Question: what can you find in a library? Answer: everything. True, but this week the correct answer will actually be Everything Everything, as the Manchester rock band of this name are staging an anarchic takeover of the city’s refurbished Central Library.
Their free event, Chaos to Order, takes place from tomorrow until Saturday and will feature performances by the band and guests including Elbow’s Guy Garvey, New Order’s Bernard Sumner, comedian Josie Long and writer Emma Jane Unsworth.
“We have invited people we admire and trust. We have no idea what most of them will do,” said Jeremy Pritchard, Everything Everything’s bassist. “We don’t know what Josie is planning, but it will be brilliant. We want to retain the possibility of the unexpected, as that is one thing we don’t have much of these days. A lot of stuff will just happen.”
Behind plans for the week are two driving thoughts. The first is a desire to highlight the cuts facing lending libraries and arts provision. The second is to create a welcome to the “reborn” library that can stand proudly alongside the public excitement that surrounded the opening of the city’s first lending institution, set up in 1852 under the Free Libraries Act, when citizens lined the pavements and Charles Dickens spoke.
“In this institution, special provision has been made for the working classes, by means of a free lending library,” he told the crowds. “This meeting cherishes the earnest hope that the books thus made available will prove a source of pleasure and improvement in the cottages, the garrets, and the cellars of the poorest of our people.”
In 1934, when the round reference library opened its doors, another hero of the people, the singer Ewan McColl, watched on: “I was there on the opening day and on many days thereafter; the Ref played an important part in my life for I made many friends there.”
The week-long festival will be ticketed because of space restrictions, but it is all free. “That was important to us,” said Pritchard, 30. “It is in line with the egalitarian principles of a public library.”
He added that, rather than feeling staid or stuffy, the library is like the frontline in a cultural battle: “There was so much last year and this year about libraries and arts cuts, so, yes, that is an element. We want to do anything we can to fight that and celebrate the benefits of libraries and of arts funding.”
Before the scaffolding came down this year, the band visited the building in search of inspiration. “They gave us carte blanche and, although we are closest to the music community, we wanted to represent the arts more generally.”
A library’s chief function – collecting and categorising millions of disparate ideas – gave the musicians their theme. “It is a place which sorts things out before sending them out into the chaos of human life again. It goes full circle. And finding order in the face of overwhelming information seems to be a very 21st-century situation. Perhaps a library has become a kind of church, bringing people together in an age when information is a new religion. We were trying to encapsulate that.”
Pritchard said the band embraced the idea of the festival as a way to shake things up after a long period of touring. “It really appealed. We were surfing the void a bit, although working on some new songs for our third album. We have been a band for seven years now and so locked into a normal routine of writing recording and touring, so I thought this would broaden our horizons again.”
The band will play at the close of the week as dancers from Company Chameleon interpret their music. “We have always wanted to perform with dancers and want to create some new music that won’t be restricted by the usual studio concerns,” said Pritchard.
The band are not the first to see the library as a place to make a military stand in a cultural war. When the writer and politician Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton spoke alongside Dickens at the opening in 1852, he called it “an arsenal”, going on: “Books are weapons, whether for war or for self-defence; and perhaps the principles of chivalry are as applicable to the student now as they were to the knight of old – to courage, give man the service, and to heaven the glory.
“What minds may be destined to grow up and flourish under the shade of this tree of knowledge which you have now planted, none of us can conjecture; but you of the present generation have nobly done your duty and may calmly leave the result to time, sure that you have placed, beside the sorrows, the cares, and passions of this common-sense life, the still monitors that instruct our youth, direct our manhood, and comfort our old age.”
