Mancs for the memories

The email is cryptic: meet outside a restaurant in Covent Garden at 13.20 and we’ll go from there.

I’m met and collected, and seated at a table on the fringes of the famous piazza. I’m introduced to a brewery marketing manager who is clearly excited and admits to being nervous. Another man looks up briefly from a laptop, on which he is working furiously, and a couple of PRs are running around in a state of barely suppressed frantic urgency.

We wait.

There’s the crackle of a PA system coming to life, and then the square fills with the swaggering guitar riff intro of Step On by the Happy Mondays. It’s a song that makes anyone — even old ladies — want to walk with a bent-knee, wide-armed, loping swagger. And now here come eight or nine people doing just that, identically dressed in long green anoraks, Beatles/Liam Gallagher mop-top wigs and dark shades, striding into the middle of the piazza and goading each other to dance to the music.

One or two of them start to throw classic ‘Madchester’ shapes, then all of them fall into a synchronised dance routine.

Suddenly there are more of them, appearing from nowhere. And now they’re emerging from all corners of the square, until there are about 40 of them — cheap Oasis clones whooping and cheering, performing a choreographed routine that’s a tribute to the iconic bands of late 1980s/early ’90s Manchester.

It suddenly switches to Swan Lake, and then back again. It’s startlingly beautiful, unexpectedly moving.

Watch the video​

Younger image​

All too soon the song has ended, and 40-odd identically dressed Manc ballet dancers somehow melt into the crowd and have disappeared by the time the delighted applause fades.

Jonathan Lloyd, marketing manager for JW Lees, looks relieved. “The idea is that you can take the beer out of Manchester but you  can’t take Manchester out of the beer,” he says.

“We want to give Manchester Pale Ale [MPA] a younger image and do something unexpected. So we thought, ‘how would you normally market a cask ale’, and then we did the opposite.”

As I’m a little older than Jonathan, I was a beer drinker when Step On was in the charts. Back then, there was one particular beer that was synonymous with Britain’s greatest musical city.

In the early 1990s, Boddingtons was the ‘cream of Manchester’, the embodiment of northern attitude at a time when music and rave culture had made ‘Madchester’ the coolest city on the planet.

The then InBev pulled its advertising support from Boddingtons in 2006, and smaller regional breweries now dominate an ale market from which the old national brands are receding. There’s a vacancy for a beer that embodies the still-cool Manchester attitude and, with Manchester Pale Ale, JW Lees is applying to fill the role.

Boddingtons established itself with a big-budget TV ad campaign, and an innovative media strategy that used the back covers of magazines as if they were poster sites. JW Lees has nothing like the same budget, but you make a big noise in a different way these days.

Attitude​

The Covent Garden ‘flash mob’ was witnessed by just a couple of hundred people, but it was filmed and carefully edited and is now available on YouTube. ‘Event’ adverts don’t happen in the centre break of Coronation Street any more.

If there’s something worth seeing, people let each other know online, and you go to YouTube to check it out. The John Lewis Christmas advert from 2011, for example, has had more than five million views.

We live in a media environment in which a cask ale from a regional brewer, with a modest budget and a bold idea, can achieve national or even international fame. On my recent holiday touring Europe, I found Trooper, the Iron Maiden beer from Robinsons, on sale in France, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium. It’s the most successful beer Robinsons has ever brewed.

Back in Covent Garden, JW Lees’s MPA exudes greater Manc confidence and attitude than Boddingtons ever did, and that’s no mean feat as Boddingtons was a stunningly successful brand in its day.

As cask ale grows increasingly confident in a fragmented and innovative media space, we can expect to see a new generation of brands inspiring whole new swathes of drinkers in clever and interesting ways.