What Andy Burnham’s by-election playlist says about him

But no. At a time when the perfectly meaningless term “Manchesterism” is the designation du jour, two-thirds of Burnham’s playlist is dedicated to bands and artists from the city of which he has been mayor for the past nine years. As pure chance would have it, I’m sure, at least part of Makerfield also falls within the boundaries of Greater Manchester. 

If the by-election was in Shepherd’s Bush, one wonders if the choices might have run to songs by the Sex Pistols and The Who. Instead, aspiring to leverage local approval all the way to the most famous front door in London, it’s The Smiths, Elbow, Ian Brown, James, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, and New Order who make the cut. Even an outfit called Manchester Orchestra are granted a spot, despite being from Atlanta, Georgia. 

Notwithstanding its convenient regional bias, Burnham’s svelte collection doesn’t strike me (at least) as having been concocted by backroom policy wonks desperate to make their man seem “relatable” or (worse still) “interesting”. This is not Gordon Brown pretending to like Arctic Monkeys. Watching the breezy clip, I don’t see the kind of politician whose carefully calculated selections on Desert Island Discs include Chopin’s Ballade No. 4 in F Minor and Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue by the Ramones. 

There is even a bit of muso knowledge for the Mojo reader in Burnham’s list. Nominating two versions of His Latest Flame – the first sung by Elvis Presley, the second by Morrissey – Burnham notes that, at a concert he attended in the 1980s, The Smiths performed this very song prior to playing their own Rusholme Ruffians. Indeed they did, several times – but you can expect searching interviews from the Tory press demanding to know at which venue this took place, whether Burnham was disrespecting the deaf by wearing a Mozzer-style fake hearing aid at the time and whether he has ever used gladioli as a recreational drug.

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One thing you could charge him with is that the playlist comprises the pale, the stale, and the male. Yet Burnham, a King of the North who dresses like Paul Heaton of The Beautiful South, says that he likes filling his ears with songs recorded by people who say something to him about his life. If nothing else, I’d pay modern-day concert ticket prices to see the Reform candidate in Makerfield – the chauvinistically exclusionary Robert Kenyon – try to have a pop at him about this. 

More surprising is the discrimination against the Aintree-born mayor’s hometown. Certainly, the curious omission of groups or artists from Liverpool – sidebar: at his best, Julian Cope is worth five Ian Browns – adds credence to my theory that Burnham has been putting the faders on his scouse accent for, ooh, almost a decade now. I know Liverpudlians don’t much like to talk about this, but I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that their city is the birthplace of The Beatles. 

More than anything, though, my dominant thought about Andy Burnham’s playlist is, “He runs to this?” It isn’t that the music here is entirely downbeat – far from it, actually – but the overall timbre is very much middle-age-man-has-a-long-think-on-a-park-bench-at-the-end-of-a-large-night-out. Listening to the reflective Guy Garvey, on Elbow’s The Bones Of You, it’s a wonder Mr Manchester didn’t throw in a Nick Drake song for good measure. 

Either way, I reckon it sounds a lot like hard work. As a fellow 50-something-year-old who huffs and puffs his way around city streets – in knee-length shorts, if you please – I have no quarrel with soundtracking my physical expenditure with a measure of musical restraint. But after an opening throw of Simon & Garfunkel or Goose, say, I need a bit more pep than does Burnham. With a flick of the thumb, for the last couple of miles, on comes Green Day or Slayer. 

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On the thoroughfares of Manchester, though, it might just be that sturm und drang is drawn from words rather than beats per minute. With its cries of “no parasan” and “aledante”, the selection of Viva La Quinta Brigada, Christy Moore’s rousing shanty about young Irishmen fighting fascism in the Spanish civil war, summons the best of the left. Blood red in tooth and claw, when united in song, no one can touch us. 

All the same, as Burnham carefully measures his every utterance in preparation for a third tilt at Downing Street, I wonder if his playlist might have found space for the kind of song that cautions against the deflating compromises of a nationwide political scene he hopes to re-enter. 

If so, I reckon This Sad Burlesque, by Elvis Costello & The Brodsky Quartet, would do the job nicely. “Can they recall being young and idealistic before wading knee-deep in hogwash and arithmetic,” it goes. “The pitying smirk, the argument that runs like clockwork, will run down eventually and splutter to a stop.”

Ian Winwood is the best-selling author of Bodies: Life & Death In Music