Menchester

I'd been thinking about Ricky Hatton since he died, but not quite got to want I wanted to say, but now I think I might combine that with writing about Mani from the Stone Roses, as they were both Manchester heroes whose death has clearly been particularly closely felt by a lot of people because of their outgoing, friendly personalities.

I'll not pretend to have been more closely attached to either than I was, but I do have specific thoughts about both. 

I'll start with Ricky Hatton. I didn't actually watch many his fights live, but he's a significant figure in my peak years of boxing-watching, nevertheless.

Hatton was, I think it's true to say, the first superstar of Sky - the first guy who built up a huge following and reputation despite never being seen on terrestrial television. I first read about him in the early 2000s, that he was attracting vast numbers to his fights, big viewing figures on Sky, that he was approaching world level. I didn't have Sky at the time and still, I think, was not that close to getting it, as they didn't have cricket yet.

His greatest night was in June 2005, when he shocked Kostya Tszyu, then considered one of the Top 3 pound for pound fighters in the world, to win the IBF (and Ring) Light Welterweight title. It was a sufficiently big deal that they showed the full fight, I think on ITV, the next day or the next week. That was the first time I saw Hatton fight. He would maybe never be so great again, though, sometimes forgotten, he had a run of good wins against good names from across the Atlantic after that. I still didn't have Sky but I would now stay up, or wake up in the middle of the night, to listen to his fights in America. I remember listening to his first fight at welterweight, with Luis Collazo, where he held on to win despite fading after a strong start. His second greatest moment was his defeat of Jose Luis Castillo - a great fighter maybe a notch past his best.

When the superfight with Mayweather was made in 2007, it wasn't perceived as a shot in the dark, a plucky shot, it was the best fighter in the world against one of the other best fighters in the world, not 50/50, but 65/35 or so.

By this point, Hatton was doing the talkshows, telling his jokes, taking about how much he drank and how much weight he put on between fights. 

The build up to the Mayweather fight was huge, and was the straw that broke the camel's back and made me get Sky. Ironically, I got Sky in such a way that I couldn't get pay-per-view, so still didn't watch it live. But many people did

Against Mayweather, most agreed that, though well beaten in the end, he was done over by the referee Joe Cortez who didn't allow him to fight his best fight by roughing up Mayweather in close. It's very clear watching the fight back that that is what happened, that Cortez called "break" unnaturally early whenever the two were in close, and this greatly favoured Mayweather's slicker style.

So, so be it. A loss to a great fighter. A couple more fights followed and the bizarre news that Hatton was going to be trained by Floyd Mayweather Sr, replacing his longtime trainer Billy Graham (I'll return to that).

I remember he fought and defeated Paulie Malignaggi on the Saturday night I was in hospital after breaking my leg, following it on my phone. I remember the good-natured build-up to the Pacquiao fight. This was Pacquiao at his peak but he was so affable, you'd forget how dangerous he was.

I remember pretty vividly the night, as I went to bed, set my alarm to listen to the fight but, of course, fights don't start at an exact time, and when I turned on the radio, I'll never forget the atmosphere, the tone of the commentator's voice. Like someone had died. Hatton had been brutally, humiliatingly knocked out in the 2nd round.

Then started the afterlife of the professional fighter. There was an attempt at a comeback three years later, ironically the only Hatton fight I watched live, when he was beaten by the decent but not outstanding Russian Vyacheslav Senchenko, and there were a lot of ups and downs, fallings out with family, courtcases, bouts as a trainer, attempts to get fit. 

Again, I think Hatton was quite pioneering in talking regularly about his mental health struggles. It is far more commonplace for sportspeople  now, but his affability set against the words he would use did set a striking tone.

I watched a documentary about him a year or two ago, and although the tone attempted to be optimistic, there was still a sadness to it, particularly as regards Hatton's unresolved relationship with former trainer Graham.

As I say, I wouldn't claim to feel Hatton's death as deeply as many, but he was definitely a notable figure, and should also be remembered, I think, as one of the Top 10, maybe top 5 British fighters this century, in terms of victories against high-class opponents. 

He was clearly a folk hero in Manchester, just like Mani (who was at Hatton's funeral).

I was not much of a Stone Roses fan most of time, in fact, for reasons, I even developed a certain antagonism to them, but I did love that first album for a while, and, it struck me, thinking about it, that what I loved, what many people loved, was the bass and drums. That is what is most interesting about the band.

I remember Fools Gold when it was first came out and that there was a lot of hype around them, and I remember when I was getting into music in the early 90s they were talked about a lot, particularly in terms of their long absence. I quite liked Love Spreads and Ten Storey Love Song as singles, and then, when I started buying the NME in mid-95, they were all over it, but not in a good way. A deteriorating soap opera from the point the drummer Reni left the band.

There was a line that stayed with me from the NME review of their disastrous 1995 Reading headline show, how it all felt promising and good as ever at the beginning of I Wanna Be Adored until Ian Brown opened his mouth. 

And that's kind of it with that band, isn't it, and actually it was notable even in the soap opera stuff in the NME. The journalists wanted to talk to, and talk about, the bassist and the drummer. Those were the interesting, cool ones that people liked. That's pretty rare in any band, particularly a British indie band.

I didn't buy 'The Stone Roses' until late-summer 96, but I did actually fall in love with it immediately, like with Astral Weeks, Deserters Song, and few other albums. It sounded like I thought it would sound. It sounded mythical, like a world unto itself. And it's Mani's bass you hear first, and all the the way through. And then Ian Brown sings. 

You can deal with it on the record, because you think maybe it's a choice, and they've got it to sound absolutely as good as it can.

But I fell away from the Roses almost as quickly as I got into them. Brown was just too much of a twat and such a terrible singer. And, as i've said before, the Stone Roses were omnipresent when I was at university, more than any other band. In the first two years there, when the living was pretty communal, and you'd always be going round to other peoples' rooms and flats (people who weren't exactly your friends, just kind of friends), it was always the bloody Stone Roses playing, so to me it became normie bloke music just as much as Oasis. But at least Liam Gallagher could sing.

The Mani went into the band of another belligerent tube who couldn't sing. Apparently his work with Primal Scream is superb, but I felt the same way about Bobby Gillespie as I did about Ian Brown. I wasn't going to be convinced that their voice or personality was tolerable. Again, if you read the interviews with the band, it was clear, every time, that the subtext was "thank god for Mani, he's a lovely bloke, but Christ, the singer ..."

It does make me think about what makes a bad singer. When people say Bob Dylan is a bad singer, it drives me nuts. Understandable not to love his voice, but, for most of his career, it's strong, powerful, not out of tune, adaptable, and, most importantly, it's appropriate. It's the voice that guy should have. Sure, you can find it ugly, but that's the ugly it's meant to be.

But a bad voice, I think, is a voice which doesn't live up to what the singer acts like, or what the music needs. So much swagger, so weak, so flat. That's Brown, that's Gillespie, that's a few indie bands of the 90s, to be honest, even some I like, but those two were the worst offenders. Like, who do you think you are? These bands would be so much better if you could sing better ...

Anyway, that might seem a detour, but it's what I wanted to say. Mani was beloved and famous because he really was a great instrumentalist, who gave the band its sound and its character. You may argue about whether that band is overrated, but, if it was a great band, he was certainly more than his fair share of the reason.