Manchester United.(The Talk of the Town)

Being England's second city, like being Prince Charles's second wife or Posh Spice's second innovatively named child, means always being in the shadow of the one who got there first. In Manchester, however, an enterprise is under way to assert the city's primacy: the first Manchester International Festival, a two-week symposium of new art and music which will take place this summer. At a party held last week in the Gramercy Park Hotel's Rose Bar to announce the festival, its director, Alex Poots, was eager to make Manchester's case. "Manchester is a city of firsts," Poots, who bears a glancing resemblance to Rowan Atkinson, said. "The first industrial society was born there. Manchester has the oldest public library in Britain." Poots, who was born in Edinburgh, promised to check with his staff on which Mancunian had built the world's first computer.

"My instinct when I was asked to do this was, Don't bother unless you are going to do something really different, so I asked people to present all new work," Poots said. The commissions will include an opera based on the Chinese legend of the Monkey King, composed by Damon Albarn, of Blur, and complete with acrobats and martial artists; an orchestral adaptation of Salman Rushdie's novel "The Ground Beneath Her Feet"; and a performance by Lou Reed of "Berlin"--not exactly a new work, since the album was originally released in 1973, but one with the advantage of having been listened to in the three intervening decades by only the most dedicated fans.

To promote the gravitas of a city best known for one of its soccer squads, for the Madchester pop-music scene of yore, and for its tendency to be drenched in slow, steady rain, Poots had imported a team of seasoned professionals. "Manchester is the first city of the modern age," Nick Johnson, the chairman of a company called Marketing Manchester, said. "It's where Marx met Engels; it's where Rolls met Royce. The industrial revolution started in Manchester. Manchester was the first city to invent the computer. I'll have to get back to ...