Downstairs, you can have a baked potato (with choice of fillings £3.50) in a cafe claiming to be sited on the exact spot of the Cavern's stage, where The Beatles played 272 times between 1961 and 1963. When you consider that there are in the Beatle canon songs such as 'Savoy Truffle' and 'Honey Pie' actually named after food, or even some that sound a bit like greasy spoon proprietors, like 'Rocky Raccoon', 'Lady Madonna' or 'Polythene Pam', it's disappointing that the cafe is called Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. They didn't really go that extra mile, did they? At least it wasn't called The Beatles Cafe, I suppose. Outside, there's an Abbey Road pub and another called the John Lennon, though for authenticity, you should sip a bottle of light ale in the Grapes just as the underage Beatles did before they discovered Scotch and Coke. On North John Street, there's the beginnings of the Hard Day's Night hotel, due to open in 2007, with every floor commemorating a different phase of The Beatles' career, from the Cavern Club in the basement to the roof modelled on that last Apple building concert.
But why shouldn't Liverpool boast about The Beatles? Without The Beatles, there are no pop groups; in fact, no pop music in the modern sense of the word. This, after all, isn't Stereophonics or Green Day. This isn't some bunch of lad-rockers going through the moves and the motions. No. These are the lads who invented the moves and the motions. These are the four lads that shook the world as Arthur Dooley's Mathew Street statue has it, a queasy thing with a halo-ed John cradled by 'Mother Liverpool'. Once a landmark, it now has competition from ton upon ton of city-centre Beatle statuary, from Tommy Steele's maudlin 'Eleanor Rigby' to the slightly too small John Lennon lounging on the Cavern wall to, of course, a Yellow Submarine or two.
If Stratford can have its As You Like It tearooms and Salzburg can have its Barber of Seville barbers, then let Liverpool celebrate its most famous sons. The Beatles Story – just follow the sound of the endless loop of Beatle songs from the south end of Albert Dock – tries hard to do this authoritatively and with some grated entertainment cheese liberally sprinkled on top. Again, I can't help wishing that they'd brainstormed a little longer at the slogans meeting. 'Let Me Take You Down' implies you're going to find it depressing – and to be truthful, the Lennon and Harrison tributes aren't chucklesome – and 'Getting Better All The Time' makes it sound as if it was rubbish when it started.
As of winter 2006, it's a very slick operation. You can get an audio guide and hear Epstein and Macca et al actually talking as you look at actual replicas of some clothes they might have worn and guitars they might have played. I'm a bit obsessed with the epochal first meeting at Woolton village fete on 6 July 1957 so I linger in front of the huge blow-up of that famous black and white picture of the Quarrymen. It's not the surly defiance of the young John Lennon that I find especially compelling – though it certainly is; he's the only one in the whole picture staring at the camera – as much as the minor players. There's a young girl smiling in an Easter bonnet and a bloke arranging a floral Union Jack. They go about their breezy business on a sunny suburban holiday afternoon in Liverpool, unaware that the history of the world will be changed today by the meeting of two teenagers a few feet away from them, in the little shed-cum-dressing room behind the stage.
Some exhibits work better than others; the recreation of the Cavern really gives you a feel for how cramped and exciting it must have been in 1962. Brian Epstein's NEMS record shop (now actually a branch of Ann Summers) is perfectly done. Something, though, has gone badly wrong with the First Beatles London Recording Session tableau. The suits are grotesquely outsized, and George's arm has come adrift and it hangs limp and twisted down to his knee. It looks more like Night Of The Living Dead than Birth Of An Era. I found the Through The Lenses Of Lennon mawkish and pointless; though, as you may have guessed, I've little appetite for the New Church Of St John.
The young staff in the gift shop are cheery and helpful. I buy a Revolver mug and am unnerved to see a punter loitering by the tea towels dressed exactly like 1975 vintage Lennon, the circular shades, centre-parted hair and New York City T-shirt. I find this very odd, as odd as seeing a chap dressed as Goebbels in the gift shop of the Imperial War Museum. ('What? This old thing? The jackboots? Oh, I'm just a big fan, I guess.')
You won't be short-changing The Beatles Story if you're in and out in forty minutes. If you have a couple of hours, though, go on the Magical Mystery Tour, a trip on a coach straight from that misunderstood film which takes in most Beatle-related Liverpool landmarks. Beatles music plays throughout, naturally, sometimes slightly out of sync thanks to a recalcitrant cassette deck – they may have an iPod by the time you read this – and Japanese tourists sing along winningly all the way. The tour stops at all the places you'd expect – Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, even the road where Lennon's mum Julia was knocked down and killed – but the latest attractions are the National Trust properties at 20 Forthlin Road and the Mendips, childhood homes of one Paul McCartney and John Lennon respectively.
There was a deal of sniggering about the National Trust buying what, in the case of Forthlin Road, amounts to a mass-produced council house, an 'Intermediate Type Standard Building 5' built in 1952 for little more than a grand. Under the layers of 'modernisation' introduced by well-meaning, houseproud tenants down the years, the Trust were excited about finding 'the original lino' in the young Paul's bedroom. At the time of purchase this prompted yet more sniggering from those who believe that the upkeep of ugly, ostentatious, stately homes in Surrey and Gloucester is the correct use of National Trust money, not council houses in Liverpool.
Mindful of the fact that my soapbox is never far away at moments like this, I'll just say that even if 20 Forthlin Road were merely an example of how upper-working-class families lived in the years after the war – modest, much-loved homes for ordinary people viewing the future with trepidation and hope – it would be worth preserving. But it isn't just that, of course. This is where Paul and John wrote the early Beatles classics 'eyeball to eyeball' on the sofa while Paul's dad was out at work, breaking off for fried egg sandwiches and crafty Woodbines. The grandiose country piles and family seats of our various Lord and Lady Mucks pale into insignificance next to this compact wee house. From this stolid, mildly frumpy little room, the north revolutionised the known world.
As an alternative to this chest-swelling proletarian pride, let me say that some of the town's Beatle industry is pretty unspeakable. The Mathew Street Gallery has original pieces by Lennon as well as Beatle associates Klaus Voorman and Astrid Kirschner but also houses pieces such as Alex Corina's 'Mona Lennon', which the city's official literature describes as 'unconventional' and 'marvellous' but which is in fact a ghastly piece of gimmicky tat. Why not stick Ringo Starr's head on 'The Scream' by Edward Munch? It would be just as meaningful and attractive. . . Oh no, let's not give them ideas.
When you're sated with The Beatles, and never want to see another Mona Lennon or hear another kitsch shopping centre version of 'Yesterday' again, remember that Liverpool, according to Paul Du Noyer's excellent book Wondrous Place, has always 'made more music than most cities, and made it more passionately, because it was in the personality of Liverpool to do so. And Liverpool has the personality it has because it is a seaport. Liverpool only exists because it is a seaport. Its virtues and its vices, its accent and attitude, its insularity and its open-mindedness, are all derived from that primary fact.' Interestingly, when Daniel Defoe was eulogising the Pool in the 1720s, he made reference to the ships that sailed from here 'to Norway, the Baltick and Hamburgh'. Three and a bit centuries later, it was the musical trade between Liverpool and Hamburg that made The Beatles a seaworthy crew, ready to conquer the world.
Liverpool music has always been joyous, skittish, heady and psychedelic while, say, Manchester's has usually been more dour, cool and narcotic. At the end of the seventies, the Cavern blossomed again, this time as Eric's, centre of a kaleidoscopic scene where The Teardrop Explodes, Echo And The Bunnymen, Wah! Heat, Pink Military, The Icicle Works and more fused pun
k attitude with hippy beatitudes to produce a new northern psychedelia. Ever since Macca went upstairs to have a smoke and then off into a dream in 'A Day in the Life', Scousers have loved a bit of blow. In the eighties, the city's lads created their own version of the football casual, the 'scally': a roguish, whippet-thin chancer dressed in Tacchini and Lacoste. Add a mellowing joint or ten, and he becomes the retro-scally or cosmic Scouser.
I first came across this strange, engaging sect when I was working in Skem. While the girls dressed as only Scouse girls can - flamboyantly and defiantly glamorous and skimpy even in the depths of winter - the lads would sport leather bomber jackets, frayed, flared jeans or 'keks', implausible fringes or straggly manes. Trainers were ubiquitous and sometimes beanie hats. While the NME would tell them on a weekly basis that they ought to be listening to Public Enemy, Pop Will Eat Itself or Einstürzende Neubauten, they existed in an aromatic world of their own making, built on their older brother's record collection, escaping from the privations of Thatcher's Britain not through officially sanctioned 'indie' music or American hip-hop but through the Floyd, Genesis, Frank Zappa and late-period Beatles. I would spend lunchtimes in the pub with them, arguing the relative merits of Atom Heart Mother and The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway and haggling to buy the college's video player back via the town's black market after its weekly theft.
In case that sounds like I'm condoning criminality, let's just say that a certain low level of nefarious activity was regarded as normal. After all, if crooks in good suits in London could line their pockets flogging off gas, water and railways that actually belonged to me, why shouldn't a scally make the odd tenner selling me my own video back from time to time? The way I felt about it is summed up perfectly in a song by The Beautiful South in which a scally thief turns up at a posh London bash celebrating 'enterprise' and rewarding the kind of entrepreneur beloved of the eighties Conservatives. The scally takes the stage and points out that he has followed their credo to the letter, working hard, living on his wits, getting to the top of his profession by being the best and to hell with those he had to step on. He is, he claims, the ultimate Thatcherite. The song is called, brilliantly, 'I've Come For My Award'.
All that said, though, Liverpool isn't red the way Manchester is red. The socialism that created the Labour Party has no history here as it does in Manchester or, for that matter, Sheffield. Liverpool was never that kind of industrial city with a stable, unionised workforce. Dock labour was casualised until the sixties, and was not regarded as a job for life, complete with a pension and rights. The kind of socialism that grows out of religious non-conformism barely existed in this city with a large Catholic population.
I doubt very much if in Manchester or Sheffield, with their strong, moralistic, conventional socialism, something as mad as the Militant Tendency could ever have taken over as they did here; a mafiosi who talked Marx but looked like a cabal of wide boys in flash suits on the make, the ultimate Thatcherites. Persistent rumour has it that as the tide turned and Kinnock began to gain the upper hand over Militant, many a member of Derek Hatton's notorious security squad, a private army in all but name, moved effortlessly into the city's newly burgeoning dance music scene.
Once I became a music writer, I spent a lot of time in Liverpool in the late eighties, encouraged by charming proselytisers such as The Farm's Peter Hooton, who would tell me the town was buzzing again and talk up the city's new bands, then The La's, Rain and The Hoovers. The former are still legendary, the middle a big influence on early Oasis, the latter a band of delightful hairy misfits who sounded like Captain Beefheart and lived on a section of Cantrill Farm estate that looked like an East German military installation. In 2006, the Scousers are still cosmic, by the way, be it The Coral, The Stands or The Zutons.
Liverpool was slow to pick up on house and dance music in the nineties, being, as Andrew Harrison puts it, 'suspicious of any trend they hadn't started themselves'. But when they did embrace it they did so with gusto and a superhuman appetite for excess. Liverpool invented the superclub and the city's club scene is still riotously fertile and very different from the southern version. The accent in Liverpool is not on untouchable cool but on irrepressible fun. If you'll let me point you in the direction of another Ian McNabb song, listen to 'Liverpool Girl' for a lovely, cheeky, affectionate portrait of the city's young womanhood who 'looks exactly like her mother, though strangely nothing like her mother' and 'wears her silver jeans, going out to Cream, dancing under laser beams'.
But is that Liverpool girl northern? I think so. But then, Whiston Hospital notwithstanding, I'm not really a Scouser. I ask a real one, a craggy, middle-aged chap with a firm handshake who's shifting barrels outside one of the Beatle theme pubs on Mathew Street. 'I'm a northerner, definitely, and Liverpool is the north. But a lot of Scousers don't reckon it is. You see, the thing is, for all that stuff about being outgoing and that, Scousers are very insular, very inward-looking. It got a bit too much for me. So I moved to Southport.'
We, though, are moving somewhere else. When Liverpool does deign to call itself 'northern', it assumes, by natural right, that it is the capital of the north. But it has a rival. There is another power in the north-west, Moscow to Liverpool's New York, Pyongyang to its Seoul, Minas Morgul to its Minas Tirith; a mortal enemy glowering from across the Lancashire plain, along the asphalt ribbon of the M62. It rises in the east, curtained with rain, swearing, walking like a monkey and wearing a beanie hat.
So Much To Answer For. . .
It's late in the evening of Good Friday 2006 and I am staring at the television slack-jawed in disbelief. BBC3 is showing, as their trails and teasers have been promising for days, an updated, modern-dress version of the Passion, the story of the final days of Jesus. There's something reassuringly old-fashioned about all this. Ever since I was a wee lad, well-meaning religious teachers with halitosis, ginger beards and sandals have been singing Simon and Garfunkel ballads or 'Nowhere Man' to us 'kids', desperately keen to make Christianity sexy and telling us that, hey, I suppose Jesus was a kind of rock and roll rebel himself when you think about it, right! Evidently, the Church is still gamely engaged in this endeavour. Why not? Mitres off to them, I say.
But that's not why I'm so thoroughly gobsmacked by this particular trendy update of the New Testament. That's not why my tumbler of Scotch is untouched on the table next to me, ice slowly melting. That's not why I'm shaking my head and telling anyone who'll listen that 'this is just incredible'. No. What is so gloriously, brazenly outrageous about this spectacle is that it is the Manchester Passion. The momentous events of the Holy Land two thousand odd years ago have been, yes, resurrected and relocated to Piccadilly Gardens on this freezing Friday night. In the audience, Manc revellers clutch Bacardi Breezers and, gurning at the cameras, mingle with well-scrubbed God botherers from around the world sporting the sweatshirts of their various parishes and groups. Tim Booth, the former singer with James, always a man with thespian tendencies, is giving us his comically intense Judas: 'How does it feel to treat me like you do?' he sings accusingly at Jesus, cast as a sort of a heartthrob brickie. Wait a minute. 'How does it feel to treat me like you do?' That's. . .
Yes, it's New Order's 'Blue Monday'. For this Manchester Passion is not just set in the north-west's most self-aggrandising city. Oh no. It is also a celebration of that city's music, shoe-horned, arc-welded, crowbarred, Superglued, if you will, onto the trifling matter of the last agonising hours of the saviour of humanity and his subsequent resurrection from the dead. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Jesus isn't dead yet. It's still the Last Supper and he's still got something to say/sing to those unshaven disciples in their fatigues and parkas. 'When routine bites hard, and ambitions run low. . .' He is now giving them the Gospel According To Ian Curtis taken from Joy Division's 'Love Will Tear Us Apart'.
Later, in a moment of understandable glumness after consigning the only son of God to a brutal death, Tim Booth/Judas sings 'Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now' accompan
ied by some meaningful sighing. Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane sings James's very own 'Sit Down' to his sheepish apostles, presumably because there isn't a Happy Mondays song called 'Thanks A Bunch. I'm Going To Be Nailed To A Cross Because One Of You Bastards Snitched'. Eventually, Jesus rises from the dead atop the town hall to the strains of The Stone Roses' 'I Am The Resurrection', the one Manc song you might legitimately include in your biblical Easter pageant without fear of ridicule.
It was simultaneously both breathtakingly awful and kind of admirable. You had to chuckle at the sheer Mancunian chutzpah of it all (yes, chutzpah; Manchester has a strong, long-established Jewish community though, come to think of it, they probably didn't have much to do with this particular bit of street theatre). Forget what has been said about the Scousers. In its own brassy, hard-faced way, Manchester is far more sentimental than Liverpool. Can you imagine the Wolverhampton Passion, the Ipswich Passion, the Luton Passion? No. No other city in Britain would have had the inflated sense of self-regard to do this, namely to restage the crucifixion as an out-take from 24 Hour Party People. No story, it seems, is so sacred that Manchester can't use it as a promotional tourist video. Nice one, our kid.
Pies and Prejudice Page 10
