It’s funny how one ends up sitting on a sofa in a cultural silo. There used to be a time, for a few years after I got a news scoop about the Northern Ireland peace process, that I was called upon by broadcasters to talk about Ulster. Now, because I collaborated last year on a book with Gordon Brown about “Britishness”, I get summoned to discuss that issue on television and radio. I’m not complaining: quite the opposite. We all need a niche (or two).

So it was ten or so days ago that I found myself in Glasgow on BBC2’s Review Show, talking about Britain, Englishness and all that with Billy Bragg, Bidisha and Pat Kane. The show revolved around the truly awesome ‘Jerusalem‘, Jez Butterworth’s play about England, recently transferred to the West End but still boasting a once-in-a-generation performance by Mark Rylance as Rooster Johnny Byron, a Jimmy Porter for our times. One of the questions Kirsty Wark threw at us was: why are the “regions” not producing the art and drama that one might expect them to? To which the harsh but fair answer is: because London draws in talent like a pitiless, ravenous monster. That’s where talent goes.

There are exceptions, of course – most magnificently the Manchester of Factory, Joy Division and the (recenty reborn) Hacienda. In that case, the existence of a critical mass of remarkable individuals (Wilson, Saville, Gretton, Curtis, Hook, Sumner, Morley et al) and the establishment of a more-or-less instant local myth of sainthood in the suicide of Curtis made Manchester a genuinely distinct republic of art and letters in the Eighties, a place it was (and is) cool to go to university, and a city that was fabulous in its own right. I think it is true that no other place on earth could have produced the Smiths, the Roses or the Happy Mondays. And then, for reasons one can only guess at, the spotlight swung around the world to Seattle. Where is it now, I wonder? Where, in February 2010, is culture being produced that has genuine menace, that takes old stuff and makes new stuff which is truly threatening to our settled ways of seeing things? Answers in a comment, please, to this blog.

PS If you are interested in the past cultural hegemonies of particular cities, then do read two new books about New York in its grimy, truly bohemian greatness -  pre-Aids, pre-Giuliani. Edmund White’s ‘City Boy‘ is a real page-turner, partly because, in his name-dropping, the author makes Nicky Haslam seem shy and retiring, and partly because the book evokes a genuinely different, lost world of literary and sexual exploration. Its accidental companion volume is ‘Just Kids‘, a new account by Patti Smith of her youthful years in New York with Robert Mapplethorpe. It is no surprise to discover that the genius behind ‘Horses‘ and Rimbaud-obsessive also writes beautiful prose. Essential reading.

Update: Patti Smith reading ‘Just Kids’ is the new book of the week on Radio 4.