Sackville Gardens sits adjacent to Canal Street in the heart of Manchester's Gay Village. It's a place where you can come and sit, on the grass or under a tree and take some time to think, if it's quiet. However, often there's someone there playing music through a huge portable speaker. Still, there is grass and trees.
Within the park is the Beacon of Hope, the UK's only permanent monument to people living with HIV or AIDS, and lives lost to it.
There's also as a statue of the city's own mathematician, cryptologist and 'father of modern computing and Ai,' Alan Turing. Alan sits, quietly on his bench holding his apple, the forbidden fruit on which the police found traces of cyanide at the site of Alan's death at his house in Wilmslow, a few miles south of Manchester, in 1954. A couple of years earlier, Alan had been charged with gross indecency (homosexuality was still illegal then) and had opted for 'chemical castration' over a prison sentence. It is uncertain whether Alan killed himself.
But, you may ask, what does this mathematician, genius big-brained bad-ass have to do with Manchester music?
Well... in a lovely round-about way he does. He lived in Manchester, and worked at Manchester University where he built one of the world's first stored-program computer: the Manchester Mark 1.
It was on one of Alan's computers that, in 1951, the first piece of recorded computer-generated music was played, something Alan had been working on since the 1940s (according to Ai, but Ai may be biased, seeing as he's its dad).
So anyway, I think we can draw a line from Alan's pioneering work on computer-generated music to, disco, house, techno, and everything else really, don't you?
