“I was sold”: Manchester’s three greatest-ever bands, according to Eva Mendes
The city of Manchester has plenty of claims to fame; it has two big football teams (one of which was great, one which wasn’t, then they swapped places thanks to money), and it used to produce a lot of cotton for a start, but can it claim Hollywood A-lister Eva Mendes too? Well, kind of.
Having lived in Manchester for three years, I can confirm that, thanks to a combination of inclement weather and a high possibility of getting mugged, it can be a fairly despairing place sometimes, no matter how many pop-up restaurants serving hot honey on food there might be. But that same battle against endless rain and potential violence has also led to some of the greatest music the UK has ever known.
Although the 1960s were ruled by their erstwhile Scouse enemies 35 miles or so down the road, the 1980s and 1990s were undoubtedly dominated by the Mancs, first with The Smiths and Joy Division, then by The Happy Mondays, Stone Roses and Inspiral Carpets, and then of course by Oasis, who for a few years made it one of the most famous cities on earth.
Perhaps it’s churlish or presumptuous not to link any of those bands with Mendes, who at the height of Madchester was studying acting at a college in California, but it’s certainly not the first connection you think of. However, Mendes was indeed present for some of those times, because she travelled around Europe in her early 20s, and visited the city in the North West of the UK for an extended period of time.
She told The Times, “I loved Mancunian bands. Oasis. The Smiths. Joy Division. It was an amazing music scene, and I had the best Indian food I’d ever had in my life. I was sold”.
She certainly would have had a decent curry or two, especially if she ventured to Rusholme and the famous Curry Mile, which packs more than 70 Indian restaurants onto the Wilmslow Road. But all of that probably points to why Mendes is something of an Anglophile, indeed she and her husband, a certain Ryan Gosling, have been living on these shores for some time, first filming Project Hail Mary and now while he films the next Star Wars epic, Starfighter, due in cinemas next year.
Mendes was a very successful actor in the 2000s, starring in the likes of Hitch with Will Smith, Ghost Rider with Nicolas Cage and memorably as Will Ferrell’s smokeshow wife in The Other Guys in 2010, but she placed herself into retirement from acting in order to help Gosling manage his career, and hasn’t made a movie since her husband’s directorial debut, 2014’s Lost River, which was a fantasy thriller with Mendes starring alongside Matt Smith and Saoirse Ronan.
It didn’t fare well at all with critics, unfortunately, which may well be why, more than a decade on, Gosling hasn’t got behind the camera again.
Not that he’s got too much to worry about, given what he does in front of it; the sci-fi book adaptation Project Hail Mary has broken all kinds of box office records in the first part of this year, becoming Amazon MGM’s highest-ever grossing movie and bringing in more than $300million in the first two weeks, more than it cost to make.
