THE older I've got, the more I've started to appreciate architecture and design: the kind that combines function and beauty. The Tate Modern in London is one of my favourite buildings. An imposing ex-power station on the south bank of the Thames opposite St Paul's, it was brought back to life by the architects Herzog & de Meuron who have transformed it into the world's ultimate art gallery. Huge open spaces of steel, glass and concrete, full of all kinds of art, create an atmosphere that powers the imagination, rather than the houses of south London, as the building used to in its former life.

I'm down to see the exhibition by American painter, Cy Twombly. His expressive, abstract paintings, done on a large scale, deal with nature, and the cycle of the seasons. He's been a favourite of mine since I stumbled in front of his giant Four Seasons series of paintings one afternoon in New York's Museum of Modern Art. I stood there for half an hour mesmerised by all the colours and their implication. His paintings seemed like large-scale projections from his brain directly on to the gallery wall: huge doodles of colour. At the Tate I end up walking around the exhibition three times and almost miss the sound check for our concert (my real reason for being in London).

The next morning we are up for the 10 o'clock train to Manchester. Touring on the train seemed like a good idea at the time, but it's turned into a bit of an endurance test. The computer reservation system is down, so all seat reservations are void and passenger stress is the order of the day - confused grannies, irate businessmen and families with hundreds of suitcases trying and failing to get seats together clutter the aisles. I end up squeezing into a seat across from a man who talks so loudly on his mobile phone that he may as well be shouting directly in my face. I find out that he works for a sports company, has just spent the weekend in Paris, which was "as mad as it gets, mate", and is now returning home to Macclesfield where he lives, but "not for much longer, just don't do it for me any more". He was also in need of a visit to what Will Self calls the Goatee support group.

Manchester's unique mix of northern friendliness and menace has been dragged (with appropriate Mancunian swagger) into the modern age of design and regeneration. A once grey and smoky industrial city is now one where the Beetham Tower looms over the buildings and cranes like a giant monolith of modernism pointing towards the future. It also has one of those city centres where everyone seems to be waiting for a bus.

The gig at night is in an ex-strip club across from an Argos store. It's hot and unbelievably loud, so much so that during the concert, through a combination of the volume, the heat, and the energy generating from the tightly-packed, jumping crowd, makes an experience not too dissimilar to staring deep into Cy Twomblys' claustrophobic and vivid Ferragosto paintings. In these works he evokes the suffocating heat and heady atmosphere of the city of Rome at the height of summer. Flashes of yellow, thick smears of red, described by an art critic as giving the impression that the paint is haemorrhaging from the canvas. I feel like I'm having some sort of mild haemorrhage myself and am quite glad when the concert finishes and I can run outside to cool off in the evening air. The Piccadilly Plaza development stands awkwardly across the street. I'm sure it was architecturally daring when it was unveiled in the 1960s but now, despite numerous renovations, still looks like no-one knows what to do with it.

Goethe once said that architecture was frozen music. If that's so, and Manchester's defrosting, we are talking Simply Red rather than the Smiths.