The Secret PeopleLiverpool Pop Music from 1980 Onwards

The Liverpool bands and singers who ought to have conquered

the world but instead captured my heart

2015

Dr Peter Critchley

Critchley, P., 2015. The Secret People: Liverpool Pop Music since the 1980s [e-book]

Available through: Academia website

<http://mmu.academia.edu/PeterCritchley/Books

ContentsINTRODUCTION – THE SINGING CITY..................................3

THE CITY OF THE SEA.............................................11

CLOCK TIME AND TIDE TIME........................................15

A CITY OF OUTSIDERS.............................................22

BILLY FURY......................................................25

PETE WYLIE......................................................27

TEARDROP EXPLODES...............................................36

ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN...........................................39

ICICLE WORKS....................................................50

UP AND RUNNING..................................................53

ELVIS COSTELLO..................................................56

ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK...............................57

COOK DA BOOKS...................................................63

1

THE CHERRY BOYS.................................................66

MICHAEL HEAD AND THE PALE FOUNTAINS.............................71

CHINA CRISIS....................................................78

A FLOCK OF SEAGULLS.............................................83

THE LOTUS EATERS................................................85

ALTERNATIVE RADIO...............................................96

BRIAN ATHERTON AND THE LIGHT....................................98

THE REVERB BROTHERS.............................................99

IT’S IMMATERIAL................................................102

THE CHRISTIANS.................................................107

THOMAS LANG....................................................117

FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD......................................121

THE WILD SWANS.................................................123

BLACK..........................................................130

LIGHTNING SEEDS................................................138

CAST...........................................................142

THE FARM.......................................................145

THE BOO RADLEYS................................................153

THE LA’S.......................................................154

SPACE..........................................................157

KATHRYN WILLIAMS...............................................163

CANDIE PAYNE...................................................166

AMSTERDAM......................................................174

MILES KANE.....................................................180

THE CORAL......................................................181

THE ZUTONS.....................................................182

A CONCLUSION … AS IF THERE COULD EVER BE ONE...................186

EPILOGUE.......................................................188

2

100 SONGS......................................................192

Once upon a time and a very good time it was.

— James Joyce

‘Liverpool is more than a place where music happens. Liverpool

is a reason why music happens.’

— Paul de Noyer, Liverpool: Wondrous Place, 2002: 1

I just wanna be thinking

Thoughts that I think

Dreaming my dreams and drifting within

I don't know where I'm going

But I know where I been

Come on

Live your dreams

Cast – Live your Dreams

3

INTRODUCTION – THE SINGING CITYHere’s my old history tutor and referee, Ron Noon, whose words

here give a good indication of the lively, creative character

at work in this magical musical tour.

Ron Noon, Subversive Histories.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvFr5xyCZao

Liverpool is not just a place where music happens, Liverpool

is a reason why music happens.

It has something to do with this statistic, the 1,300,000

Irish migrants who fled the Irish famine between 1845 and

1852.

“Ireland runs through Liverpool like a seam of coal, in the

accent, the musicality, the lexical wordplay, the swagger, and

the lack of self-censure when it comes to displaying emotion.”

(Niall Griffiths).

http://issuu.com/liverpoolirishfestival/docs/lif2013

The swagger!

‘We are not a temperate people are we?!’

Displaying all the extremes of emotion, it’s either the best

of times here, or the worst.

4

There are good words here on John Lennon, and how music can

change and shape people’s lives. The Beatles didn’t just

conquer America, they conquered people’s hearts. And that’s

what really changes the world for the better.

Liverpool - The Singing City

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvF8QWFI3Xk

This documentary came out in 1965, the year I emerged and said

hello to the world.

‘This is a city at an end and a beginning, a seaport that has

boomed and grown old, a city with 80,000 houses unfit to live

in, and an unlimited ambition.’

Liverpool is due for renewal, the documentary says! I showed

up at the right time, then.

‘These children will be the last generation to grow up in the

old Liverpool, and perhaps the last to inherit the tradition

of the singing Welsh and the joking Irish that has made this

grimy port the liveliest city in Britain.

There has always been a sense of rhythm in Liverpool … cocking

a snook at the authorities if they really belted out with

their singing. ‘Periodically the place erupts, sometimes with

Vesuvian force. Creative individuals don’t trickle out from

Liverpool’s edges: they explode from its very core. The ones5

the world knows are only the famous ones. In Liverpool there

are plenty of stars who don’t need guitars.’ (Paul de Noyer,

2002: 3).

‘These people here, they had largely to make their own

enjoyment, and one natural way of enjoying yourself is to

sing. They are the secret people that Chesterton mentioned in

his poem. “There are no folk in the whole world so helpless or

so wise; there is hunger in our bellies, there is laughter in

our eyes”. That’s not true now of the hunger, but there is

still the laughter in the eyes of these people round here, and

in their hearts.’

‘The Secret People’ in these pages will be the Liverpool

artists and bands who have not had the recognition and

commercial success that their talent has deserved. They are

frequently described by the term ‘underrated’. They are not

underrated. On the contrary, they are highly rated by those

who have heard them. But that’s the problem, much of the music

went under the radar, unnoticed.

Why this should be so is hard to explain. Liverpool has been

on the world map for centuries now as the second city of the

British Empire. Musically, Liverpool has been a world city

since The Beatles. In May 1965, the US beat poet and counter-

cultural icon Allen Ginsberg came to Liverpool, and declared

the city to be "at the present moment, the centre of

consciousness of the human universe". Liverpool poet Brian6

Patten, whose floor Ginsberg slept on, gave a typically down-

to-earth Liverpudlian response: “I think Allen believed the

centre of human consciousness to be wherever he was at the

time.” And present moments pass just as quickly as they came.

But, Liverpool is the capital of itself and, like the river

that runs through it, carries on being itself. But Patten also

detected the magic in the air. “There was a point, just before

The Beatles left, when it really did seem as if we were the

centre of the universe.”

Well, that was 1965, the year I turned up, and that sort of

thing has got to rub off. And I have always been somewhat the

centre of my own universe. But the more I think of it, the

more I think the feeling of being at the centre of human

consciousness is quite a Liverpudlian trait, and I’m glad to

have shared a little of it. It’s handy to have when

circumstances seem to conspire against you. And circumstances

certainly seemed to conspire against Liverpool once the

sixties were over. Nevertheless, I am glad to have been around

during another incredibly creative period on Merseyside. There

was an exhibition at the Tate Liverpool 2007 which went under

the name of the ‘Centre of the Creative Universe’. The

exhibition was all about how the city had inspired and

influenced postwar artists. (Adrian Henri, Maurice Cockrill,

Gordon Fazakerley, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Tom Wood and Martin

Parr.)

7

"It's hard to say what causes these surges in artistic

activity," says Patten. "But it has something to do with the

fact that the centre of Liverpool is a relatively small place

where everyone - poets, musicians, footballers - always rubbed

together." I can vouch for this. I’ve seen a few, went to

school with a few, met a few, worked with a few and count a

few as friends.

Bill Drummond is someone who arrived in Liverpool in the early

1970s to study at the same art college as his hero, John

Lennon. He managed Echo and the Bunnymen and later became

notorious for burning £1m as the founder of the guerrilla art

collective, K Foundation. Drummond explained Liverpool's

artistic pre-eminence by advancing the theory that a ley line

ran along Mathew Street, via the bust of psychoanalytist Carl

Jung that stood close to the Cavern.

It's not as far-fetched as it sounds. Well, not quite. In

1974, local entrepreneur Peter O'Halligan purchased a

warehouse on Mathew Street, believing it to stand on the exact

spot that Carl Gustav Jung, after having a dream vision, once

identified as ‘the Pool of Life’. Jung never set foot in

Liverpool. It just seems like he did, the way people talk

about him. It’s a dream, and all the more real for that. At

O'Halligan's venue, known as the Liverpool School of Language,

Music, Dream and Pun, artists became immersed in readings,

performances and bizarre experiments. ‘It was the

inspirational talking shop, where dole-queue dreamers8

developed their big ideas,’ Drummond says. Well, all men

dream, as T.E. Lawrence noted, but not equally. ‘Those who

dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in

the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the

day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with

open eyes, to make them possible.’ I’ve known a few of these

dreamers of the day, plenty of them. Succeed or fail, they are

dangerous people. Because their dreams were never idle, they

were being acted upon in their very thinking.

Liverpool is a creative city showing how culture can drive

city growth. Liverpool’s arts budget has jumped in recent

years. Before the capital of culture bid it was under £1m, now

it is over £12m today. The Everyman is once again the place to

go to see Liverpool playwrights emerge; long-established arts

centres, the Blackie and the Bluecoat, have reopened,

refurbished and revitalised, and the Royal Liverpool

Philharmonic is once more getting rave reviews.

We should be sceptical of big claims, of the boosterism that

has accompanied urban regeneration in recent times. Bill

Drummond's response to being awarded capital of culture was to

issue a challenge in the form of 100 posters calling on people

to produce something ‘that has not been mediated by experts

from the outside world, not financed by the Arts Council or

the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and avoids

blueprints that were drafted years ago’. Half the posters were

to be pasted around the city, the other half were to be folded9

into paper boats and floated to who knows were on the Mersey.

Who knows where dreams end.

‘Perhaps it's a futile gesture,’ Drummond says. ‘Yet I

wouldn't be doing it if I didn't believe that Liverpool was

still capable of producing something genuinely outstanding.

Liverpool's great cultural moments happened spontaneously.

It's pointless to imagine that these things can be

engineered.’ Wylie agrees: ‘As soon as anything becomes

official, it's our immediate reaction to distrust it. It's

fantastic for the city to receive so much attention, yet it

sometimes feels as if we're being instructed how to throw a

party. Whose party would you rather go to - a rock star's or a

councillor's?’

Here is more on Drummond’s challenge to the people of

Liverpool to deliver a genuinely creative Capital of Culture

year. Coinciding with Liverpool’s 800th birthday, Late at Tate

in August 2007 explored the way Liverpool has inspired poetry,

painting, performance and passion in its people.

http://www.tate.org.uk/about/press-office/press-releases/late-

tate-liverpool-august-2007

I’m with Pete Wylie on this. It’s my party. And my party today

is the rock star’s party. I saw some great stuff at the

Everyman, some ‘interesting’ stuff too (heaven knows what it

was called or what it was about, but ‘memorable’ to a teenage10

boy with little knowledge and a lot of imagination). I love

the exhibitions and the art, appreciate the poetry etc. It was

a decade of creative renaissance, and that renaissance

continues today. But I want to focus mainly on the music of

the 1980s, the decade in which I sort of emerged, with an

identity of my own.

Eric's, a punk club on Mathew Street near the site of the

Cavern, became the magnet for the second great wave of

Liverpool bands, including the Mighty Wah!, the Teardrop

Explodes and Echo and the Bunnymen. ‘We were arrogant enough

to believe that we could overthrow the legacy of the Beatles,’

says Wah! founder Pete Wylie.

All comparisons are invidious. I have to strike a sensible

note, make it clear that these claims and counter-claims as to

who is better than who are for the playground. Even so, I had

that chippiness too! So I shall moderate my old bombast and

simply say that whilst I’d agree that The Beatles were indeed

the greatest, the bands I loved in the eighties were even

better! You may not have heard of them, but they were my

‘John, Paul, John and Ringo’. And I think, here and there, I

can support that claim. I’ll have a go, anyway.

It’s that self-confidence, ambition, sparkiness and, yes,

bombast which stood out in an age of economic gloom, job

losses and mass unemployment. Call it swagger. Somehow,

despite the conditions of social life being cut from under our11

feet, the dreamers of the day were holding out possibilities –

probabilities? certainties! – of a better future. And I do

indeed remember this arrogance that ‘we’ could do better than

The Beatles! Arrogant? Maybe. The ambition and self-confidence

that spurs action and achievement. I still get quite chippy on

this, and still celebrate the music of this time, even though

it was never quite the global conquest of The Beatles as was

predicted. Admittedly, I am deaf to the awful ‘80s production.

And let’s be honest here, the synth based sounds haven’t dated

well. Let’s get that out of the way from the start. The major

obstacle standing in the way of recovery is the unavoidable

fact that these are songs recorded in the 1980s, with all that

that implies with regard to the synthesiser sound that

dominated the time. That sound was over-used, and intrusive

even then, and dated very quickly after. It can be rather off-

putting to those not used to it. Frankly, it disfigures many a

good tune. I can easily cast it aside to get to the song, the

lyrics and their delivery. And it’s on that basis that I

maintain that this was a great period for the Merseysound,

with, in the very least, glimpses of the greatness that very

nearly could have been. Hang it, the greatness that was. At

risk of going slightly over the top here, but I've always

maintained to anyone who is daft enough to listen to me

droning on for hours that these bands of the new Liverpool

wave produced some of the greatest records ever made. Even as

the local economy teetered on the brink of collapse, and the

local council on the brink of bankruptcy, Liverpool continued

12

to produce musicians, singers and songs as if was still at the

centre of the universe.

‘After the rain, the sun would come; and the place would look

like it had been swept in swirls and spirals of light down the

long streets before it would settle for the evening and leave

you with that long glow they experience in New York …

Liverpool, the most beautiful of western Atlantic cities.

After the docking was finished he went back to the city and

sat in his room. He continued each day down the library or

over at the docks. Nothing could keep him away … the walls of

his room took on a life of their own.’

I have no idea from where I took this quote. In my room, I

have taken notes from countless books for seemingly endless

years, for projects on architecture and art, ecology and

literature, that I’ve never had the time to start, and will

never have the time to finish. But I accomplish other things

along the way. But this quote pretty much sums me up,

Liverpool, come rain and shine, the libraries, the books, the

ideas, the music, the dreams, the schemes. In my room, looking

out, the infinite sea, the infinite sky, the endless

imagination. And listening to the songs as I thought and

wrote. They are in the blood.

13

I’ve got about a million memories associated with these bands,

singers and songs, seen more than a few of them, predicted big

things for them and can recall times, places, persons, events

and everything. Even the weather. Even sitting in a pub waxing

lyrical about these songs, and remembering who with. I just

feel truly blessed to have been around and about Liverpool at

the time of this explosion. The music of my scallywag days may

have been good or it may have been bad. But one thing it never

was, it was never indifferent. Even the ones I loathed were

certainly memorable. Socially and politically important too,

touching on issues of class, injustice, poverty, race. And

always affirming possibilities for better days, always about

respecting yourself, valuing yourself, and respecting and

valuing others, with an underlying commitment to a society in

which each and all are united in a collective flourishing. And

that’s a lot. That builds a value-system, an ethos, a

character. And the worth of those things was shown in how

determined and resolute and steadfast the city of Liverpool

was in fighting back against the calumnies and injustices of

the Hillsborough Disaster.

Call me a romantic, but I have held on to all my old vinyl -

singles, EPs, LPs, the lot. Thousands of them. And I believe

the records still standing proud on my shelves have their own

unique tale to tell, a history. As we all have, if we care to

remember. I think the past is worth remembering, not just for

what happened, but for pondering of what could have happened,

giving us clues as to what could still happen. It’s never too14

late to become the person you once could have been. And the

story of how the music got on those shelves in the first place

is as revealing as the music itself. It’s about time, place

and people. Your own. It’s a form of self-knowledge. So carry

on, and hopefully you will understand what an honour it has

been to be involved in the living legacy of one of the oldest,

greatest music making cities on the planet. I’ll focus on the

pop stuff, but I could just as easily have accented

Liverpool’s great folk tradition, including the old sea songs

and songs picked up from all over the world. And the classical

stuff. And the architecture, the plays and the poems.

Liverpool. It’s all here. But I’m no intellectual snob, and

have no qualms about saying that the pop singers and bands

were my poets and playwrights. That’s a modest claim, tied up

with my history and interests, and of no wider significance.

So I shall go further and argue that this music has the poetry

of real life and real love running through it, and that’s a

universal theme of personal significance.

You may think I am romanticising (you’re right, I am), but let

me tip you the wink here. ‘Like Ireland – from where it

acquired the taste, I think – Liverpool is notorious for the

sentimentality of its exiles. Everyone knows of its celebrity

sons and daughters, who’ll pay the place every compliment

short of living there. But the people who stay here are

usually just as passionate. Liverpool’s talent for self-

mythologising is probably unequalled. A local brochure calls

15

it ‘the Big Village at the Centre of the Universe’. Some can’t

understand why a Scouser would choose to move away.’

(Paul de Noyer, 2002: 5).

Self-mythologising in the sea of dreams, a magical world in

which fantasies are not illusions but realities to live by. We

make our own facts.

THE CITY OF THE SEA‘I grew up in the sea and the poverty was sumptuous then I

lost the sea and found all luxuries grey and poverty

unbearable but each time the distant siren of a tug boat came

to remind me. Since then I have been waiting. I wait for the

homebound ships, the house of the waters the limpidity of the

day’ (Albert Camus).

I shall be writing of Liverpool and its music. The thing to

bear in mind at all times is that Liverpool is a port city,

‘the city of the sea’ to take the title of Tony Lane’s book.

The words of Albert Camus apply to Liverpool, as they do, no

doubt, to many port cities around the world. It’s just that

the subject of this piece is Liverpool, my place, my port

city, and the music of my youth.

The sentiments expressed in these songs, and in my words of

appreciation, reflect the love of those lucky enough to have

been born in, worked in or have had some connection to

Liverpool, a spontaneous, creative, irregular city in which16

time is an experience outside the mechanical order and

regularity of the clock.

These songs are about the connection between time and tide in

Liverpool, a city that looks outwards to the sea, and has a

river crashing through its veins. Liverpool is a mari-time

city, a place in which time is connected to tide, and whose

inhabitants look not inwards but outwards to the wider world

beyond the sea. The Liverpool mentality was born out of the

maritime economy, and movement, spontaneity, irregularity and

unpredictability continue to define the character of the way

of life of people and city.

‘Liverpool is an anarchic place where spontaneity and the

flamboyant gesture are preferred to the disciplines of

tactical thinking and planned interventions. Liverpool is an

organiser’s graveyard.’ (Communist report 1935).

I’ve found some interesting words from a certain Mr Lennon

from Liverpool, drawing attention to these defining

characteristics of the city: ‘the transient, the complex

nature, the irregular and unpredictable, the turbulence which

is impossible to stabilise because it comes and goes in the

opposite direction to the normal.’ Very true. But the words

were not those of John Lennon, but of G.W. Lennon, of the

Liverpool Observatory and Tidal Institute. It seems that the

unique nature Liverpool’s tidal storms and swells made it

difficult to place it on a weather map. Liverpool has always17

been difficult to place, for its storms and swells of all

kinds.

Liverpool may be located in a temperate zone but the

inhabitants are not a temperate people. I’m proud to include

myself under that description. In my defence, I describe

myself as a most even-tempered person, the highs may be high

and the lows may be low, but taken together they form a mean

that meets in the middle. It’s just that’s not where the

actual life is lived.

Liverpool had an inland, and reaches to towns like Huyton and

Kirby which are spoken of as ‘near Liverpool, Prescott, where

I was born, eight miles east of the city centre. This

Liverpool is a big place. But here is my point, these

landlocked places inland look west to Liverpool, and Liverpool

looks outwards to the sea. The inner is defined in relation to

the outer. Liverpool is a city that lives life on the margins,

looking beyond the horizon, to the infinity of endless sea and

sky. The imagination takes flight here, and is limitless. A

place beyond place; and a people on the margins. A port city

takes its bearings not from its inland physical landscape but

from its shifting shoreline and limitless horizons. And that

produces people who are outsiders, people comfortable with

‘otherness’, people who naturally are ‘other’, individuals and

individualists who just live the awkward life, and leave the

theorising and intellectualising to the fully paid up members

of the academic establishment. Outsiders. Anarchic people who18

are an organisers graveyard. And anathema to people of taste

and sensibility.

‘The streets of Sailortown were a riot of stabbings,

drunkenness and carnality. Stepping through them gingerly, the

American Consul Nathaniel Hawthorne recorded ‘the

multitudinous and continual motion of all this kind of life.

The people are as numerous as maggots in cheese; you behold

them, disgusting, and all moving about…’ Even when the city

was prosperous there was awful poverty, and unemployment was

endemic because of casual labour. Every Liverpudlian carries a

conviction of the city’s extremity. Whatever it’s good at,

it’s the best. And whatever is bad here, well, it’s the worst

you’ll find anywhere.’ (Paul de Noyer 2002: 6).

Port cities are different to other cities, and produce people

who are ‘different’. My subject here is pop music, and a

recurring theme is the extent to which Liverpool bands and

their music have been underrated or neglected. That may seem

an odd claim seeing that Liverpool has been declared the music

capital of the world on the basis of having more hits per

capita than any other place. The oddest thing of all may well

be that a city which is so different and ‘other’ should have

generated so much music which has proven to be so popular over

a long period of time. It isn’t that odd at all, though. ‘The

dominant fondness .. is for melody and a kind of populist

Surrealism.’ (Paul de Noyer). There is always a reaching out

to communicate.19

Looking for answers, I come back to this theme of Liverpool as

a city that lives life on the margins, grounded in place but,

most of all, taking flight from it. At least in the

imagination. Liverpool isn’t so much a townscape as a

dreamscape. It would be a big mistake to overlook the proud

attachment to place, a pride that could politely be called a

passionate localism, and impolitely a full blown outbreak of

chauvenism. Liverpool did everything before anyone else, and

did it better. Just as any Scouser, they’ll tell you. But this

insularity is only part of the story, and not the most

important part. The sea draws the locals outwards with the

promise of an entirely different plane of experience.

The Liverpool mind looks beyond time and place to the

beckoning horizons of endless sea and sky. I looked up the

definition of ‘settlement’ in GCSE geography. I quote: ‘The

reason why a settlement developed in the first place is said

to be its function. For example the function of Liverpool was

as a port.’

(http://www.geography.learnontheinternet.co.uk/topics/

characteristicsofsettlements.html).

At risk of failing GCSE Geography, that characterisation of

Liverpool as a settlement is a travesty. We are dealing with a

‘place’ constituted by the endless traffic of persons, people

coming, people going, an endless circulation. There is little

that is ‘settled’ in such a place. The people are more20

dissatisfied than satisfied, ‘narky’ and bolshy rather than

smug and contented, restless rather than settled, edgy,

argumentative, aggressive, angry, direct, quick.

Liverpool is a city that knows how to enjoy itself, a city

that is always generating reasons for you to laugh and smile

and sing and dance.

The songs, the stories they tell, the people who sing them are

often awkward, but that’s the nature of the place. The mystery

for me is not that these bands and their music was

‘underrated’, but that so much of it has proven so popular at

all. The fact that many of the bands and songs here earned a

certain popularity and had a degree of commercial success at

all is impressive enough. The ones that missed out have the

satisfaction of knowing that, through it all, they made their

own statement of who they were, and avoided the self-

immolation that comes with becoming a prisoner of commercial

pressures.

The story is one of sea currents, trade roots, striking roots

within a pervasive rootlessness.

The stories are of those who go and go for good; those who go

and come back; those who come and stay; those who come and

move on; and those who are born here and die here. In The

German Ideology, Karl Marx employed the terms Verkehr or21

Verkehrsform, referring to the traffic, association,

communication, commerce or intercourse between individuals

(Marx GI 1999:42/3nl), and some such notion underlies my

attempt to characterise Liverpool as a fluid, interactive,

rhythmic world of continuous and circular dimensions of time,

space and movement. The tides set the rhythm.

CLOCK TIME AND TIDE TIME

The quote from the Communist report of 1935 describes

Liverpool as ‘anarchic’. It is unruly. Irregular. Mari-time is

sea time, not the exact, measured and uniform time of the

clock mechanism, but the irregular time of the tides. It’s a

world of waves, emotions, swings, an abomination to an order

obsessed with time and work discipline, the control of nature

and people, obedience, measurement. Max Weber famously

described capitalist modernity as an iron cage, a steel hard

cage whose domination was so total as to be invisible,

embracing our very subjectivities. We no longer see the bars

on the cage that confines us, they have become internal. Weber

is worth quoting at length, because his words make clear

precisely the distinctive character of Liverpool time, space

and movement, and why it stands apart from the regularity of a

mechanical order that ‘proceeds without regard for persons’,

to quote Weber. Liverpool is a world of personalities, as odd,

irritating, chippy and mouthy as they are. It is a world of

characters who will strike the outside world as fully paid up22

members of life’s awkward squad. And that would be right,

Liverpudlians are ‘outsiders’, they are outside of Weber’s

‘iron cage’.

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do

so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells

into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality,

it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the

modern economic order.. This order is now bound to the

technical and economic conditions of machine production

which today determine the lives of all the individuals who

are born into this mechanism, not only those directly

concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible

force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton

of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for

external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the

'saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any

moment'. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an

iron cage.

Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and work out

its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an

increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of

men as at no previous period in history. Today the spirit of

religious asceticism - whether finally, who knows?

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or

whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely

new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth

of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanised23

petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-

importance. For of the last stage of this cultural

development, it might well be truly said: 'Specialists

without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity

imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation

never before achieved’.

Weber The Protestant Ethic 1985 181/2

Any convulsive self-importance that comes from Liverpool is

one born of the irregularity of the sea, not the mechanised

petrification of the capital system’s time and work discipline

and clock order and clock work. It’s interesting that in the

popular press, Liverpool has been associated with crime.

Popular prejudice sees Liverpudlians as thieves, car thieves

in particular. Leaving aside the facts say otherwise, this

characterisation by outsiders has the truth of seeing

Liverpudlians as ‘different’, as people who don’t play by the

rules. As I said above, ‘personalities’. And in an impersonal

order, personalities stand out, and often attract the fear,

suspicion, even hatred of those who have long since

surrendered their hopes, dreams and visions to ‘the system’.

The cage they have entered may be a gilded cage in many

respects, but it is impossible to think yourself free when you

are bought and sold on the market every day. And those who

seem to be enjoying themselves on the outside are reminders of

the freedom lost in the process of ‘making it’. The Labour

Party is obsessed with shedding its association with the old24

working class, the traditions of class solidarity, collective

struggle and social justice, and instead keeps emphasising the

need to appeal to the ‘aspiring’ classes. It’s insipid,

politically evasive, pusillanimous drivel. John Lennon nailed

the lie flat in a line from Working Class Hero: ‘You think

you're so clever and classless and free, But you're still

f*****g peasants as far as I can see.’ There’s nothing wrong

with ‘aspirations’ as such, but there is plenty wrong with

false prospectuses, illusory promises of freedom and happiness

through servitude.

"Working Class Hero"

As soon as you're born they make you feel small

By giving you no time instead of it all

'Til the pain is so big you feel nothing at all

A working class hero is something to be

A working class hero is something to be

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school

They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool

'Til you're so f*****g crazy you can't follow their rules

A working class hero is something to be

A working class hero is something to be

When they've tortured and scared you for 20 odd years25

Then they expect you to pick a career

When you can't really function, you're so full of fear

A working class hero is something to be

A working class hero is something to be

Keep you doped with religion, and sex, and T.V.

And you think you're so clever and classless and free

But you're still f*****g peasants as far as I can see

A working class hero is something to be

A working class hero is something to be

There's room at the top they are telling you still

But first you must learn how to smile as you kill

If you want to be like the folks on the hill

A working class hero is something to be

A working class hero is something to be

If you want to be a hero well just follow me

If you want to be a hero well just follow me.

John Lennnon – Working Class Hero

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lKwXwU5iWs

So I’d say this notion of Liverpool as a city of criminal

activity and behaviour is ‘normal’ regular society’s attempt26

to understand the weirdness of an irregular place and people

that seems to be outside the rules. Liverpool is a city of

edgy people, on the margins, on the borders between ideal and

real, looking beyond horizons, outsiders and outlaws. It is

difficult to understand the informal ways of living in the

city of Liverpool, and very easy to misrepresent them.

Returning to this theme of Liverpool as a city of criminal

activity and behaviour, it is interesting that people who are

sent to jail are said to be ‘doing time’. Doing ‘time’ is the

biggest punishment of all, but that is precisely the fate of

most people who work in order to survive within the iron cage

of capitalist modernity. Time in this sense has become

pervasive, intrusive, stifling and oppressive, constructed so

as to suppress otherness, that wonderful characteristic

Liverpool awkwardness in self-assertion. We may, as Weber

argues, be born into this iron cage, but a modern clock sense

is instilled within us as a result of the practices and

processes defining the modern mechanical age, we are not born

with it, it is not natural. In common with all living

organisms, human beings are equipped with their own internal

clocks. Weber refers to those who are confined within the

mechanism of modernity’s iron cage as having their lives

determined with ‘irresistible force’. The clock, mechanical or

organic, external or internal, shapes our behaviour and

determines whether we are free beings or enslaved beings.

Those alternatives are presented in Lennon’s Working Class

Hero, and it is easy to see why many, even most, people

respond to the appeal of aspiration – a job, a steady income,27

a house, foreign holiday, a pension and free parking at the

golf club … It may be a cage, but it’s a gilded cage, and much

the easier option compared to being on the outside, attempting

to ‘make it’ by being one’s own person. The individual against

the system is an age old theme, and in the main, the system

wins. So if you want to play the percentages, give in, join

up, survive. It’s just not an attitude that comes easy to

people whose inner rhythms respond to the irregularities of

the currents and tides of the sea. Time has always been

experienced differently by those who live in a maritime

culture. Liverpool has not so much a sense of time as a sense

of the tides. It’s a city of the sea, not land, and of the

moon rather than the sun, the moon that governs as a result of

its gravitational pull on the world’s tides. Tide time is

different every day. The waxing and waning of the moon brings

an ebb and flow of tides that serves to make life very

irregular. The attempt at time control, and the mechanical

obedience of people, will always be thwarted by tide time.

Liverpool is an irregular place, and Liverpudlians are

irregular people. The popular press characterises

Liverpudlians as workshy, strike prone, bolshy, lawless,

criminal. The facts say something else. But these perceptions

of Liverpool and Liverpudlians has the merit of recognising

the obvious, the city and its people are ‘different’,

‘unruly’, and stand in some way outside of the regular order

that dominates the machine world. To understand this is to

identify the real issue beyond ill-informed prejudices, the

struggle over freedom and authority, power, measured time28

control and self-determination – the basic incompatibility

between Liverpool, a port city of tide time, and industrial

production and its clock time. It’s a clash between

irregularity and regularity, and it’s in culture most of all

where Liverpool expresses the never-ending, ever-resurgent

rhythmic qualities of the human soul against the mechanised

petrification of the clock world. The more regular time came

to be normalised, the more obedient people become. You can

call it aspiration along with the politicians out to seduce

and bank votes, or enslavement, with those like Lennon, free

enough to tell the truth. But this conflict between mari-time

and industrial time, between the internal rhythmic clock and

the external measured clock is a conflict between those still

prepared to dream possibilities of authentic self-expression

and those who have surrendered in order to survive. On account

of life, to give up the reasons for living. (I seem to

remember this as a quote from Terence. If it isn’t, I’ll be

happy to claim it for myself.)

“Your life is your own. Rise up and live it.”

― Terry Goodkind, Faith of the Fallen

That attitude, that affirmation of life and alternate

possibilities, characterises the music I shall discuss in

these pages. It is not unaware of the ‘dark’ side of life, far

from it. Much of the music concerns rescuing lost

possibilities out of the most adverse of adverse

29

circumstances, redeeming ideals and visions long thought

abandoned for being thought impossible.

I like this idea of tide time and irregularity. The connection

with the ‘anarchic’ spirit of Liverpool I mentioned earlier is

obvious, but worth exploring in a little more depth. Time and

tide, it is said, waits for no man. But the inclination of

those who live in a sea port is not to wait in any case.

Whilst people in offices watch the clock and count down time,

the people of the sea go out to catch the tide. There’s no

waiting on time when you have a tide to catch. As a group of

ex-Liverpool seafarers told the Guardian newspaper a couple of

years ago, ‘none of us could do the clocking on/off, that’s

why we are all independents’. Sounds wonderful, but beware,

independence takes guts and comes at the price of being

marginalised, overlooked, ostracised, vilified, excluded,

undervalued and underpaid. On the plus side, you remain your

own person. A person.

Liverpool is a city of outsiders but mark this well, it does

not make a fetish of being ‘other’, quite the contrary.

Liverpool seeks to express itself, show itself communicate,

persuade, impress, it solicits praise, it wants popularity.

Life is not separation but integration, solidarity, something

lived in a place where you never walk alone. The key is unity,

not the celebration of some abstract ‘otherness’.

Liverpudlians already are ‘other’, they don’t need to assert

30

that precious identity from a distance, they live it on the

inside.

As the city of the sea, Liverpool has natural night and day

qualities of rhythm, pace, and tempo which are distinctive and

which have fed into its musical identity. The rhythmic

qualities of people and place were given a name, the name of a

musical revolution. Merseybeat beat out the rhythm of the

river, the river Mersey.

A sea city expresses its music in movement. A tide city is a

rhythm city. Liverpool has its distinctive rhythms of sound

and vision, a living and fluid society where roots on the

inside are connected to routes leading outwards, where

boundaries are not fixed, and imaginations are always beyond

the horizon. The maritime frontier is never closed, and people

live on its edge all the time. Liverpool is liquid. That’s the

stuff it is made of.

Liverpool is characterised by liquidity and rhythmicity. The

rhythms of a maritime city contradict and always threaten to

subvert the processes of production structured by industry.

Under the tyranny of the clock, society was brought under

measured order and rational control. The body was to be

confined and regulated and administered. The songs I discuss

continually refer to hope and dreams, the need to join31

together and hold onto a vision of a life that is something

more than the present enlarged. Philosopher Alasdair Maclntyre

wrote of the need for ‘re-establishing hope as a social

virtue’ (MacIntyre Marxism and Christianity 1968: 88). Liverpool is

a maritime city, a mari-time city, a Marian city, Mary, the

Mother of Hope. The hope of the hopeless, Our Lady of hopeless

hope.

http://www.passionistnuns.org/meditation/MCMShuhmann/index.htm

https://www.ewtn.com/Devotionals/novena/hope.htm

The virtue of Hope has served as the beacon for the dreamer

and the drifter, the outlaw and the traveller, all those

seeking a place to be beyond the nullity of the present order.

The social virtues affirm the qualities of the biological

clock, the natural rhythms of life. Their enemy is

Temperancia, the mechanical world of clock order that comes to

confine and regulate human beings in mind, body and soul. All

were to be bullied and bridled by the new temperance.

Liverpudlians have always struggled to lived under such

control, knowing that authentic expression lay beyond the

boundary, beyond the horizon.

A CITY OF OUTSIDERSYou may still be asking why I am referring to these singers

and bands as ‘the secret people’ when the simple facts are

that they have sought and received public attention and

acclaim. There’s a few reasons. First of all, the word most

commonly associated with most of these acts is ‘underrated’.32

The people who use this word are actually referring to the

anomaly of so much talent (implying the bands are highly

rated) not receiving the fame and fortune it deserves. But it

goes deeper. There is an uncompromising aspect, a commitment

to self-expression, which means that these artists will always

just fall short of ‘making it’ in the big wide world. It’s

self-expression they crave most of all, not fame and fortune.

Given the eccentricity and individuality, the surrealism and

awkwardness of many of those involved, the amazing thing is

that they should have had the success they did. And there’s

another point. In Liverpool, everyone is a performer, everyone

is a contender; there is no distinction between artist and

audience. At a show, you get the impression that you could

pull anyone out from the audience to give us a turn. This is a

talent that is everywhere and nowhere at the same time,

ubiquitous, yet never quite ‘making it’.

I think this has a lot to do with the character of Liverpool

as a sea port. Dockers and sailors work on and beyond the

edges of the city. They are outside the time and work

discipline of industrial production. The inhabitants of sea

cities are ‘outsiders’, people who understand that their being

could never to be realised in a steady or ‘regular’ job.

Liverpool looks ‘out’ to sea, and the irregularity of time

tide makes being ‘out’ of work a familiar experience for

Liverpool people. They are people on the ‘outside’, and

frequently let the wider world know it. That chippiness can

cause a resentment and a reaction, with Liverpool being33

described as ‘self-pity city’, and Liverpudlians as authors of

their own problems. That comes with being a city of

‘independents’, a creative city of creative spirits, capable

of authorship, capable of challenging destiny, rejecting

compromises within the cage, and seeking other alternatives.

It takes imagination and it takes guts. But the city is full

of individuals with their eyes on the prize, whatever it is

and wherever out there it may be, carrying on with everyday

ordinary existences whilst dreaming of the extraordinary. The

hopeless hope that sustains us through the most adverse of

circumstances. Offering the most limited of options, in a

conventional work, life and career sense, the infinite skies

and sea inspire the wildest of dreams. Liverpool is a city of

hope and imagination and has produced an inordinate amount of

singers, musicians, artists, comedians, dancers, poets,

writers, sportsmen and women, political leaders, community

organisers and trade union activists. Creative people who know

that action is effective in challenging and overturning

unfavourable odds. Ideas, music, sport, art, writing are all

active expressions of being, affirming hope in the most

hopeless of circumstances.

It’s not surprising that The Beatles would conquer America,

Liverpool is the ‘gateway to America’. And it isn’t surprising

that many Liverpool acts have failed to find the national

success their talent deserved. Looking outwards, Liverpool

can, and often has, found itself alone in its own nation. Is

Liverpool England or does it belong to the Atlantic? Liverpool34

is a ‘global city’, and Liverpool people have an international

outlook. It is surprising that Liverpool bands have not

followed in The Beatles’ footsteps when it comes to

international success.

The Liverpool character can be abrasive characters, and can be

perceived by those from other places as aggressive. Liverpool

is a city whose emotions are forever swinging between loyalty

to place and lure of distance, and what it means to live and

love in hybrid spaces in between. It is within these spaces

that Liverpool bands and singers mapped out new designs for

living in words and music.

Liverpool still inspires with its hybrid rhythms and beats.

I always paid close attention to the lyrics of the songs. Of

course, Liverpool has a strong tradition of poetry, plays and

literature. But the songs always had something interesting to

say, or just a line or a phrase that could provoke thought,

inspire. There is a strong storytelling tradition in Liverpool

culture, and it does come out in the songwriting.

Liverpool is a creative hybrid of art, music, storytelling,

entertainment and self-expression.

Introducing an interview with the Liverpool filmmaker Terence

Davies on the South Bank Show, February 1994, Melvyn Bragg

stated that ‘In no other city is art so closely linked to35

life’. And the reason is obvious, the city of Liverpool is a

city of hope and imagination that breeds people who want to

and dare to dream, a city that makes you want to sing and

dance, play and perform, express yourself whichever way you

can, or write, write about a city that makes you want to

write.

BILLY FURY

I was always a little out of time. A little ahead of the

times, tipping bands that few had heard of. And a little

behind the time, even since I first heard Elvis, some two

decades after his emergence, and knew then that none could

ever compare. But never quite of them. I loved fifties rock36

and roll. But in 1977, I saw Elvis go. Then John Lennon was

taken from us in 1980. I loved Starting Over, “Elvis Orbison”

as Johnny put it. And then there was Billy Fury. I always had

a soft spot for Billy Fury, he had this cool, plaintive voice,

keening, full of longing, and sort of haunted. He had 20 top

20 hits in the 1960s, more hits than anyone except Elvis, The

Beatles and Cliff Richard. But he had been away for years as a

result of ill-health. He briefly came back in 1982, and then

he was gone too. But I never forgot him.

Billy Fury – Devil or Angel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E86_YEjfM_o

(see Ain't Nothin Shakin for Billy in his heyday).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCeWpW0CFD0

Billy Fury – Maybe Tomorrow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9JvPGdO2DY

Billy performs his first ever hit in his last ever TV

appearance. He died shortly after.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8bpXS7aI_w

Maybe tomorrow you'll understand

Then we'll go walkin hand in hand

Then in the evenin by the moon light

I'll hold you darlin I'll hold you tight,

maybe tomorrow There'll be know sorrow 37

maybe tomorrow Maybe tomorrow maybe tomorrow

Tomorrow is never promised to anyone.

As Sir Fab Paul McCartney himself said, Billy Fury was

Britain’s first genuine rock and roll star, and the first

Liverpool rocker to ‘make it’. John Lennon got to the point,

the best British rock and roll star came from Liverpool, and

his name was Billy Fury. And he’ll never be forgotten so long

as I am around.

Liverpool’s very own Elvis!? Hang on, I thought that was Pete

Wylie.

And so on to Liverpool’s very own Elvis!

38

PETE WYLIE

Peter Wylie started off in May 1977 in the band Crucial Three

with Ian McCulloch and bassist Julian Cope. Crucial indeed,

with McCulloch going on to find fame with Echo and the

Bunnymen and Cope with Teardrop Explodes. Maybe these three

individuals were too ‘crucial’ by far, because the band ended

in the June of 1977. An important, if barely existent, band,

then. September 1978 and Wylie forms The Opium Eaters, with

Peter Clarke ("Budgie"), Paul Rutherford (“Frankie goes to

39

Hollywood” AND St Helens band The Spitfire Boys) and Ian

Broudie (“Lightning Seeds”).

And this was an incredibly important song, a credo, a

statement of faith, a stand. Imagine coming out of school and

entering a world of 3 million unemployed (and there were more

than that, the official figures were fiddled). And Merseyside

was hit harder than most, and fell further than all. It took

something to push your chest out and head up and face the

world.

Pete Wylie and The Mighty Wah! - The Story Of The Blues

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO5-w3540H8

First, they take your pride

Turn it all inside

And then you realise

You've got nothing left to lose

So, you try to stop

Try to get back up

And then, you realise

You're telling the Story of the Blues

The Story of the Blues: Part One was Pete Wylie’s biggest hit,

and it can still be heard on the radio today as an ‘80s

classic. The song is about learning to value yourself in

facing life’s setbacks and standing up however much life40

knocks you down. It was certainly a song that resonated

amongst the Merseyside youth of the 1980s. Part Two is a

spoken monologue and refers to the works of Raoul Vaneigem and

Jack Kerouac.

And Wylie’s Come Back was another important statement. It was

time when Norman Tebbitt was telling the unemployed to get on

their bikes and seek work elsewhere. I loved the stories of

scousers turning up in holiday resorts were retired

conservative folk were enjoying the good life. They were soon

told to clear off back home. There were better reasons to

‘come back’, stand and fight and join together in solidarity

to build the good life. It can be done.

Well did you ever hear of hope?

A small belief can mean you'll never walk alone.

And did you ever hear of faith? Encouragement! Development!

Pete Wylie and The Mighty Wah! - Come Back

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFf0bAIT5qY

‘Down by the docks the talking turned: "As some are striving

to survive, the others thrive" (Reaching the realm of no

return) "I don't want charity, just half a chance and it's all

up to you, yes it's all up to you" Come Back! I'm willing to

try Come Back! Don't let time go by Come Back! The will to

survive's Come Back Come Back! With time on my hands Come

Back! I'm making a stand Come Back! To kill or to cure Come41

Back! To god-given belief Well did you ever hear of hope?

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! A small belief can mean you'll never walk

alone And did you ever hear of faith? Encouragement!

Development! And it's all to you! Yes, it's all to you! Come

Back! I'm willing to try Come Back! Don't let time go by Come

Back! The will to survive's Come Back Come Back! With time on

my hands Come Back! I'm making a stand Come Back! To kill or

to cure Come Back! To god-given belief Come Back! With time on

my hands Come Back! I'm making a stand Come Back! To kill or

to cure Come Back Come Back! I'm willing to try Come Back!

Don't let time go by Come Back! The will to survive's Come

Back! I'm begging you please Come Back! Now I'm making my

stand Come Back! with time on my hands Come Back! Time to kill

or to cure And hats off to Hatton!!!’

Pete Wylie’s irreverent guide to Liverpool, at least shedding

some light on whatever it is I’m getting at.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzRt9kwhc-4

With the massive loss of jobs, many had to leave or face a

life on the unemployment scrapheap. Following my beloved

Liverpool FC around, I heard the fans of almost every club

turning the Liverpool anthem ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ into

endless choruses of “You’ll Never Work Again.” Cruel, but it

seemed all too true. Pete Wylie wrote ‘Come Back’ as a call to

fellow Liverpudlians to stay here, take a stand, don’t run

away from problems, but face them and do something about them,42

and give yourself and those who follow a future worth having.

It’s the only way. If not you, then who? It was a call to

arms.

Like a lot of ‘80s stuff, the sound is dated, with tinny

synths and keyboards, cheesy backing, clunky drums.

Remarkably, though, the songs are strong enough to survive the

heavy arrangements. These songs are bursting with life and

energy. And this one in particular. Despite the heavy hand of

the ‘80s sound, the song takes wing, the lyric delivered with

a voice that is defiantly and immensely alive, starting with

that big Springsteen-by-the-Mersey opening line: “Down by the

docks the talking turned/ 'As some are striving to survive/

The others thrive.’”

"Well did you ever hear of hope?

'Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!'

A small belief can mean

you'll never walk alone

And did you ever hear of faith?

Encouragement! Development!

And it's all to you!

Yes, it's all to you!"

Pete Wylie could hit and Pete Wylie could miss. Like all

interesting things, he is erratic. And that’s how I like it,

anything but the consistency of insipid, uninspiring, dull

mediocrity that says nothing and goes nowhere, and never even43

attempts to. And when Wylie did hit, he could knock your socks

off, as John Peel testified.

"Well, he’s the kind of bloke who does things at his own pace,

for which I admire him enormously. And they were with Warner

Brothers previously and there was real conflict between the

two of them because they wanted him to conform to an idea that

they had of what he should be and of course he is not the man

for that sort of thing. A bloke I like enormously I must admit

… I dread the day when I can no longer have my stumps

scattered by a new record - you know, when I can’t really be

just bowled over by something - and the new Wah! single is the

first one this year that has just left me breathless."

(Peel on Wylie/Wah and 'Come Back', My Top Ten, 1984)

http://peel.wikia.com/wiki/Wah!

An immense, inspirational, magnificent call to arms! Blake’s

Jerusalem demanded arrows of desire and a chariot of fire.

Come Back doesn’t just throw in the kitchen sink, it wants the

whole kitchen, including taps, dish rack, dish washer and

every utensil there is, including the ones whose names you can

never quite remember. Hope? I’ve definitely heard of hope.

Anyone who follows Liverpool FC, Wylie’s team, hears of hope

every week. We walk ever on with hope in our hearts. Read on

paper, the words could be dismissed as corny by the cynical.

But what do the cynics ever do? Sing them, and you want to

make common cause with others on some march or other, get44

involved in some community project, end unemployment and world

poverty, bring world peace, end global warming or – for

starters – just punch the air and say ‘Up with this sort of

thing!’ Don’t knock it! All the great achievements start with

that moment, that determination to act on the belief that

things could be better.

Like the rest of the songs here, the power of Come Back is

bound up with memory. 1984 was a funny year. I left school,

somehow got A in the A levels, Liverpool were European

champions (again), and freedom of some kind was both promise

and threat. The bit you once thought difficult, schools and

exams, now seemed like the easy life. Until now, unemployment

was something suffered by others. No more. And storm clouds

were gathering over the north. Militant Tendency in Liverpool

– ‘it’s a paper and not a party’ – budget strife with the

government, civil war in the Labour Party, expulsions to come,

taking many working class activists and socialist hopes with

them, and the great Miners’ Strike too. I remember the

prospect of Hatton in Liverpool standing shoulder to shoulder

with Blunkett in the People’s Republic of Sheffield and with

Stringer in Manchester to take on the government. I lived in

all three great cities of the north. The rebellion didn’t

happen. It was nothing to do with me. Blunkett and Stringer

went on to long parliamentary careers …

It was interesting seeing the Court of King Arthur

Scargill in Sheffield, the NUM HQ. It was just a building, I45

thought as I gazed at it, like any other. I’m not sure what I

expected. But I knew I was part of something big, a historical

moment that would decide the future in some way. There were

still the sunny days of youth, of course, but these were

serious events and serious times. I saw the pit communities

rally and self-organise in their defence. The strike was lost,

but the lesson of how people can join and act together to

compensate for deficiencies in material resources was an

enduring one. And the failure of the agencies of labour and

working class representation was clear to me.

In the big wide world, it was another Liverpool band, Frankie

Goes to Hollywood, that was the big smash of 1984. I left

Merseyside for Sheffield that year, and the first thing I

heard when I arrived in Sheffield was those air raid sirens

that introduced Frankie’s Two Tribes. I thought they were

sounding the alarm, warning the locals of my arrival. I was

used to it. I was born to the sound of factory sirens telling

the workers it was time to go home. But in 1984, the parallel

John Peel universe that sort of bubbles under the radar was

dominated by Wylie’s call to ‘Come Back’. Come Back is, as

Peel told us, the kind of record that ‘knocks your socks off’.

I’d say. The emotional punch of the song was so strong that I

had to keep counting my toes to see if they were still on, and

had not departed with the socks. Frankie’s Two Tribes topped

the chart, Wylie’s Come Back made number 20. But that

celebration of faith and hope, and the call to return, stand,

and build was the song that defined 1984 for me. I loved46

Sheffield, a wonderful city with beautiful countryside in all

directions. But Wylie’s call to come back, stand and fight,

dig in and build the better day, was compelling.

Pete Wylie – Sinful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VDURhQeYME

This sin-ridden seaport has always been a place apart – a sort

of sunless Marseilles that operates on different principles to

the rest of Britain. When the Irish arrived in massive numbers

it became a Catholic Celtic enclave in a Protestant Anglo-

Saxon kingdom’.

(Paul de Noyer 2002; 6).

Sin city, the land of the cock-eyed Celts. Preparing for

invasion at the time of the Armada, the Spanish described

Liverpool as a ‘free land, full of cheap food and wine and

full of Catholics.’

Pete Wylie – Diamond Girl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Jb80Hm3xQ0

Wylie had grandiose ambitions not quite matched by the

marketing sense required to make it big in the music business.

The full title of the band he formed was Wah!, Wah! Heat,

Shambeko Say! Wah!, Wah! The Mongrel, JF Wah! Say that, and

there’s no time to play the record. He had a big hit, then

lost the major record label deal. But this was never about47

being a successful member of a music factory. Behind the

starry eyed belief of one who was destined for big things, the

sense of character always shone through, the determination to

be unique, take risks, and play, not necessarily by the rules,

but play all the same. It cost him. He lost a big recording

contract. But Wylie has made some remarkable records which all

went incredibly close to redeeming his oversized ambitions and

promises. The big gestures were always sustained by the big

emotions that lay behind them. Seven Minutes to Midnight,

Somesay, Better Scream, and lots more.

Wylie later wrote the immense Heart as Big as Liverpool. I

like him. Part time rock star – full time legend. Wylie is a

character.

http://www.petewylie.co.uk/biog-2/

I once got cautioned at a job I did about needing to ‘watch

that sensitive nature’ of mine. Fair enough, I had stormed out

of the building, raging at one and all, and hitting the roof

and shaking the lift as I went. I don’t care. I wear my heart

on my sleeve, I told them, and won’t ever change. They asked

me back! With the caution …

And that’s why I like Wylie, that big heart on the sleeve, and

I like him even more when the blood is pouring down the arm. I

like it real and raw, good or bad. Bring it on, I say. It’s

only life if it pours.

48

http://sabotagetimes.com/music/pete-wylie-thatcher-twitter-

and-cheating-death

What’s he up to these days? Quite a lot.

Pete Wylie: The Sound of the City

http://www.sevenstreets.com/pete-wylie-sound-city/

“I’ve been happy, sad, angry, depressed, the works,” he

admits, of his long tail of depressive periods set in train

after getting dropped from Sony at the fag end of the 20th

century, and suffering a near fatal accident falling through

broken railings in Parliament Street. Forget about an annus

horribilis. For Wylie, the 90s were a decade disastrous.

“Self doubt and self hatred, they’re always there. When you

get dropped after being given a million quid to record the

best album of your career (eventually to see the light of day

as the scorching Songs of Strength and Heartbreak), it’s

devastating. You question everything.”

“The thing is to remember that it’s all part of the jigsaw. I

wish some of my contemporaries had more self-doubt. We’d all

be a lot better off,” he says.

So what shape did ‘Pete Wylie: The Wilderness Years’ take?

49

“I had no structure. Too many choices. The freedom of being

unwanted and skint is fabulous, but you have too many options,

and you get to a point where you need a plan. I was lost, and

once you’ve been lost once, it’s easy to get lost again.”

You get the feeling that the shock, physical tumult and

cataclysmic career derailing has been stored up, kept

nourished, fed and watered. That, right now, they’re being

harvested, to become Wylie’s next chapter: songs of love,

hope, loss and redemption. Songs of the city.

Read on, discover and/or rediscover the ‘underrated’ –

actually, highly regarded, just overlooked - music of my time

and place. These ‘songs of the city’, songs of failure,

neglect, wasted potential, missed opportunities, form the next

chapter for all of those who have survived in one piece and

who remain on nodding terms with their talent. There is some

surprisingly choice music being made by figures who were last

heard of in national terms two decades ago.

“I feel like I’ve got no choice,” Wylie says, “It’s a great

feeling. I have a new partner, (Entertainment agent, Kate

Haldane) who’s really helped me to focus, and given me the

confidence I was missing, and there’s talk of a documentary

(directed by Ballad of Mott The Hoople director, Chris Hall).

Things are looking good. This is the right time.”

Pete Wylie’s website50

http://www.petewylie.co.uk/

You can pre-order Pete’s new album ‘Pete Sounds’ through

‘Pledge Music’

5% of any money raised after the goal is reached will go to

Hillsborough Justice Campaign. Good man.

https://thenewvinylvillain.wordpress.com/2014/01/17/after-

cope-then-mcculloch-it-had-to-be-wylie-on-friday/

TEARDROP EXPLODES

Julian Cope was born in Deri, Wales and brought up in

Tamworth, Staffordshire. He came to Merseyside in 1976,

attending City of Liverpool College of Higher Education. His

band, The Teardrop Explodes were a post-punk/neo-psychedelic

band formed in Liverpool in 1978. And a key band at that.

51

Teardrop Explodes – Reward

Everyone knows the immense Reward.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOdJTTOe5lA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmkcKjGyJv8

I remember the boys at school totally mishearing the first

line as “bless my cotton socks, I’m in the nude”. And this,

apparently, was most exciting. ‘But if he’s wearing socks’, I

pointed out, ‘then he isn’t in the nude’. There was much

debate on the point. It’s just an expression. Doesn’t mean he

needs to be wearing any socks in order to be blessed. And

beside the point. And it turned out that the word is “news” in

any case. Still, the half hour walking home from school passed

quickly. I don’t think we resolved anything, other than we all

had the impression that Reward was an ‘important song’.

“It still amazes me that Reward got to No 6. It’s a mad

awesome record unlike anything else in pop. We sounded like

Vikings on acid fronted by a lunatic.” (David Balfe

Keyboards). That just about describes it.

Suddenly it struck me very clear

Suddenly it struck me very clean

All wrapped up the same

All wrapped up the same

They can't have it

You can't have it

I can't have it, too52

Until I learn to accept my reward

Reward is the song everyone knows, and it remains a key song

in alternative music. But this was the one that REALLY did it

for me.

Ha Ha, I'm Drowning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aZwlQ7tGNU

Not Waving but Drowning is also worth checking out, based on a

true story of a man who drowned whilst people watched,

mistaking his calls for help as happy waving to the shore.

There’s a moral in there. And you can draw it yourself, I need

to move on.

Reward came off the album Wilder, which was a commercial flop.

It was the second and last album from the band. Cope has since

gone from being a pop eccentric to an antiquarian and national

treasure, or a treasure of whatever world he lives in, a

modern ancient or ancient modern. Look him up and you’ll see

what I mean.

Conflict and breakdown are the album’s themes, as Cope’s band,

his drug-addled brain and his first marriage were collapsing

simultaneously. But Cope is quintessentially English, so the

mood is stoic, playful, self-mocking.

‘In poptastic 1981, Wilder made little sense. In 2013, where

the musical landscape is full of well-read Dirty Projectors53

and Wild Beasts and Vampire Weekends, artily fusing

psychedelic mindsets and world music motifs, the Teardrop

Explodes’ final album sounds entirely contemporary and reveals

itself as way ahead of its time. But the clincher is its

embrace of the sadness of ending things, and our knowledge

that Cope would leave Liverpool and The Teardrop Explodes far

behind and go on to bigger adventures. “I could make a meal/Of

this wonderful despair I feel”, Cope croons, soft and throaty,

on “Tiny Children”. Wilder does exactly that, and then

swallows, belches and looks to the future.’

http://www.uncut.co.uk/reviews/album/the-teardrop-explodes-

wilder

Way ahead of its time. It can leave you endlessly at odds with

people, arguing with them, proselytising. It kind of shapes

your character.

The Teardrop Explodes – When I Dream

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAQNdiKhlDE

The Teardrop Explodes - Passionate Friend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK8q427kJiM

Julian Cope - World shut your mouth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UJbz-pp6GQ

Julian Cope Presents Head Heritage

https://www.headheritage.co.uk/julian_cope/discography/54

ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN

Echo and the Bunnymen were ambitious. Not in terms of the

transitory stuff like hit records and sales. No. The band

aimed at magnificence. The album Ocean Rain was promoted as

‘the greatest album ever made’. And why not? If there is such

a thing as ‘the greatest album ever made’, why not this one?

By what criteria could we select such a thing. ‘Kissing music,

music to fall in love to’ was how Ian McCullogh described the

record. And if that’s what it does for you, it is indeed the

greatest album ever made.

Echo and the Bunnymen – Ocean Rain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPw62-WT4CE

All at sea again 55

And now my hurricanes have brought down this ocean rain

To bathe me again

My ship's a sail

Can you hear its tender frame

Screaming from beneath the waves

Screaming from beneath the waves

All hands on deck at dawn

Sailing to sadder shores

Your port in my heavy storms

Harbours the blackest thoughts

I'm at sea again

And now your hurricanes have brought down this ocean rain

To bathe me again

My ship's a sail

Can you hear its tender frame

Screaming from beneath the waves

Screaming from beneath the waves...

All hands on deck at dawn

Sailing to sadder shores

Your port in my heavy storms

Harbours the blackest thoughts

All hands on deck at dawn

Sailing to sadder shores

Your port in my heavy storms 56

Harbours the blackest thoughts

All at sea again

And now my hurricanes have brought down this ocean rain

To bathe me again

My ship's a sail

Hear its tender frame

Screaming from beneath the waves

Screaming from beneath your waves

Screaming from beneath the waves

Screaming from beneath the waves

All hands on deck at dawn

Sailing to sadder shores

Your port in my heavy storms

Harbours the blackest thoughts

And from the greatest album ever recorded to the greatest song

ever recorded.

Echo and the Bunnymen - The Killing Moon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWz0JC7afNQ

"The Killing Moon" was released on 20 January 1984 as the lead

single from Echo and the Bunnymen’s 1984 album, Ocean Rain.

The song defines not merely the year, but the time, the whole

story, really. The band’s greatest song? Let’s pitch the

claims big and ask whether it is the greatest song ever. The57

band's singer-songwriter Ian McCulloch is in no doubt: ‘When I

sing "The Killing Moon", I know there isn't a band in the

world who's got a song anywhere near that.’ Well, he should

know. We can get analytical here, and quote music journalist

Stewart Mason: ‘The smart use of strings amplifies the

elegance of the tune, bringing both a musical richness and a

sense of quiet dignity to the tune’. That’s nice. But doesn’t

quite capture the depth of the song. Reading the notes to the

Bunnymen's Crystal Days box set, Ian McCulloch claims he woke

up one morning with the phrase ‘fate up against your will’.

Oh, those dangerous dreams! In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that ‘The world is independent of my

will.’ That statement invites a certain peace and resignation.

It doesn’t invoke anything like the trouble and the drama of

‘Fate up against your will. Through the thick and thin. He

will wait until you give yourself to him.’ ‘You don’t dream

things like that and remember them. That’s why I’ve always

half credited the lyric to God. It’s never happened before or

since’. Who knows what daimons inspire the dreamers by day.

Ian McCulloch: ‘My wife had a cob on because I’d been out all

night – then I played the song and she cried’ ‘I’ve always

said that The Killing Moon is the greatest song ever written.

I’m sure Paul Simon would be entitled say the same about

Bridge Over Troubled Water, but for me The Killing Moon is

more than just a song. It’s a psalm, almost hymnal. It’s about

everything, from birth to death to eternity and God – whatever58

that is – and the eternal battle between fate and the human

will. It contains the answer to the meaning of life. It’s my

“To be or not to be …” I think he’s slightly wrong here, the

song raises the question of the meaning of life, it is for us

to answer it ourselves. But I’ll go with the rest of it.

Will Sergeant, guitarist, mentions getting the mandolin sound

on a trip to Russia, and that opening guitar line really

introduces the darkness and mystery to come. There’s a great

timeless quality to the song. The conflict of will and fate is

an eternal theme, after all.

It’s better being cool than being big. Not that anyone would

have objected to being big.

I first came across Echo and the Bunnymen in 1981 when a

school friend was raving about them as the next big thing. I

thought he was winding me up with a name like that. The

Sunnymen? The Funnymen? I sniggered. By 1984 they had made it

big with their brand of Scouse psychedelia and, with Ocean

Rain, they added an orchestra to create a mood of high Gothic

romance. McCulloch described the album Ocean Rain as ‘kissing

music’. Maybe, but this was a romanticism in long grey

overcoated sleeves. There is a doom foretold in the lyrics:

‘In starlit nights I saw you/ So cruelly you kissed me’. That

doesn’t augur well for the future, but fitted a time when

storm clouds were gathering.

59

Bands like the Bunnymen rebooted Liverpool as music city. The

Beatles cast a giant shadow, their very success threatening to

ossify the grooves and flows that produced them. The Beatles

were to come back big in the 1990s with the release of

Anthology in 1995. But there was this spell of just over a

decade when the name and fame of the Fab Four didn't

overshadow the Liverpool music scene. There was too much going

on the now for nostalgia for the past to get too much of a

look in.

And for all of the success of the Bunnymen, Mac the Mouth was

more about ‘being cool’ than being big. ‘All I've got against

Simple Minds and U2, who I quite like at times, is the

embarrassment factor of climbing on PA stacks,’ he told Max

Bell in The Face in 1984. ‘I've been known to go ninety on

stage but I try not to look like a ponce. I prefer a non-

acting performance because that seems more honest.’ It seemed

to matter at the time. And McCulloch was always suspicious of

Bono's desire to enlighten the masses and show them the way.

‘I think that rather than write Pied Piper music where people

are supposed to follow or lead and go to this great

congregation in the Hammersmith Odeon, our songs lead people

more into themselves, more introspective,’ McCulloch told Mat

Snow.

‘That is a big difference. All that positive attitude stuff

implies that everything's all right with the individual. It's

like, let's all go wherever the hell we're supposed to be60

going and they haven't even been within themselves. There's no

self-analysis there at all. And that is true pomp when it

doesn't even question anything let alone themselves.’

Cutting, incisive and absolutely spot-on. Liverpool is about

more than the big gestures and swagger; these things are

nothing without the emotional charge that comes from self-

awareness and self-knowledge. But it’s easier to be led by

others than to have the nous and nerve to lead oneself. And

pop music as much as politics has been about active elites

leading passive masses, and following their prejudices at the

same time. Flattire. It ‘works’, if all we do is count

numbers, consumers, customers, voters. But in Liverpool, music

is not split between the active performer and the passive

audience, it’s a participatory world in which all are in on

the act. Bono and U2 got bigger and bigger on their way to

rock’s Promised Land, and the Bunnymen sort of faded away,

which was much the better fate. McCulloch always said the

Bunnymen were the best band in the world, and such a thing is

in no need of proof. Least of all by numbers. They were big,

for a while, but never the biggest. They never aspired to be

the biggest. And they didn’t need to be the biggest. They

produced The Killing Moon. And that was more than enough.

McCulloch was called Mac the Mouth. And he had a very high

opinion of himself. He still does. “I'm just waiting for the

albums that sound like Ocean Rain,” he says. “But they

couldn't write a song like 'The Killing Moon' in a million

years...” He may well be right.61

Under blue moon I saw you

So cruelly you take me

Too late to beg you

You give yourself to him

What is this ‘cruelty’? And who is this ‘him’? The Ten

Commandments, particularly those warning against murder,

adultery, stealing, and betrayal, are ways of prohibiting

cruelty. And cruelty comes in different forms. The Latin crudus

is derived from older words standing for bloodshed, or raw

flesh. In this instance, cruelty involves the spilling of

blood. But a different meaning can be gleaned from modern

dictionaries. These define cruelty as ‘disposed to giving

pain.’ And such a notion involves much more than simple

bloodshed, they involve awareness. Cruelty and pain implies

consciousness. You can only be cruel to the living, not to the

dead. A living body. Embodiment.

Liverpool is a city for dreamers, ‘dreamy’. But there’s an

edginess, too. The people are a strange mixture of voluntarism

and fatalism. And life plays out the old tragic conflict

between will and fate.

“The Killing Moon, will come too soon.”

62

These were pretty prophetic words, as it turned out. One

minute I was celebrating Liverpool FCs win over Roma in 1984’s

European Cup final – Liverpool champions of Europe, yet again,

the world as it ought to be – the next minute it was death and

disaster at Heysel in ’85 and Hillsborough in ’89. That’s some

five years to travel having started with such high hopes.

Echo and the Bunnymen - The Cutter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8H0xtvxoq0

Am I the happy loss

Will I still recoil

When the skin is lost

Am I the worthy cross

Will I still be soiled

When the dirt is off

Conquering myself

Until I see another hurdle approaching

Say we can, say we will

Not just another drop in the ocean

As the ‘80s ‘progressed’, it seemed that the ground was being

cut from under our feet. The old certainties were vanishing

quickly, and none of the new certainties were so certain as to

merit the name. ‘You cannot buck the market’, ‘there is no

alternative’. Oh, please, pull the other one! Big business and

finance were bucking the market every day. They still are.63

Such claims are plainly attempts to put politics on ice and

induce resignation. To naturalise what ought to be

historicised, if I can put my social philosophers’ head on.

The end of everything was nigh, and the Promised Land was as

far away in pop as in politics. The Bunnymen’s songs emerged

from the very depths of this land of lost belief, and evoked a

sense of unfolding catastrophe. Rock’s larger purpose had been

shown to be inflated and empty, and much the same had happened

to the social democratic dreams of ‘the mixed economy’ in

politics. The swamp, miasma, the fog, Keynes’ ‘dragons of

finance’ were back. And so was the attempt to pass of false

fixities as unalterable certainties. So we strip away the

illusions and delusions, the collective fantasies and empty

promises until we are left with the only certain possibility –

of knowing oneself.

The Bunnymen’s songs of dread and doubt fitted the times. With

the failure of each fight-back, we lived wondering how far and

how deep the collapse of the old certainties would go. And as

each year passed, it seemed that everything was nothing but

doomed. Seemingly everywhere you looked, fate was defeating

will, and in the most emphatic terms. This was the bigger

meaning of the song. It would be easy in the selfish,

egoistic, narcissistic age that has emerged since the 1980s to

interpret The Cutter as the threat of subjectivism descending

into self-harm. This privatisation of the sense of doom would

be an appropriate interpretation in light of 1980s politics.

But the doom in the song is much more pervasive than that,64

threatening to engulf us all. Whatever ‘the cutter’ is, it is

some kind of generalised threat. ‘Spare us’ is a plea, to whom

and against what is unclear. And that pretty much summed up

the uncertain terrain into which we were walking, with all the

old idols and symbols promising a better future falling by the

day, we had learned to distrust the very possibility of happy

endings.

Echo & The Bunnymen - Pictures On My Wall

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQxxT8fCPVU

Echo and the Bunnymen - Bring on The Dancing Horses

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_bJf3foa5I

No way home

Shiver and say the words

Of every lie you've heard

Bring on the new messiah

Wherever he may roam

If you can, try and find You'll Never Walk Alone, a French

documentary on the Liverpool music scene from around 1992. It

isn’t particularly good. In fact, lots of it is rather bad,

and Liverpool comes out looking dark, grimy and gloomy, rather

hopeless. But, maybe, that is some part of Liverpool, the tough

realism that provokes a counterblast in the form of a65

dreaminess that bears little relation to real experience. Do

we stick to given and known facts? Or, if dreams are denied,

do we make our own facts? Things can look so bad and hopeless

that you just have to invent a reality of your own. Looking

outwards to the sea serves just as well as looking upwards to

the heavens. The documentary follows a few Liverpool musicians

of the time around, people such as Ian McCulloch (Echo & the

Bunnymen), Michael Head (Pale Fountains & Shack), Edgar Jones

(The Stairs) and a few other Liverpool figures. That’s not bad

company. And Ian McCulloch gets to describe why Liverpool

shines in the gloom.

The extent to which people use the word magic referring to

Liverpool is not surprising. It’s a magical world. It’s a

magical place. A lot of places that seem to be fading can

still leave the mark – it looks foggy, but it’s the kind of

fog that makes people dreamy. It’s so misty it’s fantastic, a

gateway to the great beyond.

What are you going to do with your life 1999

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD_M7PLQhvs&index=39

What Are You Going to Do with Your Life? was released on 16

April 1999. I always think of this song as asking what are you

going to do with the rest of your life. The age of youth and

innocence has now gone, what remains of old ideals and dreams?

The album received mixed reviews from the music press, being

described as both flawless and having no appeal. That it could66

be both says something about the times we had come to live in.

Mac’s mouth is mellow, the mood is introspective. But the

music was always about that quest for self-knowledge in the

big, wide and very uncertain world. The doubt was still there,

but the dread has deadened or disappeared. And, in the very

least, there is some vague sense of the possibility that you

could, after all, still do something with your life. A belief

that will still counted for something against fate, however

much we had come to know the weight of the world bearing in on

us. It’s a world a weary voice, certainly, but it’s 1999 now,

nearly two decades further on down the road. And it was a good

question for me at the time. I was in Manchester, researching

and writing hard, still two years from qualifying, and

wondering where on earth it was going to lead to. I asked my

Director of Studies ‘what do you do with a PhD in philosophy?’

He first smiled, and then chuckled. And said nothing. That was

the sum total of his reply. It was a lesson in humility. Like

I should have known from the start. You may think you are

conquering the world. You are not. Fifteen years earlier,

‘Ocean Rain’ was the ‘Greatest Album Ever Made’. Now that

hubris had given way to something more humble. Assertion had

given way to introspection. ‘What Are You Going To Do With

Your Life?’ It’s a good question, a good song and a good

album. Ian McCulloch sings it the only way it should be sung:

from the heart of an experience that can only be earned. Or,

put another way, Ian McCulloch is singing songs for young

lovers of all ages. A pure, timeless Echo.

http://www.nme.com/reviews/849#igZr7Atxx7q7aZSc.9967

Echo and the Bunnymen – sighing against the dying of the light

‘There are few musical hands that are harder to play than

being a once-groundbreaking rock band declining into their

dotage. This task is made even harder if, like Echo and the

Bunnymen, they have routinely and relentlessly trumpeted their

self-diagnosed peerless magnificence throughout their 35-year

career.’ The Bunnymen are in straitened circumstances,

financing their 11th studio album, Meteorites, via fan-funding

site PledgeMusic. ‘McCulloch has described the new album as

his most soul-searching and personal to date, but it deviates

little from the Bunnymen's eternal template of impenetrably

gnomic pronouncements delivered over quasi-epic, exquisitely

calibrated guitar riffs.’ Yes, it’s that good.

In concert, ‘they have the arsenal to close their set with

Bring on the Dancing Horses, The Killing Moon and The Cutter,

sheer and sublimely propulsive pop songs that appear to be

carved from pure crystal. Sadly, their luminescence merely

confirms that Echo and the Bunnymen are now not raging but

sighing against the dying of the light.’

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jun/10/echo-and-the-

bunnymen-review-shepherds-bush

And that, in the end, is about the best we can, any of us,

hope for. It is much, much better than making it big, and

having to keep raging against inescapable fate in order to

live up to illusory promises and false pretences.68

Echo and the Bunnymen website

http://www.bunnymen.com/

31st Aug – Summer Jam – Sefton Park – Liverpool

That’s my birthday, don’t you know! I’ll see you there!

Does anybody remember Larks in the Park in Liverpool between

1980 and 1985? Was anyone there? I don’t remember mountains.

But I remember people climbing trees to get a better spec. And

I remember Icicle Works.

69

ICICLE WORKS

Icicle Works – Nirvana

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSo3Z3wsTjw

When at the end of the working day

We imitate the mountains

Riding high on a wanderlust

To question what we came for

http://louderthanwar.com/the-return-of-the-larks-in-the-park-

festival/

Love Is A Wonderful Colour 1983

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1RyvR210m0

70

Reality finds you fumbling for reasons

When the chance comes 'round

The ICICLE WORKS - 'Hollow Horse'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrJwAGA0ueg

The Icicle Works are an alternative rock band, an integral

part of Liverpool's early 1980s 'neo-psychedelia' wave. They

had just the one top 20 UK hit and one top 40 US hit. Which

isn’t right. The band were part of one of the oddest stories

in my fairly odd history. St Helens decided to put on a show

called Soap Aid, following the example of Live Aid. In the

afternoon, stars from the TV soap operas would do whatever

stars from TV soap operas do in order to raise money for

famine relief. Then in the evening, pop and rock bands would

do their thing. Icicle Works were on. And so were Marillion.

The venue was the local St Helens rugby league ground at

71

Knowsley Road. I had the bright idea that it would be possible

to hear all the acts without buying a ticket by walking round

and round the ground. Leaving aside the dubious morals of not

paying the £5 for charity, it was a somewhat dumb idea in any

case. Apart from being watched suspiciously at every turn by

security guards and police – a disconcerting experience that

somewhat hinders musical appreciation – there was also the

problem of blocks of houses sending me in directions well away

from the ground. How about, after much aimless walking, just

paying the £5 to get a rest and actually settle down and

listen to the music?

The night time was even stranger. An after concert party was

held at a local pub, the Fleece Hotel if memory serves me.

And, of course, the stars of the occasion had pride of place.

Except that the bouncers employed by the council couldn’t spot

a star if it was all pointed and shining. Ian McNabb, lead

singer of Icicle Works, turned up and the bouncers not only

refuse him entry, thinking he was a gate crasher, they beat

him up and blacken his eye. Well how much more rock and roll

can you get! Wild times in St Helens! We certainly know how to

put on a bash. Oscars, Grammies, no problem, we’ll do it.

Discography

http://merseybeasts.com/discogw.php

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Ian-McNabb/269903635301

72

The absolute Works: The Icicle Works 5 albums box set

http://www.godisinthetvzine.co.uk/2013/11/11/the-absolute-

works-icicle-works-5-albums-box-set/

‘Most retrospectives of the Icicle Works’ career tend to focus

on the fact that they never had the commercial success and

critical acclaim that their eclectic music so richly deserved.

However, settling down to listen to this 5 album box set,

what’s best remembered is how revered they were as a live act,

the quality of the songwriting and the great careers enjoyed

by both Ian McNabb and drummer Chris Sharrock, who went on to

become the drummer of choice for World Party, The La’s, Robbie

Williams and Oasis among others. Back in the Stalinist music

environment of the mid-80’s there were two types of success:

Huge commercial success on the one hand and Cover-of-the NME-

alternative-hipster success as enjoyed at the time by The

Smiths or The Jesus and Mary Chain. The Icicle Works never

fitted into either of these categories in a time when image

was all and Ian McNabb was always too intelligent and well-

adjusted to speak in quotable soundbites like Morrissey or his

friend Ian McCulloch. In many ways, The Icies are better

suited to today’s brave new egalitarian musical world that

judges most music with an equally disinterested ear, and in

which they are still worth a listen.’

More than worth a listen, essential listening.

Ian Mcnabb & Crazy Horse - You Must Be Prepared To Dream73

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Szo3YtB7jQ

amazing body of work that most americans never heard

Ian McNabb - Truth And Beauty - Great Dreams Of Heaven

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ6YqK6P8Ms

McNabbHQ – The Official Website for Ian McNabb and The Icicle

Works

http://www.ianmcnabb.com/

UP AND RUNNING

Phil Jones of Up and Running

Johnny and Marie - Up and Running

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXM8qQ_z5L8

Some 350 factories had closed in or moved from Liverpool

between 1966 and 1977, with the loss of 40,000 jobs. Between74

1971 and 1985, employment in the city fell by 33 per cent.

That’s an awful long way to fall from the very short time ago

in 1965 when Alan Ginsberg called Liverpool the capital of the

universe. It was the time when Liverpool playwright Alan

Bleasdale had comic characters Scully and Mooey Morgan

debating their prospects, or lack of them, after leaving

school. Mooey says he is going to move to Jeopardy. Why, asks

Scully. ‘Because I keep reading in the paper that there are a

lot of jobs in Jeopardy.’ There were, too.

That was the context. Yet there remained an indomitable spirit

and optimism holding out a hope against hard undeniable facts.

And it is in this context that a song about things so mundane

and ordinary as getting married, getting a job, going on

holiday etc etc could sound like conquering the world.

"Go, go, gooo Johnny, show them what you're made of Johnny"

I always remember this song as a massive smash hit record. It

burns into the memory and stays there forever. It’s the kind

of song that you hear on the radio once or twice, but is so

memorable that you think it was played endlessly as it became

a big hit. It was never a hit. But it was incredible

memorable. Play it and see if I am right. ‘Just try it with

anyone who had even a passing interest in music in the late

1980s. Sing to them a melody that goes “go, go, go, Johnny”

and watch their eyes light up. Because chances are you have

reminded them of this gem.’75

‘The song is simply a story that nobody ever sees fit to write

down – that of the perfect happy life as two lovers together.’

http://www.masterton.co.uk/2012/11/johnny-make-me-proud/

Twee? Yes. Corny? Certainly. Infectious? Definitely.

Brilliant? Oh yes!

Be careful of what you take for granted in life. In the middle

of a collapsing jobs market and urban infrastructure, these

rather ‘simple’ ambitions took some imagining and even more

living up to. Even those who had ‘made it’ were struggling to

hold on to their jobs and their marriages. And it was an

incredibly catchy tune to boot. This was the song that was in

my head as I graduated. Heaven knows what I thought was to

come. I wasn’t Johnny. And I don’t think I’ve ever met a

Marie.

Liverpool musician Phil Jones is just like many of those

singers and performers I’m writing of here, those for whom the

stardom he was always due never quite materialised, despite

huge talent, years of hard work and massive local respect.

It’s all fond memories now. And that’s no mean achievement at

all.

The thing I like most about the song is that it isn’t afraid

to have a happy ending! It starts off with an unlikely lad

fearful of the future. You just know that his little bits of

good luck along the way are going to be snatched from him, and

the whole jolly tune is going to come crashing down, leaving76

poor old Johnny an emotional wreck for daring to dream.

Actually, from the first steps conquering small fears, Johnny

keeps triumphing until he can take on and overcome the big

ones. It’s possible.

I’ve no idea why it wasn’t a hit. I remember radio play, I

remember DJs praising it. I think it may have had quite an

impact on Merseyside, making the song sound bigger than it

actually was. But it never achieved the commercial success it

deserved. So the odds are that anyone reading this – if anyone

has the guts or the madness to have stayed the course – will

never had heard of it, let alone heard it. I heard it when it

came out, and I have loved it from the very first.

You can still find Phil Jones working in pubs and clubs around

Liverpool. I don’t want to labour this point about people who

never ‘made it’, but who should have done. There are plenty of

them in these pages. Local radio presenter Tony Snell has

branded Phil Jones “the big star that never was…. the ‘I

really tried hard all my life’ award probably goes to Phil in

all his different guises”. I think that’s true of many of

those whose virtues I am extolling on these pages. But that

simply means that national and international fame and fortune

escaped them. They did actually ‘make it’, in my opinion, and

the proof is there in the songs that came to define my life.

They made the music they wanted to make. I don’t care who or

what you like, these songs are my Merseybeat and I’ll put them

against anything.77

I have heard that Up and Running once performed live in an

open topped bus travelling through Liverpool city centre. In

the 1980s friends kept telling me of a man who would get on

the local buses and play his banjo, entertaining the public. I

thought they were pulling my leg. Everyone saw him. Apart from

me. I’ve often wondered about this fabled being. Is he still

out there, riding from bus to bus, banjo in hand?

ELVIS COSTELLO

Also known by his real name of Declan McManus. (There is, and always

will be, only one Elvis for me.)

Elvis Costello – Turning the Town Red

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiT028ZLwoQ78

This was a song associated with the show Scully by Liverpool

writer Alan Bleasdale, about a boy who dreamed of playing

football for Liverpool … I have won countless cups and medals

over the years, scored last minute winners, impossible and

heroic acrobatic feats of goal line clearances, match saving

tackles, hat tricks, played at the back, in midfield and up

front, everything. I had a glorious football career, breaking

all records. Come on you Reds!

Elvis Costello 1983 Everyday I Write the Book

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfFunjzyIsE

ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – Souvenir

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDIYOiQUi2s

I remember humming this in the sixth form library during a

free period. I was told it was “ace”. The song, that is, not

my humming. Even the librarian, who normally insisted on total

79

silence, didn’t object as I hummed away. She must have liked

it. Hypnotic. The song, that is. Not my humming. I may be a

hypnotising hummer.I don’t know, though.

According to Wiki, the track has minimal lyrical content and

is characterised by slowed-down choir sounds offset by pulsing

major key piano chords. It also has a ‘gentle, sparkling’

synthesizer hook. So now you know.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD) were an innovative new

wave/synthpop group formed in 1978, blending electronica with

a genuine pop sensibility. With an album boasting the title

Architecture & Morality (1981) they seemed quite distinct from

the pop crowd, a cut above. And their innovative synthpop that

marked them out as different. They were ‘intellectual’, read

books and played chess, knew who Joan of Arc was. Their

earlier recordings are indeed experimental. They became more

pop in time, and demonstrated the ability to produce

incredibly catchy tunes. They don’t seem to have acquired the

‘cool’ of many of the other bands from Liverpool, but they

certainly garnered the hits. Boasting sales of 40 million

plus, OMD can certainly be counted a ‘big’ band. And a good

one too. A very good one. In fact, in contrast to all the

nearly-made-it to greatness stories recorded here, OMD

actually did ‘make it’. The Quietus magazine editor John Doran

in September 2008 wrote: "OMD are the only Liverpool band to

come near to living up to the monolithic standards of

productivity and creativity set in place by the Beatles.80

Frankie Goes to Hollywood captured the hysteria and the record

sales for a single year; Echo and the Bunnymen certainly had

the vaulting ambition – and a singer easily the match for

Lennon and McCartney stuck together; Teardrop Explodes had the

same homespun psychedelia and experimentation with rock's

standards, while Michael Head (Shack, Pale Fountains) is

certainly a match lyrically. But if you want to choose one

Merseyside band who combined an industrious ethic, a

combination of the pop and the avant-garde and an undeniable

gift for melody and emotional evocation, then OMD are your

band." Doran asserted: "Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark are

not one of the best synth bands ever: they are one of the best

bands ever." (Doran, John (25 September 2008). "Messages –

Greatest Hits". The Quietus. Retrieved 3 July 2013.) Ian Peel

in Record Collector also sang the praises of the band:

"Between them Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys are

responsible for creating two brilliant, but very different,

bands. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, the early 80's

Factory descendents who sampled blast furnaces and the Stanlow

oil refinery; and OMD, the late 80's stadium pop act who

defied expectations by updating their sound and becoming, if

only briefly, relevant in the 90's." (Peel, Ian. "Messages:

Greatest Hits". Record Collector. Retrieved 3 July 2013.) BBC

DJ Simon Mayo in September 2013 simply describes OMD as "the

fathers of electronic music in this country [the UK]." (OMD".

Simon Mayo Drivetime. 23 September 2013. 77 minutes in. BBC

Radio 2. British Broadcasting Corporation.) And that’s a good

legacy by any reckoning.81

Proof?

Messages

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXvlzUCB74o

So don't ask me if I think it's true

That communication can bring hope to those

Who have gone their separate ways

It hardly touched me when it should have then

And memories are uncertain friends

When recalled by messages

Read that anyway you like, in this age of myriad narcissisms

and emptinesses massaged daily on social media.

Electricity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y43XLVqjytQ

Such an important song. I feel like congratulating myself on

having such impeccable taste at the young age of 14.

"Electricity" is OMD’s debut single from 1979. It takes its

inspiration from Kraftwerk's "Radioactivity" but shows a clear

pop sensibility. This band was heading for the charts. And

it’s a song with a message and a meaning too, criticising the

way that current social arrangements waste energy sources and

demanding a green alternative. Allmusic critic Dave Thompson

described the song as the "perfect electro-pop number",

concluding: "Far from a celebration of the power of our power82

sources, the lyrics drive home the need for a renewable energy

source, some alternative to the fossil fuels we're permanently

expending by the second, and a future of abundant electricity

free from environmental depletion." (Thompson, Dave.

"Electricity – Song Review". AllMusic. All Media Network.

Retrieved 23 July 2013 ).

I want some, some energy

The ultimate discovery

Electric blue for me

Never more to be free

Electricity

Nuclear and HEB

Come fuels from the sea

Wasted electricity

I want some, some energy

Electricity

All we need is to learn to save

And if a man would throw away

It doesn't change the city cost

The alternative is only one

The final source of energy

Solar electricity

Electricity, electricity83

Electricity, electricity

Electricity

I read:

They were before their time ... Solar electricity was 10%

efficient in '80, '85 was 20% efficient '91 changed new tech

'94 >30% efficient cells and entering modern time '06 achieve

40% efficiency '07 42.8% efficiency ...and 3d tech in '12

achieved 30% nice progress from then to now.. and i bet this

guys helped along the way

There’s a lot of numbers there, so it must be right.

An important song and message. And an influential song too.

Vince Clarke of Erasure, and before that Depeche Mode, Yazoo

and The Assembly, claims "Electricity" as his primary

inspiration in coming to pursue a career in electronic music.(

"Erasure". The O-Zone. 29 November 1995. 8 minutes in. BBC 2.

British Broadcasting Corporation. When I was 18 or 19 I heard

a single called 'Electricity' by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the

Dark. It sounded so different from anything I'd heard; that

really made me want to make electronic music, 'cause it was so

unique.) Ned Raggett called it "pure zeitgeist, a celebration

of synth pop's incipient reign with fast beats and even faster

singing."

NME named "Electricity" as one of the best singles of 1979. It

certainly showed bags of promise. A promise they delivered on

with umpteen hits thereafter.84

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark - Enola Gay

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5XJ2GiR6Bo

As I said, a very intellectual brand of synthpop, and

something of an education. I remember singing this in the

changing rooms before rugby practice in 1980, only to be asked

if I knew what ‘Enola Gay’ referred to. With history as my

best subject, I had no idea, of course. I was told it was the

plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. You see, those rugby

guys are smart people. Wiki puts it better. Written by Andy

McCluskey, it addresses the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6

August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, and

directly mentions three components of the attack: the Boeing

B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, which dropped the nuclear weapon

Little Boy on Hiroshima at "8:15".

"Enola Gay" is undoubtedly one of the great pop songs. Ned

Raggett in AllMusic praises the track as "astounding...a flat-

out pop classic – clever, heartfelt, thrilling, and confident,

not to mention catchy and arranged brilliantly"; (Raggett,

Ned. "Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – Organisation".

AllMusic. All Media Network. Retrieved 23 July 2013) Dave

Thompson describes it as the "perfect synth-dance-pop

extravaganza." (Thompson, Dave. "Orchestral Manoeuvres in the

Dark – Enola Gay". AllMusic. All Media Network. Retrieved 23

July 2013.) In 2009, MusicRadar made it one of “The 40

Greatest Synth Tracks Ever", noting that the song "includes85

some of the biggest synth hooks of all time." ("The 40

greatest synth tracks ever: pt 1, 1974-1986". MusicRadar. 27

October 2009. Retrieved 23 July 2013). Those hooks define the

band and sent them into the charts repeatedly over the years.

So show some respect here, we are in the presence of pop

greatness. And you can start to see why my seemingly eccentric

view that here was a Merseybeat to beat the first wave of the

sixties is not so eccentric at all.

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark - Maid Of Orleans

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmwMhjbThKg

Joan of Arc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nE8jf0fn_U

I developed an interest in Joan of Arc as a result of the OMD

tracks Joan of Arc and Maid of Orleans. It all seemed very

‘intellectual’ and moral. This identified me with the ‘New

Romantics’. OK. That must make me one of the ‘Old Romantics’

now. The romance rather fell away somewhat when, a few years

later, the Joan of Arc in the video turned up as Brenda Hope

in the TV show Auf Wiedersehen, Pet about the experiences of

bricklayers from Newcastle in Germany. Joan of Arc, it

transpires, is actress Julia Tobin from Newcastle upon Tyne. I

can never look at the Maid of Orleans video without shouting

‘it’s Brenda Hope! Wife of Neville Hope!’ I’m not at all sure

that the real Joan of Arc was anything like this sedate figure86

meandering around on a horse for no particular reason, other

than to be glanced at from the big house, in any case.

Sailing On The Seven Seas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMST3H69-Os

OMD – English Electric

http://www.omd.uk.com/

COOK DA BOOKS

Cook Da Books

Highly rated, vastly ‘underrated’ … you know the story, and

how little that description actually says. Paul Lester wrote

an article in The Guardian about all the musical gems that

can’t be found online. Why can't I find these songs online?

These are must-have tracks that can’t be found. He produces

quite a list. And he concludes his quest with this passage.

87

‘But the Holy Grail for me remains the John Peel session,

broadcast on 18 February 1984, by Liverpool post-punk band

Cook Da Books, who despite some connection, I believe, with

Britpop also-rans Smaller (and a rumour that Oasis' Digsy's

Dinner was written about one of them: Peter "Digs" Deary),

purveyed this mindblowing, never-to-be-repeated, brand of

symphonic soundtrack-rock. There were four tracks on the

session - Golden Age, I Wouldn't Touch You, Keep on Believing

and Hurt Me Deep Inside - and although some of them were later

released as singles, they never sounded quite as magnificent

as on that Dale Griffin-produced session. Now that I would pay

50 quid for. And rising.’

http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2007/dec/20/

whycantifindthesesongson

Well I can end the quest for free. Here is Hurt Me Deep Inside

from the Peel session.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFy_kPFyhJ0

It’s just a pity that more people didn’t pay just a couple of

quid for the stuff they put out, because they deserve to be

better known.

COOK DA BOOKS KEEP ON BELIEVIN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVIWesVlEcY&index=208

Keep on believing …. because the options aren’t too clever.88

Keep on believin’, never ever ever give up or give in, you are

never beaten. Easy to say, difficult to do. Singing with

others helps. We can survive three weeks or so without food,

three days or so without water, three minutes without air, and

not at all without hope. We are not the first generation to

be confronted with a seemingly hopeless situation, and I

suspect that we won’t be the last. Which is to say that at

least some will survive the ecological Armageddon which

seems to be around the corner. Reason, logic and hard fact

have told us time and again we are beaten. But pushed too

far, reason undermines life at its source. It saps the

energy, destroys the spirit, undermines the will we need to

go on living in the face of contrary facts. The subjective

factor is the force that changes the direction of

‘objective’ trends and tendencies in a favourable

direction. Only the faith to live into the mystery beyond

the compass of reason keeps human life from becoming

devaluated and prevents the spirit from becoming

discouraged over the reports of reason. Hope remains, and

that’s enough to inspire us to keep going.

Cook da Books - Piggie in the Middle Eight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTY1aFB71KY

A hard hitting political song. It set the scene for the decade

to come. The best thing about the politics of that decade was89

that people still had spirit enough to fight back. And that

important lessons for us today.

COOK DA BOOKS -GOTTA LEARN HOW TO FIGHT IT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnE1wOZLvZc

Cook Da Books - One Day - Liverpool Pier Head

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4kWQJzm3hc

Cook da Books - This is not the time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQzJ50PNYdw

Cook da Books – I wouldn’t want to knock it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeb_04K23To

Effortlessly catchy, great melody, easy on the ears. And this

did get national coverage. John Peel raved about the band.

Janice Long too. The band made it on Radio 1 sessions.

People still talk about The Beatles, and rightly so. But this

was my Merseybeat, and I consider myself to have been truly

blessed to have had this place on my beat. The spirit of

optimism rubbed off. A few minutes with the Scousers, and I

too believed that anything is possible, there is always a

will, and if there’s always a fate, there’s always a way,

always a workaround …

90

I could go on and on and on and on. Like the river Mersey that

runs through the veins of the people here, this story rolls

relentlessly on. This is a ceaselessly creative universe.

THE CHERRY BOYS

The Cherry Boys - Kardomah Café

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V61WrhDgwkI

Not only had I forgotten how good this song is, I had

forgotten it completely. There’s a lot of years gone by since

those days. And now, I look on this with a rosy glow of

someone looking back to the days when I was cocky enough to

think I was going to conquer the world. Doing what, I had no

idea. And it seems like a somewhat pathetic ambition now in

any case. The oddest thing about listening to this song now is

how much the song evokes the fading glory of a once great band

91

or city, it has that tranquillity, that feeling of there being

nothing left to prove. It sounds like the culmination of a

long and historic career and now, in 2015, could serve as a

fitting epitaph to the music of these pages. Except that this

Liverpool music is timeless and never ending. Whilst Kardomah

Café was the music of a band looking to go places, in

retrospect it sounds like the finished article of a band that

had already gone places, or gone wherever it had wanted to go.

Which is not surprising if you are from Liverpool.

I’d say that Kardomah Café perfectly captures Liverpool at a

particular time in its history. But that would be wrong.

Listening to it now, it is no easy task to date this song. The

song is as timeless as Liverpool itself. This could be

Liverpool now as much as Liverpool then, Liverpool at any

time, for all time. It had classic written all over it when I

heard it. It’s not age that has given it classic status. It’s

not commercial success either. It just sounds like a classic

Liverpool song that could have been written any time. Ask a

friend to listen to it and ask them to try and date it. It’s a

Liverpool still basking in its sixties heyday, Liverpool still

the capital of the universe.

Put to the wonderful images of Liverpool, and the memories

come flooding back. So much so, I feel like tipping them for

the top again. Like it matters. I know they were a name

locally, and when you are young, your local world is the whole

world. It’s not that I was telling people that this band were92

gonna ‘make it’. I knew them, others knew them, you could see

and hear them – they had ‘made it’. And they had coverage.

Here they are in the Melody Maker in the early ‘80s, poised to

conquer the world.

93

94

‘More excitement and enthusiasm than other bands’. People who

saw them can back that claim up. Here they are doing a John

Peel session on Radio 1 20th March 1982.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x29ov_wnv7I

I found this comment on Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/lastshopstandingthefilm/posts/

597017447066269

‘The Cherry Boys the cult Liverpool band who I managed and

whose antics made 'Spinal Tap' appear dull. photographed in

Port Sunlight. The chairs and table were borrowed from our

dining room (had to get them back for tea). Here are 4 songs

that the band recorded for their first John Peel session.

Track 2 is Kardomah Cafe still recognized today as one of the

best songs written about Liverpool. James Clarke from the band

recorded the theme to the Last Shop Standing film. If you want

a real laugh read about the band in the “Last Shop Standing”

book.’

It’s a great eighties update of the sixties Mersey sound. I

trust that somebody somewhere will have cause to thank me for

reminding them of The Cherry Boys, or for bringing them to

their attention for the first time. Like the river Mersey

running through the veins, this is the kind of music that runs

through Liverpool, it can be a subterranean current, that95

flows all the same, and occasionally it can burst out and

engulf a wider area.

Cherry Boys Falling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3C2ihS1Mgw

Cherry Boys Maybe I'm a Fool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idMlyxcBFuw

I’m thinking hit record here, but reading that it was

unreleased at the time it was made in 1984. I don’t remember

it. And as I listen, I am recapturing all the excitement that

comes with hearing the latest releases of your favourite

bands, and wondering when it will be played on the radio and

start to make its way up the charts. It’s a strange, funny

feeling to think that three decades have gone by and that this

song – vital, alive, pulsing – is now part of history. Well,

it’s my history, and I’m still alive.

The odds are that, if you live outside Merseyside, or weren’t

around in the 1980s, you will never had heard of them. But if

you think I’m romanticising a little, well it’s that kind of

place. But independent witnesses can bear me out. Just do some

research (Wiki!).

‘The Cherry boys achieved a significant local following. This

was exemplified in them winning the Radio Merseyside award for

Best Local Band in 1982. In the same year they also stripped96

the board in achieving best band (and individual musician

awards) in the local popular magazine, The End. As a live band

they were unmatched at the time, each member being highly

respected. Attendances at their concerts were nearly always

sell out.’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cherry_Boys

‘Unmatched’, if you please! And in this part of the world,

that’s a claim that means an awful lot. I’m reading people

calling them the great ‘lost band’. And I have to admit,

somewhere along the way, I lost them, and lost them fairly

early on. I’ve no idea why. Other new bands come along, it was

a crowded field, and an exciting time. And pop loyalties can

be as fickle as they can be strong. By the mid 1980s I had my

head stuck in books, studying, writing and memorising notes,

so I got a little lazy with the music, catching whatever I

could when it came by.

Oh well, come the day, come the day, the day may yet come, or

may well have been, but good music is for any day and every

day.

Cherry Boys – Come the Day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGlEQtL5Ib8

I’ll end here with an honourable mention for Exhibit B. After

The Cherry Boys split in 1984, James Hughes (vocals) and Howie

Minns (drums) went on to form Exhibit B, releasing the97

infectious “It’s Hypothetical” as a single. Still catchy after

all these years.

It’s Hypothetical

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgRcVxj_e-A

MICHAEL HEAD AND THE PALE FOUNTAINS

Pale Fountains - Thank You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM4Y6rjeNlE

"Thank You" (November 1982) Virgin UK No. 48

A magical world.

Thank you for this lovely sort of place.98

And I think to myself there's no place I'll rather be.

The Pale Fountains were an English post-punk band formed in

Liverpool in 1980, and composed of Mick Head

(vocalist/guitarist), Chris McCaffery (bassist), Thomas Whelan

(drummer) and former Dislocation Dance trumpeter Andy Diagram

(horns). Those are the bare facts, and they tell us nothing of

the genius of Michael Head.

Head went on to form Shack. Check out their compilation "Time

Machine" - you will not be disappointed. Then followed Michael

Head and the Strands, their classic 1997 album "The magical

world of the Strands" was re-released to rave reviews and made

the album chart

99

Pale Fountains - Just a Girl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwA9ltdKhGM

Two takes on the same song. Just A Girl originally appeared on

The Pale Fountains self produced debut which was released in

Belgium on this Crepuscule 12" and a month earlier as a 7"

this side of the channel via short lived UK subsidiary

Operation Twilight.

Mick Head's first outing took inspiration from old school

songwriters like Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Webb and added a

squeeze of jazz and Arthur Lee. It's an irresistible sound.

100

Turn around let me look at you, you're just a girl who tries

to make me feel at home...

The Pale Fountains - Palm of my hand

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSJt0TRH2kM

Michael Head & The Strands: The Olde World review – sublime

set of unreleased songs and outtakes

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jun/25/michael-head-the-

strands-the-olde-world-review

‘After fronting the revered-but-unsuccessful Pale Fountains,

Shack and the Strands alongside his guitarist brother John,

Michael Head was once dubbed “Britain’s greatest songwriter

(recognise him?)” by the NME. The Magical World of the

Strands, from 1997, is a particular lost classic: gently

psychedelic, Love-influenced songs about heroin addiction,

which moved one Guardian writer to tears.’

101

Our greatest songwriter. Recognise him? I do. It’s Michael

Head. And you should make a point of getting to know him. He

makes beautiful music as the bard of Liverpool.

Revered but unsuccessful … it’s becoming a familiar refrain in

this story. You may not of heard of many or even any of the

bands, singers and songwriters who played the soundtrack of my

life, but don’t make the mistake of thinking they are of

merely local significance. That would be a very big mistake,

not least because the locality in question is Liverpool, a big

place in every sense, pointing outwards to the world. Same

part of the world, similar sort of people, all very uniquely

Liverpudlian. And all with an expansive theme.

Great Mick Head review in The Observer. One of the greatest

songwriters we've ever had.

Here is a recent article from The Guardian. It’s on Mick Head

of the Pale Fountains, extolling here.

102

Michael Head review – emotional resonance from Merseyside’s

nearly man.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jul/26/michael-head-

review-stoke-newington-old-church

There’s a lot of ‘nearly men’ in these pages. In my eyes,

though, they were and remain big achievers. ‘The wayward

former Strands frontman and bard of Liverpool plays to a small

gathering of the faithful in a powerful, low-key set.’ Which

is a wonderfully romantic image. Albeit a careworn romance.

‘A man NME once declared to be our greatest living songwriter

is onstage in a tiny church, playing Cadiz, a song about

lovers trying to escape, to be “eternally free”…

‘Head, a wayward Liverpudlian dreamer, has spent the best part

of 30 years not getting famous, despite his wistful 60s pop

chops, his fingers’ lyrical way around guitar strings, and the

efforts of fans such as Noel Gallagher, who signed Head’s band

Shack to his Sour Mash label in the 00s. Head has suffered

more false dawns, studio fires, failed labels, mislaid DAT

tapes, over-productions, delays, lost years and unfortunate

ju-ju than most, all grist to the mill of his myth.’

So, forget fame and fortune, for they are unreliable measures

of greatness and worthiness. ‘Head’s songs about everyday

life, escaping it, love and drug use are still some of the

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most gently seductive we have ever come across.’ And that

denotes a greatness and worthiness that is immeasurable.

His love songs are beatific and consolatory …

‘Head is as much of a bard of Liverpool as any Beatle,

peppering his songs with people and landmarks’, writes Kitty

Empire. So, people, please understand what I am getting at

with my ‘80s chippiness about a new Merseybeat to at least

rival the original. I love The Beatles, and have all their

records. I even sat in the Yellow Submarine in Liverpool in

1967, and would be more than happy to treat you to my very own

original rendition of Octopus’ Garden, should you be brave

enough. But Liverpool’s music scene didn’t begin with The

Beatles, and it certainly didn’t end with The Beatles. And

Michael Head is as good as anything or anyone from anywhere

ever.

The Guardian article ends by discussing Daniella, off Shack’s

HMS Fable album, describing it as one of the most quietly

devastating of Head’s songs. “Your mama/ She’s not afraid any

more/ She’s in the cemetery,” it ends, kicking the legs out

from under you. And like many of Head’s finest works, it packs

the dread, sorrow and beauty of ancient folk songs into a

contemporary tale, culturally specific, but emotionally

resonant.

Shack – Daniella104

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-leFNYJgQc

Sad song, haunting story, powerful lyrics. How can you write a

song like this and not find fame & fortune?

Never heard of him? I’m not the only one who raves about

Michael Head. Here is Andy Capper in the Guardian selecting

The Magical World of the Strands by Michael Head and the

Strands as his favourite album, ‘the best record ever made’,

if you please.

‘These songs are like a pastoral, Merseyside take on the

Velvets, the Byrds, Simon & Garfunkel and Love. Songwriter

Michael Head was battling heroin addiction at the time and

their sound seems to approach what some people describe as the

overwhelming sense of beauty and calm that taking heroin can

sometimes give you.’

Shack - Closer Liverpool to Southport

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwyBOKZbdV4

The article ends by praising “Somethin’ Like You” ‘It is one

of the most perfect love songs ever recorded by anybody.’ That

may well be true.

Michael Head – Somethin’ Like You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhXUXK_r3IA

105

‘Violins and cellos pass barely noticed through the ballad's

three-chord progression. Mick's vocals are like a bruised and

broken choirboy who's fallen purely in love with a feeling, or

somebody, or something. I've never had somebody that I've

forced to listen to it come away without saying: "Wow that

actually is amazing. Now please can I play something?"

The intensity of the beauty of Something Like You increases

over its 3 minutes and 46 seconds, building up to its climax,

with Mick singing: "I believe in you … forever". It's a lyric

that's been sung a thousand times in other songs but the way

that it's delivered here just kills me every time.

There are lots of other beautiful, amazing songs on this

sorely overlooked record, but that one is my favourite. It was

the soundtrack to falling in love with somebody very dear to

me and listening to it now we are apart breaks my heart.’

I’d better leave the magical world of Michael Head now. Or

not. It’s my world. And here I’ll stay.

http://www.shacknet.co.uk/film/1982-the-pale-fountains-thank-

you-promo-video-2/

And there was national coverage.

The Pale Fountains - Old Grey Whistle Test 22 April 1983

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwCoT5c0ySA

Michael Head and the Red Electric Band - website106

http://www.michaelhead.net/about/

The beautiful sound of The Pale Fountains was certainly far

removed from the vast majority of music being produced, not

only in Liverpool, but also the UK as a whole during the post

punk period of the early 80’s. They were an out of kilter band

with a clear vision; to bring a slice of sunshine to their

lives and anyone with the inclination to listen to them, in a

city which was struggling to cope amidst a political climate

that appeared to be doing its utmost to bring it to its knees.

“And in the morning when you rise, be sure to know your

destiny, ‘cos it’s all worthwhile…”

Musically, Head is still pushing boundaries. Where his peers

from the eighties may have lost their relevance and ability

(or will) to continue to write music of real value, he

continues to produce new material that still has the ability

to captivate and surprise his ardent fan base. They have been

aired in public to critical acclaim, with a stripped down,

classical line-up that latterly included Les Roberts (flute)

and more recently, and more cohesively has included Andy

Diagram and Martin Smith (trumpet), with Vicky Mutch adorning

these new gems with some beautiful and often haunting cello.

The songs are out there for people to judge; American Kid,

Cadiz, Winter Turns to Spring, My Pretty Girl, Amy, Josephine,

and some (I Don’t Know What It Is About You, Gorgonzola) with

titles that will no doubt change through the course of time.107

These are songs that have taken decades of experience to

conceive and nurture. From standing on Everton brow as a

youngster, and looking out across the Mersey and letting the

faintly salty air permeate his soul, to hearing You Set The

Scene for the first time, or recollecting people and places

that have passed through his life during the last half

century. These are his songs and his sound, a one-of-a-kind

modern day Mersey Folk music.

CHINA CRISIS

China Crisis

China Crisis, new wave/synthpop band formed in Kirkby in 1979.

I read that China Crisis had ‘moderate success’ in the United

Kingdom in the 1980s with five Top 40 singles and three Top 40

albums. That’s not how I remember it. Maybe all those hits

were so good and were so concentrated in the short period when

I was paying particular attention to the pop charts that the

memory extends the time period. I remember them as much bigger108

than the bare facts record. I think the reason is simple, the

hit records were good and drew attention to the other good

material that the band produced, giving the impression that

the band was much bigger than the figures show. The band’s

album titles always intrigued me, Difficult Shapes & Passive

Rhythms, Some People Think It's Fun to Entertain, Working with

Fire and Steel – Possible Pop Songs Volume Two, Flaunt the

Imperfection. Combining elements of synth pop, jazz,

progressive rock, and new wave, the band had a distinctive

style, which meant that if you liked one thing they did, the

odds were you would like the rest. China Crisis sound like

nobody else. And they just seemed to fade away, in a

commercial sense. 1989's Diary of a Hollow Horse won critical

plaudits but generated few sales. The singles "St Saviour

Square" and "Red Letter Day" went the same way. Sophisticated,

well-crafted pop it was by this stage, and it still holds up.

Maybe they went a little soft MOR by the end, but they were

genuinely innovative in those first few years. Their sixth and

final album was called Warped by Success and it failed to

chart. I’m not sure it was success that ‘warped’ the band at

all. They didn’t have that much success. The music became

increasingly sophisticated, and the slower tempos and more

soulful melodies perhaps explain the fading commercial

profile. China Crisis are another of those Liverpool bands who

were on the rise as I was on the rise, another band full of

potential and promise that, if realised, was never quite

appreciated.

109

‘From the synth friendly leanings of ‘Christian’, ‘Wishful

Thinking’, ‘Black Man Ray’ and ‘Arizona Sky’ to the more

organic, Steely Dan inclined ‘You Did Cut Me’, ‘Sweet Charity

In Adoration’ and ‘Everyday The Same’, China Crisis possess a

fabulous if underrated catalogue of work.’

OK, I’ve made my point with regard to that word ‘underrated’.

The important thing is that, after a 20 year absence, they are

back in 2015 with Autumn in the Neighbourhood. ‘a little bit

synthy and a little bit guitary, but with lots of melody and a

subtle rhythmic backbone … this is still very much a

traditional songwriter’s work, with sophisticated arrangements

of woodwinds, brass and live percussion very much in the mix.’

http://www.electricity-club.co.uk/china-crisis-autumn-in-the-

neighbourhood/

‘Still adventuresome and contemporary’ ‘Autumn in the

Neighbourhood reflects a wistfulness and introspection similar

to the best China Crisis songs.’

110

http://somethingelsereviews.com/2015/06/17/china-crisis-

autumn-in-the-neighbourhood/

‘The city of Liverpool has bequeathed us many great bands as

well as The Beatles and, for me, China Crisis are one of those

groups. Now, after a hiatus of over twenty [20] years, the

band have presented their loyal pledgers and fans with a

wonderful new studio album entitled "Autumn In The

Neighbourhood". All eleven [11] songs within have a homely if

not intimate, jazzy feel to them and this wonderful recording

is a real return to the heady days of "Flaunt The

Imperfection".

"Autumn In The Neighbourhood" dips into jazz, country and soul

yet it retains a marvellous balance and the trademark sound

which has always endeared me to the band. "My Sweet Delight"

is sheer class and "Tell Tale Signs" must be the ultimate

chill-out track ever. Mention too must also be made of the

continuing sublime vocals of Messrs. Daly and Lundon. ELOBF

sincerely hopes that this record is formally issued soon so

that not only can it grace the album chart [as it should] but

also because it will help China Crisis attract deserved new

followers. [9/10]’

http://elobeatlesforever.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/review-autumn-

in-neighbourhood-china.html

111

They are playing the Citadel Arts Centre, St Helens, 23rd

October and Liverpool Cavern Club (10th – 11th December). And

I shall be there to see them.

I took to them immediately, but the subtle charms of the music

require and repay repeated listening. The songs possess an

inner beauty that, if you allow them, cast a hypnotic spell.

Me? I was hypnotised from the first.

Christian - China Crisis

Fine cool and mellow music. Christian is meditative and

mesmerizing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIOOxY3ZlGw

I could lose myself

In this honesty

Wishful Thinking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj20LKdg8-8

Lush, light, wistful, breezy.

112

Black Man Ray

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4Xo3sWd294

I loved this when it came out, and it got a lot of airplay,

which is probably why I always remember the band as being

massive. The follow up Hanna Hanna I also loved, so I didn’t

notice it not doing so well at the time. People debate whether

the title refers to Ray Charles or Man Ray. I could care less.

In a city where you dream by day as much as by night, the

‘pensive’ lyrics had me .. well, thinking.

Are we believing

Black man ray

Are we not happy

In our own way

And we the people

Who reason why

Forever change

As time goes by

Yes, yes, I could be wrong

Why, why, should I pretend

God only knows in the end

Are we believing

The heavenly survive

Faith the future

Big life on their side113

And we the people

Who can but try

Forever learn

As time goes by

Yes, yes, I could be wrong

Why, why, should I pretend

God only knows in the end

Are we believing

Black man ray

Persuasive danger

In everything you say

And we the people

Who answer you why

Forever doubt

As time goes by

Forever doubt? Old certainties dissolving, uncertain futures

ahead. Forever changing, forever learning. Faith crops up a

lot in these songs. ‘I could be wrong’, as the song says. But

there is something at work which gives us the strength to live

forwards into the future, and embrace the mystery of it all.

‘The heavenly survive …’ God only knows in the end.

China Crisis - "King In A Catholic Style (Wake Up)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5p-s1aWA3c

114

Haven’t got the foggiest idea what this is about. An

infectious up tempo number. At the time, it seemed like the

band was here to stay, a mainstay of the pop world.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/China-Crisis/295592467251068

A FLOCK OF SEAGULLS

I know. Just don’t ask. I have no idea.

A Flock of Seagulls

A Flock of Seagulls are another new wave and synthpop band

from Liverpool. Synth heavy, which I don’t particularly like.

Paul Reynolds’ unique guitar style lifts the band out of the

crowded field at the time. I have to say, it isn’t quite my

cup of tea. But the band had real impact, international

success and even won a Grammy Award. And they were part of

this Liverpool soundtrack of my younger days. I remember them

more as a band for the dance clubs, outrageous haircuts and

115

fashions, which wasn’t for me. What can I say, music

characterised by synthesizer washes and noodling, echo-laden

guitar, electronic drumming. They had a lot of the national

and international success that eluded my particular

favourites. They were hits in the dance clubs and gained heavy

play on MTV. Notable hits include "I Ran (So Far Away)"

(1982), "Space Age Love Song" (1982), "Wishing (If I Had a

Photograph of You)" (1982), and "The More You Live, the More

You Love" (1984). The instrumental DNA won a Grammy Award.

Which is impressive enough. And all I can manage to say.

Wishing is my favourite of theirs. Watch the video, and you’ll

see what I mean. I’m thinking Dr Who. Wayward Liverpool

dreamers are sound, but not if we come soaring right off the

planet. The best dreams are very real indeed, bringing out the

wondrous dimensions of this wondrous place.

A Flock Of Seagulls - Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opkzgLMH5MA

The More You Live, the More You Love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSZ2zR56yQo

Guitar much more prominent on this. I remember it as a bigger

hit than it actually was, reaching number 26.

I Ran

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ7NVjZ-Eyg116

DNA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF2lX0ZrccQ

Well, as someone comments: ‘Ahead of their time. Great band.’

If you like that sort of thing, you will like them. I remember

them as being very much of their time, and remember the

‘outrageous fashions’ very well, spawning a host of nth rate

posers, tedious chancers and time wasters. It’s not my cup of

tea (you’d be right in thinking that I find memories of those

alarming hairstyles disquieting, having to admit to myself how

close I came to giving in to temptation.

THE LOTUS EATERS

The Lotus Eaters

117

New wave band formed in 1982 in Liverpool. Their debut single

"The First Picture of You" became a hit in the UK and Europe,

notably France, Italy and Spain.

Now this is one that I can get really excited about. This was

lighter, the synths took flight, the words meant something. A

couple of band members had come from the Wild Swans, another

band I rate highly.

The band's debut album was released in 1984, and was titled No

Sense of Sin. In 1984, I had no sense of fear or doubt. I

didn’t know enough. And if you were to ask me what sin was,

I’m really not sure what I would have said.

Lotus Eaters - "First Picture Of You"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oynqVSmYdzM

More Liverpool pastoral.

It's warm in and out

The pulse of flowing love

Spread the calm to meet the others

Pleasure fills with love 'til dawn

It's warm in and out

The call for sacred hours

The soft chant of new-born singing

The magic force of your feelings118

The first picture of you

The first picture of summer

Seeing the flowers scream their joy

Can't lose this mood gentle

With summer at our ears

Flood the world deep in sunlight

Break into the peaceful wild

The first picture of you

The first picture of summer

Seeing the flowers scream their joy

The first picture of you

The first picture of summer

Seeing the flowers scream their joy

Heady stuff when you are seventeen and getting your first real

picture of anything as an almost independent creature of the

universe. I wanted to know what this screaming of joy was all

about. Liverpool won the European Cup, and I screamed a lot

that night.

The First Picture of You was the band’s first and greatest

hit. In fact, I think it as their only UK hit. But what a hit.

Arista dropped them a couple of years later, and the band

split some time around 1985.119

The Lotus Eaters – Hurt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJqBpNCaxiw

Their last single "Hurt" shows the band working well at their

brand of intelligent, well-crafted synth pop. So why it

flopped and why so little became of so much promise is one of

life’s little mysteries. But, hey, we are in the world of pop

music, where there is neither rhyme nor reason. The Lotus

Eaters were infinitely superior to the bulk of the mush that

swamped the charts in the eighties. I believe the song reached

number 5 in the Italian charts, which is something.

Listening to this material, I’m struck by how fresh it is, and

I start to think that the past 30 years didn’t happen, and

that fame and fortune may well be round the corner. Well, it’s

gone, it’s over and done. The song remains the same. And it’s

a wondrous slice of summer pop, when the world was young and

all things seemed possible.

The Lotus Eaters – You Filled Me with Need

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLKjbIH-EnQ

too many times when i'm outside you

too many barriers breaking us part

cities are full of conflict and boredome

only one way to escape all that

she wants to change the world120

she's not the only one

like the wind and rain on a cold night

she's angry at the world

you fill me with need

sitting on the edge of our warm bed

i'm trying so hard to drive the pain away

locked in your dreams of human potential

still believing in a world without wars

she doesn't believe in death

she's not the only one

like the surge of raging waters

she's angry at the world

you fill me with need

nothing can sway her from her purpose

she is here to open the door of heaven

people hide in the shadow of evil

crowds of people with no desire for freedom

all she sees is hate

surrounding everyone

like the sun heats a desert burning

she's angry at the world

you fill me with need

OK, being critical, I’ve heard The Lotus Eaters described as a

bit limp and wimpy, making Morrissey sound like heavy metal.121

Point taken, the new romantics not only walk a tightrope, but

fall off it more often than not. Things can get a bit twee and

insipid when taken whole. That doesn’t apply to the above

track at all. It’s the danger of a subtle, lyrical approach

that is bursting with ideas and imagination.

But I can mount a defence. Somebody up there and down here

likes pop music, and the stuff I’m praising here mediates

between the holy and the profane.

Clever stuff, unafraid to be intelligent. I like the nerve

demonstrated in trying to reach a popular audience without

compromising original ambitions.

The Lotus Eaters - Soul In Sparks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqLhcOnOp2w

Sit back, listen and relax to the whole exquisite six minutes.

Just float away.

This is beautiful, innately sophisticated and lyrical,

intelligent, original pop music. It helps if you are an

unabashed romantic with no time for cynicism. You lose nothing

but are always hopeful of gaining something. Easier to despair

than to hope. Risk nothing, lose nothing, gain nothing.

Granted, the nice guy singing nice lyrics yet whining about

permanent loss and loneliness – see, I can do cynical easily –122

gets a bit wearing. Not sure lonely guys singing about female

sexuality is a good idea either. (You don’t need someone new).

That’s asking for trouble. At the same time, it indicates a

willingness to explore unusual questions.

“We would go on and I would sit cross legged with sandals

singing about the wonders of releasing your feminine side. I

was singing about quiet spaces in your soul and the boys in

the audience were probably thinking when can we get to the bar

and obliterate all knowledge out of our minds… Is this some

weird parallel universe? We are born to pogo not to explore

our quiet meditative spaces. Especially some messed up male

perception of female space. People probably don't see this but

The Lotus Eaters were pure rebellion. It was just the kind of

rebellion that people were not ready for. Not then anyhow back

in 1983.” - Peter Coyle.

The gentle, flowing sound was a rebellion against power chords

and riffs and the rhythmic thrust of guitar-based rock. Synths

were taking the place of guitars, and not always for the best,

but it was something for hip music critics seeking relevance

to latch on to. We were a few years away from The Smiths and

the genius that is Morrissey. So why did The Lotus Eaters miss

out? 1983’s “The First Picture of You” remains to this day

what it was from the first, a sad joyous sumptuous song

expressing yearning and delight. It still stands apart from,

and above, the crowd.

123

So what went wrong? Well, we are in the world of pop music,

and it doesn’t do to be too aware, too analytical, too serious

about the music – you may have a great innovative idea and

approach, but you also have to have the ability to dramatize

and popularize it, bring it within reach. A little bit of

conceit and arrogance, a lot of self-importance, dressed with

a little irony, goes a long way. It’s not enough to have

something to say, you have to convey a sense of why it

matters. And this is where that wimpiness and earnestness

becomes a problem. It’s not only a crowded field out there,

it’s a noisy one. It’s easy not to be heard. Critically

praised, but overlooked by the public. And I’m not sure anyone

could have topped “The First Picture of You”. If you come in

at a peak, the only place to go is down. The band never quite

fulfilled its promise, but it was a big promise to fulfil. And

the music remained warm and melodious, a soothing consolation

in a loud and ugly world. Listen to the end of Soul in Sparks

and you’ll see that I’m right. The music floats and glides.

I’ve read intellectual disquisitions purporting to give some

reason why The Lotus Eaters failed in their admittedly lofty

ambitions. It’s fine to have this ethereal, heavenly sound,

but if you are trying to find and give expression to the inner

feminine, you had better start looking down here rather than

up there, since you cannot deal with categories of feminine

and masculine in abstraction from the bodily polarity of

female and male from which the categories are derived in the

first place. And that gets us into an endlessly shifting world124

of meanings. Not sure the relation between biology and culture

can be settled in a three minute pop song. And, being fair, we

are being overly-critical, making too many demands on the

music. The ambition, however flawed in the execution, is

enough. Listening to Peter Coyle sing, he sounds like a man

trying to express that more caring, nurturing, sensitive,

side, but the strain indicates that he has put the inner

feminine somewhere on high, somewhere always just out of

reach. And if that is a failure, it is an interesting failure

for that. Now what’s the name of that album from 1984 again?

No Sense of Sin. That title makes perfect sense when ambitions

are detached from earthly and bodily realities. We are in some

heavenly realm where the old natural law, or basic human

biology, no longer applies. Whatever else you will find up

there, it won’t be the inner feminine. Or the outer masculine.

It’s a realm of both the missing masculine and missing

feminine. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion we are in the

realm of sensitive males who have swallowed a lot of feminism

without digesting it. There may be no sense of sin here, but

there is a pervasive sense of male guilt that soon becomes

tiring. It may be better to give expression to one’s masculine

side and avoid endless apologies for thousands of years of

patriarchy. Claim your Anima, by all means; but don’t forget

to give full-blooded expression to your Animus at the same

time. That would be to opt for a genuine masculinity, avoiding

the descent into a permanently guilt-laden emasculation that

is certain to keep male and female as polar opposites.

125

At the time, I loved the sounds, the catchy tunes. The meaning

escaped me. Heck, forget finding the inner feminine, I was

having trouble finding the external bit. It was out there

somewhere, I knew that at least.

But, getting really critical, there is the suspicion that the

ethereal, abstract, heavenly categories of feminine and

masculine are no more than rationalisations of the good old

bodily categories of female and male. The loftiness could

actually be evasiveness. It’s the stock in trade of pop music,

boys interested in girls and girls interested in boys, only

too shy, too precious, too damned delicate to – lean furtively

forward to whisper in the ear – actually get their clothes off

and, well, have sex. And enjoy it. After all, like all

Romantic souls, ‘I’m not like anyone else!’ When you actually

‘do it’, you are. So stick a glass case around yourself and

strain and for the impossible.

Lotus Eaters Set Me Apart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBrlrM3zB9U

If that sounds overly-critical or frankly far-fetched, you

have to remember I’m searching for reasons why this gorgeous,

intelligent, melodious, impeccably crafted pop failed to come

in from the margins. And, even if half of these points are

correct, the music is still classes above the bulk of the

stuff that sold in the ‘80s. Simply put, abstract categories

that separated the feminine and the masculine was always a126

dead-end. Bring those categories down-to-earth and explore the

complicated, dangerous and exciting area between them, and

find and expose the connections. I think it’s called (whisper

it) sex. And let’s be honest, you ain’t gonna dramatize and

popularize any message when there is No Sense of Sin. As the

title of a Pete Wylie classic puts it, ‘It’s Sinful’.

The frustrating thing for me is that The Lotus Eaters were a

band who were miles ahead of the field, and much, much better

than most of what was to follow in that style. So, despite my

criticisms, I’ll sing the praises of Coyle and the band for

having the nous to strike out in a certain direction and

having the nerve to follow it through. It’s just that,

impossibly split between false oppositions, there could be no

culmination.

I’m being overcritical. It’s the frustration of knowing this

band were so, so close. And it seems that Coyle himself

understood the points I’m making.

“A lot of people found it difficult to understand how I could

be in The Lotus Eaters and write about the calmer aspects of

beauty and the higher things in life coming from working class

Liverpool. They were even more confused after I showed the

sheer aggressive aspects of my character and thoughts by

making a record about the darker side of life. The fact is

people are complex and they are made up of opposing factors.

The Lotus Eaters was about achieving order out of the chaos.127

The A Slap in the Face for Public Taste album was about

expressing the deep chaos I was feeling.” - Peter Coyle.

So, it’s not all nice guys with nice thoughts. And Coyle did

go on to explore the shades of grey that make up life,

recognising the many-sidedness of human nature. In fact,

looking back from an age that has wallowed in cynicism,

meaninglessness, hopelessness, ugliness, violence, the lot,

there is something rather noble about No Sense of Sin, because

of its high-minded impossibilities. I think the hint of future

disillusionment is already present.

And to do this in 1983, take the risk and take the lead, is

achievement enough. I just wish the band would have had the

hits and the recognition the music deserved.

Love Still Flows

The Lotus Eaters’ music is like a warm embrace. It is blessed

with gentleness. “Love still flows in my vein, love stops

looking up through her heart, slip his tired arms at night and

at night in that space between their touch sweet love lays in

ruin. His love had a weakest heart she closes paradise

forever, love's lost her power there's nothing in those words

of boy angel there's nothing in that childlike soul”. It’s

like being engulfed in a warm glow or soothing stream. “It's

warm in and out the pulse of flowing love. Spread the calm to

meet the others, pleasure fills with love till dawn”.

128

You Don’t Need Someone New was a decent track, Love Still

Flows and Set Me Apart too, whilst Out on Your Own pretty much

summed up the summer of ’84 for me. On my own in the big city

of Sheffield. I lived at Totley Hall. Recalling the TV show,

The Ghosts of Motley Hall, I call myself the Ghost of Totley

Hall. I was never where I should have been when I was in

Sheffield. Search parties were organised. Occasionally, there

were sightings and reports back to HQ, but I was never

apprehended. In the meantime, I was wondering what was

happening back home.

Founder member Peter Coyle went solo, recording the album I'd

Sacrifice Eight Orgasms with Shirley MacLaine Just to Be

There. He must have been singing about Liverpool.

You wanna look back, family, what’s meant to be, memory, of

what used to be?

Peter Coyle has produced this gem which redeems all the

promise of those early days.

Peter Coyle – Christmas in Liverpool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13PKkMzBCh0

I wish I could spend some time with you

Christmas in Liverpool

We could talk about the childhood pain

We could laugh about the falling rain

129

I wish I could spend some time with you

Christmas in Liverpool

The songs you would sing out loud

We could dance until we were falling down

Can you hear me sister?

Can you hear me brother?

Can you hear me mother?

Can you hear me father?

Holding on to sweet memories

When we were laughing in the front room

Holding on to how we used to be

Holding on to sweet memories

When we were young without the worries

Holding on to how we used to be

I wish I could spend some time with you

Christmas in Liverpool

The wide river of memory

The wide river of Christmas with the family

Like it's meant to be

But now it's just the memory of what used to be

Holding on to sweet memories

When we were laughing in the front room

Holding on to how we used to be

Holding on to sweet memories

When we were young without the worries130

Holding on to how we used to be

Holding on to sweet memories

When we were laughing in the front room

Holding on to how we used to be

Can you hear me sister?

‘The former frontman of The Lotus Eaters delivers a haunting

lyric of loss and memory of more innocent times. It is

dedicated to his younger sister, Jeanette, who died a year

ago, but its theme is universal.’

“Christmas is a special time of the year but there are always

people who struggle for many reasons, one of the most common

is that we miss the people who are not here any more, so

Christmas can make you feel outside your memories, outside all

the celebration and togetherness.

“Christmas in Liverpool is about cherishing the memories and

feeling grateful for what we have experienced and shared

together, and also Liverpool is my home, always has been

always will be, even though I don't live here any more.”

New single about loss and longing.

http://www.liverpoolconfidential.co.uk/entertainment/music/

peter-coyle-hijackedchristmas-in-liverpool

131

I’ve read Peter Coyle described as an ‘underrated genius’. You

have already met a few in these pages and will meet some more.

I don’t know about genius. But Coyle is not ‘underrated’. And

neither are the others described in these pages as

‘underrated.’ Those who are aware of the work of these artists

tend to rate them highly. The problem is lack of awareness.

Peter Coyle - Reach For The Sun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S24k_BjYEJ4

Peter Coyle with China Crisis - Here comes a Raincloud

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojGqTZHaGuE

Just gorgeous. Seriously, music, any music, let alone pop

music, doesn’t get better than this. If you touch the soul,

move it, make it sing, you can do no more.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Lotus-Eaters-UK/

249570482098

Peter Coyle – Fractal

http://www.petercoyle.com/index

132

ALTERNATIVE RADIO

It’s that word ‘underrated’ again. I still say that that word

is pretty meaningless. Most of these bands were critically

lauded and earned positive reviews in the music press. The

problem is not that they are underrated as overlooked, or

simply that the unique qualities that recommended them to the

critics also put the public off.

Alternative Radio are a band that fall into this ‘underrated’

category, rated by all who heard them, but largely unheard.

I’m saying ‘underrated’. The fact is that Alternative Radio

won the 1982 'Battle of the Bands' held at the Empire Theatre

in Liverpool. The panel of judges included Noddy Holder

(Slade), Mick Khan (Japan), Roy Wood (The Move & Wizard),

Angie Bowie and representatives from Melody Maker & NME. They

signed with EMI Parlophone in 1983 and released their debut

133

single 'Valley of Evergreen' in January 1984. It received good

reviews and dented the top 100, but EMI said that the follow

up, 'First Night', wouldn't get any national radio play! The

band signed to Cold Harbour Records in 1985, ‘First Night’

came out and made the Radio 1 play list. The problem was that

Cold Harbour was a small indie label and couldn’t get the

records in the shops quick enough to meet the demand for them,

with the result that the single’s chart position didn’t match

its popularity.

'Strangers in Love' followed in 1987, and the session the band

did for Simon Mayo on Radio 1 session was voted 'Best Session

Of The Year'.

"Swing Out" and "Change of Heart" were released in 1988 and

received good radio play but .. the record company PRT went

bust! The band formed their own label, tried a change in style

and wrote music and script for a musical play "Twopence to

Cross the Mersey". Momentum had been lost, new directions were

being taken, a compilation album called "Retrospect" gathered

all the singles from 1983 - 1990. It’s a record of the near

misses of a band that should have made it. And something of a

recognition that for all the striving and achievement, their

time had past. But they are still writing, music for

Television, Film and Theatre.

134

I predicted big things for these boys. And maybe, in the

records they made, however ‘underrated’, they did actually

make it.

https://www.facebook.com/ItsImmaterial

Alternative Radio - Concertina Ballerina

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYToBlm_3-A

Alternative Radio – Valley of Evergreen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IafyKqTYE1c

Never never in valley of evergreen

Ever ever is it quite as it seems

Never ever in the world had I ever seen

Mirror ball sunlight

Dancing at midnight

Change Of Heart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huZVR8--Tyo

Alternative Radio - Strangers In Love (First Night, 1986)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFcZs8KAc5I

135

BRIAN ATHERTON AND THE LIGHT

Brian Atherton The Light Contrasting Strangers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qva7aa57tHI

Brian Atherton could never be called an ‘underrated’ anything.

He is almost totally unrated and unknown. He could be

described as a forgotten New Wave artist, had he been known in

the first place by more than those handful of people who

bought this gem of a song. I was one of the handful. Most

people never knew him. Which is a shame. Because 1985’s

‘Contrasting Strangers’ is a definite classic, a mellow,

reflective synth-oboe driven piece that really should have

found a wider audience. Few heard it, fewer bought it, it

wasn’t a hit. And it’s a beauty. If you are very lucky, you

may catch me crooning this one in the night. But, until that

moment, stick to Brian Atherton.

136

THE REVERB BROTHERS

The Reverb Brothers – Someone is selling off the country

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdpC-8ycI0s

They’ve filled in the local pool,

They’ve boarded up the YMCA.

And when the kids are out from school,

There’s nowhere for them to play.

‘cause they’ve built little boxes on the fields

Where we all used to roam

And they think if they call them executive homes

We’ll all form a queue for one

But the houses that they built last year

Are all still for sale

Because anyone who could has left long ago137

Like criminals jumping bail

Someone is selling off the country

Someone is closing down this town

Someone is planning my future for me

But no one has asked me of what I think of all the things they

are doing all round

They’re selling off the country

Someone that I will never see

Someone that thinks they got it all worked out

They can’t work out what to do about me.

They’re collecting door to door today

So we can have a kidney machine

‘cause the NHS can hardly pay

To keep its bed sheets clean

So you’d better not get ill or grow old

‘cause it’s bad for the economy

And if you can’t pay your way no more

You’d better look to charity

But the house of commons has just approved another pay

increase

Which they all agree is long overdue

For our own w

138

Someone is selling off the country

Someone is closing down this town

Someone is planning my future for me

But no one has asked me of what I think of all the things they

are doing all round

They’re selling off the country

Someone that I will never see

Someone that thinks they got it all worked out

They can’t work out what to do about me.

The free-riders, enclosers, exploiters, expropriators,

appropriators, dividers and conquerors are still selling off

the country. It’s time for the practical reappropriation of

our alienated powers and the recovery of our physical,

political and ethical commons. The conditions of life are the

concern of all, belonging to all, not resources to be used for

private gain.

The Reverb Brothers play a sort of swamp rock that encompasses

country, blues, jug band, R&B and old time jazz. Their sound

is characterized by exuberance, high energy and fun with a lot

of vocal and instrumental interplay. The material is a

combination of obscure covers from the American songbook as

well as original songs.

http://www.mcmenamins.com/events/122509-Reverb-Brothers

139

https://www.facebook.com/TheReverbBrothers

IT’S IMMATERIAL

It's Immaterial - Driving Away From Home

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypadKraAb1s&index=5

It's Immaterial – Itsy - were an indie pop band from

Liverpool, formed in 1980. Their 1986 single "Driving Away

From Home" hit number 18 in the UK Singles Chart. That may not

sound like a big hit, but the song is still played on the

radio and, over the years, has acquired the status of a cool

and hip classic. I heard it on BBC Radio 2 only yesterday.

I remember meeting up with old school friends back from

university in the Black Bull public house, Knowsley Road, St

Helens and absolutely dazzling them with my in-depth knowledge

of the indie scene in Liverpool. And this, the one who really140

knew his stuff – meaning he agreed with me – nodded his

approval of my good taste. Choice. My old friend from school

days, who was considered the one with his finger on the

musical pulse, was most impressed with my knowledge. I had

become ‘cool’!

What we have here is a road song with a difference. This isn’t

Route 66 or The Promised Land or any of those American songs

about the romance of the road, cars and girls. In typical

Liverpool fashion, all that mythology of “the road” is coolly

dissolved and treated with complete, if humourous, disdain.

“After all, it’s just a road.” ‘It’s only 39 miles and 45

minutes to Manchester …’ And so John Campbell puts his foot

down on the pedal – but not hard – and cruises on down M62. I

never did learn to drive. But I have walked up and down the

A580 (officially the Liverpool-East Lancashire Road), which is

the United Kingdom's first purpose-built intercity highway,

don’t you know. I did make it from Liverpool to Manchester by

train. I came back. Eventually. A Liverpool road movie. Lost

on holiday in Anglesey, the route back cut off by the incoming

tide and the darkness, I got a lift back to the caravan by a

scouser. Friendly fellow he was too, all smiles and jokes. It

was dark. It was very dark. And this car started off quick and

got quicker. Until we were speeding down country lanes. I

can’t be sure, he could just have been a wild kind of guy. But

it has crossed my mind many times that he had nicked this car

and I was in on the getaway. Hurtling at speed into the pitch

141

black down the country lines, my life flashed before my eyes.

There was nothing else to see.

Driving Away from Home (Jim’s Tune) is a pastiche of the

American ‘road song’, delivered with tongue firmly planted in

cheek. ‘Driving away from home, 30 miles or more’.

39 miles and 45 minutes gets you next to nowhere in the US!

It’s a trip down the road to the corner shop! Here, it’s an

epic journey, from Liverpool, the second city of the British

Empire, to Manchester, the first industrial city of the UK,

the first industrial nation. That’s big! The industrial

revolution has gone all over the world, and Liverpool is the

gateway to everywhere. I love the little references evoking

the expansive American context, the ‘move em on, move em out’

line from Rawhide. But it’s not the wide, open plains of the

West in view here but the M62 motorway stretching from

Liverpool past Manchester and Leeds to Hull, best known for

fog and traffic jams. But it remains a road song, even if the

chugging, syncopated rhythm suggests some antique jalopy

rather than some hot rod. In fact, I’m thinking more of horses

than cars here. That harmonica running throughout evokes not

so much the road as the lonesome prairie.

To an American observer, the ambition of maybe one day making

it to Manchester may seem somewhat unimpressive. But the

yearning is genuinely heartfelt in the northern landscape,

evoking youthful dreams of going to a better place. “When I142

was young we were gonna move out this way, for the clean air,

healthy you know. Away from the factories and the smoke”.

Quite a longing and quite an ambition for those of us born in

these dirty old industrial towns with their polluted

atmospheres. When I was young, the family would go for walks

‘over the fields’, over the blue bridge over the East Lancs

road into the countryside. It was another world, and a better

one. A little idyll. ‘There are a lot of nice places to see

out there.’ I went on foot, and still do. But I dare say you

could drive out there, put the foot down, but gently. I don’t

know about the healthy clean air, but I made it to Manchester

as the first industrial city was making itself into the first

post-industrial city, a site of play, entertainment and

recreation. Still seems like an industrial city to me.

It's Immaterial – Space

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ph0TXv4RxI

Ed’s Funky Diner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwVOSpdmFTk

"Ed's Funky Diner (Friday Night, Saturday Morning)" was

another great track from It’s Immaterial. It’s a song for

those with memories of Molly’s Kitchen up on Cheapside, where

erstwhile revolutionaries would plot the overthrow of global

capitalism over a drink of tea, before speeding back to

lectures before we were late. As Alexander Herzen said, any

ideal that can’t tolerate being laughed it isn’t much of an143

ideal. Or something like that. It’s thirty years since I read

him.

The band released their debut album, Life's Hard Then You Die,

in September 1986. Their second album Song followed four years

later in 1990. Too long a gap? The problem with this kind of

off-beat, understated, quirky music is that however much it

impresses the critics and people of discerning taste and

musical acumen, it gets completely submerged in a pop scene

forever dominated by noisy non-talents mugging for attention.

So, once more, the same old story of critical plaudits and

commercial failure. The last I heard, a third album, 'House

For Sale', was finished in 1992 but unreleased. Here’s a track

from this elusive artefact. The band’s sound is as enigmatic,

low-key, understated as ever.

‘The whole thing brought back so many memories.’

It's Immaterial - Just North Of Here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5nSr1PlK_I

‘Where’s Heaven?’

Walking in the moonlight

Well that was Heaven for me.

Just north of here, that’s where Heaven is for me, just as far

as you can see.

It’s those little things that mean a lot, those trips in a

quiet spot.144

I’m gonna give it all up, and travel north of here … and

disappear ….

‘Liverpool's most underrated New Wave band have finally

released a free download of one of the tracks from their

unreleased third album, House For Sale, which has been in the

vaults since 1992. If this gets a good response they may

release the full album!’

http://www.omd.uk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8119

Underrated!! Grrr!! Underrated by who? Overlooked and unknown,

maybe. But rated very highly by all who have heard them.

This is an absolute beaut of a track. So let me make an appeal

here. Let's give It's Immaterial their long-overdue

recognition and download Just North Of Here:

http://soundcloud.com/it-3/its-immaterial-just-north-of

The It’s Immaterial Facebook page was launched on 5 February

2013, with a rather charming message that explains a lot:

"It’s been a while. A few years have passed, but we have never

really been away. We just retreated from the limelight and

kept on doing what we do. We’ve had adventures, scrapes,

laughter and tears in the interim but we have kept on going

and never split up. When the music business ceased to be fun

we just walked away. We never stopped making music, we simply

145

carried on. So this is not a come back, it’s just another

chapter in the It’s Immaterial story".

In a way, all my favourites never really faded away at all,

they just kept on living, embedding words and music in the

everyday. And the music is as eclectic as life itself — new

wave, country, blues, folk, and synth pop. Being hard to

pigeonhole is an achievement but also a drawback when it comes

to radio play and record sales. The music is range-riding and

genre-bending but an integral whole all the same. A genuine

multiplicity rather than mere confused eclecticism. And the

diversity keeps everything fresh. But if you have to have a

definition, try intelligent sophisticated synthpop, ironic

urban folk music, Spanish guitars, tongue-in-cheek musings and

musical meanderings, atmospheric art-rock, rambling

recitation, subtle melancholia, and a unique Liverpudlian take

on country music. Whatever that is. Odd. Edgy. But weirdly

compelling. Like the mermaid.

It's Immaterial - The Mermaid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RymaYftxsxk

Fantastic! I just wouldn’t expect to find it topping the pop

charts.

The music of It's Immaterial has a character that eludes first

listening. You need a genuinely expansive of music and a lot

of patience to appreciate the band’s oddball hooks. There’s an146

air of melancholy hanging over the music, with wistful

observations set in a heartfelt sense of place.

Throughout I’ve been arguing the case for great records that

should have been big hits but never were. Now I shall hit

reverse. Driving Away from Home is so understated and subtle

that I’m amazed it was even noticed, let alone made the top

20.

Information on all the early recordings, 1980-1984, along with

the Liverpool context, can be found via this link.

http://music-isms.blogspot.com/2007/12/its-immaterial-early-

recordings-1980.html

Its Immaterial - Washing The Air

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ohb0R32mtXw

80’s Music Rules ~ Criminally Underrated Artists/Bands ~ It’s

Immaterial

http://rave-and-roll.com/2010/03/06/80s-music-rules-

criminally-underrated-artistsbands-its-immaterial/

Yet another Liverpool band in the ‘most underrated’ category!

Well I’m here to rate them. And I rate them highly.

Liverpool’s finest, it says in a You Tube comment. Like all of

them.

147

THE CHRISTIANS

The Christians

I first heard The Christians as a vocal backing group for It’s

Immaterial, and I heard them harmonising on radio. They had

contributed the backing vocals to It’s Immaterial’s Ed’s Funky

Diner, a song I had high hopes for in cementing Itsy’s

reputation as ‘the next big thing’ (I know, it’s a sad

obsession of mine, coming from years of following my pop

favourites up and down the charts). I knew The Christians were

going to have a future, but their success took me by surprise.

For a while, it looked as though this band were really going

to be big. Each of their first five singles made the UK top 40

in Britain, and their debut album The Christians (1987) made

no.2 in the UK Albums Chart at number 2. And they were cool,

super cool, and critically rated. They looked good, they

148

sounded good, they sang well, they had good taste. Ideal World

made the UK top 20 and they were a band I enjoyed telling

everyone about. They soon needed no introduction, they had

national and international success.

Forgotten Town

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmR7VAPd1pg

I bought their debut album The Christians as soon as it was

out and then set about annoying one and all within earshot

that The Christians were ‘the next big thing’. With five UK

hit singles coming off this first album, an album which went

on to be a million seller, I was entitled to feel rather

vindicated.

The Christians combined socially aware lyrics with great

melodies, vocal harmonies and slick and punchy pop-soul

arrangements.

The Christians’ songs are a rich blend of socially conscious,

evocative lyrics, soulful harmonies and great melodies

supported by impeccable pop-soul arrangements.

When The Fingers Point

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjEla5Lw_TI

The fingers were pointing at Liverpool from all directions in

the 1980s, and the Christians captured the mood. 149

You're the man with no choice

Yes it's been decided you've done wrong

And their's no single voice

That will stand up and say

Oh just what has he done?

For they all read the news

And it's surely proof enough for them

And they flatly refuse to consider oh

Was he really to blame?

Cause when the fingers point... whoah

It's too much to take

Too much to take

Too much to take

Too much to take

And when the fingers point... yeah

It makes your heart break

Now you're moving away

For you can not take it anymore

No amount of explaining can alter the truth

It's all happened before

(Where can you go)

Where can you go

Where the evil eyes won't follow on

And the curtains won't move

Every time you walk by150

Boy just what have you done?

Cause when the fingers point... Oh

It's too much to take

Too much to take

Too much to take

Too much to take

And when the fingers point... Oh

It makes your heart break

Too much to take

(Too much to take)

(Too much to take)

(Too much to take)

So you find a new home and a new place to hide

Where's there's peace and shelter from the poison outside

But before too long I'll be staring at the walls

Don't kid yourself son, it's just a matter of time

Cause when the fingers point... Whoa Oh

Fingers point...

Oh when the fingers point

Makes your heart break

Cause when the fingers point... Oh

It's too much to take

Too much to take151

Too much to take

Too much to take

And when the fingers point... Oh

It makes your heart break

[Repeat]

(Too much to take)

(Too much to take)

(Too much to take)

But where can you go when the poison is outside? Come Back! A

genuine home is more, much more, than a place to hide. But it

needs to be built. It needs builders.

The words to their first single “Forgotten Town” also seemed

rather appropriate, in a week where many were making

comparisons with the ‘80’s. Much of the news in the North-West

has been of town centres in decline with half-empty high

streets, boarded up shops and pubs next to derelict wasteland;

all reminiscent of ‘80’s Britain. Interviewing workers on

their way out of the factory gates of BAE who announced more

redundancies this week, one worker said that “there are no

local industries left around here”. So I suppose these lyrics

written in 1987 could just as well apply to today:

“Well should I stay and fight? Where else is there I can run?

How can I get out? There's no way I can get out!

Hear the hollow words a-ringing now the chips are down.152

This must be one of the troubles of a-living in forgotten

town”

The questions are still being asked. Public spending cuts,

zero hours contracts, casual work, food banks, the profile of

many towns and cities is being defined by bargain and charity

shops. And boarded up shops.

The Christians – Hooverville

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dssA5ApFbo0

Hooverville is the name given to shanty towns that homeless

people built during the Depression under President Herbert

Hoover. Parallels were being drawn between the Depression and

the economic crisis and mass unemployment that characterised

the 1980s. Once more, the lyrics possess a contemporary

relevance.

“The doubt of work sends the out of work man,

To city a hope and a home.

153

One door shuts here another two slam,

Yes he's homeless he's hopeless alone….

Oh Hooverville, and they promised us the world,

In Hooverville, said the streets that were paved with silver

and gold,

Oh Hooverville, and they promised us a roof above our heads,

in Hooverville,

And as fools we believed every last word they said…..”

The Christians – Ideal World

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7_zfivvmwU

Before you point the finger

And hope the whole thing disappears

Remember empty words will fall

And fall upon the deafest ears

He won't give in without a fight

And foul play without a doubt

No silver lining to be seen

In this thundercloud

Oh, that's not allowed

In the ideal world

We'd be free to choose

But in my real world

You can bet we're going to loose154

Your money fills your pockets

Fear fills their tiny minds

At last the world is talking now

This ain't no way to treat mankind

A sudden blackout stops the show

But doesn't stop the way I am

'Cause all my life I've been oppressed

You're not the first to say I am

I do all I can

For an ideal world

Where we're free to choose

But in my real world

Oh, you can get we're going to lose

In the ideal world

We could start again

But my real world

Hangs on the colour of your skin

We could be free forever

If they would only change

But fools never change

Oho, no

A speck of blue up in the sky155

A song of hope, a noble thought

But how long must the people die

Before the guilty ones are caught?

Oh, will you spare a thought?

For an ideal world

Where we're free to choose

For an ideal world

And we're no longer born to lose

In the ideal world

We could start again

Now in my real world

Let's put an end to suffering

End suffering

In the ideal world

We're now free to choose

Oh, in my real world

We are safe to air our views

In the ideal world

We can start again

Now in my real world

It matters not about the colour of your skin

Ideal world

Free to choose156

Ideal world

Oh, there's much a man can do

Ideal world

Start again

Ideal world

We're goin' to start again

The appeal to a universal ethic calling for the freedom of

each and all was rather touching in the context of the 1980s,

but this was no flabby idealism. The lyric plainly recognises

that those ‘filling their pockets’ ‘won’t give in without a

fight.’ General appeals to an ideal world are just ‘empty

words’ which ‘fall upon the deafest ears’. Appeals to the

common good are ineffective if they lack social relevance.

That doesn’t invalidate the ideal, it just means we have to

practise some effective politics in ensuring its realisation.

‘How long must the people die before the guilty ones are

caught …at last the world is talking now, this ain’t no way to

treat mankind.’ How do we identify, isolate and eliminate the

free riders, the exploiters, the enclosers, the appropriators?

‘I’d do all I can for an ideal world where we’re free to

choose, an ideal world where we’re no longer born to lose’.

It’s a ‘song of hope’, no doubt, hope that we can one day

achieve a free society beyond relations of exploitation and

domination. A ‘noble thought’. And a noble song.

“What’s in a word?” also remains pertinent.157

“Oh, yes it's hard, it's getting harder

To turn the cheek or just walk away

When all I see is degradation

Day after day

I wanna fight, my hands are tied

My weapons are pitiful

And all that's left

One troubled mind, one timid voice

Such a desperate noise

What's in a word, more than you imagine

What's in a word, more than I can say

Once in a while you can hear such sweet sounds

Freedom's singing in your head, in your head”.

Frankly, a marvellous band, combining a social conscience and

impeccable pop-R&B sensibility.

Critic Charles Bottomley (In Rock: The Rough Guide), described

them as "The Temptations in ripped jeans, producing gritty-

centred songs in a sugary vocal shell". I don’t think that’s

quite right. The Christians sang well and harmonised well, but

there was grit in the warm tones. Idealism and a social

conscience, too. I couldn’t describe any of this as sugary.

Warm and rich and passionate, yes. But not sugary.

158

The Christians’ songs of the 1980s stand up very well nearly

three decades on, and much of that is down to the soulful

vocals and gritty, pertinent lyrics.

Again, people ask why commercial success eluded the band. With

five hit singles off their million selling debut album, the

real question is why they didn’t sustain the success they

achieved at the start. I just remember that it seemed like an

eternity before their second album came out, and that that

album contained covers where the first album contained all

originals – as if there was a struggle to keep writing to the

standards set by that first smash. The songs were polished and

well produced, Harvest for the World was a brilliant and

successful cover – but I just felt an edginess had been lost.

It may just be that they didn’t follow up the breakthrough

quickly enough. Because the music remained excellent.

The Christians 'Harvest For The World'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s-SHrzXbU8

And the band remained a good live act. I saw them supporting

Ray Charles in the Big Tent at Liverpool’s Kings Dock, it must

have been the Summer of 2001. They absolutely rocked the

place. The audience seemed quite elderly, they were there for

a ‘jazzy’ Ray Charles. I think The Christians, big fans of Ray

Charles’ early R&B material, were obviously thrilled by this

opportunity to perform on the same bill as they great man, and

really pulled out the stops. I thought they did a stunning159

set, but I’m not sure the audience as a whole was as

appreciative. They seemed a whole lot livelier when Charles’

band came out first and did a jazz set.

The Christians – The Bottle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15vn5XRJ6dk

The Christians "Greenbank Drive"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_9JSS4XorQ

The Christians’ Official Website

http://www.thechristianslive.co.uk/

THOMAS LANG

Thomas Lang

Thomas Lang’s closest brush with national fame came with the

jazz-tinged song "The Happy Man", which hit no. 67 on the UK

top 100 singles chart in January 1988. His debut album,

Scallywag Jaz, came out in 1987. He still performs in

160

Liverpool, where he has the 3345 recording studio complex and

members club. Lang is an immensely talented singer, his

beautifully crafted songs showcase the quality of his voice.

He has a great vocal range, allying technique and control with

a real emotional charge. I strongly recommend Scallwag Jaz to

those who have never heard of Thomas Lang, which is most

people, but you can’t go wrong, really, with Lost Letter Z or

Little Moscow or the Best Of compilation Outside Over There.

The problem is that Lang’s music can be quite hard to find. He

is another of those critically acclaimed but commercially weak

artists .. I’ve said enough on this theme already. I have no

idea why Lang didn’t have more commercial success, why he

wasn’t played much on the radio, why he didn’t do more

television. I’m not going to use that word ‘underrated’ again,

because pretty much everyone who has heard him rates him

highly as a singer with real interpretative skill and

emotional impact. Don’t just take my word for it, read the

glowing customer reviews on Amazon, where Lang gets the full

five stars out of five.

A perfect antidote to bland soul-less pop pap.

The sound is rich and warm, though fragile and loose. The

suggestion is one of turmoil and angst, each song examines and

redefines the loss of love and alienation in a cityscape

strewn with emotional wrecks.

AN OVERLOOKED TALENT

161

This guy has got so much talent - yeah, what a voice! It's a

shame he never got the breaks - he deserved to be a huge star.

Forget your indie shoe starers and Beatles rip-offs - this is

contemporary UK songwriting talent.

FORGOTTEN STAR?

PREPARE TO BE MOVED!

true British talent

How this guy isn’t among the headlines beats me.

Quite why Thomas Lang isn't a household name is one of the

more puzzling facets of life in the 21st Century. His voice is

just LOVELY....songs are drenched in atmosphere of smoky late

afternoon cafe's, windswept European streets.....the guy is a

star, should be one of the greatest voices of our time...

Underhyped genius

This man has an amazing talent,such a shame he didn't get the

recognition he deserves.his voice is liquid gold better than

so many who made it to the top.

True Class

Truly astonishing. The lyrics and music are combined to

perfection.

A definite must buy for any music lover. It features song like

"The Happy Man" and "Little Moscow."

162

I’ve nothing to add, apart from ‘I agree’.

Here is a review of his last album Torch, with a couple of

live tracks which give a good indication of his late night,

smoky jazz style.

https://musicshack.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/thomas-lang-torch/

I remember Thomas Lang supporting Alison Moyet at the Royal

Court in Liverpool around December 1986, and thinking, ‘this

time next year, Lang will be the star topping the bill’. Well,

Lang made great music, and that’s all a singer and musician

needs to do, really. Where he sings and how many he sings for

is a different question. He should be more widely appreciated,

but he isn’t. He does have a beautiful voice and he has made

some beautiful music. And isn’t that what it’s all about?

Thomas Lang – Fingers and Thumbs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBtHVcs4U4o

Happy Man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRek7rAqm5A

I think many around Liverpool can remember being taken to a

bar, a pub, like this and seeing Thomas Lang. Amazing. I

remain eternally grateful to Thomas Lang. It was the first

time I had heard a Jacques Brel song. He sang Fils De/Sons of,

and it was immense.

You can find it on Scallywag Jaz. But hearing it live for the

first time was life changing.

163

Thomas Lang - Sleep with Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_GU9cm2Du0

Thomas Lang - "In the Wee Small Hours" (Torch live in

Liverpool 2011)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KIIFMnaM64

The Bible – Graceland

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lIPBFAiKyE

The Bible released two critically acclaimed albums in the mid-

1980s and are best known for the independent chart hits

"Graceland" and "Mahalia". The Bible was formed in 1985 in

Cambridge …

Whaaaaat!? Let me read that again …. I always thought they

were from Liverpool. That’s where I heard them. They were

good. I liked them. I always presumed they were from

Liverpool. They have to be from Liverpool! I’m claiming them

for Liverpool.

“You will never see Graceland.” The line struck me how distant

Elvis, the man and his music, was becoming a decade after his

death. I never did see Elvis. And never will. And I never have

seen Graceland. I have a friend who has been. Elvis? He’s long

gone. Which is a shame.

The real thing is a fleeting moment, the rest is a surrogate

or worse.164

There was another aspect to this song that troubled me.

It related to the line in the Paul Simon song : “All shall be

received in Graceland.”

Would that promise of social justice in the universal society

be destined to be ever elusive.

You will never see that universal society in which each and

all shall flourish.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

A gentle demeanour is never lost in life. The soothing tones

of a musician seemingly at peace with themselves is never

truly overshadowed by the storm that rampages around them, the

squall and the rough tidal surges that drown out the less

romantic find ways to inspire the artistically gifted. For Boo

Hewerdine if the squall and blizzards of life affect him, then

his music doesn’t show it, not outwardly possibly but like all

great artists there is something of the dark attached within

the moving, almost sensual lyrics that command the same

attention as coming across the flowing beast that is the River

Nile for the first time.

The former The Bible musician may well be an enigma of sorts,

perhaps never really garnering the true wealth of public

opinion that was due to him over the years but his career has

been one of steady, almost unfazed adoration by those who have

kept him close to their hearts and his latest release, less of165

a compilation, more of a welcome companion piece, My Name In

Brackets (The Best of Boo Hewerdine & The Bible) is a very

welcome retrospective which characterises the man and his

music completely.

http://www.liverpoolsoundandvision.co.uk/2014/12/11/boo-

hewerdine-my-name-in-brackets-the-best-of-boo-hewerdine-the-

bible-album-review/

FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD

Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Welcome To The Pleasure Dome

You have no idea how much I hated this outfit. I spent ages

cursing them. I hated the way they seemed to eclipse the other

Liverpool bands and what I considered to be the genuine166

Liverpool sound. I hated the engineered music and the

engineered controversy, the publicity machine, the talk about

who played what on what, the miming. The fact that hard-faced

pop promotion triumphed where all the intelligence and

lyricism and wistfulness and talent of my favourites could

generate little more than laments for underrated,

underachieving lost geniuses. This wasn’t the Liverpool sound,

it was music industry production for maximum publicity and

sales. That said, this was always a guilty pleasure. The

outrage, the attack, the style, the grooves, the moves …. Very

Liverpool mid-eighties, still incredibly tangible at this

distance. Just don’t get me started on Relax.

Frankie Goes to Hollywood – Welcome to the Pleasuredome

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfHKgcTaU_4

Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Two Tribes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic0tVFYvRZ0

Frankie Goes To Hollywood - The Power Of Love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPWuLSzDWnI

As for Holly Johnson … really … the man’s incorrigible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqPUy4Ok2mU

167

THE WILD SWANS

The Wild Swans

The Wild Swans are a post-punk band from Liverpool, formed in

1980. Paul Simpson, formerly of The Teardrop Explodes, is the

band's only constant member. I’ve always rated them very

highly indeed. They are a band that have acquired a certain

cult status, but neither their singles nor their albums have

troubled the charts, not even at the lower ends. As an

indication of how closely tied together the Liverpool scene

was, members of The Wild Swans have also been members of other

Liverpool bands such as Echo & The Bunnymen, The Icicle Works,

The Woodentops and The Lightning Seeds, acts which have seen

some serious chart action.

I’m not sure what success or failure means in a context such

as this. The Wild Swans came and went and came back again and

went away once more. Yet they have always been ever-present,

168

certainly that original spirit, the thing they represented

from the first.

Singer Paul Simpson’s attempt to explain prospects for the

band’s reformation gives some sense of the enigma.

"This unhappy band has been unfinished business for me for

over 20 years, haunting my days and nights, obsessing my

thoughts at the expense of my health and sanity. I never got

over the sudden implosion of the first incarnation and was

devastated by the crash and burn of the second. In returning

from the ambient wilderness I am not trying to recreate the

unique sound of any of the former members, how could I? It is

the original spirit of the group I am after, the original

blueprint for an English electric brotherhood. I formed and

named the band shortly after leaving The Teardrop Explodes

back in 1980, individually recruiting the members and

establishing both the look and the compass direction. I lived

and breathed The Wild Swans Mk. I and was traumatised to see

it seized and taken from me, so this shouldn't be viewed as a

reformation or even an exorcism, it is a continuum; different

but the same."

— Paul Simpson, vocalist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wild_Swans_(band)

There was definitely an awareness of being different, and a

concern to try something different, in the band from the169

first. Their debut single was called ‘The Revolutionary

Spirit’. Or, in Simpson’s own words: "For me The Wild Swans

was like a beautiful, holy, sexy, disturbing, dreamy nightmare

about breaking into heaven to have sex with the angels.

Unfortunately I was woken from my reverie by someone yelling

into my ear " Paul, it's 3 a.m. it's pxxxxxg with rain, it's

your turn to clean the toilet and, oh yeah, your dog is dead"

— Paul Simpson, vocalist

It all takes place in the strange world where dreams meet

reality, and it’s not that clear which is which.

The Wild Swans - Bible Dreams 1988

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3yoEcoKGEQ

Bible Dreams was released in 1988 from their album “Bringing

Home The Ashes”. From the moment I heard it I thought ‘hit’. I

thought this is a song that defines the time. Living close to

it all, and thinking that the place you live in is the whole

world and not just a small part of it (insofar as Merseyside

could ever be ‘small’!), the impact of songs such as this seem

to be much greater than it actually was. I’ve spoken to people

from all over the UK since. They’ve never heard the song and

never heard of The Wild Swans. Which explains what, for years,

for me, was inexplicable – why Bible Dreams was not a smash

hit. It didn’t get much radio play. A local band with an ‘80’s

sound that inhibits chances of belated discovery. The lyrics

170

struck a chord with me, the way they were delivered even more

so.

I loved the world when we were poor, when winter banged on

summer’s door and pain was April rain upon my skin.

I sheltered as each friend was tamed and shackled by the

wedding game, now life has left this stain upon my skin.

Soldier boy, soldier on

Your eyes are cold and the spark has gone.

My blackest days were bandaged white, I prayed upon my darkest

night,

and bible dreams the lives of former whores.

I slept beside this angry calm, kept faith alive and far from

harm,

torn I’ve lived, I’ll die a boy stillborn.

Soldier boy, soldier on

Your eyes are cold and the spark has gone.

They’ve chosen you to bear the stain

But God has left this world bereft and the scars remain.

Yep. That line pretty much nails it, where we are at in this

disenchanted world.

There’s a game we used to play whenever we had an idle hour or

three (and we did) – ‘what’s the best opening line to a song171

ever?’ I’ll take it further and ask ‘which song possesses the

best opening and closing lines ever?’ I always thought John

Stewart’s Armstrong had the best coda of any song, but that

refers to a whole passage. The last line of Bible Dreams takes

some beating. I could write a book debating the death of God,

the loss, the separation from home, the strain of bearing

responsibility. This line captures our entire predicament. And

the opening line expresses a yearning for some lost idyll.

Ontological nostalgia, the ground of our being, where will my

resting place be? If the world is objectively valueless, what,

then, are we? I loved the world when we were poor, blessed are

the poor in spirit.

And, in it all, there is the suggestion that we can indeed

take on the responsibility of creating – and living up to –

our own values. It’s a challenge to us. Can we? Where does

value lie?

172

The Wild Swans – Bitterness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWGHFKkdVZs

naked girl don't let the world degrade you

the years ahead are strung like pearls

ragged boy when will your young life settle

you're the brightest point for a thousand miles

lie down, prepare your wedding

life's hard, forget about the bitterness of life

spent my time praying for golden saviors

when times were hard the good things came

goodbye world, god knows he never loved me

the years ahead hang so heavy now

lie down, prepare your wedding

life's hard, forget the bitterness

lie down, prepare your wedding

life's hard, forget the bitterness of life

The Wild Swans - Bringing Home The Ashes (1988)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJZHM4hmcAc

Songs of life and death, war and peace, religion and faith and

values define the Wild Swans’ debut album, 1988’s Bringing

Home the Ashes. I think this band, and this album in

particular, stand high in my musical affections because 1988

was the year I graduated. I felt like I was exploding out into

the world. And here was an album which covered all the big173

themes of life, but brought them down to earth, made them of

personal significance. It wasn’t just the lyrical content for

me, but the way the message was delivered via Paul Simpson’s

haunting vocals. The words carried an emotional weight that

brought home the reality of a life swinging always between joy

or sorrow. In the reassuring “Bitterness,” Simpson urges us to

"Forget about the bitterness of life," “when times were hard,

the good things came”. “Prepare your wedding”, choose life,

the good things will come. That message rings out throughout

the entire album. Yet there is often an iciness in his

baritone that maintains a certain sceptical distance from

happy endings all too easily promised. There’s an angst and a

drama that indicates that the good things in life are hard

won, if won at all. In retrospect, I can see why Bringing Home

the Ashes resonated with me back in 1988. The songs are about

coming of age in an age of war and strife and seeking answers

in God and love. It’s noticeable how often religious themes,

words and imagery crop up in a lot of these songs, even with

respect to song titles like China Crisis’ ‘Christian’ or band

names like ‘The Christians’. Just words tapping into something

deeper? It’s a standard trick in pop music. But there’s more

going on here. “God only knows in the end” sing China Crisis

in Black Man Ray. It may sound like a throwaway line. But it

could also express a profound truth. In "Young Manhood,"

Simpson sings, "Lord, I'm in your hands on Judgment Day." And

I don’t think it’s a throwaway line at all. The fact that the

religious theme isn’t hammered home with big grandiloquent

gestures suggests a genuine spirituality at work here as we174

try to come to terms with the eternal swings between despair

and hope. Add the ringing guitars of Jeremy Kelly, and this

album is simply gorgeous. Try “Archangels”, you can hear the

wings ascending upwards. The effect is ethereal, uplifting,

with songs about the bad things in life, the things that go

wrong, being cathartic rather than depressing. Take "The Worst

Year of My Life". We’ve all had one, there’s no avoiding it.

Life is like a mountain. To get to the summit, you have to

potter around in the foothills – and you need all of it to

support the peak. Bringing Home the Ashes is a pivotal record

in my own life – and it did precisely nothing commercially.

Which may say something. Another underrated gem, more

overlooked talent, more hidden treasure. The story of my life.

But, hey, ‘life’s hard, forget the bitterness ..’ And talent

doesn’t date, it just ages well.

The Wild Swans Disintegrating

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I6046UV6eI

Recording of the new album, The Coldest Winter for a Hundred

Years, finished on 10 September 2010; it was released early in

2011. In February 2010, Paul Simpson said "For the first time

ever I am happy with the results, the unmixed tracks are

sounding so good its scary. It may be 20 odd years late but I

think we have finally made the definitive Wild Swans

masterpiece."

We may all ‘make it’ yet.175

My Town

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvRAGgvcQIA

Good tune, and words worth thinking about. Nostalgia traps us

in the past and denies us a future. I like the idea of

Liverpool as a living tradition, but there has to be

resurgence. Great songs like this prove that that creativity

is still there! I don’t think ‘it’s over now’ at all. But it

could be if we turn the present into a museum that ossifies

the living spirit.

Northern England

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1LUQJDcimU

days braving the wild winds

and years building this ark

while prayers go unanswered

seeds thrown in the dark

bring back that spark

to northern england soon

how much longer must we mourn for you

days have passed without numbers

since blood spilt on the stones

i'm courting disaster

and i'm close to the bone

bring back that spark

to northern england soon176

how much longer must we mourn for you

The reason why the songs of The Wild Swans songs are tinged

with sadness is because the part of Liverpool where they

originated is such a lonely and depressing place (provincial)

which became the fuel that sparked their creativity in making

songs like"Whirlpool Heart", "Archangels", "Bringing Home The

Ashes”, and "Bible Dreams"....Unlike their contemporaries like

Duran Duran and Soft Cell who lived in places that are more

progressive and had lots of clubs ad disco sounds.Accoding to

Jeremy Kelly,the poverty of their town which they're in gave

them hope and in that hope it became the inspiration for them

to create and compose"Northern England"which is My Favourite

Song of The Band.Knowing that made me appreciate the song much

better...David Dylan Malana Puzon.1V

Maybe it’s because I’m a Northerner …

The Wild Swans-English Electric Lightning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyuW4niDNOA

Paul Simpson website

http://www.paul-simpson.co.uk/

177

BLACK

Black

Black is a band that intrigued me from the start. Because as

far as I could ever tell, the band Black is the singer Colin

Vearncombe. He was the man in black, his records were in black

and white, videos too. We are talking cool melancholy here. It

was the voice and the manner that got my attention, that air

of resignation. William Ruhlmann of Allmusic described

Vearncombe as a "smoky-voiced singer/songwriter, whose

sophisticated jazz-pop songs and dramatic vocal delivery place

him somewhere between Bryan Ferry and Morrissey." I’m not sure

that places him at all. Scott Walker is a closer comparison.

But Vearncombe’s delivery always carried more doom and defeat,

without ever sounding sour or bitter, just warm and resigned

and a tiny little bit hopeful despite it all. It is, indeed, a

“Wonderful Life.” The trouble is, Vearncombe sings like he

doesn’t quite believe it. But he’s open to persuasion.

178

Black Wonderful Life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMXz3TQOS_c

"Wonderful Life" is a song by written by Colin Vearncombe, and

a top ten hit in Switzerland, Germany, UK, France, Austria and

Italy in 1987. This was probably the most fame Vearncombe was

to enjoy. He appeared on Top of the Pops, where some girls

asked him for his autograph. Inspecting what he had written

for them, they shrieked ‘we thought you were Rick Astley’!

It’s a fickle old business.

The video showcases the song well, and pretty much

encapsulates what the music of Black is all about. The film

was shot in black and white around the English seaside resort

of New Brighton, Wallasey, looking over to Liverpool.

Here I go out to sea again

And dreams hang in the air

There’s magic in the air

Here I go out to sea again

The sunshine fills my hair

And dreams hang in the air

Gulls in the sky and in my blue eyes

You know it feels unfair

There's magic everywhere179

Look at me standing

Here on my own again

Up straight in the sunshine

No need to run and hide

It's a wonderful, wonderful life

No need to laugh and cry

It's a wonderful, wonderful life

Sun's in your eyes the heat is in your hair

They seem to hate you

Because you're there

And I need a friend, oh, I need a friend

To make me happy

Not stand here on my own

Look at me standing

Here on my own again

Up straight in the sunshine

No need to run and hide

It's a wonderful, wonderful life

No need to laugh and cry

It's a wonderful, wonderful life

I need a friend, oh, I need friend180

To make me happy

Not so alone

Look at me here

Here on my own again

Up straight in the sunshine

No need to run and hide

It's a wonderful, wonderful life

No need to hide and cry

It's a wonderful, wonderful life

No need to run and hide

It's a wonderful, wonderful life

No need to run and hide

It's a wonderful, wonderful life

Wonderful life

It's a wonderful life

It’s serious-young-man music. ‘Alone’, ‘here on my own again.’

I’m always a bit wary of the romantic image of the lonely

individual who is unlike everybody else, it comes over as a

little too precious and totally incapable of ever forming the

relationships with others that a fulfilled life requires. No

need to run and hide is right, but why the need to make that

statement in the first place? It doesn’t matter where you run,

you can never hide from yourself, it always catches you up.181

The whole lonely young man thing can seem a little calculated,

an image for public show that soon becomes a shell that

suffocates all life within. I used to dress in black a lot.

Until someone told me that black is easy, black is a ‘cop-out’

colour that makes no statement of anything. It lacks the nerve

to stand for something, it just negates. So I started to wear

yellow. I looked ridiculous, of course, like a big round

canary. But at least I was no longer hiding.

And I’m not sure about the indifference either.

You tell me why people stand for ages gazing out to sea.

No need to laugh or cry? There are plenty reasons why we

should both laugh and cry. If there is no pain, there can be

no joy. It’s pretty easy to argue that since all our problems

are caused by desires and appetites and attachments then we

should relinquish all such things. That’s not being, that’s

182

non-being. Which is what? I wonder how many people reading

this knows the feeling and the memory of seeing death, of

seeing numerous dead bodies together, to know the significance

of that fact of mortality, and what it is to come through all

of that and yet remain hopeful, open to joy, retaining the

conviction that the world is a good world. I have never

remotely understood why some people think despair is the

tougher choice and hope is no more than the ‘hopium’ that

dulls our pain and distorts our senses. Despair is easy, there

are facts and reasons enough all around us to justify it. And

it is much easier to abandon ideals and dreams and ambitions,

for fear that they may be dashed and taken from us, as they

always seem to have been, and embrace despair. I’ll go with

the joy and sorrow that comes with hope. Without a word of

irony, I can say that it is indeed a wonderful life. And even

at our lowest ebb we can keep on believing. Then again, as one

of the resurrection men, I can live in hope of a happy ending.

To Hell with the indifference of institutionalised,

ritualised, habitualised cruelty. That is simply a giving in,

an acceptance of a Weberian world that proceeds ‘without

regard for persons’, an internalisation at the personal level

of the impersonalism that characterises the world. It’s

impossible to be ‘objective’ about life and the way it is

lived, we select in everything we do and say. There is no

Archimedean vantage point from which we can observe the world,

we are in this ‘wonderful life’, and how wonderful it is, or

isn’t, depends upon our choices and actions, what we do, and

what we don’t do. And that being the case, we cannot be183

indifferent to life and its relationships, the people who are

the victims of these cruel, inhuman, impersonal relationships,

and the people and systems that are the victimizers. And

embracing that view releases us from the grip of despair, the

cult of powerlessness that eases the pain when our highest

values and ideals are crushed or turned against us, but

entrenches us in defeat. I want the cry that expresses pain,

and joy, that shows that life remains vital and sensitive. I

have no sympathy for the resignation of melancholy hindsight

and existential gloom. It strikes me as the indulgence of

narcissists, the precious people who make a cult of being

alone and being different, ‘different’ as in being ‘better’

than others. ‘Cool’. We are all same but different, but

neither better nor worse. And one of the reasons I value the

music produced in Liverpool is because it is not only good

music, not only part of my own history and identity, but

because it isn’t afraid to walk on the wild side of life,

expose the dark side, and yet express a peculiarly, and

inherently, moral message that affirms life is good, and that

is unafraid to seek the joy and happiness that is our

birthright, however much circumstances seem to conspire to

cheat us of it. And it is populist enough to think making the

charts matters. In the words of the Black song “Everything is

Coming Up Roses”.

Black - Everything's Coming Up Roses

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrFfzOYY45M

184

At the start of this piece, I raised the issue of ‘cruelty’

with respect to pain and suffering. This theme runs

throughout. Despite overt appearances, a profoundly moral

theme resonates throughout this music. It is indeed possible

to embrace goodness and reject cruelty. These songs seek and

find in the flesh and blood history of people with definite

names, who live in definite places at definite times,

something that any moral philosopher or priest or theologian

would have no trouble in identifying as goodness, a goodness

often rescued from the nightmare of events and circumstances.

And, as a philosopher specialising in ethics, who survived the

Hillsborough Disaster and part-time mailman, I’ll make a

personal statement to that effect.

Sweetest Smile – Black

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_k3XCb_rWQ

The breakthrough single, reaching UK no.8. I watched the

singles come out, I saw them stall in the charts, and drift

further outwards until by 1990 I had to accept the horrible

truth that Black, despite superbly crafted, beautifully sung

songs, were never going to see the top ten ever again. You're

A Big Girl Now reached 86, I Can Laugh About It Now reached

nowhere at all, Here it Comes Again stalled at 70. All top ten

material.

Black – You’re a Big Girl Now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uj0GCoHFQk#

185

Black – Too Many Times

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIRMXmzCrF4

Black / Colin Vearncombe - This is life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PskatLfJS5U

If your lonely heart is aching,

think you can't take any more,

you have to cup your hands to keep the light.

I will lean across your shoulder

and whisper in your ear

that this is life.

If you're old enough to face it,

you are old enough to fake it,

to get what you desire and still ask why.

Then I'll tap you on the shoulder

and whisper in your ear

that this is life.

This is what you struggled for,

no reprisals, no resistance,

this is life.

Can you answer me a question-

Have you lain awake at night,

the blinds undrawn, the ceiling streaked with light?

You feel tired but you can't sleep,

feel so hungry you can't eat-

Well, this is life.

Has your courage seemed to fail you186

as you take your chosen path?

You pass a camel through a needle's eye.

Get up in tiny little pieces

and you've learnt the major rule:

that this is life.

This is what you waited for,

no rehearsals, no more stalling,

this is life.

Have it tattooed on the inside

of your pink and sleepy eyelids;

This is life.

This is life.

(solo)

Absence makes the heart grow fonder,

grow more foolish than we can ever guess.

You feel your nerve ends slowly coiling

and you hope the answer's "no", the answer's "yes".

This is what you struggled for,

no reprisals, no resistance,

this is life.

This is what you waited for,

no rehearsals, no more stalling,

this is life.

If you can't do what you ought,

lead by example, don't get caught,

'cause this is life.

Uh, this is life.

This is life.187

This is life.

This is life.

This is life.

Things maybe not turning out quite as I expected? In 1991 I

had three years since graduating behind me, and four years in

front of me of having my PhD thesis proposal turned down by

one and all. That’s four years of failure and frustration and

uncertainty. Of seeing potential being wasted, of creeping

doubt. The failure and the rejection installed an unbeatable

self-belief in me, an iron will that determined to prevail

over all the contrary opinions of others. I play the long

game. And I’ve learned that in the game of life you never ever

ever give up, never quit, least of all on yourself. ‘Lead by

example.’

“This is what you’ve waited for, no rehearsals, no more

stalling, this is life.”

And it was. And it is. You get there in the end, just keep

walking, wherever you are going, it’s somewhere out there. One

foot in front of the other, motion forwards. You can’t miss

it. It’s always underfoot.

‘Hello! Welcome to my website. Here you’ll find what I’m up

to – where, how and why. Feel free to say what you like… we

don’t know each other yet but I’m looking forward to it!’

http://www.colinvearncombe.com/188

My research proposal rejected by both universities in

Liverpool, I was facing exile in Manchester. And that was to

come only after another three years of rejection.

LIGHTNING SEEDS

Life’s too short

Lightning Seeds - Life of Riley

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ugeyuMdBoQ

So, here's your life

We'll find our way

We're sailing blind

But it's certain, nothing's certain

I don't mind, I get the feeling

You'll be fine, I still believe that

In this world, we've got to find the time189

For the life of Riley

Ever hopeful, eternally optimistic, better days to come

All this world is a crazy ride

So, take your seats and hold on tight

The Lightning Seeds - You Showed Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_g1gji1u1Q

The Lightning Seeds – Lucky You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3AKwm1XoIw

Happy, up-tempo, life-affirming optimistic music. But socially

aware. The Lightning Seeds keep alive Liverpool’s proud

190

fighting tradition, coming out clearly on the side of the

Liverpool dockers engaged in class struggle in Tales Of The

Riverbank.

Tales Of The Riverbank

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxzQxvhE4wk

Fourteen hours of working shifts

In early morning Mersey mists

Too tired to taste the cornflakes on your tongue

As morning hits the docks you dream

Of all the ships there must have been

A river full of everything it's lost

And if your life's not meant to feel like this

Maybe it's time for someone to resist

The riverbank could tell you tales

Of working lives, ship with sails

Jobs were passed from fathers to their sons

Sometimes it comes down to you

The many to protect the few

Unless you cross the line your jobs are gone

If it takes a thousand days we'll never stop

Tell it a thousand ways you'll still be wrong

Not a word in the morning paper191

Feels like we've been out for ages

Maybe unions and prayers won't save us

But there's nothing on earth can break us

Strength to load a thousand ships

But willing hands can turn to fists

On picket lines feelings overflow

A decent job for decent pay

To fight it thats the only way

The union says well tough your on your own

If it takes a thousand days we'll never stop

Tell it a thousand ways you'll still be wrong

Not a word in the morning papers

Feels like we've been out for ages

The unions and prayers won't save us

There's nothing on earth can break us.

‘There’s nothing on earth can break us’. A powerful statement

of working class solidarity. And note well the awareness of

the failure in the official agencies of working class

politics, the utter uselessness of parliamentary parties and

trade union leadership. They are part of the system, not its

enemies. The Liverpool dockers were sold down the river, by

their own side as much as by the employing classes. Learn that

lesson and engage in some genuine solidarity.

192

Ian Broudie and the Lightning Seeds website

http://www.thelightningseeds.net/

CAST

Cast – Walkaway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iuyudmu2Fkg

I can’t put it better than a comment on You Tube:

‘This is one of the greatest British pop songs every recorded.

John Power's best work is equal to that by any of the great

British songwriters. This song could only come from

Liverpool.’

Hadn’t you heard, we don’t just do everything first here, we

do it better than anywhere else.

I remember the old Liverpool goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar

returning to Anfield with Southampton. It was the last time he

193

ever played at Anfield. And as he turned and waved to the

crowd for the final time, this song came out slowly over the

PA, embracing the whole crowd in a wave of nostalgia for the

good times now long gone. Very moving. And I gave old Bruce a

little wave as he went on his way. And he waved back. To me.

And a few thousand others.

Bruce was a character. The things he did must have taken years

off my life. I once saw him dribbling the ball out of his box

being chased by any number of opposing Queens Park Rangers’

players before finally getting rid of the ball on the halfway

line. It probably lasted all of five seconds. It seemed like

five years. I always remember what he said in the interview

after: “I knew I was in trouble when I heard the crowd go

quiet.” He was. And we did. And Liverpool won. As usual. As I

say, nostalgia for the good times. I’d walk a mile down the

road with the fans, talking about the game in the Liverpool

night air, then catch the bus home, still talking about the

game, and finally get home, to talk about the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfoIurDhtOI

Oh, those wayward Liverpudlian dreamers!

Cast - Live The Dream

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lVYAG0z380

Somebody's after me194

I can't pretend to be

Something I know I'm not

And when they come for me

I'll just let them be

Because all that I need today

Is all I need

I just wanna be thinking

Thoughts that I think

Dreaming my dreams and drifting within

I don't know where I'm going

But I know where I been

Come on

Look within

Live your dreams

Someone will always be

More than I'll ever be

So then I'll be myself

And when they come for me

I'll just let them be

'Cause all that I need today

I need today

Oh, you're big enough

Tough enough

Now, I begin to see

Girl, you gotta lay your love on me

It's big enough, so far enough195

As far as my eyes can see

Girl you better lay your love on

Lay your love on me

Like a bird without wings

Like a bird who don't sing

Like a fish on dry land

Like I'm swimming in sand

Like I'm falling for you

Official site of Cast

http://www.casttour.com/

THE FARM

The Farm - All Together Now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7MwXniOD44196

Remember boy that your forefathers died

Lost in millions for a country's pride

They never mention the trenches of Belgium

When they stopped fighting and they were one

A spirit stronger than war was working that night

December 1914 cold, clear and bright

Countries' borders were right out of sight

They joined together and decided not to fight

All together now

All together now

All together now

In no man's land, together

All together now

All together now

All together now

In no man's land, together

The same old story again

All those tears shed in vain

Nothing learnt and nothing gained

Only hope remains

All together now

All together now197

All together now

In no man's land, together

All together now

All together now

All together now

In no man's land, together

All together now

All together now

All together now

In no man's land, together

All together now

All together now

The boys had their say, they said no

Stop the slaughter and let's go home

Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go

The boys had their say, they said no

Stop the slaughter and let's go home

Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go home

All together now

All together now

All together now

In no man's land, together

198

All together now

All together now

All together now

In no man's land, together

The boys had their say they said no

Stop the slaughter and let's go home

Let's go, let's go, let's go home

The boys had their say they said no

Stop the slaughter and let's go home

Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go

home

All together now

All together now

All together now

In no man's land, together

All together now

All together now

All together now

Here's a song that I loved from the very first, "All Together

Now" by The Farm. The fact that Peter Hooton is a mad keen

Liverpool fan helps, of course, but it's one of those one in a

million songs that strikes the right chord.199

The title of the album this single came from was enough to

spark my interest – Spartacus. The song itself and how it has

been interpreted and used over the years manages to thread

together many of the key themes of my life: peace, unity,

commonwealth, socialism, solidarity, football. The song was

inspired by the unofficial truce called by soldiers on the

Western Front during Christmas 1914. Rather than fight, the

soldiers decided to play football. As writer Peter Hooton

explains: ‘The unauthorised spontaneous truce 100 years ago

was a unique act of humanity amidst the horrors of trench

warfare. A triumph of humanity over conflict. There are

numerous accounts of British and German troops greeting each

other, conversing, swapping presents and even playing football

in No Man’s Land on Christmas Day 1914. On some parts of the

front the ‘truce’ lasted several days and in some instances

well into January as soldiers on both sides were reluctant to

resume the fighting.’

200

The song is about peace, unity, harmony, hope, reconciliation,

home. The lyrics No Man’s Land were put to the music of

Pachelbel's Canon to produce the final song, All Together Now.

It’s an anti-war song, certainly, but it is more than that, it

has a positive message, affirming the love of home and urging

us to go home, to make a home. As Hooton says: ‘there is a lot

of debate about the causes of the First World War, who was to

blame and emphasis on the horrors and futility of the tactics

employed but we would like people to concentrate on this

incredible moment when ordinary soldiers came together. This

event should be cherished and publicised as an incredibly

unique moment in the history of conflict throughout the ages.’

All Together Now was a big hit, reaching no.4 in the UK chart

of December 1990. The song was revived as a song for the World

Cup held in Germany in 2006. Which makes some kind of sense.

The soldiers who inspired the song had swapped fighting each

other to playing football together. Which is an altogether

more civilised way of settling differences and celebrating

unity.

One of the lines in the song says: ‘A spirit stronger than war

was at work that night, December 1914, cold, clear and

bright.’ It sounds like a religious claim, peace on earth at

Christmas time. For Hooton, ‘It's about the working classes

being sent to war. People across a divide who probably had

more in common with each other than the people who had sent

them to war in the first place.’ It’s about identifying a201

common cause and forging unity on that basis, rejecting the

false ideas and imperatives that divide us against each other

and take us further and further away from home.

Despite being an anti-war song, it has struck a chord in the

military. That shouldn’t be so surprising. After all, soldiers

will be thinking of home, family and friends when engaged in

conflict, they more than anyone will respond to the call

‘let’s go home.’ A certain Corporal Jay Wheeler, a serving

soldier in the Queen's Royal Hussars and now the Reservists,

identifies himself as The Farm's number one fan for this

reason. At the end of every tour, he’d insist the song be

played at the squadron party, and in time it became a regiment

custom.

‘When I was in Iraq in 2008 I was part of the transition,

teaching Iraqi soldiers British military skills. I thought I'd

inject a bit of fun into it, so I got this squadron of Iraqi

soldiers to sing the chorus. And it worked - because it

brought barriers down.

‘I know it's an anti-war song. I've got no gripes with that

and I'm not about to argue with Peter Hooton's philosophy on

All Together Now - but the sentiment, 'let's go home', it just

works for us.’

You see, the song is anti-war, but not against the soldiers.

Is this possible? Yes. The politicians and the business

interests behind them – the puppets and the puppet masters –202

the people who divide in order to conquer, are another matter

entirely.

Corporal Wheeler says: "Life throws so much crap at us from

time to time. That song, in whatever form, will kind of put

the world to rights in its own little way."

So, maybe, whilst the message may have been somewhat clouded

by the song's use as a football song, it is still present. And

still having a positive effect. Peter Hooton describes going

to a school in Bootle, Merseyside, and seeing the children

read out World War I poetry and sing the song. ‘That was very

moving for me, very poignant.’

And that’s the kind of positive energy that goes round and

round and multiplies, generating a spirit of peace, unity and

life that, ultimately, must prevail over war and division. We

join together to make the world a better place to live for all

of us.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11902124

Dr Nick Megoran, a political geography lecturer at Newcastle

University, told the Sunday ECHO: “I loved The Farm when I was

a teenager. In late 1990 as the US and UK were preparing to

attack Iraq, they released that single both to remember the

truces but also to oppose the planned invasion.

“The song voiced an unease I was struggling to express myself

and has stayed with me all my life.203

“The resource pack includes lessons which use that song, so I

hope that schools around Liverpool will find it particularly

useful.”

Dr Megoran said: “The Christmas truces are worth commemorating

because they are simply so extraordinary and evocative in

themselves, grabbing the imagination of even young children.

“It was incredibly brave of those men to refuse orders and we

should be telling as many children as possible about them.”

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/liverpool-

band-farms-together-now-7844442

We should, by now, have learned all about war, Lord knows

we've had enough of them. How many millions have lost their

lives as a result of war since 1900? Death on this scale is

not accidental, it is systematic, and can only be achieved by

deliberate institutional purpose. "Of all the enemies to

public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because

it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the

parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known

instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the

few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of

continual warfare." (James Madison, Political Observations,

1795).

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research

Institute (SIPRI)’s Year Book 2013 summary on military

expenditure:204

World military expenditure in 2012 is estimated to have

reached $1.756 trillion, which amounts to some 2.5 per cent of

world gross domestic product (GDP). That may seem small as a

percentage, but bear this in mind, a small number of countries

spend the largest sums, and initiate trends in expenditure

that other countries follow. The 15 countries with the highest

spending account for over 81% of the total;

The USA is responsible for 39 per cent of the world total,

distantly followed by the China (9.5% of world share), Russia

(5.2%), UK (3.5%) and Japan (3.4%).

We need a new concept of security, shifting resources away

from protecting power interests through accruing means of

destruction and towards creating a liveable, sustainable

environment that facilitates human health, well-being and

flourishing.

Anyway, back to the song. It's all about stopping all this

fighting on the planet and going home, joining together and

deciding not to fight - all together now, building a home

worth living in. Only hope remains. And that's all we need for

love and justice to prevail in the end. Let's go home!

It’s up to us to put an end to this ‘same old story’ of

politics, the destructive cycle of attack and counter-attack,

war and more war and endless preparation for war. ‘Let’s go

205

home’, let’s get out of our political trenches and reclaim

this no-man’s land as our own home.

So come on then, all together now! ‘Let's go, let's go, let's

go, let's go, let's go, let's go home!’

The Farm - Love See No Colour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=N7YXxF8EKwA&list=PLOrDHyxbqOwyZAFqS9CRPD9FU_iJyekqp&index=31

Love it see no colour, friendship is the same.

Love it has no border, hear the wise man sing.

The Farm - Groovy Train

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In75rgGsp4A

Get on board, Scousers dancing!

What happened to the attitude, when you broke all the rules?

The Farm – Rising Sun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oKPFQulFPI

The Farm band’s Official Website!

http://www.thefarmmusic.co.uk/

https://www.facebook.com/TheFarmLive

206

THE BOO RADLEYS

The Boo Radleys - From the Bench at Belvidere

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o509aAEZiw

A top ten hit with Wake Up Boo! and a no.1 UK album with Wake

Up in 1995. To me, they are one of the ‘new’ bands. But that’s

now twenty years ago. Doesn’t time fly when you are having

fun? I make a distinction between clock time and real time.

Clock time is measured by numbers and minutes, real time is

measured by experiences. If you are ill, in pain, miserable,

time drags, and a minute can seem like an hour. ‘What took

you?!’, you shout at someone who took just five minutes to

return from the chemist with some medicine or other. ‘Where

did the time go?’ you ask yourself when you realise two

decades have gone by and it seemed like only yesterday. Which

is interesting. A happy life is lived in subjective time, but

is over almost as soon as it is begun. A long life is a

miserable life, which no one wants to live.

207

Moving on.

THE LA’S

In Search of The La's: A Secret Liverpool is a biography about The La's

written by M.W. Macefield, published in 2003 by Helter Skelter

Publishing. It’s the theme I’ve been taking for the whole

Liverpool music scene of my period, since 1980. The La’s may

well have written Liverpool’s anthem. Timeless Melody gets to

the heart of Liverpool music, that never-ending melody that

will run as long as the river Mersey. Liverpool music is a

combination of melodic core, surrealism and populism.

The La's - Timeless Melody

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eus8vzjBVaQ

Whenever the thought reminds me208

Breaking a chain inside my head

The melody chord unwinds me

The rhythm of life unties me

Brushing the hands of time away

If you look in your mind

Do you know what you will find

Open your mind...

Even the words they fail me

Oh look what it's doing to me

I never say what I want to say

It's only a word believe me

If only the world could see me

I promise I'd send the word away

If you look with your eyes

Do you know what you will find

Open your mind

Open your mind. And open your eyes. The secret people are out

there. Look with your imagination, and trust your heart.

You’ll find them.

209

The La’s - Way Out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvlNGRq8iXg

The La’s are important because they really marked a departure

from the synth-based pop of the previous decade – ‘my’ music –

and the start of the new Liverpool boom. I say ‘new’. It

marked a return to the sound of The Beatles. And it’s

significant that in 1995 we saw the ‘return’ of the Fab Four

with Anthology and a new single, Free as a Bird. Anthology

impressed more than Free as a Bird, but the accompanying video

worked wonderfully well as a nostalgia that reminded us of our

roots. But the La’s were more important, I’d say, because they

showed Liverpool music to be alive and thriving, that old

creative spirit still at work. You can’t live in the past,

210

only die there. Nostalgia can trap you, suffocate you, by

denying you a future, a future that is in your own hands.

The La’s – Timeless Melody

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cveh8ycOgA

I’m about to come to this ‘timeless’ Liverpool melody. For

now, let’s just note the return to the guitar-based beat group

sound. The eighties synth-pop has dated as a result of the

technology. I say that Liverpool melody runs through that

music. But The La’s represented a clear and unambiguous return

to that ‘timeless’ Merseybeat sound. I love it. All I would

say is …. The Beatles … Have a listen and you’ll hear what I’m

getting at.

The La's - Feelin'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBwU7cPcGn0

The La's - There She Goes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht0GxBFUvNo

https://www.facebook.com/thelasofficial

211

SPACE

If these Liverpool bands were sticks of rock, they’d have

‘melody’ running right through them. And the melodic core at

the heart of the music made by Space identifies them as

Liverpool immediately. As timeless as the river Mersey. Oh,

and there’s tonnes of Liverpool quirkiness and oddness. I’ve

seen comment on the band’s ‘over-the-top, dark humoured

lyrics’. There’s humour aplenty, that’s for sure, but it makes

light of ‘dark’ things. As for ‘over-the-top’, it’s all just

every day tales of every day folk. In my job, you get to see

all kinds of people doing all kinds of things – social

outcasts and misfits who fit in rather well, broken

relationships, the mentally ill, even the odd serial killer.

I’ve met ‘em all. Even the serial killer, who was also a

public figure, well known on local radio. I can tell you some

interesting things about Yukka plants too. I’ve been door-to-

door all over Merseyside doing various jobs, sales, mailing,

building. Doing odd jobs over the years, you come to learn

that, behind the faces put on for public show, people and

places are actually quite ‘odd’, and that ‘odd’ is actually

quite normal. I just think they express it more here.

212

As for Space, they came, they were strangely compelling with a

weirdness that could seem to outsiders as put on a bit, but

which made perfect sense to me, they gained a certain cultish

status with Spiders, and then toned it down in a more pop-

friendly way, split up, reunited and, well, had their moment,

had their splash in the river, and made a big splash too. They

were odd, quirky, off-beat. I liked them.

Space – Neighbourhood

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4otgudPdtOA

More Liverpool ‘otherness’, if you can cope with it. Anyone

can talk the talk, but to survive here you have to walk it.

There are all kinds of different people here, ‘come stay a

while in my beautiful neighbourhood’. All shapes and sizes,

every kind of people. Who lives in a house like this? You’d be

surprised. ‘In 666 there lives a Mr Miller; He's our local

vicar and a serial killer.’ You see, I’m quite normal here.

Who lives in a house like this

Who lives in a house like this

In number 69 there lives a transvestite

He's a man by day, but he's a woman at night

There's a man in number 4 who swears

He's Saddam Hussein

Says he's on a chore to start the

Third world war213

Oh if you find the time

Please come and stay a while

In my beautiful neighbourhood

In 110 they haven't paid the rent

So there goes the TV with the repo men

In 999 they make a living from crime

The house is always empty

Cos they're all doing time

Oh if you find the time

Please come and stay a while

In my beautiful neighbourhood

My neighbourhood

My my my beautiful neighbourhood

My neighbourhood

My my my beautiful neighbourhood

Who lives in a house like this

Who lives in a house like this

In number 18 there lives a big butch queen

He's bigger than Tyson and he's twice as mean

In 666 there lives a Mr Miller

He's our local vicar and a serial killer

Oh if you find the time214

Please come and stay a while

In my beautiful neighbourhood

My neighbourhood

My my my beautiful neighbourhood

My neighbourhood

My my my beautiful neighbourhood

Who lives in a house like this? (Who lives here man?)

Who lives in a house like this?

Oh they want to knock us down

Cos they think we're scum

But we will all be waiting

When the bulldozers come

In a neighbourhood like this

You know it's hard to survive

So you better come prepared

Cos they won't take us alive

Oh if you find the time

Please come and stay a while

In my beautiful neighbourhood

My neighbourhood

My my my beautiful neighbourhood

My neighbourhood

My my my beautiful neighbourhood

215

And if you are still inclined to think this an exaggeration,

think again. Here is Liverpool writer Paul de Noyer on his own

beautiful neighbourhood.

‘The street where I first lived was Belmont Road, near

Liverpool Football Club. As a child I watched, from an

upstairs window, the crowds stream down towards Oakfield Road

and the Kop. But I keep discovering things about my street. At

one end lived the future comic Alexei Sale. His mum was the

lollipop lady outside my school. Across the road, the young

Elvis Costello would come to visit his relatives. A few doors

down from me lived Neil Aspinall, who was the Beatles’ roadie

and still runs Apple. A few doors the other way is a flat

where Echo and the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes first

took shape in shambolic rehearsals. Ten doors to the right of

mine was a big nightclub, the Wooky Hollow, in the middle of a

row of houses. And at the far end of the street was a park,

Newsham, in whose public lavatories Holly Johnson had his

first homosexual encounter.

And that’s no more than an ordinary residential street.’

(Paul de Noyer 2002: 4).

I can’t beat that, but a Hollywood actor was born at the top

of our road, I went to school with rugby internationals, both

league and union, and there’s always that serial killer.

Space - Me And You Versus The World

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuZ8VYze37k216

A beautiful and quite touching love song which possesses such

a rare delicacy, beginning with the line ‘I first met you

hanging knickers on the line …’

‘We're together we shall never be apart

You took a chance on a loser like me

But you never let me down

And whether we were in heaven or hell

I know it's better than separate cells

Now we know it's us versus the world now

Me and you against the world now

Look up there in the sky now

See the stars well they're shining just for us

Hey now me and you against the world now

Look up there in the sky now

See the stars

Well they're shining just for us.’

And oddballs like me find that very moving indeed. After all,

what more could anyone want?

Space - Ballad Of Tom Jones

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9zL9wlMvZE

Wicked. The ‘B’ side was Now She’s Gone …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJbNEJ4gPWA

217

‘She took my clothes, my passport and my papers

And then she told my darkest secrets to the neighbours

Cos when she left, she wasn't alone

Somebody else had taken my throne

Another man, or could I be wrong?

It was a woman who looked just like James Bond.’

You live and learn. Well, you live. For a while.

Space - Female Of The Species is deadlier than the male

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-wIvsZBFhQ

Nevertheless, I am still standing.

And that begs another question – where are the girls!?!

I don’t actually remember any female artists as part of the

new sounds coming out of Liverpool in the 1980s. There must

have been some, at least one. I can’t recall any. I can

remember DJ Janice Long on Radio 1 raving about the Liverpool

bands. Is Janice the only woman in Liverpool?

218

They turned up in the end. And very good they are too.

KATHRYN WILLIAMS

Kathryn Williams is someone I rate highly. She is Newcastle

based, but Liverpool born. And what she says about her 2013

album Crown Electric encapsulates the appeal of her songs and

her singing.

“The nice thing about the album is I haven’t intentionally

made it accessible but people who have listened to it have

said ‘I really feel like that song was for me.’ That’s such a

compliment. Once the songs get released they are no longer

mine they start belonging to other people, it’s a lovely

feeling that people take them to heart as their own.”

219

Her voice is gentle like soft breezes, or water falling down a

mountain stream. But precise and perfectly measured too,

establishing the meaning of each lyric.

Kathryn Williams - Heart Shaped Stone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI7xg-IcaHs

We climb into bed with the lights turned out,

Working so hard I’m all burned out.

All the times you’re on your own,

Looking on the beach for a heart shaped stone.

We are thinking, the distance in us now, so sick of sinking.

Outside world mirrors my heart;

Cold rain has torn the sky apart.

All around the tide is low

…. We ebb and flow ….

Known for an introspective, delicate, acoustic style, Crown

Electric might be Kathryn Williams’ most immediately

accessible record to date, breezy and light with heartfelt,

wistful, occasionally bittersweet lyrics. The title Crown

Electric helps too. As a dyed-in-the-wool fully paid up Elvis

fanatic (and, for fans of Declan McManus!, I mean THE Elvis),

I immediately saw the connection with Elvis in the title. Now

that’s the kind of thing that always succeeds in drawing me

in. Williams explains what lies behind the title.220

“It’s from a lyric on the song Gave It Away, because Elvis

drove trucks for Crown Electric before he was the King. Never

knowing which way light would shine on destiny’s wings. I had

quite a few titles and I felt Crown Electric was saying the

right sort of thing for this record. It feels nostalgic, it

also feels strong and sounds like the name of a classic

album.”

And that’s a rather good way to describe the whole show, kids

from Liverpool setting off into an uncertain world, loaded

with talent and ambition and taking flight on dreams nurtured

in adverse circumstances. Taking a chance, taking a risk,

backing your talent, and most of all doing what they enjoy

doing. There’s the lesson. Whatever you do in life, enjoy

doing it, because you could be doing it a long time.

Living into an unknown future, embracing the unknown and the

uncertain as life’s mystery. ‘Never knowing which way light

would shine on destiny’s wings.’ Fate up against your will,

certainly; but your will up against fate. No one can know in

advance how that will play out. Playing it out is the stuff of

life. And it goes where it goes.

Kathryn Williams - I started a joke

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wzsS5EJtqQ221

Kathryn Williams - In a broken dream

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfC140LB8cQ

Every day I spend my time drinking wine, feeling fine...

Waiting here to find the sign that I can understand, yes, I

am.

In the days between the hours, ivory towers,

Bloody flowers push their hands into the air...

I don't care if I ever know, there I go.

Don't push your love too far.

Your wounds won't leave a scar.

Right now is where you are...

In a broken dream

Did someone bow their head?

Did someone break the bread?

Good people are in bed before nine o'clock.

On the pad before my eyes, paper cries, telling lies,

The promises you gave from the grave of a broken heart...

Hmm

Every day I spend my time drinking wine, feeling fine...

Waiting here to find the sign that I can understand, yes, I

am.

222

I sit here in my lonely room...

Don't push your love too far.

You know your wounds won't even leave a scar.

Right now is where you are...

In a broken dream!

And don't forget what I said?

Here she is raving about books, poems and Sylvia Plath.

Kathryn Williams: ‘Sylvia was a big shadow over my writing’.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jun/14/kathryn-williams-

sylvia-plath-was-a-big-shadow-over-my-writing-hypoxia-

interview

Born in Liverpool in 1974, Williams always loved books. “I was

one of those really annoying Morrissey teenagers, taking

myself off to the graveyard to read all the books teenagers

read.” She remembers enjoying The Bell Jar, but forgot about

its power in the intervening years. “You end up just having an

idea of it, because [Plath] became this strange sort of icon

and persona, because of killing herself, because of Ted

Hughes, and because she was beautiful.” The pre-gig dinner

arrives; Williams clasps her fork like a sword. “It’s like

she’s become this shorthand of those three things. Here’s the

sexy, depressing writer poster girl! And that’s crazy… she’s

still so underrated in terms of the content of what she did.”223

Kathryn Williams website

http://kathrynwilliams.co.uk/

CANDIE PAYNE

Candice "Candie" Payne (born 19 December 1981 in Liverpool …

There’s something about those bare facts that make me feel

rather … well, I remember December 1981 very well indeed. Then

again, the fact that Payne sings 60s-inspired pop makes her

familiar to me. I’ll stick to the music.

‘Candie Payne sings songs about love lost, makes you think of

skinny, melancholy girls in 60s eyeliner, tramping

Liverpudlian streets wishing their lovers would give them one

last chance. Her bell-clear voice coos through the224

introspective songs like ‘A Different You’, goes full-throttle

and ragged round the edges on the bigger production numbers

like the title track and the jaunty, distraught ‘Hey Goodbye’.

Her references are Dusty Springfield and The Shangri Las, the

shimmer of old 60s film themes and the women who belted out

Northern Soul in working men’s clubs, but this isn’t a cynical

attempt to jump on the Winehouse bandwagon - less booze-soaked

grief, more cold, dawning clarity.’

https://www.list.co.uk/article/2091-records-candie-payne/

Candie Payne - I Wish

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7WTLDvHcek

Wonderful, but it sets me to thinking – where has Candie Payne

gone? Oddly, the one record of hers that I’d expect everyone

to have heard of – I Wish I Could Have Loved You More – turns

up in 'The Rough Guide to the Best Music You've Never Heard'

by Nigel Williamson (2008). I find this odd because that album

got great reviews, all predicting a great future for Candie

Payne.

‘Brooding and beautiful; the title track of this album is a

gorgeous, smooth pebble of musical delight that takes you to a

place where happiness and sadness meet in a towering

crescendo. The track kicks off this startling debut from the

sister of a Zuton (to her credit not something she has used at

all) and leads to many gems. Payne sings with a genuine225

feeling of heartbreak in her voice and her words reflect this.

In the Morning is an optimistic soul song with a Bond

soundtrack feel. A Different You is bluesy pop with a

delicious edge. Sucessfully creating the fifties vibe that

Emma Bunton has so often fallen short of, Payne has the chance

to become very popular. If any criticism could be pointed her

way, it is that some tracks are slightly too similar, with the

likes of By Tomorrow slipping by in a unmemorable fashion. The

album finishes with the tear-jerking Turn Back Now, and

Payne's voice sails like a falcon across a cloud-filled

valley. An incredible talent to balance the sound of an

optimistic new sunny day with a tearful stare out a rain

soaked window, Payne has a positive future ahead of her.’

[Sean Mcnamara]

http://www.theskinny.co.uk/music/reviews/albums/candie-payne-

i-wish-i-could-have-loved-you-more

Candie Payne - All I Need To Hear

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUHQVwNkGZw

226

The Big House – debut single now available

http://www.the-bighouse.co.uk/

She has an ‘interesting’ website that is well worth having a

look at, Baudelaire quotes and all.

http://candiepayne.bigcartel.com/about

'Common sense tells us

that the things of the earth exist only a little,

and the true reality is only in dreams.'

Charles Baudelaire

I do enjoy these wayward Liverpool dreamers. They have a

better understanding of reality than anyone else.

227

Candie Payne – Big Umbrella

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRIdCeAWuoE

I read a review of this infectious little song which made me

laugh.

‘The idiot-grin on the face of this song might only be

acceptable in the first week or so of summer, when everyone’s

looking smug because they’ve worked out how to leave the house

in just a t-shirt and the football’s still on.’

How sweet to be an idiot …. I’ll keep my idiot-grin all over

my big stupid face if you don’t mind.

'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.

'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here.

I'm mad. You're mad.'

'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.

'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.'

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, ch 6

1:40 ‘we’re all mad here’.

And we are in Wonderland.

Lewis Carroll, real name Charles Dodgson, was born in the

small parsonage at Daresbury in Cheshire near the towns of

Warrington and Runcorn, a stone’s throw from Liverpool, and

the river Mersey. He knew the score.228

‘Liverpudlian speech indicates a playful approach to language

and logic… the port of Liverpool would have heard new words

brought ashore on every tide, refreshing the native fondness

for verbal novelties. ‘Scouse’ itself is one example, probably

from a Scandinavian seafarers’ term for Lapland stew. The

wilful twisting of syllables (‘antwacky’ for antique) is

probably Irish, with a dose of instinctive Surrealism. When

critics thought that John Lennon must have studied James

Joyce, they missed the linguistic roots the two men shared.

Nor was John’s ingenious gibberish entirely drawn from Lewis

Carroll and Edward Lear; Ringo’s way with wordplay (‘a hard

day’s night’, ‘eight days a week’) was nothing special. They

merely grew up in a place where people talk like that, all the

time.’

It was always dangerous to waste time decoding Beatles’

lyrics.. Precision is not a characteristic of this city, where

the word ‘thingy’ is indispensable. “It’s a thingy! A fiendish

thingy!” Cries George in Help! In fact, the Liver Bird itself,

from the civic coat of arms, was only a medieval draughtsman’s

attempt to draw a cormorant. It looks nothing like one.’

(Paul de Noyer 2002: 8-9).

Are You One of Us?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcHVgc-Ycos

229

Well, are you? You should be by now, I’ve given you more than

enough reasons.

Candie Payne - One More Chance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE7RBl2YfOg

How many is ‘one more?’

Hailed ‘the most promising young pop star in the country’ back

in 2007, Candie Payne, critics fell over themselves praising

her 21st century take of sultry sixties pop. But that ties her

down too much. ‘The thing about people like John Barry and

Serge Gainsbourg,’ she says in reference to her influences,

‘is their music sounds so timeless, and it still sounds modern

now. That’s why it’s used so much in samples, because it still

cuts it today. That’s something I’m inspired to try and

achieve, so the sound I tried to get is more timeless rather

than retro.’

Fiona Shepherd identifies a more obvious influence, one so

obvious that it is prone to be overlooked – Liverpool.

230

‘One wonders if Payne would have made the same journey into

the land of kohl eyeliner and backcombed hair if she didn’t

hail from Liverpool. That city engaged in an ongoing love

affair with the beatpop sound which sprang from its nightclubs

in the 60s, and, via a certain fab foursome, influenced the

course of popular music. While Echo and the Bunnymen, The

Teardrop Explodes and their kin spent much of the early 80s

creating a whole new set of musical reference points for the

city, the Mersey sound reverted back to type in a most

beguiling fashion with the arrival of Lee Mavers and The La’s

debut album in 1990. After this it felt that for the greater

part, the Mersey’s musical youth have remained under that

spell. It seems like every new band to emerge from Liverpool

in recent years has taken its cue from pop’s golden decade and

Lee Maver’s finest 37 minutes. Payne is however, quick to

defend her musical brethren.’

231

‘Bands in Liverpool are just into really good music,’ she

explains. ‘Melody seems to be quite important to Scouse bands.

Maybe it’s the Irish influence, strong melodies and really

nice parts in songs.’

There’s no ‘maybe’ about any of that, it all runs through the

city’s ever-resurgent grassroots music scene, and Payne is

immersed in it.

https://edinburghfestival.list.co.uk/article/2663-show-girl/

Candie Payne - Why Should I Settle For You?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfLc__eqOak

There’s other stuff going on here that I am utterly and

hopelessly clueless about. Take the fashion writers who draw

attention to Payne's influence, and that of Abi Harding, sax

player with the Zutons, on Liverpool's "underground band

scene", as against the "brassier" style of local WAGs such as

Alex Curran and Coleen McLoughlin (wives of footballers Steven

Gerrard and Wayne Rooney). Sunday Times Style remarked early

in 2008 that the fashionable Korova bar in the city's Fleet

Street "is so cool, you can sense Liverpool evolving from a

city full of in-your-face show-offs into something far more

knowing". Apparently, Payne and Harding and the like are

‘different’ (as in ‘cooler’ and ‘better’) from their brassier

neighbours. ‘Yet, if they're indie, they're still a glossy

version. Peroxide bobs, red lipstick, polka-dot shirts, good

heels ... They are inspired by local success stories such as232

Abby [sic] from the Zutons and Candie Payne – and united in

their dislike of Curran and co ... "Lots of girls think she

[Curran] is it, but it's a pretty sad life to be 25 and only

go shopping”.

Me? I’ll sit this one out if you don’t mind. I like Candie

Payne and I like Abbi Harding fine. But I don’t like any kind

of snobbery and condescension. I don’t like vulgarity much,

but I like impeccably good taste even less. And I don’t like a

concern with taste that differentiates between people. I’ve

come across these brassy, tasteless, vulgar and incredibly

foul-mouthed Liverpool females, and they amount to a whole lot

more than airheads concerned only with shopping. I think there

is a new war underway here, new times of money and fashion and

influence distorting people’s perceptions of who they are and

what they ought to be. But I’d never be too harsh when it

comes to style and taste. Liverpool is as Liverpool does. I’m

sceptical of the taste-makers, whether they are classy or

brassy. And I like that idea that Liverpool never does as it’s

told.

So you tell me. ‘What is it about Liverpool? Is it something

in the water? Why does so much music come from here? Why do

they talk like that? And why don’t the girls wear more

clothes?’ (Paul de Noyer 2002:1).

"Liverpool: a boozy city, comfortable as an old shoe, warm as

a beefy barmaid's red-armed embrace. The city planners have233

turned her natural dark buildings into bleached blondes and

forced her into concrete skirts much too uncompromising for a

girl of her age .... She is a seaport full of all the sinning

ways of such cities but she is also a Celtic city, nicknamed

the Capital of Ireland - the Capital of Wales too - and with

it she possesses all the cockeyed Puritanism of the Celts -

reverse Puritanism, Puritanism through the looking glass. …

Liverpool cannot rub so much as two sentences together without

the sparks of four - letter words flying in the air, and yet

she is moral in a way foreign to the starched-collared

nonconformists of Manchester or the trim-lawned respectability

of the suburban South... Of course ... times have changed. But

where is the moral in all this? Well, Liverpool is a working

class city, a continuous frustration to both the liberal do

gooders and Marxist thinkers: she will not behave herself,

neither will she straighten up and become middle class like

all good little Western working-class cities should, nor will

she become politically conscious and  positively revolting…

Then, too, drink, as the Irish say, is a good man's weakness,

and the more subtle southern form of seduction which sometimes

seep in across the Runcorn Bridge or aboard the Wallassey

Ferry, are not going to trouble you overmuch when it is all

you can do to keep upright on a pavement which is spinning

like a warped old 78 record."

(Stanley Reynolds, City of the Cockeyed Celts, The Guardian 9.3.1974).

234

AMSTERDAM

Amsterdam - Does This Train Stop On Merseyside

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsWFYucvrVw

"Does This Train Stop on Merseyside?"

McKenzie’s soul lies above the ground

In that pyramid near Maryland

Easyjet is hanging in the air

Taking everyone to everywhere

See the slave ships sailing into port

The blood of Africa’s on every wall

Now there’s a layline runs down Mathew Street

It’s giving energy to all it meets

Does this train stop on Merseyside?

235

Alan Williams in the Marlboro Arms

Giving a story out to everyone

Famine boats are anchored in the bay

Bringing in the poor and desperate

Does this train stop on Merseyside?

Boston babies bouncing on the ground

The Riggers beaming out to every town

Why don’t you remember

Can’t conceive what those children done

Guess there’s a meanness in the soul of man

Yorkshire policemen chat with folded arms

While people try and save their fellow fans

Does this train stop on Merseyside?

I share something in common with Ian Prowse, of the Liverpool

band Amsterdam. We are both former students of history tutor

and lecturer Ron Noon, Liverpool’s own Mr Sugar Cube. Here,

Prowse explains to outsiders how he came to write the iconic

song:

http://www.catalystmedia.org.uk/issues/nerve16/

amsterdam_train.php

“Does This Train Stop on Merseyside?”236

“Some songs take 15 minutes to write some take 15 years,

either method can produce a cracker or a stinker. This song

took 15 minutes. Well actually, most of it took 15 minutes,

the final verses I had to think about long and hard.

Not many cities can stand up to this sort of examination in

song and not end up boring the listener. Liverpool is

exceptional though. In England but not of it, facing out

across the sea with its back to the rest of the country, the

once magnificent second city of Empire, as exemplified by its

fantastic architecture. Liverpool people though lived cheek by

jowl with splendour and utter depravity, most ripped from

their motherland across the Irish sea by a great hunger which,

if not facilitated by their new homeland was certainly

exacerbated by it. Liverpool was always thus! A crazy seaport

of the best and worst of all humanity.

I started the song with a rumour, the grave of McKenzie, a

ghost story about a Liverpool merchant who entered into a deal

with the devil. As ghost stories go it’s a brilliant one.

Seaports specialise in these. I go on to contrast the mundane

nature of commercial airliners flying out of John Lennon

Airport with the completely unimaginable actions of a child on

child murder. The dark and still not openly spoken about

horror of Liverpool’s central position in the trade of human

beings as slaves is firmly nailed, those Africans ripped from

their homes and culture and made to work that most pernicious

237

of needless crops, sugar cane, are honourably mentioned in my

song.

The Beatles though not directly mentioned are everywhere in it

really. Mathew Street, the city’s most famous thoroughfare and

home of the Cavern and Alan Williams the very first manager of

the four mop tops who conquered America. He leads the charge

most days in the old pubs like The Marlborough with stories of

Merseybeat past, and the ghosts of long gone four piece beat

groups will forever reverberate around the cellars of this

city.

The final lines of my song concern the awful tragedy at

Hillsborough in 1989 and the dreadful still not admitted

mistakes made by the South Yorkshire police force were the

most difficult to write. It’s still a burning issue within the

city and everyone knows someone who didn’t come back that day.

We all demand Justice for the 96.Listen to my song, then come

and visit. Liverpool is alive, its people are its gold. Be

warned though. It’s just as likely to offend as to thrill. We

have a river running through it and a sea that crashes inside

all of us.”

I quote in full to make the point that if you can all of that

into one song and into one city, you have a masterpiece and a

masterplace.

238

The song was cherished by legendary DJ John Peel, who once

called it his second-favourite track. ‘[John] wasn't capable

of playing [the song] without crying,’ his wife told BBC Radio

1 in a tribute special. "If he played it on the radio he'd

have to put something on straight afterwards because he

wouldn't be able to speak. When he played it at home, he'd

always need a cuddle afterwards."

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/oct/21/john-peel-train

This is an outstanding song. It is nothing less than a modern

day Liverpool folk song. It’s a great tune, and has a chorus

you want to join in with, singing loud and proud. It’s a

psychic geography, and a folk mythology too, starting with the

local legend of William Mackenzie, a notorious gambler who is

239

said to have made a pact with the devil, giving his soul in

return for a winning hand. When he died, he was laid to rest

above the ground in the pyramid tomb, in the belief that that

if he was sitting upright and unburied, the devil couldn't

come to take him. And that’s the most believable part of this

tale of Liverpool. Most of all, though, it tells a tale, a

tale of a city and its people, the experiences that have

shaped both together – the slave ships, the Irish famine,

Beatles, football, the Bulger case, Hillsborough. Its claim to

folk status was confirmed when it was recorded by Christy

Moore on his album "Listen".

Since the Hillsborough Independent Panel produced their

report, the horrible truth that the 96 Liverpool fans crushed

to death at the FA Cup semi-final, April 1989, were victims of

police and emergency service incompetence and negligence, that

that the events of that day were covered up, and that the

reputations of the memories of the 96 were smeared, has

started to sink in. It is worth recalling how many times over

the past quarter of a century the Liverpool families were told

to ‘move on’, were accused of being interested only in

compensation, and Liverpool as a whole was described as ‘self-

pity city’. I have written in full on this elsewhere, and have

been told to keep it for private circulation only until the

new inquests are over. I’d be happy to share this lengthy

document on request. The families of and campaigners for the

Hillsborough victims have given a practical demonstration as

to why it's important to stand up and fight for truth and240

justice, no matter the odds, and no matter the criticism and

abuse that may come your way. This song counts as a bona fide

folk song because it powerfully expresses the reality of

Liverpool as a city of suffering, pain, tragedy, and hope. The

city is formed from the past experiences of the people, and

their stories live on not just in the collective memory but in

the collective character of the living. We neither forget nor

deny the pains of the past, they have shaped the city and the

people and through them they shape those who come after. We

are our experiences. We share our pains and our joys, and we

come through our struggles ever stronger, ever-resurgent

through a living tradition. There is a little bit of each of

us in all of us, past, present and future. And this is a

magnificent addition to the Liverpool songbook. The story goes

on ... Truth and Justice depend on our power to remember, and

forge new memories in the process. We are not prisoners of the

past, but we learn and are inspired by it.

So I’ll end this section with a particularly personal

selection.

Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying - Gerry and The Pacemakers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKta_gRc2gA

This is a special song for me. Gerry Marsden is known for the

Liverpool anthems ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ and ‘Ferry ‘cross

the Mersey’. But this one will forever stand for the magic of

Liverpool for me. It was the night of the Hillsborough241

Disaster, I was returning home from Sheffield, shattered and

bewildered. I had a little sit down on the Liverpool front

gazing out to sea, thinking who knows what. And that night,

listening to Radio Merseyside and the coming to terms with

aftermath, this song came on. And struck the perfect note.

The night time shadows disappear;

And with them go all your tears.

The sun comes up, and with a new dawn and a new day, there’s

always something to do.

It was just a very long night that was to come, and the

shadows still hang. But I was never too concerned with

protocol after that night, I’ll say it as I see it, and do

what I do any way I can. No need to impress people with the

big hats, the people who hand out the gold stars. And if that

put me on the outside, so be it. I can see. Never forget who

you are. Know who you are.

242

MILES KANE

Miles Kane - Don't Forget Who You Are

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zj5RKp0inTw

we won’t let our worries dictate who we are …

my time is now …

don’t forget who you are

I’ll keep the faith

THE CORAL

243

The Coral - Pass It On

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxBfQLHykfI

But don't think this is the end

'Cause it's just begun my friend

And when it's done

And all this is gone

Just find the feeling, pass it on

The Coral - In the Morning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KErHjXpsfwA

The Coral - Dreaming of You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj6QztiHkFY

The Coral - All Of Our Love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fZoHd_VYXk

I’ll be lazy here, and bracket The Coral with The Zutons.

That’s how it seemed in the early 2000’s, and that’s stuck in

my head, however much it may mislead and annoy. Comparisons

are invidious, and that applies here.

244

THE ZUTONS

Rock’n’Soul!

For a while between 2006 and 2008 it looked as though The

Zutons were everyone’s favourite band, two top ten hit singles

and constant airplay and exposure. Their debut album was

called Who Killed … the Zutons. That was in 2004. Since 2009,

they’ve gone from being everywhere to being … well, where are

they? Has anyone spotted them in recent years? The band was a

commercial success, critically acclaimed, hit singles and

albums, nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. Neither

underrated nor overlooked.

Hold on, what is this?

THE ZUTONS' DAVE MCCABE ANNOUNCES NEW ALBUM CHURCH OF MIAMI

Inspired by Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode and Grand Theft Auto

http://www.gigwise.com/news/100428/dave-mccabe-from-the-

zutons-announces-new-album

245

A truly gifted songwriter, Dave McCabe recently signed to

James Endeacott's 1965 Records and his new album Church Of

Miami will be released on 4 September.

How appropriate, and a very Happy Birthday to me on 31st

August!

The album’s central theme concerns humanity's constant

reliance upon and interplay with technology. “It’s about a

fella who falls in love with a robot, but after a while he

realizes that he actually needs some real human contact,”

explained McCabe. “Its scary man, you look at the way

technology is going then you look at the way humanity is going

and it’s like technology is going to start edging ahead of us

and be more advanced than we are as humans. You look at how

little we interact now on a normal level, we just do

everything through our phones, we’re so reliant on gadgets and

stuff you wonder where it ends.”

We’ll see. I just hope the music is good, because as concepts

go, it’s a bit familiar.

What we do have from The Zutons already is truly impressive,

and still sounds fresh a decade on. Critic Craig McLean states

that at first, circa 2002's debut single 'Devil's Deal', The

Zutons seemed like another bunch of 'cosmic Scousers', a

rollicking pub band with Sixties dust in their amps, pitched

somewhere between the La's and the Coral. That good!! But on246

the debut album, Who Killed... the Zutons? (2004), ‘their

voodoo-blues wit and imagination came to the fore. There

weren't many bands who could reimagine Merseybeat as swampy-

bayou-beat.’

The Zutons – Valerie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3xpmfJp0Xc

Combined with the Amy Winehouse cover, 'Valerie' became a

mainstay in the Top 100 airplay charts. ‘No other indie-guitar

band possesses the Zutons' ether-of-pop-culture ubiquity.’

Craig McLean

The Zutons – Confusion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_c2sUArjQk

I’m thinking The Lovin’ Spoonful here.

The Zutons - Don't Get Caught

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU3LquIG20s

The Zutons - Always Right Behind You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc8JczXusnY

This has to be a throwback to the glam-rock era of instant

party classics, and all the better for that.247

The Zutons - You Could Make The Four Walls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bIbtVtY4-Y

The Zutons’ music is quite difficult to pigeon hole. It’s

guitar based, and has a clear pop sensibility, hence the

ubiquity of the band when they hit. But it can be dark,

psychedelic, bittersweet. Popular, but eccentric. They are

described as ‘cosmic scousers’. Sounds good. I just have a

problem with a certain side to the band, certain jaundiced

attitudes that come out in the lyrics. The music reminds me a

lot of the sixties, Lovin’ Spoonful etc etc. But The Zutons’

last album charted how far we have come since those optimistic

times, with McCabe portraying a pretty nasty view of modern

society, taking pot shots at people who have been the victims

of an increasingly iniquitous society, joining in with right

wing definitions of the undeserving poor - Family of Leeches,

Asbo-wielding scallies, people on benefits portrayed as

scroungers: "You're a parasite, you're a virus/ Like a lepper

[sic] or a tapeworm."

Call that what you like, right-wing, dumb, cliché ridden. I

just think it’s lazy, and makes me question what the music is

rooted in.

So here’s to the new album, and a seemingly new sound. Paul

Lester summed up the band’s predicament in 2008, when writing

about Valerie: ‘it is by far their best song, the one that248

achieves everything they set out to do. It also makes you

wonder where the Zutons can go next.’

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/jun/10/popandrock

God save The Zutons!

http://vinylmanifesto.com/god-save-the-zutons/

We shall see soon enough. But there’s been a few years’

absence now, they have to ‘make it’ again.

Oh, there’s a million more bands and songs to cover, and a

billion more things to say. I can write forever, but Liverpool

beats even me. Let the river roll on, and jump in wherever you

can. I have to go now, but I’ll leave with a couple more

tracks, a somewhat rambling conclusion and an Epilogue that

makes as much sense of it all as is possible. You have to live

it rather than write it. And there’s a list of 100 Songs at

249

the end, one per artist, that gives some indication of why

Liverpool has earned the name of ‘the Singing City’. You may

not have heard of most of these acts, but you ought to have.

But I’m happy to have them as my own secret, my own secret

world. The door is open, but the keys of the kingdom are not

for all. It’s a world of hope, imagination and dream, and if

you have none, you will see and hear nothing.

Care - Whatever Possessed You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QetHSWC-W8Y

The Monkey Steps - Next In Line

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSt-cIHhl0Q

A CONCLUSION … AS IF THERE COULD EVER BE ONE. There’s a river running through the city, and that is endless.

The Pool is Cool. But you know that by now.

Pete Wylie giving a tour of Liverpool in 1985

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzRt9kwhc-4

I like Wylie’s line here that here is where we would form our

plans for world greatness. We all have our own little places

for scheming and dreaming. I remember world revolution being

plotted over a cup of tea in Molly’s Kitchen up on Cheapside,250

Liverpool. And then all would scurry back to the Poly on

Tithebarn Street for lectures, afraid of being late and

getting a good ticking off. I don’t think Lenin would have

left it at that.

I remember the days, the year I started my ‘official’ life as

hard working, earnest, straight A student in Liverpool.

The Mighty WAH! - Heart As Big As Liverpool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYOVIc1pwR4

The 1st single release from Liverpool based singer Thomas Lang

in years...

He’s still going strong on this August Day. And so am I.

Going, that is. And now gone.

Thomas Lang | August Day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPRMoKxDRug

JOHNNY KENNEDY

Johnny Kennedy – Stay in Your Own Backyard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQHXrnFbBo8

Sad, sentimental old me, and Liverpool, sad, sentimental old

city. I have to have this one, ‘me ma’s’ favourite. I remember251

this being played to death back home. There was nothing more

likely to get me fleeing my own backyard than the opening

lines to this song. Oh no!! Not this one again!!

Johnny Kennedy was sound, though. JKJD as he called himself,

making fun of the fact he was a disc jockey who could never

quite cope with the complex technology that comes with disc

jockeying, like turntables, and putting the right side of the

right record on, at the right time. Complicated technical

stuff like that. Pushing buttons and CDs was the end of him.

But I liked him all the same. Nice man, funny man, and a

Liverpool fan to boot. I must have had a thousand mentions on

his show over the years. And I still have my mother’s well-

loved, tremendously over-played copy of this, a treasured

possession. It brings a tear to a glass eye. And if you don’t

have a glass eye, glass eyes can be provided.

From Top of the Pops 1965

Gerry & The Pacemakers - Ferry Cross The Mersey (1965)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08083BNaYcA

I’ll end with a comment from someone on You Tube on some

Liverpool band or other.

“I dunno how the hell I got here but this music is great.”

Sums up my life.

All please be standing for the anthem:

You’ll Never Walk Alone252

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV5_LQArLa0

Party on!

EPILOGUEThe rhythmic pulse of tide time will continue to flow through

the Liverpool veins, and the music, and the story it tells. It

will continue to find new expression to the dialectic of home

and flight, separation and reunion, city and sea, passionate

localism and inspired cosmopolitanism, attachment to place and

dream of the world beyond the horizon. ‘You say Goodbye, and I

say Hello’. In celebrating this music of my youth, I recognise

the danger of being trapped in some no-place between past and

present. Nostalgia is a temptation to be resisted, because it

not only misrepresents the past through the rose-tinted

spectacles of distance in time, it denies you a future. It

denies the very creative spark that produced the very music

being celebrated. It denies the world beyond the horizon. I

love Elvis and I love The Beatles, but I would loathe Memphis

and Liverpool coming to be turned into museums of music,

ossifying the very creative energies that produced them in the

first place.

At the city’s edge, you look out to or up to endless sea and

sky, and the horizons are only as limited as your imagination.

Turning to look in the other direction, inland, and you enter

the industrial world of steel and glass, the cotton factories

and coal mines, and these are set within a much more bounded253

frame of time and place. The world of the industrial

revolution, capitalist modernity, with its time and work

discipline and impersonal bureaucratic order and regulation.

It’s passing now, with all its rational mechanical madness.

Liverpool never quite fitted that world. It is an irregular

place, a place of flow, with a rhythm and a pulse all of its

own.

Living in this endlessly creative world, and understanding

this world as in part a co-creation, we may well come to

appreciate the qualities of those Liverpudlians who described

themselves as ‘independents’. The mechanistic age, with its

fantasies of rational control, regularity and order, is

passing and we are coming to terms with what it is to live

with the uncertain, the unknown and the unpredictable.

Theoretical biologists like Stuart Kauffman are writing about

emergent properties in the ceaselessly creative universe, a

co-created world in which the active role of meaning, value

and agency take us beyond natural physical laws. There is no

regularity of mechanical order and rational control. Well

welcome to my world! My careers officer, after she had stopped

sobbing, and given up placing me in a job, called me a ‘round

peg in a square world’. She couldn’t place me, but she

couldn’t say I was altogether wrong. That square world is

passing now, all its straight lines and linear thinking. My

world? Let’s call it irregular, like time tide, like Liverpool

and the rhythm of its river.

254

Liverpool, a dreamscape caught between here and there, a

permanent desire to be ‘here, there and everywhere’. That

pretty much captures the restless spirit always at home but

never quite at home, the sea connecting all places, all at sea

on the ocean of being, at home anywhere. The Celtic spirit

needs the ocean at its back.

I examine the lyrics and hear in them the voices of the

marginalised, the excluded, those on the outside. We can

create our own truth, not as idle fantasies and empty

illusions but as realities, the realities of our world as a

dreamscape, looking out to infinite sea and sky.

These singers are our dancers of tide time, our maritime

poets.

There were many times when I hung my head and lugged my heavy

heart around living life at half-mast. I am sure I was never

alone in this. ‘We are not a temperate people, are we?’, asks

Ron Noon. No answer necessary. We all know the answer. Big

hearted and highly sensitive, and apt to suffer heavy

emotional bruising. Many a time, evening and night, I would

wander the streets in the company of the walking wounded.

Nothing needed to be said, we recognised ourselves in the

others, the castaways, the deserted ones, the abandoned and

the … not quite hopeless. The wanderings were never aimless.

There was hope in the faces of others, a recognition. A255

recognition that we, the outsiders, were actually inside a

very real and very rich community of our own.

In my head were thoughts, and more often than not words and

music. So you see why I am close to these songs, because I

internalised them, made them part of my character and

identity, and the passions and dramas contained in the songs

became my very own. Here, we are never quite powerless, but

have the ability to create our own world, as reality, not as

fantasy, as fantasy in the process of becoming reality. It’s

about seeing the world with the imagination, trusting your

heart, and ‘getting real’. And the music was integral to this.

I remind myself of how intimately and affectionately I enjoyed

those rarefied, time-transcending moments when the divine

lunacy of the show swept all the obstacles standing in the way

aside, and the caresses of words and music worked a magic that

turned us all into sensual dreamers.

I love to see Liverpool because she makes to sing and dance,

and in doing so, the most trite of observations come to seem

to be the profoundest wisdom: ‘as long as there’s life,

there’s hope’. Liverpool is teeming with life. And is never

without hope.

The most courageous thing to do is give your heart, and the

bigger the heart the greater the courage required. The most

courageous are those who live the hopeless hope, and who256

continue to believe that they have the right to a real human

relationship, the ones who dream on, the sweetest small smile

on their lips, expressing a lingering memory of a kiss or an

embrace, and the tantalising prospect that tomorrow, when it

comes, will bring something more.

I don’t doubt the greatness of The Beatles. I don’t believe

that ‘it’s over now’, in the words of The Wild Swans’ My Town.

It could be, if we make the mistake of turning our

celebrations of the past into a denial of the future. I read

that new statues of The Beatles are being proposed for the

Liverpool waterfront. (http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/whats-

on/whats-on-news/new-beatles-statues-liverpool-could-9925147).

It’s an attractive image, and no doubt something that will

appeal to the tourists who flock to this part of Liverpool.

It’s good business, locating the city in the global economy,

an update of the maritime economy. I do not think Liverpool

will become a museum as a result, as good as The Beatles and

as ubiquitous as they are. The rhythmic qualities of Liverpool

life and people are still in evidence, the identity of the

place is fluid and cannot be fixed. The people, like the

tides, come and go. Liverpool’s liquidity and rhythmicity is

subversive and anarchic, ever undermining attempts at fixity,

ever flowing. In this city that makes you want to sing, dance

and dream, the city of hope and imagination, I am sure that,

as good as the music has been in the past, even better is to

come.

257

Such a view could be dismissed as a romantic dream by those

acquainted with hard environmental facts. I’m reading this

article that came out today, ‘NASA Says Three Feet of Sea

Level Rise Is Unavoidable. Scientists say coastal cities

around the world are all but certain to face catastrophic

flooding in the coming decades.’

http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/08/27/sea-levels-are-

rising-3-feet-unavoidable?cmpid=tpdaily-eml-2015-08-28

This is not exactly news to us. We’ve known about the threat

to cities like Liverpool for a long time now. Environmental

realities of this kind are inescapable and destined to defeat

the hopes, dreams and visions of even the most ardent of

romantics. We’ve beaten the odds a few times, and been beaten

by them more than a few times, lest it be forgotten. We carry

on in hope and with solidarity and with a burning sense of

justice. But not every cause is won. The great docks struggle

in the mid-1990s says it all. A great cause, but a cause that

was lost. Some causes are won. I am proud to have played my

own small part in the struggle for justice for the 96 victims

of the Hillsborough disaster. And that’s the point. To live in

and act on hope forges a spirit and a collective identity, a

people and a culture. We absorb the events and struggles into

our collective memories, and turn them into character and

identity, and carry on with an indomitable spirit. But fate

cannot always be denied, not even with the strongest will.

Climate change is the Last Great Cause. And it may now be a

lost cause. But we’ll continue to defy the odds until all hope258

is gone. And carry on all the same after. This is the mari-time

city of hopeless hope after all. Succeed or fail, the right

thing to do is the only thing to do.

Those who have seen through the Titanic film from 1997, and

managed to sit through the whole four days it seems to last,

will remember the emotion charged ending when the ship tilts

upwards and slowly sinks until finally, all that we see is the

name of the ship “Titanic” with the name of …. “Liverpool”

underneath. Then the waves engulf one and all. When this scene

comes on, I have a tendency to jump up and shout “Liverpool”.

People absorbed in the emotions of the moment could find that

most annoying. But I have a feeling that as the world starts

to go under, I’ll still be taking a stand on the ground I love

and shouting “Liverpool”. And wondering where that Yellow

Submarine I sat in in 1967 has got to. It could come in handy.

‘We all live in a Yellow Submarine, a Yellow Submarine ….’

Liverpool creates its own truth, first as fantasy, then as

reality.

‘Deep in the heart of the place’, says a local writer, Ronnie

Hughes, ‘a constant pop song keeps getting written, which

lifts its spirits when sometimes it seems nothing else can.

This is not a place that has given up. It’s a proud, boastful

Celtic city where the lads dream big and keep writing a big,

tuney, hopeful song that could only come from Liverpool.’

259

That’s what I’ve been saying. And I’ll carry on dreaming and

carry on singing ‘til the ship goes down. Then I’ll take to

the submarine.

People come I count every one

Faces burning, hearts beating

Nowhere left for us to run

The pictures on my wall

Are about to swing and fall

Love it all, love it all

100 SONGS

As someone who has spent a lifetime drawing up lists to prove

that all the things I like really are the best things in their

field, I can honestly say that the activity of writing a list

is enjoyable, therapeutic, reassuring, pointless, time-wasting

and of no particular importance whatsoever. The selection

process is usually pretty arbitrary and, by definition, highly

selective. I could take my stand on the figures produced by

the Guinness World Records in 2001, which named Liverpool

(pause for a big cheer) the UK capital of pop music (longer

pause for bigger cheer and much applause). Liverpool’s 54 no.1

hits gives the city a chart topper for every 8,485

Liverpudlians. Cardiff came second with 8 no.1’s (that’s 46

less than Liverpool), or one for every 43,750 inhabitants, and260

London so distant a third I can’t be bothered finding the

figures. In fact, had Dublin been eligible, then it would have

come second. You understand now why I quoted from the 1965

documentary on Liverpool called The Singing City, the quote

which emphasised the singing Welsh and the joking Irish. The

Irish sing and the Welsh joke too. Liverpool is a Celtic city,

and these figures give us a Celtic hat-trick.

Either way, I don’t need statistics to tell me what my

favourite songs are. These are personal selections but they do

also reflect a certain judgement on my part. I believe these

songs are of wider than personal significance and possess an

enduring quality. Amongst the well known are the obscure. I

have limited selection to one song per artist. I could fill

the list with 100 Beatles songs easily and, adding the songs

of Beatles’ members as solo artists, this list would be as

good as anything produced anywhere by anyone. That clause in

the selection has caused me some real pain, because most of

these artists have three or more real classics to their name.

But one track per artist keeps it brief. I could produce a

dozen or more lists of similar quality to this one. In fact,

in an idle moment in the future, I may get round to another

list, 100 Liverpool songs vol. 2

So here it is, in absolutely no order at all. Just let it

flow. Like the River Mersey.

261

1

The Beatles - Strawberry Fields Forever

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsziB3cBGKI

‘Living is easy with eyes closed, Misunderstanding all you

see.’

2

The La's There she goes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu2iv-vMKT8

‘This feelin' that remains.’

3

Echo and the Bunnymen - The Killing Moon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWz0JC7afNQ

‘Fate, Up against your will.’

4

Wah! - The Story Of The Blues

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTmA1wQOd78

‘So you try to stop, try to get back up.’

5

The Searchers - When you walk in the room

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XWQCLqab4o

‘I see a summer's night with a magic moon.’

6

The Real Thing - You To Me Are Everything262

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT1iDKkZNYU

‘The sweetest song that I could sing.’

7

Cilla Black - You're My World

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7-QBw862zk

‘I feel a power so divine.’

8

John Lennon - Oh My Love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Kh-IMKDqM

‘Everything is clear in our world.’

9

Gerry and the Pacemakers - Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKta_gRc2gA

‘But stop your cryin' when the birds sing.’

10

Billy Fury Maybe Tomorrow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9JvPGdO2DY

‘Maybe tomorrow, There'll be no sorrow.’

11

The Swinging Blue Jeans - You're No Good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My3jTh6PuSU

‘I've learned my lesson, it left a scar.’

263

12

Ian McNabb - Great Dreams Of Heaven

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ6YqK6P8Ms

‘Countries die, when rockets fly, and cities have been

levelled, And we got great dreams of Heaven.’

13

Frankie Goes To Hollywood – The Power of Love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyoTvgPn0rU

‘This time we go sublime, Lovers entwine – divine, divine.’

14

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – Electricity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y43XLVqjytQ

‘All we need is to learn to save.’

15

The Christians – When the Fingers Point

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjEla5Lw_TI

‘So you find a new home and a new place to hide, Where's

there's peace and shelter from the poison outside.’

16

The Troubadours - Gimme Love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOoz7hCZfpQ

17

Deaf School - Hi Jo Hi264

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mpprg8Bt1U

‘Ain’t you see it in the news, It’s good to be back with all

of you’se.’

18

A Flock Of Seagulls - Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opkzgLMH5MA

‘I wouldn't spend my life just wishing.’

19

Liverpool Express - You are my love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3fXMVjVgmQ

‘And then my heart began to sing.’

20

The Lightning Seeds - Life of Riley

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ugeyuMdBoQ

‘So, here's your life, We'll find our way, We're sailing

blind, But it's certain, nothing's certain.’

21

The 23rd Turnoff - Michael Angelo (1967)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd4H9weVqoM

‘Stay in your book, dreamers.’

22

Michael Head – Something Like You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibwytyXxzoU265

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3n9jktaycA

‘So come on get in.’

23

George Harrison - Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-KAvPbO8JY

‘Give me hope, Help me cope, with this heavy load.

Trying to, touch and reach you with, Heart and soul.

24

Jimmy Campbell - Don`t Leave Me Now (1970)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dErjA8Kj3YY

25

Speed with Monica Queen - Good Luck Charm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnbG5ORmgxc

‘The things that look so good, don’t always go to plan.’

26

The Lotus Eaters - The First Picture Of You (1983)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEE-Hl80fFk

‘flood the world deep in sunlight, break into the peaceful

wild.’

27

Cast – Walkaway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iuyudmu2Fkg

‘Now you must believe me, you never lose your dreams.’266

28

Elvis Costello 1983 – New Amsterdam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfK1_FBTMtA

29

Lori & the Chameleons – Touch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5-H_Lqfm24

30

The Teardrop Explodes - Reward (1981)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNHc56y0POU

31

The Cherry Boys - Kardomah Café 1983

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V61WrhDgwkI

32

The Wild Swans - Bible Dreams (1988)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRNTsX-BPxA

‘But God has left this world bereft and the scars remain.’

33

Black / Colin Vearncombe - This is life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PskatLfJS5U

‘You feel tired but you can't sleep, feel so hungry you can't

eat.’

267

34

The Merseybeats - Sorrow 1963

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6zPVLkpdpA

35

China Crisis - Working with fire and steel (1983)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ7vX7xX0G8

‘To be workers of red.’

36

The Coral - Dreaming Of You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amJNTsfl8MU

‘Up in my lonely room.’

37

Space – Neighbourhood

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE8ER2bobIc

‘Oh if you find the time, Please come and stay a while, In my

beautiful neighbourhood.’

38

It's Immaterial - Driving Away From Home

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypadKraAb1s

‘It's only thirty nine miles, And forty five minutes to

Manchester.’

39

Thomas Lang - The Longest Song268

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv8EcejYtAs

40

Cook da Books – Keep on Believin’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVIWesVlEcY

41

The Farm - All Together Now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buJ2DZZHHAI

‘Let’s go home.’

42

Billy J Kramer & The Dakotas - Bad To Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CMX0mCFYJ4

‘So the birds in the sky won't be sad and lonely, 'Coz they

know that I've got my one and only.’

43

Pale Fountains - Thank You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM4Y6rjeNlE

‘And God say right and I'll be there in time, There's just

something for me.’

44

Johnny and Marie - Up and Running

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXM8qQ_z5L8

45269

The Reverb Brothers - Someone's Selling off the Country

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdpC-8ycI0s

‘Someone that thinks they got it all worked out, They can’t

work out what to do about me.’

46

Miles Kane - Don't Forget Who You Are

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zj5RKp0inTw

‘We won't let our worries dictate who we are.’

47

The Zutons - Don't Get Caught

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU3LquIG20s

‘In my old clothes, I lay there just dreaming.’

48

Alternative Radio - Concertina Ballerina (First Night, 1986)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYToBlm_3-A

49

Brian Atherton – Contrasting Strangers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qva7aa57tHI

50

Amsterdam - Does This Train Stop On Merseyside

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsWFYucvrVw

270

51

The Monkey Steps - Next In Line

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSt-cIHhl0Q

52

Kathryn Williams - Heart Shaped Stone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI7xg-IcaHs

53

Candie Payne - All I Need To Hear

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUHQVwNkGZw

54

Pete Leay & Buster - Juliette

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY9NB0wysxE

55

Pete Wylie – Heart as Big as Liverpool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYOVIc1pwR4

‘(And you are not alone), And I am not alone.’

56

The Care – Flaming Sword

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY-6eZk_FxA

57

Shack - Cup Of Tea

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSPmjrj5GYw271

58

The Last Chant - Run of the dove

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ9aZoxIW7k

59

The Real People – She

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7K-x_Yur2Cg

60

Rain - Taste Of Rain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BloI8KatZNI

‘It is carved in stunning shapes and patterns on my soul,

Carried like dreams to places my body could never go.’

61

Rockin' Horse - Baby Walk Out With Your Darlin' Man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IQ8u6BFKFw

62

Skyray - Mind Lagoons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPmsaVrqT1o

63

The Boo Radleys - Wake up Boo!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJXPTnPmm78

272

64

The Icicle Works - Love Is A Wonderful Colour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1RyvR210m0

65

Peter Coyle – Christmas in Liverpool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13PKkMzBCh0

‘Holding on to sweet memory.’

66

The Crescent - Spinning Wheels

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYnAzLOlrX0

67

The Stands - Here She Comes Again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLVIfIquI2A

68

Howie Payne - The Brightest Star

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHeR6PhWtXU

69

Ringo Starr - It Don't Come Easy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvEexTomE1I

70

a.P.A.t.T. - Give My Regards To Bold St

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izx1BkcDKFA273

71

Marina Van-Rooy - Sly One

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHI01U4LwPA

72

Henry Priestman - Valentine Song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS7OZePOKk8

73

Anathema - Dreaming Light

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk0OF9DdVhw

74

The Dead 60s - Riot Radio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAXMYCeq2Ao

75

Kling Klang - Heavydale

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpI1SSyil6U

76

The Little Flames – Isobella

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wctRde7_rNM

77

The Maybes - Trick of the Light

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufn8IORmVUc274

78

Ooberman - Shorley Wall

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3lTC-njReo

79

The Room - Heat Haze

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7g-dT5za9g

80

Gomez - See The World

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKJJRnuCwF4

81

Alun Parry - My Name Is Dessie Warren

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h290s7Sv0nA

82

Ian Prowse - Lest We Forget

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icbHrlnlJcA

83

Neil Campbell - Mr S Meets JSB

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDMTp0L8bE4

84

Dalek I Love you - Freedom Fighters

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI2YaVFfhW0275

85

Frankie Vaughan - Tower Of Strength

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HzCiqtqxC4

86

Paul McCartney - My Love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SB3x6KtNi4

87

Beryl Marsden - I Only Care About You – 1963

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtpAuIJ40u0

88

Xander and the Peace Pirates - Shadows Acoustic Session

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-iPzI3VHxU

89

The Seal Cub Clubbing Club – Aurienteering

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RuJZreNnS4

90

The Dennisons - Nobody Like My Babe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UGiWMgzytg

91

Scaffold – Liverpool Lou

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV10X3yqY0c276

‘Oh Liverpool Lou, lovely Liverpool Lou. Why don’t you behave

just like other girls do? Why must my poor heart keep

following you? Come home and love me, my Liverpool Lou.’

92

The Ellan Vannin Tragedy - Hugh E. Jones

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK6g46ooCmk

‘She sank in the waters of Liverpool Bay, There she lies until

this day.’

93

Michael Holliday - The story of my life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiTKlU9Ck7o

94

Lita Roza - It's For You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKkdpJ3_d7s

95

Badfinger – Come and Get It

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3TOcw7taBo

96

The Reverbs - Make A Chain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLSo6IJivyk

97277

The Mojos - Everything's Alright

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8tMGdUrpLw

98

Faron's Flamingos - Do You Love Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4yz7rsv-Gs

99

Hambi & The Dance - L'Image Craqué

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWSkPl0qR2k

100

The Liverbirds - Down home girl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wk0_fo5mcSA

Hey, let’s break the rules and have a proper ending!

Deaf School - What a Way to End it All

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU5XxTa-3uw

These tracks all nearly made the list. (As did a million

others by the Bunnymen, the Icicle Works, China Crisis, Colin

Vearncombe/Black etc etc etc).

River City People - What's Wrong with Dreaming?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwGHp6e_f6s278

The Rascals - Out Of Dreams

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgl9TKy0yqU

The Shadow Theatre – Ghosts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kNKxjhMfU8

The Liverbirds - Peanut Butter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-essM3zzcrY

The Stairs - Fall Down the Rain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lds7Z0hvrT4

David Garrick - Dear Mrs Applebee

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-Qaeq4LjHY

Hot Club de Paris – Shipwreck

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NucxlF_eGSM

Apollo 440/Morphine - This is not a dream

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xboSIeESUYI

The Bandits - Take It And Run

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydIm9y6rz80

Shack – Daniella

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-leFNYJgQc

279

Peter Beckett - Baby Come Back

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXVBOse4m4I

The Big Three - What'd I Say (live at The Cavern) – 1963

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRfQ-hm3APs

The Chants - Heaven And Paradise

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6hajucxDP0

The Room - Things Have Learnt to Walk that Ought to Crawl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbzeLaYSK6U

Bass Heads – Is there anybody out there

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXuZx4Xtikg

Supercharge - "You've Gotta Get Up And Dance"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm_xCjjoVMI

Johnny Keating - Theme from Z-Cars [1962)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cQh-b11vcM

Poor Scouser Tommy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHSVLIl-fds

Ringo Starr - Weight of the world

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CONdOuNIv80

‘Ev'ry heart has a hunger.’

280

Two People -Rescue Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWwAZFboLYs

Michael Head & The Strands - It's Harvest Time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kpHMXya-gI

The Foo Foo Band - We're All Bound to Go

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6iEW8rxksY

The Mersey Rigger - Whip Jamboree

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gwv7_JGHYRA

Keep That Wheel A Turning - Trad. Arr.P.M.Adamson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emwRzaiaA9M

High Five – Working for the Man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg1oJO29jk8

Rory Storm and The Hurricanes - I can tell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvFSGPXjfp4

Hughie Jones - Mist Over the Mersey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8maq-xTFMM

Jack Owen – Mist Over the Mersey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11iA7-at7IQ

The Leasiders - Seth Davey281

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6_LCCBZoqg

‘Come day go day, I wish in my heart it was Sunday.’

Gerry & The Pacemakers - You'll Never Walk Alone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV5_LQArLa0

‘Walk on, through the wind

Walk on, through the rain

Though your dreams be tossed and blown

Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart

And you'll never walk alone

You'll never walk alone.’

Paul McCartney - Every Night

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAWh4JWGnUM

The Stairs - Weed Bus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_YTg8G6iwE

Gomez - Get Myself Arrested

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9drameYoMek

Lita Roza - Allentown Jail

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6HgEU18T_s

‘I'll sing you a song, la-da-da-da.’

I’ve just read this on You Tube (an unimpeachable source).

‘Elvis Presleys fave song, Think of me sung by Ken Dodd.’

282

I’ve never read that anywhere else. But it’s a good enough

reason to end on a sentimental note.

Ken Dodd - Think Of Me (Wherever You Are)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R43oso4kwtY

‘So goodnight, and God Bless, wherever you may be, The moon

you can see, it's shining on me.’

283