On this damp Tuesday evening a Scout band is marching round a Manchester car park — practice as usual. But, hold on. “Hit the north!” scream a troupe of cheerleaders as the tune ends, launching their silver pom-poms into the air. They have been playing a song by the Fall. Either the Davyhulme Scout and Guide Marching Band is unusually cool or this all has something to do with the chap in the corner, scampering around in shorts and a scruffy shirt while snapping away on his camera.

“This is fantastic,” he says, flicking his shoulder-length hair between clicks. “It’s coming together . . . really exciting.”

The bandmaster Dennis Yarwood and the co-principal of K & K Dance Academy, Karan Sanders, are glad that Jeremy Deller is pleased. Their troupes form about an eighth of the Turner prize-winner’s latest work — a procession of 620 people plus a horse down Deansgate tomorrow, celebrating the launch of the Manchester International Festival.

“We’re incorporating all different aspects of life in Manchester,” says Deller as we sit outside the Scout HQ afterwards. The march will explore the city’s industrial, social and cultural history and will be “just like a normal procession” but with a few surprises.

One will be a “gospel ode” to the chip, Adoration of the Chip. Because in Oldham you can find a blue plaque for the first chip shop, a float has been transformed into a glammed-up chip shop. Music has been written specially by the local artist James Atherton for a choir dressed in gold pants and tabards. A team of dancers will portray the chip-shop queue.

Julie Ashforth has been co-ordinating. “I contacted Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant and got the secret of how to re-create the chip-shop smell,” she says proudly. “So we’ll have cans of atomiser to spray as we go.” Incidentally, the secret is surprisingly simple — but I don’t want to spoil the illusion. Ask the chip apostles tomorrow.

“Any decent parade has strange things in it,” Deller says. He is being particularly eclectic in his music. As well as the sound of the Fall, he has included a steel band, an emo band and a team of Indian bagpipers. “The bagpipers are amazing. I’ve seen most of the bands rehearse, except the emo band. But that’s probably a good thing.”

Another notable commission is Blackout Crew from Bolton, five MCs who like hair gel, tracksuits and are the pioneers of “donk”, a hyperactive music that has made them stars of the UK club scene and a YouTube phenomenon for their signature track Put a Donk on It (four million hits). They have created a new techno track to be blared out in individual parts from five souped-up cars with a crew member in each — “middle England’s worst nightmare come true” is how Deller describes it.

Almost everyone approached has been happy to take part. “We wanted John Cooper Clarke to do a poetry recital on the back of a bus, amplified as he went along, because he’s brilliant,” Deller says. “But he just didn’t get it. He thought we were taking the piss. It’s a pity.”

The procession, though, will include Big Issue sellers, a re-creation of an historic market café, local sporting mascots and a giant replica of a mill — complete with the last generation of mill workers riding on top. Critics have accused Deller of cliché, but he doesn’t care. “There’s a truth to clichés — they are there for a reason.”

The procession will pass by in about 40 minutes, walking the mile along Deansgate — which, during our conversation, Deller learns was Manchester’s original Roman road. He is upset not to have included any Romans. It’s probably a good thing though; he has got enough celebratory pasties for only the 25 groups that he did include. They are congregating afterwards for a feast in a local nightclub.

The procession isn’t hugely out of character for Deller, whose most recent work involved driving the wreck of a Baghdad car bomb around the United States. For Acid Brass in 1997 he invited a brass band to rework house anthems, and later documented it in a huge wall diagram exploring culture in the North West, as part of his winning 2004 Turner Prize exhibition. “That was about how what happens here relates to culture around the world; dance music and industrial history and pop culture mixed up together in a big stew. That was an important work for me, and the first time I really spent a lot of time in Manchester.”

Presumably aware of that, the festival organisers approached Deller last summer. “I wanted to do a procession because they are the easiest way of showing the public to itself — what people’s interests and hobbies are, what music they make, and putting them together in a way that wouldn’t otherwise happen.”

He’s calling it Northern Social Surrealism. “The social realist films of the early Sixties showed the North as a gritty, hard-bitten part of the world, but there’s another version of the North which is a place with a lot of humour. You see strange things and you hear strange stories and those are the kinds of things you want to see in a procession. The odder side of life.”

There will be a linked exhibition at Cornerhouse, for the elements that didn’t fit into the parade — and there were some ideas that were so odd they didn’t pan out at all. “I wanted to do something with Alcoholics Anonymous, but they’re supposed to be anonymous so they couldn’t march. And I wanted to do something with MPs dressed up as animals and clowns. But, you know. And we were thinking of doing something about the rain. I’m assuming it’s going to rain on Sunday.”

Then it rains and we head inside the Scout hall, decked out with badges, photos and trophies. “I used to be a Scout,” reveals Deller, a Dulwich College boy. “This place brings back memories, with all the bits and bobs. I wanted to involve them because I knew they’d be organised, you can trust them. They’ll be good.”

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