers there about what the event was and why they were doing it. Elisha Bates, one of the key organisers, explained what drove her to get involve She explained: “I am really passionate about anti-human trafficking,

we wanted to do something that lots of different people could do lots of different things to be involved and not just one event. We decided to do an event that was in public so we could get as many people involved as possible.”

We then went on to discuss why, as students, we should be concerned with modern-day slavery. She explained the extent of the problem. There are 40.3 million people still in slavery, that’s 16 times the population of Manchester. Hearing it like that makes you realise just how many people are suffering and that it seems like you are not able to do anything about it.

But many of our actions have an impact, such as not buying Fairtrade chocolate, or buying from clothing brands that have unethical sourcing of their workers.

Elisha’s advice to students for how they can shop more ethically to address the issue of modern slavery is: “Where possible, buy clothes from charity shops or use second-hand clothing, there are also some great ethical clothing brands, secondly do the research and know which brands are more ethical than others. You should just do the best you can and make decisions that even if can’t be perfectly ethical but still choosing brands that are making movements that way.”

Elisha explained to me how the Stand For Freedom event came out of an organisation called Just Love Manchester, a Christian student society empowering people to pursue social justice.

Abi Alsop, who started Just Love Manchester, explains that she felt moved to act because of the gap she saw that exists between what, as a Christian, her faith tells her to do, in terms of loving our neighbour and what people are doing.

At this point, the girls had been standing for 9 and a half hours. I wanted to know how they felt it was going so far. They both explained that they have had over 50 students pledge to change something about their lifestyle to make it more ethical and that the footfall interest had been amazing. At this point, everyone was very cold and even I was losing feeling in my toes.

As well as the organisers, there was a range of different students standing at the event. I was really touched by the warm sense of community and compassion at this event.

Amy Lockhett, a first year PPE student, explained why she felt she had to attend: “Modern slavery impacts us all and we have a duty to stand against it.”

Paul Treddaway, a first-year history and politics students, also felt compelled to act, saying, “we have such power as a consumer in the modern world and therefore a chance to make a difference.”

The team completed the 24 hours despite the freezing cold Manchester weather. The event, however, is just the start of tackling

this problem.

If this is something you think you might want to contribute to, here

Photo: Phil Grant are some top tips from the Stand For Freedom team to live a more ethically conscious life: Research what you buy and know your brands: so many people are just unaware of the ethical status of the brand they are using and it only takes a few easy changes to have a big impact.

Evaluate the things you really need and work out what you don’t.

Buy Fairtrade products. Items such as chocolate and coffee can easily be brought Fairtrade.

One of the biggest contributors to modern slavery is fast fashion, so the next tip is avoiding this.

Lastly, challenge yourself! — push yourself to make a change in your lifestyle in the ways described above.

Opinion

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Angela Merkel: Die Überlebende (The Survivor)

How the Queen of Europe rose to her throne

Photo: Aleph @ Wikimedia Commons

Despite the stories being flung around by the media and analysts, Angela Merkel, the ‘Queen of Europe’, still has a vast amount of both power and influence. Angela Merkel has been German Chancellor since 2005, and the leader of her Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union centre-right alliance since 2000.

Merkel’s tenure in power has been marked by her impressive ability to out-manoeuvre every single one of her rivals and tackle every crisis thrown her way. From my standpoint, what many analysts seem to forget is the amount of power Merkel still wields over both her own political party, government, and Europe as a

whole. As a result of this, she is unlikely to be going anywhere anytime soon.

When Angela Merkel appeared on the German political scenes shortly after re-unification, she was grossly underestimated by almost everyone, including by her former mentor and the thenGerman chancellor, Helmut Kohl. With a degree in physics and a PhD in quantum chemistry, Merkel is without a doubt intelligent and analytical. During her time in Kohl’s cabinet she watched, observed, and learned. She tolerated the male arrogance of politics and after years, when the CDU and CSU where dragged into a corruption scandal, she seized the opportunity

and stuck a dagger in Kohl’s back, publicly calling on him to resign and called for a new re-branding of the party in a newspaper article. This was an act he would never forgive her for. This was the first hint of Merkel’s ruthless skills of political operator.

She outwitted his closest ally and chosen successor, Wolfgang Schäuble, after he too was implicated in the scandal and was forced to stand down as the CDU party leader, a role she assumed after him. She even allowed another candidate from her party, Edmund Stoiber, to run for the chancellorship, and when he lost to Gerhard Schröder, her gamble had paid off and she was in control of her party and the position of leadership within that party. She later defeated Schröder in the 2005 elections for the Bundestag by exposing his arrogance and showing her clam style of politics after he publicly tried to humiliate her in a live TV debate, an act that proved unpopular with German voters.

Merkel’s survivability has been shaped by her ability to plan and think long-term and her nonideological approach to politics. We see this in her handling of the Eurozone crises and her decision to close all of Germany’s nuclear power stations.

Her calm, polite, and consensus-grounded style of politics have proved popular amongst voters and she still receives broad public support within Germany, much to her critic’s disappointment. It is clear to say that the heyday of Merkel’s career is past however, she is still in complete control of the German political landscape and political party landscape. That is the result of her ability, to outplay and wit her rivals on all fronts.

Merkel’s party’s loss of eight per cent of the vote and the emergence of the hard-right AFD in the 2017 German elections was not a uniquely German phenomenon. In most European nations, populist parties have gained influence and considerable shares of the vote in recent elections. Merkel’s decision to take in over one million refugees certainly played an important role in the losses suffered by the party.

Carillion’s dirty papers

Parliament voted to release the government’s risk assessments of Carillion… and they are devastating

The recently published documents detailing the financial history of the construction firm Carillion are a stark reminder of the danger of political hebetude. The evidence is conclusively damning; Carillion was teetering on the edge of financial disaster, but politicians and regulatory bodies blindly continued to follow the well-trodden path. They were awarded public service contracts rather than upset a precarious status quo.

Carillion had one of the largest pension schemes in the FTSE top 350 companies, and were responsible for countless government projects, including part of the HS2 construction, the provision of meals in schools and hospitals, and the maintenance 50 prisons.

Not to mention the number of other private ventures they were involved in, including the development of Manchester University’s Fallowfield Campus. Their collapse has put thousands of jobs and retirement plans in the lurch, but in the bubble of neo-liberal government, private finance initiatives and outsourcing continue to be the frontmen of a risk-free economy.

Now that this illusion is crumbling, predictably everyone is looking for someone to blame: some individual to take the wrap for this mess so that it was a failure of one cog in an otherwise perfect system rather than an inevitable breakdown of a rusty engine.

MPs have accused the Carillion directors of being “delusional” and “asleep at the wheel”, accusations that are not to be denied, but whilst their behaviour was irresponsible, it is beyond rich for those who continued to put their faith in this confused company to criticise them for lethargy.

Meanwhile, Carillion has blamed delayed payments from Qatari contracts as contributing to their financial strife — claims which have

been strongly refuted by those they have been levied against. This leaves a slightly sour taste in the mouth when the supposedly strangled company continued to pay their Chief Executive a £660,000 salary, leaving the pensions of the most junior employees in the danger zone.

Carillion’s behaviour is strongly reminiscent of a teenager attempting to budget their first pay check in the face of a weekend home alone, and it’s an established fact that shifting the blame for an illicit house party doesn’t tend to sit well with the homeowners.

The Tories tried to dodge the blame from the beginning, originally protesting the release of the Carillion papers, feigning complete innocence as just one of many Carillion customers. And it is no wonder that they didn’t want the evidence in public hands, their negligence is obvious. For instance, the HS2 contracts were awarded to Carillion without so much as a face-to-face meeting between representatives from the company and anyone from government. It was taken for granted that the Carillion mammoth would keep lumbering on.

When people’s futures are at risk, this blame game is childish, and so beyond this point it’s almost laughable. Carillion messed up, companies do all the time, but that they remained even in consideration for government contracts is shocking and betrays the true lack of care for ordinary jobs within high politics.

It displays the complete rejection of accountability that persists in this government.

They would much rather hide their dodgy behaviour behind the public’s ignorance no matter the consequences for the majority population who may have lost their pensions, or whose local public services will now be

Jake Dunn Opinion Contributor However, like with every decision she makes, she was thinking for the long-term future of Europe and Germany’s economy, which seems to benefit from refugee workers now in the country.

The very fact her country absorbed one million extra people and she is still in power is in itself astonishing, it too is a sign of how much control she actually has over the German political landscape.

Her out-manoeuvring of her rivals has allowed her to dominate her party for 18 years without any major rival and even to this day there is no clear successor to Merkel. This sends a clear message to her rivals in all German parties: Merkel will be the one who decides when she resigns and who will succeed her.

The formation of her fourth government with the Social Democrats is again an example of her political skill as she has almost blackmailed the SPD while making the deal too attractive to refuse. The SPD itself also slumped in the polls with Merkel’s CDU/CSU still ahead by a wide margin, meaning that they would be the ones to suffer if a new election was called if their members were to refuse to approve the deal.

However, Merkel has given the SPD a very good deal. If the deal is approved by their members, the party will gain control of the finance, foreign, and justice ministries therefore giving it vast amounts of influence in Germany’s domestic and foreign policies for the next three years. For many in the SPD leadership and membership, propping up Merkel is a price worth paying if they can implement their own policies like Eurozone reform and stricter labour laws for workers.

Merkel’s personal authority over the governance of Germany is not as strong as it once was, but her personal domination over her own political party and the SPD, her closest rivals, means that the ‘Queen of Europe’ is not going to be de-throned anytime soon. Merkel’s ability to survive crises is simply staggering and after 13 years in power, she still has plenty of cards to play.

Sophie Marriott Opinion Contributor

Opinion 11

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Where’s my (oil) money?

A look at what Brits can learn from the Norwegians and their $1 Trillion sovereign wealth fund Sahib Patel Opinion Contributor 23rd December 1963, this is an important date in Norway’s economic history. Norway struck gold of the hydrocarbon kind; Philips Petroleum discovered one of the largest offshore oil fields in history. This was the date that Norway’s success story started in earnest.

In 1996, the Norwegian government decided to launch a sovereign wealth fund, which was mainly funded by oil taxes and state control of the oil revenues. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is currently valued at over $1T, a 13-fold increase since 2002.

But why would any government want to have its own fund and invest taxpayers’ money in the stock market and in bonds and real estate? The answer is less complex than one might think: to ensure Norway’s massive oil resources — expected to last another 50 years — guarantee the prosperity of future generations. The returns from the wealth fund to pay for pensions and other public services.

Norway is not the only nation with a sovereign wealth fund. The UAE, Kuwait, Singapore, have their own large sovereign wealth funds to protect, invest, and grow their national investments — China has two! Question is, where is the UK in this sovereign wealth league? Surely, we have a few oil resources in Nicola Sturgeon’s backyard. Last I checked, since 1968, the UK has netted over £250B

Francesca McClimont Opinion Contributor

in oil and gas revenues.

In the age of rising council taxes, NHS struggles, housing challenges, and other public service cuts, surely the bright minds on both sides of the political spectrum have thought of economic policies that go beyond taxing corporates and the rich. Surely, both Labour and the Tories have looked at the Norwegians’ success and thought of leveraging London city’s collective financial acumen to invest the 2017-18 oil and gas revenues of £700M — with some more to come — with a view to the long term.

Looking to the rankings, however, Team GB is nowhere to be seen.

We have had £250B of oil revenues, some additional £70B of revenues from privatisation proceeds since 1979, and the £22B cash cow that was 3G mobile phone licensing auction under Gordon Brown – some £342B in total. So, next time you hear about austerity, the widening deficit, NHS problems, and council tax hikes, ask yourself two questions. Firstly, where has over £342B worth of UK revenue gone? And secondly, is it too late for the UK to launch a sovereign wealth fund that addresses the nation’s long-term problems such as pension and NHS funding?

So, where did all this money actually go?

Effectively, UK’s £342B was distributed to taxpayers

streams, and big men in big office blocks have become the trusted stalwarts of our society.

This is at the heart of the problem, privatisation is intended to mitigate risk by putting it in the laps of private companies which can cope with it. The big secret is though, that despite all the capitalist bravado about entrepreneurship and business bravery, nobody actually wants to accept this uncertainty. The leap of faith is all very starry-eyed on paper until it’s your own name on the loan. So, liability gets parcelled up and passed around until it can be left on the doorstep of someone completely unaware of what they’re taking on. In this case, it was the workers whose pensions are floating in the ether of the bailout. Carillion is the cautionary tale of the hubris of an economy with its roots in fairy-tale ideas of big business.

to spend and save the way they want. Having said that, the public sector’s net investment is lower as a percentage of GDP today than it was in 197879. Both the Labour and Tory governments used this cash extra cash to keep non-oil taxes “lower than would otherwise have been possible without rising debt levels or sharp cuts in public spending relative to GDP”.

This is the frustrating part. The UK government could have used £342B in the 80s to start a longterm sovereign wealth fund. If managed well (like Norway), this fund would be valued similar to Norway’s at about $1T in today’s money. Norway draws about 3 to 4% of its fund to pay for public services every year in the budget, about $26B – what would Theresa May give for this luxury?

Is it too late for the UK to jump in the sovereign

wealth management? The short answer, in my view, is no. The UK has some of the finest investment experts and civil servants, that would doubtlessly be capable of managing a Great British Sovereign Fund that is transparent, responsible, and driven to deliver for the next 100 years of public services in the UK. In a backdrop of Brexit, mounting pension bills, a housing crisis, and a paralyzed NHS, British politicians are often blamed for not having ‘enough imagination’ to drive the UK economy forward.

Moreover, with North Sea oil resources depleting faster than ever, and the post-Brexit outlook looking uncertain at best, Britain requires bold leadership with new ideas. A sovereign wealth fund may just be the answer.

Brexit: not my vote “Brexit is done, just accept it,” they say. A year and a half on, remainers still find this very hard to do.

Photo: Ilovetheeu @ Wikimedia Commons

Photo: Terry Robinson @geograph.org

struggling to continue to operate. Whilst they are busy battling with semantics, they open the window for the public to see just how unconcerned the right is with reality.

There’s also potentially going to be damage done to a number of smaller business and subcontractors which interacted with Carillion, as well as the individuals they directly employed. The process of contracting out gives giant companies the opportunity of accepting responsibility for a massive variety projects, most of which they have no real expertise for.

So, they outsource them to smaller firms and make a tidy profit along the way.

These businesses have now been left in the lurch, because they put their trust in the sheer titanic-like (all connotations intended) size and scale of Carillion. Big business, big revenue

Photo: Robyn Lee @ Flickr

The referendum result for Brexit may have taken place over a year and a half ago, but remainers still feel the bitter pang of rejection as if it were yesterday. This is true for students in particular where the remain-to-leave ratio was found to be six-to-one.

Leaving the EU will massively affect educational institutions, which fear they will lose the 15 per cent of the funding they receive from the EU as well as academics being less inclined to come to the UK due to visa issues.

These consequences were felt closer to home when the University of Manchester announced in 2017 that it would be making 171 members of staff redundant across all disciplines.

Yet it was the School of Arts, Languages, and Cultures (SALC) that was being hit the hardest — this was definitely the impression I got when speaking to both my French and English lecturers.

The anger with this decision prompted a strike on the 23rd and 24th of October. Staff dissatisfaction was only intensified by the financial stability and prosperity of the University at the time.

Consequently, management seemed to be using Brexit as an excuse to make cuts that would inevitably cause long-term damage to many departments.

SALC needs protection from the Brexit storm and the only umbrella that can protect it — the University — is refusing to open itself to them.

Speaking to a Manchester University Business Management student from France regarding her Brexit concerns, she explained that “prices and

Calling for opinion section contributors

the employment sector will suffer as a result of a growing number of international companies leaving the UK due to new employment regulations.

“They fear these new Brexit-friendly rules will damage their business and their image.”

This will leave many Brits without jobs. Such unemployment will be particularly damaging when coupled with prices of imported goods rising due to Brexit.

The effects of this surge in prices will be felt the most by low-income households and those who consider themselves working class of which 70 per cent of the former and 59 per cent of the latter voted leave according to a NatCen social research paper.

Brexit seems all the more astonishing when taking a look back at what a lack of European unity resulted in the twentieth century.

Two world wars, millions of people killed, and years of economic and infrastructural damage are within the memory of our grandparents. Yet 64 per cent of over-65s voted leave even though they will not live to see the consequences of their vote.

Pro-EU students and young people are left with years of instability lying ahead of them and will suffer the consequences educationally and financially as they seek jobs after graduation.

Our best hope is to put pressure on the government — to the best of our ability — to implement post-EU legislations that will benefit future generations and not merely their own political agenda.

Do you have an opinion you want to share with the Manchester student community? The Mancunion is looking for regular contributors for its weekly paper editiom and for its day-to-day updates on its website!

From thought-provoking insights into contemporary feminism to rants about movies, we want hear what you have to say.

Simply come to our weekly opinion section meetings on Monday in the Student Union, or message our editor Jacklin Kwan about your interest in writing.

Great for your CV, and a platform for your ideas, we at the Mancunion will be waiting for your contributions!

Email us at : opinion@mancunion.com

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Album Review: Brian Fallon

Photo: Album Artwork

The Gaslight Anthem frontman delivers stunning second solo effort to further his impressive back catalogue, says Jack Sadler Brian Fallon’s second album sees him go further in marking a strong identity as a solo artist, and it showcases the very best of his song writing capabilities. Following The Gaslight Anthem’s hiatus, 2016’s Painkillers showed some truly great glimpses of how well Fallon could suit this role. But, understandably with the split from his band happening so soon before, there were elements of an attempt to distance himself from Gaslight’s much-criticised last album, Get Hurt (2014).

As a huge fan of all Brian Fallon’s work, I would say we have now entered the ideal world of a superb solo album alongside the recent news of the reformation of The Gaslight Anthem to celebrate their seminal sophomore record The ’59 Sound (2008). It is very much to Fallon’s credit that this record fills me with just as much, if not more, excitement than the latter of these two things.

Sleepwalkers opens with intent using two songs that Fallon released as singles in the build up to the album. ‘If Your Prayers Don’t Get to Heaven’ sounds like it should be played alongside a train journey through the mid-west, and this celebratory Ameri-

can sound continues throughout and is done to the very highest level.

‘Forget Me Not’ sees a common Fallon trait of singing to a girl (Stacey, in this instance, not Maria!), but also showcases one of many undeniable choruses the album has to offer. Moreover, it has the knack of so many of his songs that let you envisage your own interpretation of what he is saying. This also goes hand in hand with the classic American storytelling within song that he manages to achieve, that to this day can only really be rivalled by The Menzingers.

Brian Fallon manages to romanticise elements of the past, in a way that still sounds brilliantly relevant, and not dated in the way that nostalgia often can. In addition to this, Fallon gives tributes to his favourite artists, most notably in a highlight of the album, Etta James, with arguably his strongest vocal performance to date in ode to the late star.

The following track, ‘Her Majesty’s Service’ also sees Fallon seemingly pay homage to Bob Dylan and/or The Rolling Stones by referring to himself as a “rolling stone,” reaffirming his character as someone who is never afraid to cite his influences in his songs.

Live Review: Franz Ferdinand 13th February 2018, The Albert Hall It’s been five years since Franz Ferdinand dropped an album (not including that weird detour with Sparks), and it seems that this tour heralds a fresh start for the band. New songs, new look, new sounds. The night in Manchester was theirs for the taking, and boy did they hit a home run. After a brief but gratifying warmup by Albert Hammond Jr, it began.

From the moment they set foot onstage, they commanded the evening, Alex Kapranos looking more Malfoy than man, his robotic star jumps seemingly weightless, his vocals smooth, and growling restlessly atop the band’s danceable angular sound. Franz Ferdinand has a quant, understated swagger only Brit bands can truly pull off. Nothing’s ever too serious, but the performance

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

is seriously tight.

There are some great moments in the set, and not just great songs, though there were plenty. A fun twist on the normally dull ‘introduce each member

This song in fact lends itself as a tribute to Britain in general, aligning with Fallon’s previously professed love of bands like The Clash and The Smiths.

The album ends fittingly, with Watson encompassing a romantic letter to London and a fear of being alone wrapped by a contagious hook that are omnipresent throughout Sleepwalkers. ‘See You On The Other Side’ slows down with a tale of the ending of life, putting an end to an album that goes against any possible negative pre-conceptions about former band members going solo.

Sleepwalkers is the best album Brian Fallon has put his name to in some time, and it showcases his established song writing and storytelling, as well as pushing himself to new sounds he may not have been able to experiment with in the realms of The Gaslight Anthem. He brings this album on a touring cycle at the end of this month, and if he translates this form to the stage we can expect one hell of a performance to rival Gaslight’s shows this summer.

8/10

Franz Ferdinand show no signs of slowing down in a careerspanning, electrifying live show says Jay Plent of the band and they take a solo’ trope, for example.

Kapranos built up the reveal of the names (which given the two new members, was helpful) to a silly degree, “I KNOW YOU WANT TO KNOW THE NAME…” Charming.

Furthermore, in the final, explosive build up for ‘This Fire’, everyone was made (after some coaxing) to crouch, then leap upon the song’s re-entry. Not a new idea by any means, but something that both showcased the power of Kapranos’ front manship, and looked crazy in a venue the size of the Albert Hall.

Speaking of songs, the setlist for the night was any fan’s dream blend of old and new. Classics like ‘Take Me Out’, ‘Do You Want To’ and ‘Jacqueline’ was of course, a riot, but so was their more recent work.

Songs like ‘Ulysses’, ‘Love Illumination’ and ‘Always Ascending’ were just as ‘super fantastische’ as the

rest. Franz has always been the masters of tight danceable hits covering all emotional ranges.

They’re one of the few bands from that early 2000s period that seem to love all eras of their music equally, and the confidence in the material is rightly earned. Throughout the performance, there’s not a bum note, not a lull that wasn’t needed for a recovery, and not a second that they didn’t stop being an absolutely stunning band to watch.

Franz Ferdinand has said in past interviews that they wanted to write music that would make people dance. Over a decade on, through various phases and experiments, they are still doing exactly that and doing better than any other band on the market. They sound just as vital and exciting as they ever have, maybe even more so. See them play live with haste, Franz Ferdinand are the absolute gold standard for a good time.

Preview: Rex Orange County Review: DMA’s - ‘In The Air’

One of the hottest British artists of 2017 stops by Gorilla on his first headline tour, writes Tobias Soar

‘In The Air’ is a beautifully tranquil release amid DMA’S’ growing hype, writes Lucy Stockdale

Surrey-born Alex O’Connor’s lo-fi, scratchy in the ever-growing pool of mediocre post-pop guitar soul borrows elements, old and new, artists of our current time. from Stevie Wonder, Frank Ocean, Mac I had the pleasure of seeing Rex open for Demarco, Thundercat, King Krule, BadBadNotGood back in November at Photo: Purple PR KAYTRANADA, and Toro y Moi, the O2 Ritz. When purchasing my to name a few, while still holding tickets, I was just as excited for him its own character. At 19, Rex as I was of the main act, and Rex Orange County’s already really delivered. He’s slightly made an astounding start in awkward and a bit shy but those the industry, most recently traits make him all the more collaborating with Tyler, charismatic and, ultimately, The Creator on his criticallyalmost hypnotic with a special acclaimed 2017 Flower Boy stage presence that few artists can album. achieve.

If I had to put into words what Due to high demand, the venue Alex’s music feels like, I’d say this: for his Manchester gig on the 24th of it’s the sound of the thoughts of that February has been upgraded from the fresh, novel teen love racing through your Deaf Institute to Gorilla. This means that more teenage brain while as you stand in the corner tickets will be available on the door, and I highly of the house party, illegally drinking some pissrecommend you go and see Rex perform live. poor beer. The slightly upbeat rhythms of his 2018 will bring big things for him and by being songs are contrasted by his almost melancholic at this show you’ll be able to say “I discovered voice, leading to a unique sound that stands out Rex before he got big.”

No introduction shall soon be required for DMA’S, an alternative rock trio from Sydney, who are rapidly establishing themselves in the British music scene. With a sound often likened to Britpop and some of Manchester’s most renowned bands like Oasis, their growing popularity is hardly surprising. Following a string of successful and sold out Academy and club gigs last year, DMA’S have their second album in the bag. For Now is due for release 27th April.

In the meantime, the album’s second single, ‘In The Air’, dropped on 12th February. The boys have delivered once again. A song about an uncertain relationship perhaps is not what you want to hear around Valentine’s Day, but Tommy O’Dell’s powerful yet soft vocals on the chilled-out, melodic track are impossible not to fall in love with. The track’s stripped back sound takes a break from their more lively and guitar-based singles such as ‘Dawning’ – For Now’s first release – which is perhaps a little

more up your street if you like it turned up to 11.

Their latest releases prove that DMA’S are not just another rock band, but a competent group of musicians capable of producing a variety of different sounds and vibes. Guitarist Johnny Took claims there is ‘more synth stuff going on’ in their upcoming album, with guitar-based bangers still to be expected. This should leave no room for boredom with fans, as well as providing an appeal to a wider audience, particularly as The Presets’ Kim Moyes is the producer on the album.

‘In The Air’ will undoubtedly raise lighters when played live; who doesn’t love a mushy gig moment? The emphasis however on the moment, as the majority of DMA’S’ sets are loud, lively and exactly what you would expect from great upcoming rock stars (who charmingly play in their trackies, I must add). With this being said, DMA’S are playing Liverpool’s Sound City festival this May, so you can experience the magic for yourself.

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Absolutely smashing it this year, Dua He has a track record of winning 1 in Lipa has received 5 nominations! every 3 BRITs, so he’s odds on to win at least one...

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Top 5 - BRIT Nominees With the BRITS 2018 round the corner, Imogen Doyle runs us through the top nominees...

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Nominated for British Breakthrough Act, Mastercard Album of the Year and British Single

Having won 2 BRITs last year and receiving 3 nominations in 2018, will he bag another?

Music 13

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Calvin Harris, Clean Bandit, Jonas Blue, Liam Payne, Little Mix, Loyle Carner and Stormzy all have 2

Live Review: Ratboy Rat Boy is nothing short of unusual. The 21-year-old, who goes by the name Jordan Cardy from Essex is an eccentric individual, who has almost been thrown into the deep end of fame. The group started making music back in 2014, to winning NME’s best new artist in 2016 to even having track ‘Knock Knock’ was even sampled on Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Lust’ in his 2017 album Damn.

His wild past and eccentric personality really shone through to his performance on the 9th February at Manchester Academy.

Bounding onto the stage, the group were greeted by thousands of young teens flinging their drinks and bucket hats across the room.

Rat Boy, who at one point in the first three songs had to restart due to some technical difficulties, had got themselves off to a rocky start, but Cardy didn’t let this phase him and carried on with a laugh and smile.

The band bounced from earlier more famous tracks such as ‘Sign On’ and ‘ Fake ID’ to more of his most recent work from albums such as Skum and Civil Disorder which was recently released a few weeks ago.

Whilst it is mentioned in literally every re-

Rat Boy really knows how to drum up an audience...but did he really take the cheese?

Music Editor , Hannah Brierley reviews

view about the band, there is an uncanny but undeniable resemblance to that of Jamie T. Musically, the following indie jingles with

Photo: Hannah Brierley @ The Mancunion

twinges of hip-hop re-occurred consistently through the tracks, combined with a familiar singing/rapping delivery. Lyrically, Rat Boy also similarly talks about being broke and generally just about being around scummy people... hence the album name I suppose.

“The cunt stunk of skunk as he grabbed me by the neck, trackies and North Face, a future court case.”

Rat Boy delivers his performance with such

a sheer amount of confidence and with an almost ‘fuck you’ attitude. Whilst the overall night was not polished nor a clean performance, this was not an issue for all involved.

The audience were never expecting such a performance but instead came to get drunk, dress curiously and have a good time jumping around, singing their heart out and losing themselves to the music.

The 21- year old is no doubt onto big things in the future, looking at the way he’s already been received and support he’s gathered isuch a short space of time from famous names such as Slaves, Kendrick Lamar and a whole range of others. Whilst his fan base is a much younger one, around 16 one would guess, it doesn’t take away from the admiration that they have for the group, which was clear to see from even hours before the show had even started.

This would suggest that this next generation strongly relates to some of the topics they rap about in their music, thus being a lot more switched on with the inequality that’s going on in the UK.

Interview: Tom Grennan Tom Grennan rests a sore head from the NME Awards as he chats to us about his love for grime, his upcoming tour and watching Liam Gallagher, writes Deputy Music Editor, Yasmin Duggal Getting its first play as Annie Mac’s Hottest Record in the World on Radio 1, ‘Sober’ is the new single from Tom Grennan. It’s the follow-up to the huge single ‘Royal Highness’ which featured on the Radio 1 B List and Virgin playlists and saw him record a Maida Vale Session for Annie Mac. ‘Sober’ is another taste of Tom’s forthcoming debut album Lighting Matches, set to be released on Insanity Records in May. The album sees Tom working with Grammy award-winning producers Fraser T Smith (Stormzy/ Adele/Kano/Plan B) and Dan Grech (Liam Gallagher/Killers/Radiohead) and is set to be one of the most important albums of 2018.

We caught up with Tom after a crazy night at the 2018 NME Awards...

Hi Tom, I actually saw you at the NME Awards last night — did you have fun?

Did you?! You should have come and said ‘Hi’. Yeah, it was wicked, though I’ve got a bit of a sore head now. Liam Gallagher was amazing. Are you back in Manchester now then?

Yeah, I’ve literally just got back!

What was your favourite bit last night?

Yeah, I reckon it was Liam. I love his album from last year, and he did some Oasis stuff and it just got everyone up and lively. Also, BBK winning the Innovation Award was amazing. I’ve been a massive fan of them since I was about 12 so to see them win that award... that woman as well — Shirley Manson — who did that speech. That was inspirational too.

How has the last year been for you?

Pretty crazy I guess? Any particular

highlights?

Yeah, the last year has been crazy.

Exciting though. Oh... they’re all highlights. This world is just crazy.

Selling out my tour last year, touring Europe, doing festivals, writing my album... it’s all been one big highlight.

Are you excited for the tour to begin in March?

So excited. My home is on the road. At

“The album goes on a journey...yeah, it feels like growing up” heart, I’m a performer, and I just love the energy you get from performing live. 100 per cent my favourite thing to be doing is performing on stage. I love the excitement of the whole thing. I’m buzzing, my band are buzzing, then you head to venues and the crowd are buzzing.

Are you looking forward to getting out to some festivals this summer?

Yeah I’m doing loads. Last year was my first year doing festivals, and now I think I’m headlining the Republic Stage at Reading and Leeds!

Your debut album Lighting Matches is out 18th May. It feels well overdue!

Album Review: MGMT - Little Dark Age MGMT (stemming from the bands original name, The Management), have released their first album in five years, Little Dark Age. The album’s name is in-keeping with anyone’s view on the world right now in both political and social terms.

When asked why they had been gone so long, they stated how the US elections of 2016 sparked the inspiration for the new album: “Apparently, we were more inspired to write pop music after evil took over the world.” The two members Andrew Van Wyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, met at college and carry through their heavy electro-pop influences to this day. The touring band expands to six members, one of which provided inspiration for the track ‘James’.

Stand-out tracks on the album include ‘When You Die’ and ‘Me

Does it? Well originally it was supposed to come out in March, but I pushed it back to May. But yeah, it definitely feels like the right time for the album and I’m so ready for people to hear it.

Will your album feature more of the same?

There’s some surprises. There’s a lot of orchestra and brass. I’d say it goes from the more upbeat stuff like ‘Found What I’m Looking For’ on a journey to more mature stuff...yeah, it feels like growing up.

We love the new track ‘Sober’ - was it an easy one to write?

Erm... no. Well, I’ll tell you why I wrote it. You know those hungover mornings when you just wake up and you think you never want to drink again? Like you don’t want to smell it, see it, taste it? I thought I’d write a song about it. I wrote Sober when I was hungover, which I think makes it better.

More real.

Who would you say is the biggest influence on your music?

Biggest influence on my music would have to be... anyone like Adele, Robert Johnson, Ray Charles. But I’m also a massive grime and hip-hop fan, so I guess I’m taking elements from everywhere.

If you could recommend one artist/ album/song to our readers right now, what would it be?

Can it be a known artist? I would have to say J Hus’ album [Common Sense] from last year.

Brilliant! Thanks for the chat Tom, and we hope that hangover clears up...

Rewind This week in music history What do you call a cow with one leg?

Lean beef!

19th February 1965, Working at Abbey Road studios in London, The Beatles recorded a new John Lennon song ‘You’re Going To Lose That Girl’ in two takes.

The track was released on the Help! album.

20th February 1959, 16 year old Jimi Hendrix made his stage debut when he played a show at the Temple De Hirsch Sinai synagogue in Seattle.

21st February 1981, Dolly Parton started a two week run at No.1 on the US charts with ‘9 to 5’, the singers first No.1, a No.47 hit in the UK.

22nd February 1986, MTV dedicated a full 22 hours broadcast to The Monkees, showing all 45 episodes of the original The Monkees TV series.

23rd February 1991, Whitney Houston achieved her ninth US No.1 single in just over five years with her version of the Sister Sledge song ‘All The Man I Need.’

24th February 2009, The United States Mint launched a new coin featuring American composer, pianist and bandleader Duke Ellington.

25th February 1977, The Jam signed to Polydor Records UK for £6,000 ($10,200).

Photo: APB

With those songs now synonymous with television adverts and film soundtracks, MGMT are back with a new album and potential new hits, writes Tara Bharadia

and Michael’. The former is an uncomfortable song which plays like a chilled pop song but the lyrics add a tenser air: ‘I’m ready/ To blow my brains out’. The latter sounds like an ode which would be just as disturbing when spoken aloud as well as sung. It sounds like the kind of music and comments Soft Cell would be making now.

The LP’s title track sounds like classic MGMT, just a little less upbeat, which is in line with the tone of the album. Spaced out lyrics with big breaks for synth beats will remind you of an earlier time for the band but this track has more to say than initially appears. While haunting and clean, the track also manages to masquerade some darker themes in that it is commenting on society and music as we know it: ‘I grieve in stereo/ The stereo

sounds strange’.

Their music may have gotten darker in tone compared to summers past, and while the music is very good, the mass market aren’t listening to anything like they used to. Gone are the days of ‘proper’ bands and that is what will keep this album’s goodness under wraps. MGMT are fully aware that they haven’t been able to recreate their success of their debut album and while we can safely say this LP won’t bring them the same recognition, it has the ability to influence people’s thinking.

7/10

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Opinion Album

How PUBG and Fortnite will redefine the industry But not in the way you might think

Jeremy Bijl Games Editor Battle Royale: the two words are on everyone’s lips right now after both Fortnite: Battle Royale and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) hit over three million concurrent players last weekend.

What is perhaps surprising about this is that neither are so-called ‘AAA’ games, and have few of the hallmarks of this year’s biggest releases.

The success of Battle Royale (which is essentially a large-scale fight to the last man in a large arena) has already been taken note of by AAA developers, with leaked information from Red Dead Redemption 2 suggesting the upcoming blockbuster will feature the game mode.

This is not uncommon. Indeed, Fortnite itself saw an opportunity to mimic PUBG to capitalise on Battle Royale-hungry Playstation 4 players. It has also been a trend in major game releases over the last decade, where one success has spawned a multitude of similar games - consider the saturation of firstperson shooters that followed Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

However, deeper, more telling lessons can be taken from Fortnite and PUBG than the popularity of the game mode itself; lessons that even the biggest, most powerful developers and publishers will be taking note of.

The first is that games don’t have to do everything. This generation has seen huge titles which really have tried to conquer audiences across all fronts: multiplayer, single-player, co-operative play. Even within these broader categories, games like Call of Duty, Star Wars: Battlefront II and Destiny 2 have a huge number of game-modes.

PUBG and Fortnite have taken one, actually quite simple concept, and perfected it, building the entire experience around getting everyone involved in that one gamemode and optimising the game’s mechanics to suit that experience. And it shows.

The second lesson pertains to graphics. The graphical capabilities of the Playstation 4 and Xbox One has meant that big-budget games have focused huge amounts of their time, resources, and manpower into creating games that refuse to fall short of photorealistic, highly detailed graphical fidelity.

Consider this in contrast to PUBG, which most closely resembles the decadeold Battlefield 2, or the clean but heavily stylised aesthetics of Fortnite. These are a long shot from the likes of Assassin’s Creed or Uncharted 4 — but their audience doesn’t care. It may be, then, that cinematic graphical quality is not as much as a necessity as the likes of Ubisoft, EA and Activision consider it to be.

Review

When will we see a new Elder Scrolls game?

Chris Glover Chief Games Correspondent

S

ome video game franchises manage to churn out new installments on an annual or biennial basis — a feat usually made possible by huge development teams, formulaic game content, or a combination of the two. Say what you will about how this may affect the quality of the games, one thing’s for sure: this tenacious level of consistency is what has allowed series like Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed and FIFA to maintain prime real estate in the forefront of gamer’s minds.

But some titles manage to foster this kind of following despite lengthy and sometimes unpredictable periods of time in between releases. Bethesda games are perhaps the best example of this; their two IPs Fallout and The Elder Scrolls (TES) have, since 2006’s Oblivion , alternated in their major

“No, no, we’re pretty clear: The Elder Scrolls VI isn’t in development.”

Photo: Bago Games @Flickr

Photo: Bago Games @Flickr

releases, taking two to four years in between.

With the studio’s huge success with Fallout 4 back in 2015, it must be about time we heard about the next Elder Scrolls game, right?

Wrong. So very depressingly wrong. I scoured the darkest corners of the internet and braved more niché subreddits than you could shake a stick at, and the prognosis isn’t great. I’ll try to break it gently to you: At E3 2016, Bethesda’s Director Todd Howard told us that yes, The Elder Scrolls VI is “of course” going to happen, but that the technology simply isn’t there for it yet. He then said that we would be seeing two major titles release before TES VI , and that both would be brand new IPs and bigger games than we have ever seen from Bethesda.

Fast forward to E3 2017, and Bethesda’s Pete Hines reiterated, with the heavy sigh of a man tired of receiving the same question relentlessly on twitter, that there were two big projects we would see before the eagerly-awaited Skyrim sequel. Then, after some more prodding, delivered the dreamkiller:

Gutted. When in the world, then, can we expect to return to Tamriel? When will we get this Elder Scrolls which will boast mind-blowing technology of the future?

Well, since 2002, Bethesda Game Studios have released a game roughly every 3 years. If we take that trend as a given, that puts their next release this year, in 2018. Multiple leaks and a number of Bethesda-registered trademarks suggest this first of the two massive mystery projects will be a game called Starfield.

Assuming Starfield does release later this year, that means Massive Mystery Project Number 2 will release in 2021, three years later. Which, as I’m sure you’ve already figured out, puts TES VI at a projected release year of 2024.

2024. If I only I knew when I first sat down to play Skyrim aged 15 that I’d be nearly 30 years old by the time I played its sequel. Perhaps I’d have even spent more time taking in the game’s beautiful landscapes before I systematically eradicated its inhabitants.

Of course, I could be wrong — and it can’t be overstated how happy I would be if that’s the case. Bethesda may expand their core development team to accelerate production beyond their average three years, or they may even be lying about TES VI not being in development — anything could happen. 2024 is simply an estimate based on the current numbers we have at our disposal.

So, all that remains to be done is to wait to see if Starfield does indeed release later this year, and whether we can glean from its content any hints of the new technology Bethesda need for TES VI , or the direction they may take it in. As for whether the unbearable wait for a new Elder Scrolls will be worth it, only time (a whole lot of it) will tell.

Photo: Bago Games @Flickr

The third, and perhaps most important lesson, is the value that PUBG and, in particular, Fortnite put in simple, not always entirely serious, fun.

‘Fun’, of course, is a nebulous term - what I mean by this is an ambition to create simple, unadulterated enjoyment for the player without any overarching ambitions to create ‘a piece of art’, ‘an insight to the human condition’ or ‘a game of the year contender’.

How many earnest, narratively ambitious, big-budget games have we seen this generation? Uncharted, Assassin’s Creed, Mass Effect, Destiny, Call of Duty, Horizon Zero Dawn, Bloodborne, Dark Souls, Star Wars: Battlefront, Batman, Battlefield. This is a lengthy list and I could go on.

I’m not criticising each and every one of these games, but this shift towards games that try to deal with weighty themes in a brooding, serious manner has saturated the market with games that take themselves very seriously.

News

Nintendo unveils plans for mobile The Japan-based company outlines ambitions for 2018 David Uncle Contributor alone made $94 million. Even Nintendo’s collaboration with Niantic on Pokémon Go is still bringing in the money, with $890 million revenue in 2017.

Photo: Wikimedia

Photo: Bago Games @Flickr

In stark contrast, PUBG has harboured no illusions of being anything other than what it is, whilst Fortnite has actively integrated a more light-hearted feel into everything from its place names (Dusty Depot, Loot Lake, Titled Towers etc.) to its game modes, like ‘Sniper Shoot-out’ and the upcoming ‘The Floor is Lava’.

The popularity of this more tongue-in-cheek light-heartedness should have been evidenced by the two games that arguably proved the biggest hits on the PS3/XBOX360 generation: Grand Theft Auto V and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim — the former of which was an unapologetically nihilistic all-action game with a wicked sense of humour, the latter a more serious narrative that gained much affection for its array of bugs, clunky dialogue and bizarre storylines.

I’m not saying that everyone wants games with one gamemode, limited graphics and no attempt at a serious plot-line — indeed, variety is preferable to anything else.

However, given that games all have limited budgets, it may be time for AAA developers to reassess the relative importance of where huge amounts of their budget is going. In other words, Fortnite and PUBG will teach publishers and developers to reprioritise in order to get the “recurrent revenues” and “sustainable player-bases” that the two have obtained, and that AAA publishers so desperately desire.

In early 2017, Nintendo announced to its customers plans to develop two to three mobile games annually as part of their attempts to reach a larger audience by converting to mobile gaming.

This was announced despite its failures with recent titles such as Super Mario Run and Miitomo — Nintendo’s first mobile game, which is due to be axed on May the 9th. Despite these setbacks, Nintendo seemed confident in their announcement, stating that the classics which everyone loves will be reprised as a mobile game, from Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem , to Legend of Zelda. In the latest news, Nintendo also announced the release of Mario Kart Tour for smartphone users in late January.

From recent statistics and insights, it shows that Nintendo is both succeeding and failing with their ambitions. Their revenue in the nine months ending in December 2017 for their mobile gaming was $268 million, mainly due to the successes of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, and Fire Emblem Heroes - which

Photo: Iphonedigital@Flickr

However, in terms of content, many are pessimistic over the direction in which Nintendo is taking their mobile games. Many complain that their mobile games are a failed attempt at nostalgia, some claiming that these games fail to capture the same feeling as their console equivalent did.

Recently this month, DeNA’s CEO Isao Moriyasu has reportedly stated that Mario Kart Tour , due for release before the company’s fiscal year ending March 2019, will be “free-to-start”, which has stirred a lot of concerned responses from gamers as to what this means.

Does it mean that the game is free, but only after a certain amount of time where you have to unlock certain

levels? Is the tutorial only free? Does this mean microtransactions? Is it a onetime payment, or do you need to pay for each level? Whichever answer, these features are not new to mobile gamers, unfortunately. Nowadays it’s almost expected.

Whilst Nintendo’s mobile past has been only partially successful, we can only speculate as to the future of Nintendo for smartphones, and what possible hidden agenda they may have. The website gamesindustry.biz gathered evidence proving that the mobile market should not be underestimated in terms of market value, earning $50.4 billion, accounting for 43% market value in contrast to Console’s 29 per cent and PC’s 28 per cent. There is some serious money from investing in numbers such as these.

However, people should not be deterred by these statistics and Nintendo’s possible agenda. Fans are allowed to get excited over their favourite games adapted for a platform that is accessible to almost everyone, to relive the nostalgia they have over the games, or for a new generation to discover these games. Nintendo’s presence in the mobile market could even raise the game for potential competition, which is definitely exciting news for the world of mobile gaming.

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Fashion player of the week: Vera Wang

Ooh la la Mattemoiselle

Fashion and Beauty Editor Talia Lee-Skudder gives her verdict on the new Fenty Beauty products

Photo: harveynichols.com

Following the hype surrounding Rihanna’s Fenty beauty line in September, I was keen to try out the products as soon as my student loan permitted. I had heard and read rave reviews about the skin products and so I was keen to get my hands on the foundation and Match stix matte skinstick to use for contouring.

The foundation is available in 40 shades meaning that there is a shade for every skin tone. The huge range of shades on offer adds to the line’s popularity and versatility in the cosmetics industry and further what sets Rihanna’s brand apart from other celebrity endorsed cosmetics. The formula of the foundation itself is light and easily blendable but can easily be built up without looking cakey.

I loved this about the product because it is super wearable for your everyday makeup look, whilst it conceals your blemishes and dark circles your skin still looks fresh and bright. I am also a huge fan of the skinstick, the consistency is great and easy to blend but I also love it because of its practicality. The skinstick comes in a slick pale pink tube that is small and compact enough to fit nicely into your makeup bag — a welcome change to lugging my contour pallet around with me just for the use of one shade.

As such a big fan of the rest of the range, I was so excited to try the new Mattemoiselle lipsticks which are described as ultra slim lipsticks with a long-wearing, petal-soft matte finish that are created in a rainbow of 14 weightless and colour-intense shades which are designed to flatter all skin tones. I received two lipsticks; Clapback, a true navy, and Single which is described as a blushing nude.

Clapback is a dark blue shade and my initial reaction is that it would never in a million years suit me because I have a light skin tone and blonde hair. Once I applied the lipstick I found that the colour wasn’t as harsh against my skin tone as I had expected. The lipstick applied really well. It was creamy and nourishing but also super pigmented. The product felt lovely and not drying as most matte lipsticks do. I have seen the shade

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worn by other women who really do slay the look but for me, I feel I’m not brave enough to carry the shade off with confidence.

The second colour I was sent was Single and as soon as I took the lid off I knew that I was going to love it. The shade was lovely and suited my skin tone perfectly, it’s a nude with peachy undertones that will look great with spring and summer makeup looks. The peach tone creates a lighter nude than what I usually wear but this shade is now going to have a firm place in my everyday make up look especially as the weather starts to get brighter.

The lipsticks come in thin, sleek silver packaging that fit neatly into your clutch bag or even your purse. Plus the lipsticks all come with tongue in cheek names such as Saw-C and Spanked. I was impressed by the formula even though the lightweight texture means that the lipstick is not hugely long-lasting and therefore required frequent top ups. In comparison to other matte lipsticks, the Mattemoiselle more closely resembles a creamy moisturizing lipstick as opposed to a thick matte covering that you get from MAC lipsticks for example.

However, that does not discredit the hugely wearable and pigmented aspect of the lipstick plus the huge range of shades that are available. The lipsticks do not bleed or feather and even with a dark colour like Clapback, a lip liner is not essential because of the shape of the applicator that easily glides across your lips and helps to create a fuller pout. I am now coveting Ma’Damn, a royal red shade and PMS which is described as a moody brown for my next lipstick purchases.

The 14 product collection really does cover every makeup vibe you have, from wearable and neutral everyday lips to bold colours to make a statement, Rihanna has once again delivered with her cosmetics range. All of the products by Fenty Beauty are completely cruelty-free and the lipsticks retail at just £16, making them super affordable and also entirely reasonable to buy at least four shades… It’s guiltfree shopping, what’s not to love?

Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty range is available to purchase at Harvey Nichols.

Rona McCann dedicates this week’s fashion profile to the eponymous bridal couture Queen, Vera Wang Few high-profile celebrity weddings, awards-season red carpet events or fashion-orientated rom-coms can truly be taken seriously without the feature of a Vera Wang couture gown. The line’s namesake designer has been at the centre of high-end fashion since designing her first dress aged forty and continues to reign as the industry’s couture queen.

First making a name for herself by becoming Vogue US’s youngest ever editor, Wang worked her way up the magazine that she called home for seventeen years, before a brief stint at Ralph Lauren. Of course, her greatest career journey was yet to come.

Her global brand had its origins in a very personal occasion when in 1989 Wang designed her own wedding dress.

A year later, she had launched her first bridal boutique in her hometown of New York. It wasn’t long before her talent saw her open similar sites across the globe, and later take the fields of perfume, lingerie and jewellery similarly by storm.

Her work has made her the indisputable go-to for feminine, elegant and simply beautiful couture. Whilst she may be regarded as the force that introduced the strapless neckline into the wedding dress world and establishing this style as her trademark, Wang delves deeper in many of her creations, experimenting with

different cuts and fabrics - think lace, think bows, think handstitched embroidery of excruciating detail. Whichever way she evolves her dressmaking it is always guaranteed that her pieces look timeless.

Wang’s influence stretches further than red carpets and the pages of Vogue. If you caught this year’s Super Bowl you may not have even noticed her involvement. Its 2018 champions, the Philadelphia Eagles, donned their cheerleading squad in exclusive Wang-designed get-ups, curated by the designer right down to the ‘sneakers’.

The sport that truly holds the designer’s heart, however, is figure skating. Having competed in the 1968 US Figure Skating Championships and just missing out on making the Olympic team, Wang kept up with the elite of the sport by designing intricate costumes for Olympic skaters since the 1990s, most famously iconic numbers for skating star Nancy Kerrigan. This year Wang is dressing American male champion and Olympic hopeful Nathan Chen for the ongoing Winter Games.

With a career of this magnitude under her probably selfdesigned belt, we can only expect that the impact of Vera Wang will subtly guide our style for decades to come.

Ugly trainers: the rise of the dad shoe Ella Searle discusses high fashions pandemonium around The Dad Trainer trend

The latest beauty dupes Jennifer Knowles reviews the high street’s game changing pocket friendly beauty brands If you procrastinate away countless hours that should be dedicated to university work watching makeup tutorial videos on YouTube, you will be aware that there are some amazing dupes on the market at the moment. The message has been delivered that we no longer need to make that crippling investment of our student loans into purchasing expensive brands to obtain the quality factor.

YouTube sensations such as Rachel Leary and Hannah Renée, often film videos giving us reviews of these ‘dupes’ in a sort of try-before-you-buy way making this an excellent way to find out how a product applies before going out and actually buying it, because, as we all know makeup isn’t like clothing, you can’t just take it back expecting a full refund if you don’t like it on.

I want to talk about a few game-changing products and brands on the market currently that deliver the high standard of quality without the high price tag.

Firstly, Revolution is a cruelty free non-animal testing brand such as all the makeup brands at Superdrug. Personally, I find their products amazing quality for their prices. But their latest ground-breaking product is what has got beauty bloggers and youtubers all over the country talking. This is their brand new

‘Conceal and Define Concealer’. Shelves have been stripped bare by makeup-fanatics eager to get their hands on this £4 revelation.

It has been compared by beauty youtubers such as Stephanie Toms to the Tarte Shape Tape (£22) and has said to be the closest dupe to this raved-about product that beauty bloggers have seen to date! It is full coverage (an essential for covering those dark night-out-induced under eye circles), comes in a vast variety of shades and has even been described as feeling lighter on the skin that the Shape Tape. If you have only just discovered this product and it’s sold out in your local retailer, you can order it directly from TAM Beauty online.

Another innovation from Revolution is their liquid highlighter retailing at a mere £6.

This product has a dual effect, doubling also as a liquid eye shimmer. A paralleled pocket-friendly product to this is the Barry M Liquid Chrome Highlighter Drops (also £6) which can be blended in with your fingers or a sponge to create a flawless and blinding glow. These products are amazing dupes for the infamously hyped Iconic London (£30) and the Cover FX Liquid Highlighters (£34). e.l.f Cosmetics is an American cosmetic brand that

Photo: www.superdrug.co.uk

Photo: Vera Wang.com

Photo: Flashmag @ flickr.com

If wearing ripped jeans doesn’t set off a tirade of abuse and corny jokes at any family event, what would your grandparents think of the latest designer trend of ‘ugly trainers’. With brands such as Balenciaga and Gucci sending pre-muddied, distressed sports trainers fit for your school’s lost property bucket down their catwalks, is it time we reconsider blind brand loyalty?

Balenciaga’s sold out ‘Triple S’ trainers retail at £595, and appear to be a perfect combination between a pair of soiled hiking boots and your dad’s oldest pair of gym trainers. Yet despite looking like they should also come smelling of old socks, causing mass amusement and mock online, the model is continually sold out, fetching almost double their retail value on reselling sites.

Yet it is also brand of the moment Gucci that has similarly cashed in on the ‘Dad’ nomcore trend with their ‘Ryton’ trainer. Their chunky, scuffed, yellowing trainers are yet another example amongst the likes of Lanvin, Raf Simons and Yeezy to cash in on the

moment.

The hefty looking runners mimic what you might slip on to take the bins out, and in the process, thousands of Dads in wide leg jeans and stained t-shirts have unwittingly become fashion’s latest dystopian muse, being resold to fashion followers at £675. But what makes these luxury models any more desirable than the likes of the notorious Lonsdale scuffed trainers found in every local sports direct or the unbranded Primark trainer?

The popularity of these ‘ugly trainers’ is just further evidence to show how designer fashion has become a world of ironic references and deep-set brand loyalties, whilst also moving toward a much more daring and individual aesthetic. If Fallowfield is anything to go by, the muddy trainer trend is something which is here to stay, and appears the catwalks of Paris have been similarly inspired by the mass of muddy reeboks found on every magic bus.

Whatever the outcry, these bold, extreme models don’t seem to be disappearing anytime soon.

Ross Wilson reigns Supreme Nicole Lloyd explores the exclusive cult of Supreme and it’s greatest collector Ross Wilson

Photo: www.elfcosmetics.com

has recently been launched into 250 Superdrug stores nationwide. Encouraging artistry creativity and innovation on a budget is the message embodied by their range and having used their products on several occasions, it is wonderful to see it sold on home soil!

Previously an e-commerce business, the global enterprise has built its custom on their renowned affordable products; starting from just £3. Their collection has also grown to incorporate skincare, make- up and an array of beauty tools brushes.

Other suggestions that wont break your bank include Freedom, MUA and Collection which can all be found at your local Superdrug.

Dedicating time to some hard-core beauty research, will enable you to increase your savings and get your hands on some amazing products for a fraction price freeing up your cash flow for more important things i.e. guilt free cocktails!

Supreme is the hype beast statement of today’s generation, with kids queueing for hours to get a piece of the glory. It is a streetwear clothing brand founded in 1994 by James Jobbier, with the goal to give fellow skaters in New York clothing to skate in and somewhere to call home.

In 1994, Supreme opened its first store in Manhattan and became the embodiment of new York’s skate scene. The supreme box logo t-shirt one of their first designs, originally sold for $19 more than 20 years ago, and has become the love letter to the cult streetwear brand. It can now be resold at prices of up to $300.

Supreme is embraced by skaters, artists, musicians and creatives who make up the supreme family. Supreme established its brand over the years as quality, style and exclusivity operating on a small scale; supreme garments

are little quantity and have only 11 stores worldwide. This Photo: Eden,in Janine and Jim@flickr.com exclusivity is what drives the excitement for each supreme drop, many items being rare and hard to get a hold of.

They exploit this by coming out with new clothes every Thursday, which means people will have a a reason to come back every week. This has led to the recent culture of reselling; many people rush to purchase the supreme merchandise before it sells out in mere minutes, then resell for a bigger punch of the pockets of youngsters. Many have criticised this movement as the death to streetwear believing it’s no longer about the fashion, creativity and self-expression. Whilst others believe it only strengthens the brands presence and generates greater excitement.

Now that you can understand the literal hype over supreme. You’ll understand why the name Ross Wilson and

his announced plans have been such a recent buzz amongst the supreme family. Ross has been collecting supreme merchandise since 1994, since the early box logo days, his Instagram is now considered as the temple of some of most exclusive and more rare supreme pieces.

Ross Wilson took a trip from the UK to New York in October 1994 to explore the skate scene, which wasn’t very popular within the UK. Ross came across supreme whilst exploring the streets of downtown Manhattan where he bought his first box logo tee for $19. Over the years the brand widened, and they began to design shirts with the box logo t-shirt flipped onto images of famous people. Ross continued to buy into the brand because it embodied everything he was about; pop culture, music, movies and skateboarding.

Now Ross has taken his collection and made his vault of 23 years available to all hypebeast who reign the land, it consists of many skateboards, clothing, trainers and accessories etc.

He held a supreme archive launch party on the 4th of February at the idle man in London where many people came out to get a glimpse of the glorious collection, it included supreme basketballs, boxing gloves, American footballs, toolboxes, skateboard decks and endless supreme clothing.

He has also teamed up with idle man to sell his items online.

The intent for the exhibition was to give people a glimpse of what Wilson has to offer before he sells half of his collection.

Although half of his collection will be departing from his home, Wilson will still have a heavy collection remaining, still holding the power to make every supreme fan swoon. His decision to sell some of his prized possessions on to the next generation came about when he felt like supreme was taking over his house.

Now only 20 per cent to 25 per cent of his collection remains, but once a Supreme-head, always a Supreme-head, so I imagine his collecting won’t stop there.

Film

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Review

Darkest Hour

Review

Oriented

Oldman delivers the performance, but beyond that Darkest Hour has little else to give

Photo: Allociné.fr

them before in your GCSEs, A-Levels, and countless films before.

Tom Hunter Film Critic It’s May 1940. Hitler’s Germany has swept across Europe, and his sights are now firmly set on France. Europe trembles beneath

“Surprisingly, however, Oldman’s Churchill is not infallible” the swastika, as the last of the British troops find themselves at Dunkirk, trapped between the sea and the Nazis. Neville Chamberlain is ousted from government and the only man to fill his shoes, and to do so with Clement Atlee’s approval, is Winston Churchill. You know the stakes; you’ve seen

And therein lies Darkest Hour’s fundamental problem. Look around you. Spoiler Alert: We won the war. Darkest Hour barely has a plot, because to rely too heavily on it would be equivalent to watching Return of the King first, then going back to Fellowship knowing nearly everyone (sorry Sean) turns out alright. A good film of this genre must have either a good plot, ground-breaking visuals (see: Dunkirk), or an impressive performance. Oldman delivers a spectacular performance, but beyond that Darkest Hour has little else to give. However, it’s testament to its lead that in 120 minutes, I never felt bored.

Despite what the marketing for this film would have you believe, there is a supporting cast. Notably, Ben Mendelsohn gives a remarkably understated performance as King George VI, and joining him in the world of war-time speech impediments is Stephen Dillane, as the usurped candidate Viscount Halifax. Mendelsohn is the star of

the background cast, and Dillane brings the same gravitas he gave Stannis in Game of Thrones. Unsurprisingly, given the era, the women take a back seat. While both Kristin Scott Thomas and Lily James (as wife Clemmie and Elizabeth ‘Typewriter woman’ Layton) give some life to otherwise dull moments, it’s hard not to see James as a token inclusion (a shame given her similar ‘non’ character in last year’s Baby Driver).

But it doesn’t matter, as no one is allowed to outshine Oldman; the film simply won’t let them. This is partly because the film doesn’t let him out of your sights for more than a few paltry minutes in its entire twohour run time. We get snippets of political skulduggery from Halifax and Chamberlain, and a few brief interludes on mainland Europe, mostly revolving around Dunkirk, but beyond that this is Gary Oldman’s film.

Quite simply, he’s phenomenal. He dominates every scene as expected, be it a rousing speech, an inappropriate joke, or simply a conversation between husband and wife.

Surprisingly however, Oldman’s Churchill is not infallible. Short-tempered, rude, rash, the range on display here is truly astounding and it’s made all the more impressive by the sheer quantity of prosthetics layered on top of Oldman’s usually distinctive face. Despite the sheer amount, it never seems silly, nor do you ever doubt the authenticity of his performance or his characterisation. It’s remarkable, but not always truthful.

Anyone with access to Wikipedia will know Churchill was far from perfect, not least for his staunch advocacy of the British Empire. Therefore, Darkest Hour is forced to play fast-and-loose with history. For example, given his views on white supremacy, you might question the authenticity of his friendly interaction towards a black man on the London Underground. It’s understandably difficult to market a film of this nature while simultaneously acknowledging such steep pitfalls and, as such, Oldman’s Churchill by necessity has had a slight personality makeover. Whether you see it as a problem is another matter, though if you ask me, the problem lies in the film’s mere existence.

Perhaps we should be questioning the necessity of a film glorifying Churchill, now one of Britain’s most controversial figures, in 2018. I’ll leave that up to you.

Whilst watching Darkest Hour, I learned two things. Firstly, any company called ‘Perfect World Pictures’ should never have their name displayed over footage of goose-stepping Nazis. Secondly, Gary Oldman is simply brilliant. Any actor who can bring such an infectious likeability to a character so shrouded in controversy is surely worth of an Oscar. Thank God. Because without him, it’s difficult to recommend.

3/5

Feature

‘The Italian Job’ is the best film ever, and nothing will change my mind Tobias Soar Film Critic A wide shot of the Italian Alps precedes a beautiful opening montage of Rossano Brazzi cruising round the winding mountain roads. This is put to the symphony of the screaming Lamborghini Miura’s V12 in a duet with Quincy Jones and Matt Monroe’s ‘On Days Like These’. A spectacular crash that abruptly ends the pleasant scene introduces the antagonists, the Mafia, as they dispose of the wreck with the aid of a bulldozer and a cliff.

The plot is straightforward: Charlie Croker — played by Michael Caine a couple of years after his stellar debut in Zulu — gets out of prison and is tasked with stealing 4 million dollars worth of gold in Turin, under the Mafia’s nose, in the middle of an insane traffic jam. The se pieces for the getaway include Turin’s streets, its subway, and the sewage system, where a 360 degrees roll of the cars was attempted and, allegedly, completed when the cameras weren’t rolling. Finally, there’s also the the test track on the roof

of the Fiat factory, who were of course the sponsors for the project.

The clever camerawork, a soundtrack that assigns instruments to different characters’ when they are present on screen and the witty writing make for a 99 minute joy ride filled with clever quips and classic quotes delivered with finesse by its fantastic cast. Honestly, the film never bores you because it is pure filler and no fluff whatsoever.

Despite my title, it wasn’t love at first sight for wee Tobias. It used to be a boring slog of a film that was ultimately rewarded with the most thrilling car chase I’d ever seen. This was of course accompanied by the hilarious ‘Get a Bloomin’ Move On’ or, as it’s more commonly referred to by its chorus, ‘The Self-Preservation Society’.

As the years went by and I re-watched the film at an almost yearly rate, every viewing of it revealed something new to appreciate.

The Mafia’s over-the-top plot and writing, the undyingly patriotic Mr. Bridger’s reign over the prison while still being a convict, the fact that Croker is a womaniser, Benny Hill’s hilarious antics

as Professor Peach and so many other details. On my most recent watch I noticed the clever use of music, the fantastically stylish wardrobe of all the characters, laughed at every single subtly rude joke and realised that Camp Freddie was definitely not PC in the late 60’s.

The payoff of the iconic getaway in red, white and blue British Mini Cooper’s — always shown in that order and forever being established as the coolest vehicle on the road — is just as sweet as the first time I saw it and the literal cliffhanger ending always makes me laugh and appreciate that the lack of a sequel makes the film all the more sweet.

Some bits of trivia that I picked up over the years add to the charm of Peter Collinson’s masterpiece. The “Pakistani Ambassador’s car” was, in fact, the actual car of the Pakistani Ambassador; the real Mafia allegedly aided in creating the traffic jam in Turin; the entire scene where Croker goes to pick up his Aston Martin DB4 was completely improvised and, most surprisingly, Michael Caine, couldn’t drive at the time of making the film, which explains why he’s

never seen in control of a moving vehicle.

It’s impossible to deny the cultural impact the film has had. Every British person knows the quote “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”. Hell, I’ve even seen a stop-motion Lego recreation of the iconic practice scene on YouTube produced by what must be a very young lad. I could honestly quote this film all day long as the script is timeless and unpredictable.

Many polls have set this film as one of the best ever made and the aforementioned line as the most unforgettable cinema quote of all time.

Of course, I can’t express my never ending love for the film without addressing the cliffhanger ending with the bus carrying the loot and the crew hanging off a cliff. Only recently, in 2009, Michael Caine disclosed that the reason for the ending was, quite simply, because the censors wouldn’t allow a film to show criminals getting away with a crime. So, as the bus hangs precariously over a valley in the Alps, it hits me: the solution to the fiasco was staring right at us all along.

Bear with me, I’ve got a great idea...

‘Oriented’ is a documentary following three Palestinian Gay friends, living in Israel who are raising awareness of LGBTQ rights in Israel

Photo: Benson Kua @Flickr

Aisha Al-Janabi Film Contributor In 2015 Jake Witzenfeld, an Essex born film maker, released his film ‘Oriented’, a documentary following three men, Khadar Abu Seif, Naeem Jiyres and Fadi Daeem, living in Israel who identify as Palestinian and gay.

Together with some friends, they formed a social activist group called Qambuta Productions, “Cauliflower” Productions, to raise awareness for LGBTQ rights in Israel by creating satirical music videos.

Witzenfeld documented their stories over the course of fifteen months, forming relationships with each of them, enabling

an intimacy within the film that, perhaps, would not have been achieved otherwise.

This is evident when Naeem shares a letter with us, the letter which his parents will read, finding out their son is gay.

This relationship means Witzenfeld can show aspects of life that the news does not cover, which tends to focus on Arabs as the victims living in an Israeli society, but there is so much more to those who live there.

Witzenfeld films the lives of people, not of victims, chatting in Shisha bars, or dancing freely in night-clubs or simply hanging out, capturing life as a citizen with a tense political backdrop.

The film was shot in 2014, during the

Israel-Gaza conflict – a word I, personally, avoid, but seems to be used to describe what is happening.

The dictionary definition of conflict is ‘a serious disagreement or argument’ which trivialises the situation. I have conflicts with my parents or conflicts between friends but I don’t think that this can be used to describe events in Israel.

It makes it sounds like a diplomatic issue, one that is being discussed and resolved, rather than one involving more than fifty years of violence and no sign of an end.

Witzenfeld does not make this the centre of the story, choosing not to explicitly mention or dramatise it, nor does he shy away from the violence.

Instead, he informs the audience by showing clips of the Israeli news bringing the harsh reality that this is their local news, happening where they live. While a segment is being filmed an air raid goes off, something that I still associate with the 1940s rather than something people our age experience regularly.

Khadar and his boyfriend, David, sit in their stairwell, calming their dog while on

their phones until the siren stops. There is an overwhelming sense of reality in this clip; they just have to sit it out.

Because the film focusses on LGBTQ rights, rather than the conflict it means no black-and-white, “they are wrong, we are right” opinions are portrayed, which can often be the case.

There is no clear divide, and is naïve to think so - the conflict has gone on too long.

The narratives unfold slowly throughout the film, interjected with scenes of merriment at weddings or the beautiful landscapes throughout Israel tempting me to visit for the scenery.

Witzenfeld embraces silence and stillness, creating the appropriate atmosphere for the intimacy the audience has with Fadi, Khadar and Naeem.

‘Oriented’ is currently on Netflix, and as Khadar puts it; “We are Palestine, We are Here, and We are Queer.”

4.5/5

Review

Black Panther Director Ryan Coogler creates a dazzling superhero movie with a deep revolutionary and racial debate James Gill Film Critic and Books Editor

Photo: Allociné.fr

It was always going to be a risk from Marvel to produce a film surrounding a minor superhero and with an almost entirely black cast, but it is one that certainly pays off. Not only does Black Panther boldly stand shoulder to shoulder with the other films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it feels distinct enough from those previous that it can serve as a stand-alone film.

When T’Chaka is killed in a terrorist attack, his son T’Challa inherits the throne. His nation of Wakanda is hyperadvanced by fortune of a mineral-rich meteorite hitting their land thousands of years prior. To protect themselves from the outside world they don the disguise of an impoverished third-world country.

When a rebellious Wakandan tries to take the throne and through it take revenge for an age of discrimination against his race, T’Challa must risk his life to defend peace.

Whilst T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) is the titular character in the film, he is surrounded by strong female characters.

The key difference between the women here and in other Hollywood blockbusters though is the importance they have in the story. Lupita Nyongo’o plays the King’s most trusted spy, Letitia Wright his wickedly intelligent sister and, in arguably the best performance of them all, Danai Gurira takes on the role of Okoye, the warrior general. All three influence the direction of the plot and it was refreshing to see female leads who were well-written and not just used as flimsy love interests.

That same high quality of performance was shared amongst almost all of the cast with one major exception, Michael B. Jordan’s villain Erik. The character had a rich backstory and yet, as is often the case with Marvel villains, he felt one-note and unexplored. Jordan’s character had a tough upbringing in a poor American community before entering the army and getting the nickname ‘Kilmonger’, the sheer amount of detail glossed over could have easily become a film in its own right.

Nevertheless, even with this scripting disadvantage, he squeezed every drop of life from his lines to be one of the best villains yet.

Photo: Allociné.fr

Black Panther is immediately striking in its unique aesthetic. Bold and colourful, it is unlike anything we have seen in the Marvel Universe before. In the Kingdom of Wakanda, for example, there is a dazzling mesh between traditional African and contemporary culture, a style contained within Afrofuturism. With 20th century roots in artists such as Sun Ra, Afrofuturism lays at the heart of the artistic vision for the film. It runs deeper than just clothing and architecture though, a critique of the African and African-American experience, one that is revisited multiple times throughout the film.

Accompanying the visual delight is a soundtrack featuring that same traditionalcontemporary collaboration.

Hip-hop visionary Kendrick Lemar creates and curates a collection of emotionally and politically charged tracks with artists such as SZA, Schoolboy Q and Future. Ludwig Göransson, best known for working with Donald Glover on his Childish Gambino albums, composes a complementary score

containing a vast array of unorthodox sounds. In fact, Göransson spent a month in Africa to ensure he could weave these authentic African elements in a way that wasn’t intrusive. Bringing all this together and you have one of the most innovative soundtracks ever seen in mainstream cinema.

In the end, despite the new representations and artistic style, Black Panther cannot escape what it truly is: a Marvel film.

Therefore it must adhere to the formula, with a CGI packed climax where our hero overcomes the villain. Thor: Ragnarok and this show that the creative reigns are loosening but the series needs to evolve to remain dominant after Infinity War. You can dress a man in different clothes, but at the end of the day he’s still the same man.

Maybe the time has come for Marvel to cast someone else.

3/5

Books

20

Feature

Seven Audiobooks worth a listen A different way to enjoy literature

ISSUE 16 / 19th FEBRUARY 2018 WWW.MANCHESTERMEDIAGROUP.CO.UK

Feature

The rise of the audiobook Read my lips: books have never sounded better, and they’re definitely here to stay

James Gill Books Editor Harry Potter: The Complete Collection – JK Rowling (Audio by Stephen Fry) 127 hours 39 mins Stephen Fry’s masterful narration of all seven Harry Potter books is arguably the greatest audiobook series ever recorded.

The beloved polymath adds an extra dimension to J.K Rowling’s work, knowing when to change the tempo of the reading, as well as adopting various voices for the different characters.

Recommended for fans of the wizarding world or fantasy in general.

Sherlock Holmes: The Definitive Collection – Arthur Conan Doyle (Audio by Stephen Fry) 71 hours and 58 minutes Another magnificent Stephen Fry audiobook, this time the definitive works of Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps the world’s bestknown detective, Holmes has entertained millions in books, tv shows, and films. Stephen Fry narrates all four novels and five short story collections as well as personal introductions for each one. A must-listen for fans of crime, mystery, or thrillers.

Photo: Ambient Mixer

Jeremy Bijl Books Contributor and Games Editor

Photo: Brian Minkoff-London Pixels @ Wikimedia Commons

A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson (Audio by William Roberts) 19 hours and 2 minutes Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything is a humorous and interesting trip from the Big Bang to present day. He takes topics that normally make people fall asleep like geology and physics and makes them fun and engaging. William Roberts does a fine job as the narrator, especially with his comedic timing. Recommended for fans of humorous or educational books.

The Girl on the Train – Paula Hawkins (Audio by ensemble) 10 hours 57 minutes Paula Hawkins’ explosive hit follows Rachel Watson, a woman who catches the same train every day, passing the same houses and seeing the same people. One day she sees something shocking that will change her whole life if she so chooses. The ensemble of narrators for this audiobook help to differentiate the characters, allowing them to develop independently. Recommended for fans of mystery.

Ready Player One – Ernest Cline (Audio by Wil Wheaton) 15 hours 40 minutes In the year 2044, the world has become almost uninhabitable, the environment is ruined, and famine is widespread. To escape this painful reality humanity goes into the OASIS, a virtual world where the possibilities for life are limitless. When the founder of the OASIS, James Halliday, dies with no heir to take over, he leaves a series of riddles and puzzles behind with his fortune going to whoever solves them all first. Actor Wil Wheaton is fantastic in the role of narrator. Recommended for fans of science fiction.

The Spire – William Golding (Audio by Benedict Cumberbatch) 6 hours 49 minutes Written by Lord of the Flies author William Golding, The Spire is a dark tale of one man’s journey to build, on the supposed authority of God, a grand spire on his cathedral. Benedict Cumberbatch’s versatile voice work as the narrator truly brings this fantastic novel to life. Recommended for fans of historical fiction.

Matilda – Roald Dahl (Audio by Kate Winslet) Length – 4 hours 18 minutes Whether it’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Twits, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl was a major part of most children’s early literary education. Here we have Matilda, a child genius with horrible parents. Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet employs various voices for each character in a wonderful rendition of the book. Recommended for a little dose of nostalgia.

Literature has been declared dead many times. From renowned critics such as Walter Benjamin decrying the death of the novel, to John Barth declaring that modernism had been exhausted, to a general societal conviction that books are increasingly less important, the literature industry as a whole has faced many perceived crises.

Like most industries, however, it has always found a way to adapt. In 2007, with the high street dying and books struggling to keep up with film, television, and video games, we saw the Kindle, the product that initiated the mainstream integration of the e-book.

Fast forward ten years and e-books find themselves in a similar position to that of the high street bookshop. Sales in 2017 were down by a staggering 17 per cent with most publishers refusing to even publish specific sales figures.

The main beneficiary of this, it would seem, is the audiobook, which has been the fastest growing sector of the publishing industry for the past four years. Just as the Kindle was the catalyst for the success of the e-book, the audiobook has its own intermediary platform — Audible, Amazon’s online platform for e-books.

Two factors have contributed to the rise of the audiobook.

The first and simplest is Audible itself.

Audible, who claimed that its customers had listened to a record-breaking one billion hours in 2017, propelled audiobooks from the cassette tape to the mp3. Backed by the financial power of Amazon and the abilities of modern smartphones, Audible allows you to get almost any book, any time, anywhere.

The second is a more widespread millennial concern: screen fatigue.

Photo: Audible.com @ Wikimedia Commons

With screens a professional necessity and a leisure time prerequisite, modern consumers are drawn to the sonic solace of audiobooks and an experience that rests the weary eyes whilst also scratching the same literary itch.

Audiobooks also provide other benefits.

Polyphonic works, for example, such as David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks are enhanced by multiple narrators for multiple characters, while the contemplative reveries of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch are granted gravitas by the evenly paced narrative perambulation of David Pittu.

“One of the

audiobooks’ main appeals is that, unlike a book, it does not demand one’s complete concentration.”

One of the audiobooks’ main appeals is that unlike a book it does not demand one’s complete concentration. One can alleviate the tedium of everyday tasks such as cooking, driving, travelling, exercising, or manual labour. The fact that one can use Audible to bookmark individual moments makes it a valid option for studying, too.

There are certain cases, however, where the audiobook format is not as practical. David Foster-Wallace’s Infinite Jest, with its plethora of lengthy footnotes is one such case, and post-modernist works which use the physical layout of the page to convey meaning or comment on written convention are also

unwieldy in an Audible format.

The inherently interpretative figure of the narrator is also a potential drawback. The written form allows more subjectivity in interpretation of literature, but the narrator’s and producer’s decisions in how a book is read can shape the meaning of it outside of the consumer’s control.

Nonetheless, for me at least, the audiobook provides a more pleasant way of consuming literature, reconciling reading for relaxation and reading as a genuinely worthwhile, thought-provoking pursuit.

The main question, however, is whether this dramatic growth is just that — growth — or whether the audiobook can endure the test of time and provide a genuine outlet for the industry.

Trends in technology suggest the answer is yes. Much of modern technology, from computing to architecture, is focused on compression: on making more fit into less.

Books take up a lot of space. Some might argue an impractical amount. The e-book was the first step towards remedying this in that it condensed multiple books into one device, and yet even that was limited to A5 dimensions.

The audiobook is the next natural step in this progression, allowing for physical compression down to the size of an Ipod Shuffle — or as small as any device that can store data and remain useable; sizes at which written text would be impractical, as suggested by the modest sales of the Kindle Fire.

I’m not saying that audiobooks will kill the written book. Quite the opposite. By providing a viable alternative to the way that we consume literature, audiobooks have diversified the industry and will only benefit literature as a whole in the long term. For an industry that’s dead, there’s a lot of life here.

On Thursday February 22nd we Reclaim the Night…

Bring your glow sticks, bring your friends and bring your voices.

Owen’s Park 7PM

We’ll be raising our voices and After Party: 9PM Students’ uniting our energies to stand Union DJ’s, cocktails & more up to street harassment, sexual violence and victim blaming.

22nd February 2018 www.facebook.com/reclaimthenightmanchesteruk

Food & Drink

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ISSUE 16 / 19th FEBRUARY 2018 WWW.MANCHESTERMEDIAGROUP.CO.UK

Review: Inferno cocktail bar and restaurant Anokhi Shah Editor The Ram was a great grungy pub. It had a wonderful beer garden, band-eoke every Tuesday night, and an authentic student atmosphere. Now though, it’s turned into “Inferno” cocktail bar and restaurant. The appearance from the outside hasn’t changed much — it still looks pretty shabby and uninviting.

I had very low expectations upon entry. However we were greeted by the sound of The Smiths — always a nice welcome. We were completely shocked by the transformation. The restaurant now has a country pub feel, with feature beams, wooden panel floors, an AGA stove cooker, big Chesterfield booths, and fairy lights dotted about the place.The floor space is on the larger side, and we were the only people in the whole restaurant, which made us feel like we were in a village hall. Not ideal.

The cocktail list is good but lacking variety — considering it’s marketing itself as a cocktail bar. The options are a pornstar martini, espresso martini, strawberry daiquiri, pink gin fizz, zombie, elderflower spritz, mojito, toasted marshmallow piña colada, and an after 8.

All are priced at £10.95 for two or £6.95 for one. On average, the bottles of wine were priced at around £18 and a pint at £3.30. We went for the pornstar which was pretty tasty and well-made. However, due to the lack of atmosphere in the restaurant, we weren’t tempted to order a second.

There seems to be a wide selection of food on offer. Students get 30 per cent off their food bill too. They have a range of Persian dishes, kebabs, steak, burgers, and pizza. An extremely varied menu to satisfy all tastes and cravings.

On our way out we noticed that the patio area of the ram has been converted to an outdoor shisha space with big round sofas, and it has been decorated with beautiful colourful lanterns. A nice spot to remember for the summer.

Overall, I would suggest trying Inferno if you are a large group of people. For the two of us, due to the sheer size of the place, it felt quite strange given its emptiness. I think Inferno definitely has potential if word gets out. I presume it is the exterior that is not enticing people in, which is a shame, as it stands in complete contrast to the tasteful interior.

Photo: Anokhi Shah

Photo: Anokhi Shah

To start we had the aubergine dip with naan to share. The naan made an entrance due to its sheer size and was covered in toasted sesame seeds giving it a lovely flavour. However the showstopper was the aubergine dip: smoky, garlicky, and creamy. For our mains we ordered the Persian salmon dish (£12) and the veggie hot pizza (£9). Both dishes were very average. There really isn’t a lot to say about the pizza, but considering it was a veggie hot it definitely lacked some spice. The Persian salmon came with two fillets of salmon and steamed herbed rice. Overall the dish was extremely dry and the salmon was overcooked. Considering the quality of the mains I would say the prices are too high.

Photo: Anokhi Shah

Review: La Viña Deansgate Anokhi Shah Editor This is a split review between the carnivores and a herbivore. Why would you take a vegetarian to a traditional tapas restaurant?

However La Vina seemed to have a decent veggie selection.

Unfortunately this did not live up to expectations. Upon entry, I thought “It could do with a touch of illumination and some charming Spanish tunes.” I changed my mind after a generous helping of delightful tapas.

The décor was lovely and traditional, even if the four of us were sat

“Crisp, lightly battered aubergine slices stacked and drizzled in honey and truffle oil” at a very high table with very uncomfortable chairs, not what you want when you’re about to indulge. We had a quick scan around the room to try move however all the chairs seemed very similar, a small but important grievance.

We choose to dine during their 50 per cent off food deal so went a little crazy ordering nearly everything on the menu. They suggest around three or four plates per person.

Photo: Anokhi Shah

Here’s what we ordered: Gambas Pil Pil, Chorizo sautéed in garlic thyme and honey, Pollo Envuelto — chicken breast stuffed with piquilo and wrapped in serrano ham, Goats cheese, and Spinach Croquetas (On the specials board), Patatas Bravas, Berenjenas con miel y trufa — Crisp lightly battered aubergine slices stacked and drizzled with honey and truffle oil, Mushrooms in a cream sauce (On the specials board), Brocoli a la brasa — tenderstem broccoli chargrilled with garlic and chilli and a Paella Mixta.

The portion size was huge for tapas, there were at least ten prawns in the gambas pil pil, amazing value for money. The paella, chorizo, and chicken were all an absolute dream and cooked to perfection.

Unfortunately there is little praise for the vegetarian selection apart from the fact that they had a substantial one.

The only thing my vegetarian friend enjoyed was the patatas bravas,

Review: Habesha Alina Mclellan Contributer Habesha, a hidden gem serving delicious Ethiopian food, is in the heart of Manchester’s gay village. The excitement begins with the search, as you discover that the restaurant is hidden above a rather glum looking fast food joint. However, having entered, you take a winding staircase leading you up to a pleasantly simple but welcoming restaurant.

You are greeted with a big smile, and are offered a menu and a drink while you wait to be seated. Though the menu is limited, you are unlikely to be familiar with the signature dishes they have to offer which makes it all the more appealing. All dishes come with the traditional flatbread, Injera. Unlike others you may have tasted before, it has a subtle sour flavour and a fluffy, almost crumpet like texture. Partnering the flatbread, the menu offers an array of meat dishes; beef, chicken and lamb, or a plentiful vegetarian selection of lentils, chickpeas and other green goods.

The waiter advised us that the lamb was the

you the impression that time is standing still.

Filled with what appeared to be a regular clientele, who were watching the football match on the TV next to the bar, there was also a range of families, couples and groups of friends. When the food arrived, our eyes lit up. Presented on a large platter, was one Injera, the accompanying dishes coming in separate bowls along with a basket of extra flatbreads. The waiter explained that we were to spoon the meat and veg onto the platter and then rip off pieces of flatbread to eat it with. This informal style of eating made for a nice change, and was an ideal way to share all the dishes meaning we didn’t get food envy.

Particularly exceptional was the lamb dish, which was both tender and tasty. The side of cabbage and carrots was equally flavoursome.

The beef, which came minced in a tomato based sauce with cottage cheese on the side, was more of an acquired taste. It had a subtle minty flavour that we couldn’t quite put our finger on.

Costing just £7 for each main and £1.50 for the vegetable side, it was wonderfully cheap. All in all, we had an exceptional meal that was filling, good quality and excellent value!

“...relaxed and friendly atmosphere” most popular dish so we opted for one Yebeg Wot lamb dish and a ‘Special Kitfo’ beef dish, with a side of cabbage and carrots.

Drinking our Ethiopian lager as we waited for our food, we enjoyed the relaxed and friendly atmosphere; it was the type of place that gives

Let’s admit it, lunch times at uni predominantly consist of a basic meal deal or a quick bite from one of the many university cafes dotted around campus.

I have therefore been on a mission to discover somewhere where I can eat something new, in nice surroundings and for a reasonable price. Friska delivers just this and although you may not have heard of it, it can be found only a few feet from the University of Manchester Main Library!

“I predict that Friska will soon become a hot spot for students”

Maia Coelho Contributer This vegan recipe is so simple to make and it is super healthy! The ‘parmesan’ is only made from four ingredients, yet has a similar taste and texture to grated powdery cheese.

Ingredients: For the batter 160 grams flour chickpea flour 240 ml water A pinch of salt and pepper 1 small onion finely chopped or grated 3 garlic cloves minced 1 tbsp mixed herbs Olive oil For the parmesan 90 grams of cashews 9 grams of nutritional yeast 3/4 tsp salt 1/4 tsp garlic powder For the Ratatouille1 lb courgette, chopped into 1/2 inch cubes 1 small eggplant, chopped into 1/2 in cubes 1 onion

1⁄4 cup olive oil or 1⁄4 cup butter 2 garlic cloves, minced 2 tomatoes, peeled & chopped 1 green pepper 1⁄2 teaspoon salt 1⁄4 teaspoon pepper 1⁄4 teaspoon dried basil 1⁄4 teaspoon thyme Method: Mix together the chickpea flour and water.

Stir in the rest of the ingredients and leave to sit for 10 minutes.

Heat up a pan and add a ladle of mixture.

Cook for approximately 4 minutes before flipping over and cooking the other side, until golden brown.

Meanwhile in a separate saucepan, saute the courgette, eggplant & onion in the oil.

Add the garlic, tomatoes, green pepper, salt, pepper, basil & thyme. And cook covered for 10-15 minutes.

To make the parmesan place the ingredients into a blender and blitz until the contents resemble a powdery cheese.

To serve, top the crepes with the ratatouille and sprinkle the ‘cheese’ on top.

Enjoy!

Similar to what you can expect from Habesha.

Photo: Stu Spivak @Wikimedia Commons

The menu offers a range of sandwiches, salads, and phos as well as a delectable selection of ‘hot-boxes’ and ‘hotpots’. These hot offerings include options such as Lebanese Meatballs, Chicken and Chorizo Gumbo, and Butternut and Blackbean Dopiaza, all of which are around £5 in price. A more recent addition to the menu has been traditional Asian bao’s, which are steamed buns filled with either Sriracha chicken, pulled pork, or vegan sweet potato. These buns are currently being individually sold for £3.50, or you can purchase two for £6.50.

On my most recent visit I tried the Halloumi and Roasted Pepper Wrap as well as a Sriracha Chicken Bao, both of which were delicious. The bao was light yet filling so two will definitely be enough for lunch.

The wrap tasted really fresh and was filled with veg and a generous portion of halloumi. When I have previously visited I have often gone for the Lebanese Meatball Hotbox, which I highly recommend as it comes with salad, rice, saucy meatballs, and nacho style chips.

Overall, I predict that Friska will soon become a hot

Situated in the Science Park, which is just behind the library, Friska is a treat for the eyes as much as the tastebuds. It is an open plan area with big windows, Scandinavian-style decor, and a multitude of seating arrangements. This makes it an ideal place to chill out with friends during a lunch break or even to study, as it is a fairly peaceful and quiet environment.

Photo: Daisy Tolcher

Photo: Anokhi Shah

Recipe: Vegan pancakes topped with ratatouille and ‘parmesan’

Review: Friska Daisy Tolcher Head Editor

Photo: Anokhi Shah

fried potatoes, and garlic sauce which is quite frankly very difficult to get wrong. The aubergine was watery, the mushrooms seemed to be from a tin in the most uncreamy sauce and the broccoli was far too hard and crunchy.

Whilst we were all gorging on the wonderful meat selection my friend looked increasingly disappointed, it’s fair to say veggies should stay away from La Vina.

In terms of wine, we ordered a glass of the house rose priced at £6 per glass. Complete rip off, tasted like the £3 bottle from New Zealand wines. The food was great value under the 50 per cent off deal however I’m not sure I would pay full price.

La Vina does seem to have frequent offers so I would suggest going only when there is a deal on.

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ISSUE 16 / 19th FEBRUARY 2018 WWW.MANCHESTERMEDIAGROUP.CO.UK

Photo: Daisy Tolcher

spot for students, especially as they are currently offering a free meal on their app. If you refer a friend to the app you get a voucher for a whole free lunch, which definitely makes this spot worth the visit.

Furthermore, you can pre-order your lunch for collection on the app if you are on a tight schedule, which makes eating here a really flexible experience.

Friska can be found in: The Bright Building, Manchester Science Park, Pencroft Way, M15 6JJ

Photo: Maia Coelho

Photo: Maia Coelho

B12: The vitamin we should ALL be talking about Daisy Tolcher Head Editor As students we are all used to those long days where we feel so run down that even coffee has little effect in improving our energy levels. Well what if I told you that there is an essential vitamin which can be found in our food and in supplements which can put an end to just this. B12 is this vitamin and it benefits us in three key ways — with our energy levels, our stress levels and our digestion.

In regards to energy, B12 helps with your bodies production of red blood cells which carry oxygen around our bodies.

If our organs do not receive this oxygen then they will slow down and you will end up feeling run down and fatigued.

Therefore, increased levels of B12 can help you feeling spritely and energised, what every student needs! Our digestion systems are also key areas where energy is produced. B12 metabolises fats, proteins and carbohydrates into energy which also results in vital nutrients being absorbed by the body. With regards to our stress levels,

B12 is essential in the proper development and functioning of the brain. Therefore, good levels of B12 can contribute to a healthy mind which in turn can reduce feelings of stress and anxiety.

I am sure you are now wondering where you can find this magical remedy. Well, our bodies do not naturally make B12 which means you have to find it in your food or in supplements. Beef, pork, cheese, milk and fish are all good sources of B12 which is good news for meat and dairy eaters, but bad news for vegans and vegetarians.

If you are someone who is excluding these food groups then it is essential that you use supplements to make sure your B12 levels remain intact. Furthermore, a deficiency in B12 can cause a condition called anaemia which can leave you feeling fatigued and faint.

Given all of this, we should all definitely be talking about this wonderful vitamin and its wonderful effects! You may not have known it before now, but it can be found in many of the foods we eat, and can alleviate some of the most common ‘student illnesses’, like tiredness and stress. Something to bear in mind as deadlines loom...

Arts

24

Feature

Review

Hylas and the Nymphs: More than meets the eye

Manchester Art Gallery deliberately provoked discussion last week, by removing the painting Hylas and the Nymphs from their website and walls, leaving a blank space for audience debate.

The painting by Victorian Romantic John William Waterhouse was targeted for its enticing antagonists: seven naked nymphs who are seducing Hylas with their topless — yet adolescent — beauty.

The public gallery claims to have been conducting an experiment by challenging the male gaze in Victorian fantasy and the modern-day attitude towards the female nude, in light of the #metoo campaign and recent sexual harassment revelations which have shaken the culture industry and the world of politics. The painting was down for a total of seven days — one for every nymph — before it was re-hung thanks to public demand.

The youthful appearance of the mythological females depicted was the main point of contention. The general consensus so far, however, seems to be that the painting wasn’t offending anyone. In most cases, a greater contempt has been expressed towards the removal itself, branded as conservative censorship by many.

As a matter of opinion, I quite like the painting. I have seen Hylas and the Nymphs numerous times and it has never stood out to me as being offensive.

I don’t believe that it is remarkable enough to be controversial, and I don’t believe therefore that this painting would influence an audience to think differently about sexual entitlement.

What did offend me about the event is Manchester Art Gallery’s disingenuous and opportunistic co-option of a pressing social and political issue, exploited to ignite a media stunt.

It saddens me to criticise one of my favourite UK galleries, but there are

numerous reasons why we shouldn’t buy into this public performance.

Firstly, the project was announced “in anticipation” of the gallery’s upcoming Sonia Boyce exhibition. Manchester Art Gallery has harnessed this debate as a tool to promote the artist’s work, a fact that they have been relatively transparent about.

It is also not unreasonable to imagine how the re-opening of the Whitworth Art Galley has cast a shadow over Manchester’s trusty city gallery

of integrity in this instance, purporting an interest in contemporary public opinions, is clearly an attempt to update itself, by engaging with current cultural affairs.

A similar event took place in the press a few months ago. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York declined to remove Therese Dreaming by Balthus from public view, despite a large petition demanding that it be taken down.

The curator of the Hylas’ media circus, Clare Gannaway, likely took

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

throughout the past three years. Without any sort of permanent collection, the Whitworth’s flexible blank-canvas layout has been able to attract increasingly impressive names such as Andy Warhol and Steve McQueen, leaving the lesser-known names and more localised narratives to its public companion.

Manchester Art Gallery’s intended display

inspiration from the Met’s negative press, which was publicity nonetheless.

It’s not hard to sympathise with the Met’s critics, who argue that Balthus’ depiction Therese, as a highly sexualised young girl, actively promotes paedophilia.

When considered within these wider walls, the connection between Hylas and

#metoo seems a little more contrived.

I would also argue that the Manchester Art Gallery never intended to permanently remove a key piece of their collection, if this had been the persuasion of the public’s verdict.

You might be interested to visit the gallery (now that they’ve swiftly re-hung Hylas) to view some of the other larger treasures they have on display. Less than a thirty-second walk from Hylas you can see Sappho, the ancient female poet, portrayed by Charles-August Mengin as stormy embodiment of busty sexual energy.

Or, you could see The Sirens and Ulysses by William Etty, a painter who’s academic obsession with the female form has long been called into question.

If you look closely at this painting, which takes up nearly an entire wall, you can see that Etty spent a vast amount of time painting the naked women. So long in fact that he ran out of time to finish the ropey background, that poorly contextualises their generous nudity within a loose mythological theme.

I don’t believe that any of these artworks should be taken down, but it seems that Manchester Art Gallery doesn’t think so either. There is a definite irony in this marketing campaign’s success. The attention Waterhouse’s painting has attracted has led to its image being circulated more than ever before. It has developed a fresh infamy.

Hylas and the Nymphs is nothing but a throwaway manifestation of an outdated Victorian imagination, a specific form of misogyny which has been regarded as problematic ever since it began. Whether or not we do continue to revise the art on display in our public collections is to be seen. This tired debate has resurfaced in the Western art world time and time again.

As a matter of urgency however, I think it should be asked “is it really fair to equate a Victorian mythological fantasy, with the living instances of sexual assault and abuse that we face today?”

The Rusholme Sketcher Len Grant brings life to the otherwise ordinary in ‘The Rusholme Sketcher’ series

Ayesha Hussain Arts Contributor The only place in Manchester to buy shawarma from, is Atlas Shawarma in Rusholme! January had been rather bleak, and upon returning to Manchester, I thought I’d visit my favourite place to drag me out of the merciless black hole that is January, and fill it with carbs.

Upon entering the small shop, I shuffled forwards and backwards, struggling to find somewhere to stand and I found myself looking over the shoulder of someone perched on a stool intently drawing. How strange! The last thing that you would expect to see in Rusholme, is perhaps an artist sitting at a cramped shawarma stand sketching away and quizzing the shop workers about their daily lives and backgrounds.

After some conversation, or rather blunt intrusion on my part (!), I learned that artist Len Grant, was completing part of his The Rusholme Sketcher project. It is a series of sketches, that depict the ordinary lives of the diverse people in the area, that go somewhat ignored by Manchester’s art scene.

It is a series of sketches that document the Curry Mile, its workers, inhabitants and visitors through storytelling.

Len Grant, says “Drawing is older than the alphabet itself and remains a powerful way of telling stories.

Sketching is the most recent addition to my storytelling repertoire and one that fits many situations. People engage with the process of drawing.”

At the shop, Len allowed me to be part of the sketch. He struggled to copy the Arabic script that hung behind the counter on the wall, however, unfamiliarity like this does not scare him away. Rather, his work indicates that he is interested in asking questions about our surroundings, interested in minor details, and interested, above all, in people.

It is this inclusion, collaboration and openness that characterises much of his work and sets him aside from many current artists on the Manchester scene.

Back at the shop, it was heartwarming to see, otherwise excluded minorities, become part of art work that is both remarkable and simple simultaneously.

The medium of Len’s artwork mirrors the subject matter of the work itself.

By using just pen and ink, he manages to create busy scenes that capture the Curry Mile’s many facets, with a few lines and a splash of colour.

“ Drawing is older than the alphabet itself and remains a powerful way of telling stories. ”

Winter Solstice

Rob Tomlinson reviews an ‘important and engrossing’ production from The Actors Touring Company

Initiating a pertinent debate or merely a publicity stunt? Florrie Badley considers the implications of Manchester Art Gallery’s recent removal of a canonical Victorian painting Florrie Badley Arts Contributor

Theatre 25

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Photo: Len Grant

Aside from The Rusholme Sketcher, which is presented through a blog, laced with the tiny details of Len’s encounters, his work as a photographer and a writer in Manchester, is also available to view on his website. www.lengrant.co.uk Photo: Len Grant

Rob Tomlinson Contributor The Actors Touring Company, who are responsible for bringing David Tushingham’s translation of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s German play, Winter Solstice to Manchester, describe their ambition to create theatre which places “the actor at the heart of the work and employing a lean aesthetic which promotes environmental sustainability”.

This outlook is evident as soon as you enter the theatre.

Instead of a stage the audience is confronted by school canteen tables arranged in a square, inside a rectangular area marked on this floor which demarcates the performance space.

At various moments in the play this space is the kitchen, living room, bathroom and bedrooms of the upper middle class family around whom the play is centred, sometimes

actors in one instance a pink highlighter becomes a pair of glasses. This is reinforced by the wilful manipulation of the visual by the spoken narrative. However, for all its novelistic aspects and formal trickery the performances remain emotionally relatable.

The relationship between

“an incredibly strong ensemble cast ”

“the performances remain emotionally relatable ” it is two or more simultaneously. This effect is achieved through the actors describing the scenery and events in an almost novelistic style; often one performer will explain an action or a sentence of dialogue immediately before it is delivered.

Some of the play’s key comedic moments come from the use of improvised props which have been described by the

and Betina. It is made abundantly clear to the audience that both the couple and their home are resoundingly bourgeois. Albert is a historian and Betina a director of worthy artistic films; the tasteful excess of their apartment is a motif throughout the play. The introduction into this flat of Betina’s mother, Corinna, only adds to the fraught family dynamic. Rudolph is a dark figure; returning from a post war exile in South America he represents the recent return to Europe of far right ideologies which we thought had been left in the past. He is extremely charismatic. Konrad, a painter, makes up the final member of an incredibly strong ensemble cast.

Photo: Stephen Cummiskey

intellectual couple Betina and Albert is beautifully acted and their non-verbal responses both to one another and the other characters are a delight.

The narrative revolves around the Christmas Eve intrusion of Rudolph, a man from Paraguay, into the home of Albert

It is Rudolph’s Freudian slip when regarding a painting of Konrad’s on the wall of the flat – he refers to ‘The Struggle’ as ‘My Struggle’ – that gives the audience its first insight into the political orientation of the interloper. The play in centrally concerned with the inability of bourgeois liberalism to confront the rising tide of extremism, as Albert, who during the play changes his opinion of Rudolph from one of suspicion to disgust, is unable to challenge him in any meaningful way. Instead we see him turn to medication and silence. Actions which shine a light on the silent complicity of the intellectual classes in the return of nationalist extremism to Europe. This is play which is both challenging and thought provoking and is definitely worth seeing.

Reviews

Showstopper! The Improvised Musical Anuli Changa Contributor The ‘Showstoppers’ are Olivier award-winning ten-year Fringe veterans, who, for a one-night engagement at the Palace Theatre, presented ‘PisteOff’ — a Winter Olympics musical.

It was a perfect family show. The entire audience was involved from the start. It began with a call from the ‘producer’ expecting a brand new musical, with the suspiciously convenient deadline of 9:30 that same evening. It was quite the experience sitting in the traditional Palace Theatre with the house lights up amidst raucous laughter, as the audience called out where tonight’s musical should be set and which of their favourite musicals were to be referenced.

Having seen other ‘improvised musical’ companies at Edinburgh Fringe, I’ve seen how each troupe has a unique selling point that grounds the comedy and entertainment. For the ‘Showstoppers’, it is the extensive list of beloved musicals they pay homage to throughout the show. Showstopper! is an absolute must for musical lovers. The astounding range in the musicals that the songs are plucked from leaves the audience wondering if the whole cast has studied every possible musical that one could imagine, just on the off chance they’ll crop up.

Whether we were laughing uncontrollably at an Avenue Q tune — complete with puppets and inappropriate humour — or catching the colourthemed jokes in a song about medals, performed in the style of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, the show was constantly entertaining.

The Hamilton homage was a standout, with the cast freestyle rapping on the spot — one cast member making hilarious ‘rise up’ innuendos.

Some strong vocals were displayed in the impromptu harmonies, particularly from cast member Ali James. Lucy Trodd was also a highlight, with her wonderful comedic timing.

That’s not to say it was perfect. The songs that didn’t reference actual musicals were somewhat underwhelming, and there were a few moments of dodgy vocals. Considerable leeway should be shown, however. After all, they effectively created a musical completely from scratch!

It has to be said that some of the best plot lines came from the audience. It was certainly a successful writing partnership between us and the ‘Showstoppers’ as the tension built — who will Olga choose? Marie Claire or Jimmy? Will anybody win?!

Wondering what I’m on about? Well, I’m afraid you had to be there!

The Vagina Monologues 2018 Anuli Changa Contributor

The performers consistently impressed throughout, not only in their imitations of varied musicals but also in the display of sensitivity to the vibe of the room. They seemed to judge the mood perfectly and were masterfully in sync with the audience at all times.

This show absolutely succeeds in bringing the comedic ‘wow-factor’ — even despite the odd moment of wobbly vocals. Although Piste-Off will never be seen again, that’s the appeal! Every night a new musical that only those in the audience will ever know. Improvisation can be a risky business, but this show was most certainly a hit!

Empowering, inspirational, and beyond relatable, this performance was based on the original episodic play The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler. The original play was written and originally performed in the 90s dealing with topics such as consensual and non-consensual sexual experiences, body image, and genital mutilation, and was criticised for being anti-transgender, anti-feminist and lacking in cultural diversity.

This year’s University of Manchester rendition of the monologues kept some of the original script but also updated the performance with pieces written by the women performing and in a wonderful display of diversity. Complete with vagina-themed cocktails and Reclaim the Night t-shirts on sale, the night had great whimsy but also moments of sombre realisation, as each

Photo: UMSU

Photo: Steve Ullathorne

monologue or spoken word piece resonated with the audience for endless different reasons.

The monologues were presented in association with the Women’s Theatre Society (created in September 2017). The society aims to be inclusive for all identifying women. Open to those experienced in theatre and beginners, a charitable society linked with Independent Choices (a domestic violence charity).The event itself was charitable , as it is every year, the proceeds of the show going to Manchester Rape Crisis (as are the sales of the Reclaim the Night T-shirts).

The whole performance was raw and engaging, with a plethora of voices and performance styles. Amy Rose opened up the conversation about women who haven’t experienced orgasms and the stark realisation that erectile dysfunction is combatted with Viagra and more but women don’t often voice how they feel about their sexual experiences.

Fikeyinmi Odulaja delivered a rousing spoken word about consent and the prolific rape myths that people use to qualify turning blame on the victims because of their dress, or behaviour or how much alcohol they’ve consumed. Holly Khambatta shed light on the exclusion she experienced due to her disabilities, people are so quick to exclude anyone different from the conversations. I was appalled to hear her story about being sent to the library to work during the sex education and STI assembly at school.

Seevana Raghubeer was another impressive performer, with her spoken word that encompassed so much, relating to all ages and genders, demonstrating that we are all oppressed in some way, whether by others or by our own insecurities or some combination.

“The Vagina Monologues left me inspired and emboldened and proud to call myself a woman” This is to name a few wonderful performances, each stood out its own way and I imagine, different performances resonated more personally for other audience members. The choice to go beyond the original script was an extremely successful one, not only modernising some of the issues but encompassing diversity in race, appearance, ability, gender identification and more.

A great authenticity was brought to the performances because some people acted their pieces, others came across as boldly speaking their truths and a further few fell somewhere inbetween. The Vagina Monologues left me inspired and emboldened and proud to call myself a woman.

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Lifestyle

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Manchester and the history of HIV/AIDS

In light of LGBT History Month 2018, James Huyton recounts the winding history of HIV/AIDS and a city that fought to overcome the stigma

Photo: Pixabay

James Huyton LGBT Activist In the year 1980, reports began to emerge from the United States of people presenting unusual symptoms associated with immune collapse, followed by rapid health deterioration and later death. A couple of years later, the first reported case appeared in the United Kingdom. Initially named GRID (Gay-Related Immune Disorder), it would later become known as HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus).

The progress we have made with HIV in the past few decades has been nothing short of miraculous. Thanks to advances in modern medicine, people who are living with HIV go on to live happy and healthy lives. Regular testing to know your status is the best way to combat HIV transmission, and early diagnosis and treatment ensure that a person living with HIV will become undetectable and will not transmit the virus – the medical concept of Undetectable = Untransmittable or U=U. The LGBT community was affected in countless ways by the AIDS crisis, and a worldwide mobilisation of this community and our allies were ultimately what pulled us through it.

Manchester has always been a unique city in terms of its community, and this is especially true with its LGBT people.

This month is LGBT History Month and it’s important to remember the decades of progress and fighting Mancunian activists have made against HIV. As HIV began to emerge throughout the United Kingdom, fear and uncertainty about how it was transmitted led to widespread panic. Sensationalist media reporting only made this worse, stigmatising those living with HIV as well as anyone vulnerable to the disease. It was often colloquially known in the tabloids as the ‘gay plague’.

In a 1987 editorial, The Sun newspaper openly called for the deportation of all gay men from the UK. Uncertainty about how HIV was passed on initially led health authorities to adopt disproportionate and

sometimes draconian infection control measures. In 1985, one man diagnosed with HIV was quarantined against his will at North Manchester General Hospital.

In 1988 the Conservative government introduced ‘Section 28’, a clause of the Local Government Act forbidding the ‘promotion

homosexuality should never have been legalised, and that those with HIV were “living in a cesspool of their own making”.

Anderton was known to order raids on gay bars and his tenure as Chief Constable marked an all-time low point in the relationship between the police and the

Photo: LGBT Foundation

of homosexuality’ and ‘pretended family relationships’ in schools and local authorities. In practice, this prohibited any discussion of services for homosexuals and marked the first anti-gay legislation for over 100 years.

At this time, the Chief Constable of GMP was James Anderton. Known by the moniker “God’s Cop” and infamous for his old-fashioned views, Anderson stated publicly in interviews that he believed

LGBT community.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the combination of HIV/AIDS, Section 28 and James Anderton meant that many LGBT people felt under attack, galvanising the community and fuelling waves of protest and direct action across Manchester. The first meeting about HIV took place in 1984 at The Thompsons Arms leading to the formation of Manchester AIDSline in 1985, one of the first HIV-specific organisations in

the country.

The helpline offered support and information about HIV to thousands of callers. In 1988 tens of thousands of people rallied in Albert Square against Section 28, the largest demonstration in the country.

Activists from this demonstration would go on to form the Manchester branch of ACT UP. In 1994 campaigners from Manchester MESMAC set up Healthy Gay Manchester, an organisation dedicated to improving the sexual health of men who have sex with men. HGM launched a free condom and lube distribution scheme in Greater Manchester that became a model for the rest of the country. In 2000, HGM merged with the Manchester Lesbian and Gay Switchboard to become the Lesbian and Gay Foundation which is now LGBT Foundation.

Operating since 1985, Manchester AIDSline was succeeded by George House Trust. GHT is today the largest HIV charity in the North West and is currently the main provider of services to people living with HIV in Greater Manchester. George House Trust along with the LGBT Foundation, Manchester City Council, the NHS, Brook Manchester, the BHA and the Manchester World AIDS Day Partnership – a collective of organisations that marks World AIDS Day every December 1st by showing solidarity with all those living with HIV and remembering everyone who has lost their life to the virus.

Launched this LGBT History Month, the ‘Let’s Talk About Sex’ exhibition documents the stories of people across Greater Manchester involved or affected by campaigns on sexual health and HIV prevention sparked by the AIDS crisis.

Providing a fuller picture of this story, it also features video testimonials from those involved that can be found in the North West Film archive pods at Manchester Central Library.

Events are still happening across Greater Manchester for LGBT History Month that is well worth checking out, as well as those ran by the UoM LGBTQ+ Society.

WOMEN IN

MEDIA CONFERENCE 2018 #WIM18

Dates: 3-4 March Venue: People’s History Museum Info: Q&A sessions, workshops and speeches showcasing successful women in media and empowering confidence in those wishing to follow in their footsteps.

Location: People’s history museum Tickets on sale now!

Website: www.womeninmediacon.co.uk

Supported by Amnesty International UK

Photo: LGBT Foundation

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Football and ‘authentocracy’ Arthur Salisbury talks about the modern game

Arthur Salisbury Deputy Sports Editor

MEET & EAT

I first became aware of the term ‘authentocracy’ about three years ago, although the concept had been doing the rounds on Left Twitter for a few years prior to that. Before looking at the ideology of authentocracy and its relation to football, it’s worth skimming over the historical context that produced it.

In the early second half of the 20th century (David Harvey puts the symbolic date as the Oil Crisis of 1973), the Fordist mode of production that had dominated since the interwar period began to break down as we entered a third, multinational phase of capitalism. In Britain, as elsewhere, this took the form of rapid and destructive deindustrialisation, while concomitant technological advances radically altered our perceptions of space and time.

The resulting cultural phenomenon that emerged was postmodernism, which defined itself in opposition to modernism, and in particular that movement’s belief in a meta-narrative of history — postmodernists rather prefer to highlight a multitude of conflicting perspectives and the difficulty or impossibility of finding objective truth in any of them. One of the positive achievements of the postmodernist movement was to emphasise the voices of previously marginalised groups of people — women, ethnic minorities, the LGBT community, and the rest of the list that we are by now all familiar with. The corollary to this was that the male, white manual worker, who had carved out a good standard of living under the Fordism, began to feel his relative loss of privilege.

Football, suspiciously coterminous with the rise of industrial capitalism, has traditionally been the domain of the white, male, manual working-class — the three o’clock kick-off time on a Saturday was the result of weekend concessions won by industrial trade unions in the nineteenth century. Nowhere else was a sense of unease over the new circumstances more keenly felt.

Football, of course, is a microcosm of society at large, and has been no more nor less prone to the financialisation, commercialisation, and commodification we can observe all around us. From 2019-20, Premier League matches will kick-off in any of eleven different time slots, excluding Bank holidays. In the early 21st century, much of the inevitable backlash to this congealed into the archetypal authentocratic movement — Against Modern Football.

While Against Modern Football contains many well-

Photo: wallpaperscraft.com

intentioned people concerned primarily with safe standing and lower ticket prices, it also contains a more politically dubious element. These are people with an understandable yearning for The Good Old Days – but these Old Days were, remember, Good only for the demographic outlined above.

Anyone who has scrolled through the #AMF hashtag on Twitter or stood near a flat-capped man buying a Bovril will be aware of the movement’s tricky relationship with race, sexuality and gender. These are the authentocrats, and it’s entirely correct that the first use of the term in the national press was in relation to the (now ex-) UKIP leader Paul Nuttall.

The article by Phil McDuff, which appeared in The Guardian in February of last year, defined the term as “[invoking] the spirit of the regular working classes through the use of props, costumes and rituals, like a cargo cult of the common man”.

I would quibble here only with the phrase “regular working classes”, which I hope McDuff has deployed with a touch of self-awareness, because it is not Deliveroo workers or single

UoM suffer double elimination

Both the men’s and women’s first exited their respective cups

There will be no cup glory this season for either of the University of Manchester’s football first teams, as both suffered defeats and subsequent eliminations this week.

Both the men and the women lost 2-1 at home on the 14th of February and will not be taking any further part in this year’s competition.

The men, competing in the BUCS Football 2017-2018 Trophy, faced a visit from Scottish side Strathclyde in the round of 16. The team from the North have been struggling in their respective league and find themselves at the bottom, but they will be buoyed by this recent cup victory.

The women meanwhile faced Edge Hill, a team from the

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mothers that the authentocrats seek to imitate, but the miners and steelworkers of mid-20th century. Frederic Jameson famously argued that postmodernism — as he called it ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’ — would inevitably collapse into pastiche and revivalism. The aesthetic trend for vintage replica shirts and the nostalgia industry that has grown around hooliganism would seem to bear out his point.

This article constitutes just a few preliminary notes on the subject. The point of writing it is to remind people that we cannot divorce football from the society it sits in. The tragic nerds behind the intensely tactics-focused football blogs like Zonal Marking are attempting, however consciously, to reduce football to simply what happens on the pitch, and to strip it of its entire social context. This trend is at least as worrying as the phenomenon of authentocracy and must be ruthlessly disparaged. I still believe that football has radical potential but we cannot limit our fight to football alone. Against Modern Capitalism. For Future Football.

division below them, in the quarter final stage of the BUCS Football 2017-2018 Northern Conference Cup. Despite being a league above, UoM women could not secure the victory, and also exited via a 2-1 defeat.

The elimination from the cup competitions means all attention now turns to the league. The women sit in fifth place in the Northern 2A league and need positive results from their final two games of the season if they are to avoid the bottom. The men are around mid-table in fourth but will be hoping to finish as high as possible. The final game of the season away at Leeds Beckett could prove crucial.

Upcoming fixtures: UoM Men vs Uni of Sheffield Men (7th March 4:30pm, The Armitage) Photo: Sam Cooper @TheMancunion

Uni of Central Lancsashire Women vs UoM Women (21st February 3:30pm, UCLan Sports Arena)

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Why Tottenham can’t be trusted Spurs fan Will Baldwin-Pask ponders: are they just style over substance?

Will Baldwin-Pask Sports Contributor Someone needs to talk about Spurs. And by talking, I don’t mean chanting “we hate Tottenham, we hate Tottenham” over and over. Most people do that every day whilst they brush their teeth. What is needed is a decent discussion of the problems facing a team with so much promise and why it is so hard to trust them.

There are very few on the landscape of footballing commentary that can be arsed to talk about this team at the moment. Paul Merson certainly won’t do it. Harry Rednapp will occasionally step up if he can recharge his kneecaps for long enough and leave the local. So it falls to a frank fan like me to get something said on the matter.

The lack of enthusiasm to talk about Tottenham and their problems is indicative of their not-quite-the-same status. Years spent begging for a possible Champions League place and averaging just outside the bracket have given Spurs as much reputability as an Ironborn or a three times divorced dad. Now, after two great seasons and some teasing of trophy wins, it appears the mud-brawl of mediocrity is calling us back.

It’s been an interesting run of results. After scraping a point at Newport a few weekends ago, Spurs somehow belittled Man United in the same fashion that United have done to Spurs for decades. They then went to Anfield for a draw, which could prove valuable in the fight for fourth. And of course, beating Arsenal, who are now seven points slower than Spurs, is always nice.

But should a team that tops a Champions League group with Madrid and Dortmund be quite as uncertain of returning to the tournament next year? How do you manage to draw with West Ham and Newport when you’re defeating European chamions?

What has characterised the whole season is what one could call unprovoked bottling. And it is this bottling nature that worries me most about Spurs. The fact is that Tottenham lacks the legacy of teams like Arsenal, Liverpool and United. The histories of success that these teams bear put them under more pressure to perform than anyone else. If any of the traditional big four fail for long enough, they buy superlative players, bring in fresh managers and get distraught fans attempting to start hashtags, petitions and lynch mobs.

Not having this pressure has been to Tottenham’s advantage in recent years, having married a prodigious manager with a cheap yet talented squad, allowing them to play the way they like and to the frustration of their adversaries. Pochettino’s players have looked completely comfortable with the style

they cultivated and the fans have never been so satisfied.

However, that lack of pressure — that added weight of history and legacy — felt by the other clubs, is contributing to their failure to convert anything into a trophy. They have not experienced winning a league or a cup in modern times, which stands them out from their rivals. That winning grit is not something they’ve inherited. And until they do so, their tendency to bottle might keep haunting them.

There is one thing about Tottenham that gets brought up in conversations everywhere all the time. You’re probably wondering why I’m only just mentioning him.

Kane might well be Tottenham’s very own Sword of Damocles. If Spurs were to sell Harry Kane, they would make a lot of money, but not enough to buy someone of equivalent quality. After the move of Gareth Bale to Real Madrid, Spurs decided to spaff their winnings on a bunch of players ranging from decent to disastrous. Meanwhile, Daniel Levy will not dig into his pocket as deeply as owners of City, United or Chelsea, simply because the pocket ain’t that big. The better Kane gets, the greater the interest in him and the harder it will be tether him without dramatic wage increases or silverware. Holding on to him is the best hope.

It is said that Kane’s not the sort of player to leave Tottenham, that he’s loyal. Sure, Kane seems a smiley chap in that white shirt, and his heroic, home-grown status within the club is great for his image. But as Wayne Rooney pointed out, he can’t keep scoring like he does and receive so many accolades without feeling like he should be playing with the absolute best. Alli and Erikson aren’t far behind him either. It’s hard to imagine the current line-up losing none of these individuals if they sustain their quality for the next few years.

Regardless of how well they’ve proved they can play, Tottenham still can’t convert it into substantial reward. The tectonic plates of Premier League power are shifting back to Manchester and it’s hard to see Spurs lifting the trophy any time soon. The thrill of the chase will be the greatest allure to staying at the club for some of these players, especially when the fat Spanish cats come calling.

As the status quo revives and the elite reclaim their thrones, the Premier League from 2014 — 2016 may in future be regarded as a continuity blip; a bizarre counter-moment, when Leicester City could win the title and Tottenham Hotspur finished in the top 3 twice in a row. What could have been the maturation moment for one of the most improved clubs of recent years could go down as another temporary spike in a largely disappointing history. If this season ends on another underwhelming note, Tottenham fans might have a lot more to worry about than higher parking fees at the redeveloped White Hart Lane.

Dane Massey Sports Contributor

Photo:Oleg Bkhambri @ Wikimedia Commons

Photo: Martin Le Roy @wikimedia commons

Manchester United to make several passing errors.

In the opening ten minutes Newcastle have had five shots and conceded none. Pogba or Matic need to calm their team down and try to have some sustained possession. A scrappy game will suit Newcastle as they seem intent on challenging for every ball, their work rate so far has been incredible.

Dubravka, a deadline day loan signing from Sparta Prague, has made a confident debut so far in goal for Newcastle. Matic cuts the Newcastle defence in half with a delectable pass to Martial, putting him through one on one with the keeper, a position you would expect him to score, but Dubravka makes a fine save.

Not a minute later, St James’ Park erupts in anger as Chris Smalling takes down Dwight Gayle in the very corner of the penalty box and a penalty nor a foul is given. Replays show that Smalling’s foot misses the ball and lands on Gayle’s foot, a very poor decision by referee Craig Pawson who was in a good position to see it.

The second half begins much like the first, end to end and very scrappy. Lukaku manages to head the ball into the back off the net in a bit of penalty box pinball but he fouls his man to get to their first. Sánchez then tries to break through this Newcastle defence singlehandedly, going past two players in the box but his shot hits the side netting.

Lukaku receives the ball on the edge of the box and finds Sánchez with a sublime pass. The Chilean then takes on the keeper and, only needing to tap the ball into the empty net, does a fake shot which allows the defence to recover. He really should of taken that first time and I can’t quite understand what he was trying to do. In such a close game that could prove very costly indeed.

Newcastle are not without their chances too, however they are limited more to counter attacks. The Manchester United defence, particularly Young, don’t look entirely confident on the ball and if Newcastle get a goal here it’ll be from a defensive error or a set piece from a nervous tackle.

Chris Smalling, inside his own half, dives and receives a yellow card.

Not just that but he concedes a free kick in a good position for a set piece attempt. The ball is lofted in, headed down, and then flicked on to Matt Richie with acres of space to pick his spot. He finds the back on the net to make it 1-0. All originating from a Smalling dive.

Immediately after Lingard and Pogba come off for Carrick and Mata.

Pogba sustained an injury in the warm up and it is surprising he has lasted this long, he spent all of the second half so far ambling around and it would have perhaps been better for the team to bring on some fresh legs earlier.

The final substitute is Scott McTominay coming on for Nemanja Matic. His first piece of action is a Manchester United corner. The ball is crossed in and headed down by Smalling to Martial. The Frenchman has two stabs at goal but both are blocked by a Newcastle defender.

You get the feeling this might be Newcastle’s day.

The defending is desperate but every home supporter in the stadium is on their feet cheering the team on. In the last seconds of the game Dubravka makes an astonishing reacting save. As the whistle blows the fans celebrate wildly and rightfully so, it is their first win since October an a deserved one too.

Rafa Benitez’ side moves from the relegation zone all the way to 13th. The bottom half of the table in incredibly tight and that win gives Newcastle fans hope that they can survive. On the other side of the table, the loss for Manchester United means they are just six points away from missing out on the top four with Chelsea and Liverpool in their next three games.

His middle name is ‘Sidi Yaya,’ and there’s certainly shades of a prime Yaya Toure about Spurs’ Mousa Dembélé right now. The Belgian bulldozer was a colossus yet again in midfield against Juventus in Turin last Tuesday.

Harry Winks’ early season form, the change in system to three at the back, along with personal injury problems would have concerned Dembélé – especially considering that Winks is eight years younger than his fellow central-midfielder and Pochettino is building for the future.

But the man from Antwerp has kept his feet firmly on the ground and wrestled back his place in the team as assertively as he dispossesses opponents. The game at the Juventus Stadium was the latest Dembélé midfield masterclass.

The Belgian international attempted 95 passes – 17 more than anybody else on the pitch. He completed 94 percent of his passes in a controlling performance against last season’s Serie A Champions and Champions League finalists.

In a match that saw Juventus race into an early 2-0 lead thanks to a brace from Gonzalo Higuain, Spurs began to gain a foothold in the game after going two goals behind and Dembélé was the catalyst. As a centre midfielder, he is as complete as they come. Just as they overran Manchester United and Arsenal in midfield, Spurs did the same to Juventus, as midfield duo Sami Khedira and Miralem Pjanic – so vital

to the Bianconeri’s success last season, struggled.

The pair completed just 42 passes between them – less than half the number of passes Dembélé completed. Pjanic’s pass success rate was just 67 percent, while Khedira’s was as low as 54 percent.

This was the same midfield pairing which successfully overran Barcelona’s midfield in last year’s Champions League quarter-final.

If Massimiliano Allegri’s team are to reach that stage this season, they have a huge task on their hands at Wembley in three weeks’ time. Spurs’ two away goals have blown the tie wide open, and their strength in midfield may force Allegri into a change or two.

The absence of Blaise Matuidi perhaps helped Dembélé to find extra space, with the Frenchman’s energy a vital factor in the way Juventus play. Matuidi’s skill set would have proved useful in preventing midfielders such as Dembélé and Christian Eriksen dictating play so easily.

Even if Allegri was to change the structure of his team ahead of the second leg, though, finding the answer to nullifying Spurs’ man mountain will be problematic due to his sheer physical strength yet incredible composure on the ball. Jose Mourinho and Arsene Wenger also struggled to cope with Spurs’ midfield unit. For long periods in the games against United and Arsenal at Wembley, and also against Juventus, Dembélé was left unmarked in the middle of the pitch frequently.

In last Saturday’s North London Derby, Spurs talisman Harry Kane was given the man of the match award for his towering

header which separated the sides, but in truth Dembélé’s influence on the game was greater than that of Kane’s. As well as his 97 per cent pass accuracy on the ball, Dembélé was equally as good off the ball doing the nitty-gritty side of the game. The former-Fulham man won 100 per cent of his tackles and recovered the ball eight times for his side. Arsenal’s midfielders simply couldn’t touch him, just as Pjanic and Khedira failed to get to grips with the box-to-box midfielder.

Both Arsenal and Juventus, as well as United, replicated Spurs’ 4-2-3-1 formation, a system which has proved fruitful for Mauricio Pochettino when he has used it over the past three and a half years since he took the managerial reins in North London. But neither of the three midfields could contain Dembélé, it was like a lion holding off a pack of hyenas.

This has become an all too familiar sight in the Premier League over the last two and a half seasons. Dembélé has fought for and continuously maintained his place at the central hub of Pochettino’s team structure, becoming one of the best in the league in his position. While Kane and Eriksen gain most of the plaudits for Spurs for their decisiveness in the final third, Dembélé’s contribution in the middle third cannot be underestimated.

The claim was made at the beginning of this article that he shares characteristics with a certain Yaya Toure, and Dembélé can use the Ivorian’s game template to get even better. If he can add goals to his game, there is no reason why he cannot reach the destructive levels of Toure at his very best, and fire his team up another level.

City stroll to Basel victory

Photo: soccer.ru @wikimediacommons

Newton’s Third Law finding it’s way into football

Manchester United will be looking to cement their place in the top four with a win over Rafa Benitez’ Newcastle United. Manager Jose Mourinho has never won a Premier League match at St James’ Park (Played six, Drawn three, Lost three) and will be hoping his side can end that bad record here.

Mourinho decides to field the same eleven that lost 2-0 to Tottenham.

De Gea starts in goal with a back four of Valencia, Smalling, Jones and Young. Pogba and Matic are the central midfielders, Martial, Lingard and Sánchez play in an attacking trio. Romelu Lukaku is the lone striker.

Newcastle get a free kick in the opening minutes from a Chris Smalling handball. It’s around 20 yards out, a prime shooting position.

In the end it is a poor attempt to hit it under the wall but the ball bounced to Jonjo Shelvey who fires an absolute rocket requiring a good save by de Gea to stop the Red Devils going behind early.

That shot gives the Newcastle fans something to chant for and the players react off that excitement, pressing high and causing

Mousa Dembélé – Spurs’ Midfield General Harry Kane and Christian Eriksen often grab the headlines, but is the Spurs midfielder underappreciated?

A Smalling dive helps Newcastle leap to 13th

James Gill Sports Contributor

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ISSUE 16 / 19TH FEBRUARY 2018 WWW.MANCESTERMEDIAGROUP.CO.UK

A brace from İlkay Gündoğan helped Guardiola’s side all but confirm a place in the next round.

Sam Cooper Sports Editor Manchester City took a commanding lead in their Round of 16 knockout tie against FC Basel thanks to a 4-0 win in Switzerland.

A period of three goals in nine minutes from Gündoğan, Bernardo Silva and Sergio Agüero put Basel out of sight before Gündoğan doubled his tally in the 53rd minute.

Wary of Manchester United’s struggles here earlier in the season, Pep Guardiola named a very strong eleven despite being overwhelming favourites. Vincent Kompany made his first Champions League start since May 2016 while Leroy Sané returned to the bench.

Despite City’s perceived superiority, it was the home side who had the first chance of the game just after the five-minute mark. Blás Riveros sent a searching ball upfield and Dimitri Oberlin was the quickest to react.

City defender Niciolás Otamendi could not handle the pace of the Basel striker and Ederson struggled to make up the ground in time. In the end, Oberlin hit a tame effort round Ederson but it was swept up by Otamendi.

Shortly after, Basel were punished for their failure to take their chance. An in-swinging corner from Kevin De Bruyne was met by Gündoğan whose clever run had given him a few yards of space from the defender.

The German powered his header into the net to give City the first goal of the tie in the 16th minute.

Minutes later and the ruthlessness nature of this City team was there for all to see. De Bruyne was again involved as he played Raheem Sterling in behind the Basel defence.

The Englishman crossed the ball but a Basel defender managed to get a head to it. The attempted clearance could only find Silva though who fired a volley goalwards.

Basel keeper Tomás Vaclik did manage to get a hand to it but was not strong enough and palmed it into the net to double City’s advantage.

A visibly shellshocked Basel only found their evening getting worse in the 23rd minute. In-form Agüero collected a loose ball and without any hesitation shot from range towards the bottom left corner.

Vaclik could only stand and watch as the pinpoint strike found the net and put this tie beyond Basel.

The pick of the goals was City’s fourth. After the half time break, it was much the same story with City continuing to press home their advantage.

In the 54th minute, Gündoğan moved the ball past the defender before curling an effort into the top right corner. This time the keeper did dive but he was just as helpless as the Agüero effort and Gündoğan got a deserved second.

The final half hour of the game was more about energy conservation. With the game won and presumably the tie as a whole with it, Guardiola had the luxury of resting some key players.

De Bruyne and Sterling left the field while there was a welcome return for Leroy Sané just 16 days after suffering damage to his ankle ligaments against Cardiff City.

The game finished 4-0 to the visitors and barring a Basel miracle at the Etihad in three weeks time, City’s place in the quarter-finals is all but ensured.

Manchester City - Basel 7th March, 7:45pm Etihad Stadium Photo: Daivd Flores @flickr

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Photos: soccer.ru @wikimedia commons (Eriksen) soccer0010.com @wikimedia commons (Salah) Biser Todorov @wikimedia commons (Sterling)

English teams excel in Europe Convincing wins for Manchester City and Liverpool while Tottenham Hotspur earned an impressive draw away at Juventus Sam Cooper Head Sports Editor The first week of the round of 16 knockout ties in the UEFA Champions League is over and all three English sides that played provided a throughly impressive performance. Tuesday saw Manchester City travel to Basel, while Tottenham faced a tricky tie away in Turin against Juventus.

Spurs’ evening against the Italian Champions got off to the worst possible start when the hosts scored two goals in the opening ten minutes. Gonzalo Higuaín was smart in his movement to finish off a Juventus set piece in the second minute and seven minutes later he had the chance to double his and his team’s tally from the penalty spot. The Argentine slotted the ball into the net and put Juventus firmly in the driver’s seat.

A characteristic of Spurs under Mauricio Pochettino has been an increased maturity in their game and it was on show here. Unfazed by conceding two quick goals, the London side continued to dominate the ball and assert their authority on Juventus. The sustained heightened pressure earned its rewards when Harry Kane pulled a goal back in the 35th minute.

Still trailing by a goal, Tottenham continued to look the better side and a free kick from Christian Eriksen secured a deserved equaliser. Pochettino’s men continued to push for a winner but the

game ended at 2-2. A very strong result given the circumstances and one Spurs will be confident of building on at Wembley.

It was a much easier night for Guardiola’s City, who strolled to a 4-0 win over Swiss outfit Basel. İlkay Gündoğan scored a brace while Sergio Agüero and Bernado Silva competed the scoring.

“A very strong result given the circumstances” Liverpool also enjoyed a fine away performance as they went one better than City with a 5-0 victory away at Porto. Billed as a potentially tricky tie in the build-up, Jürgen Klopp’s men took very little time in opening the scoring.

Sadio Mané, who had been out of form recently, fired a low shot towards goal in the 25th minute and the power behind the ball meant the Porto keeper could only palm it into his own net.

The hosts looked shocked and just three minutes later, James Milner was unlucky not to score. A wonderful effort from outside of the box cannoned off the woodwork but an alert Mo Salah was on hand to calm round the keeper and prod the ball home.

With the score 2-0 at half time, Liverpool could afford to sit deep and punish Porto on the break with their devastating front three. Roberto Firmino saw his attempt saved by Mané was in a great position to roll the ball into an empty net.

Firmino was not to be left goalless though as another Liverpool counter attack released Milner on the left wing.

His drilled pull back was precisely laid into the path of Firmino who did not even had to break stride as he finished.

It was 4-0 and, like City, Liverpool’s place in the quarter final was looking assured. The evening was rounded off with the perfect icing on the cake as Mané completed his hat-trick. This time, he recited the ball on the edge of the area and powered a shot into the top corner. For a striker suffering of late from bad form, this is the perfect tonic and one that will give him confidence for the next run of games.

With an aggregate scoreline of 112, it was a fine week for English sides in Europe and all three teams will be confident of their chances at progression to the next phase. Chelsea and Manchester United both restart their Champions League campaigns next and face difficult Spanish opponents in Barcelona and Sevilla.

Whether it will be five out of five English teams in the next round remains to be seen but given that this time last year the Premier League only had one team make the quarters (Leicester City) it is an uplifting sign for any English fan.

City in Basel

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Photo: Ben Sutherland @ Wikimedia Commons

Tottenham’s problems

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