13/01/2012

100 Miles To Liverpool



In the early 1980’s the Thatcher Government apparently discussed a novel idea for dealing with a city – Liverpool -  they regarded as a problem: the bright idea tossed about was shutting the whole  place down and moving its population elsewhere. It seemed a long way from the heady days of  less than 20 years before when the ‘Mersey Sound’ had London music  agents flocking to Liverpool to sign anything that moved and  even folks in deepest Dorset could go about saying “It’s fab gear, wack” without ridicule. As late as 1972 the lasting remains of this image could give Little Jimmy Osmond a UK Number One with Long-haired Lover from Liverpool without any sense of irony. (Unlike Stereo Total who dug up  Bonnie Jo Mason aka Cher’s  1964 Ringo, I Love You (Yeah Yeah Yeah)  in 1999, in what  one must assume is a kind of Gallic  joke)

In pop music history , of course, Liverpool has played an iconic role, with artists from there having had 56 number one hits. The Beatles weren’t the first successful pop act from the city -  Billy Fury, Frankie Vaughan and Michael Holliday had all had UK chart success before them -  but they did spearhead a new era in music, making Liverpool perhaps the equivalent of Memphis .Most of those following in the first wave of the British Beat boom, however, had little lasting musical  impact and soon either returned to a day job or found shelter in the supper-club and nostalgia circuit. Even in 2012 you can catch the Merseybeats at Skegness or Ilfracombe with half their original line-up from 1961  intact. The exception here  were the Searchers  whose 12-string guitar jingle-jangle sound on songs like Needles and Pins  and When You Walk In The Room  influenced ,in a neat but ironic little circle, the Byrds who influenced back the Beatles and thence a long string of acts from REM to Teenage Fan Club to the Smiths. (In an exceedingly trivial but entertaining diversion below,  clips show 4 different versions of  Love Potion Number 9 by the Searchers from 1964 to 2009, motivating the listener to wonder what it must be like to sing a particular  song every week for 45 years or so. The eagle-eyed viewer will spot that whilst the guitarist and bassist remain constant  there are 4 different drummers - ipedantic order, Chris Curtis, John Blunt, Billy Adamson and  Eddie Rothe. I sometimes wonder if I should get out more).

Few of these acts –or those that followed in the 80’s and 90’s - featured Liverpool as a place  much in their music. The first was probably Gerry and the Pacemakers with Ferry Cross The Mersey, followed by the Beatles with Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields, but most acts looked further afield for inspiration. As mentioned in the column on Manchester, many of the songs about Liverpool too  tended to  a  sentimental, even maudlin, view of the place not generally found  much with big English cities, where a harder edge is more common. Try transposing Ferry Cross the Mersey to the Woolwich Ferry and it wouldn’t work. Then there’s  the Leaving of Liverpool (the Dubliners, the Pogues), Heart  As Big As Liverpool (the Mighty Wah!), Liverpool Lullaby (Cilla Black, Judy Collins). The cynical might say people only get sentimental after they have left the place.

Some, however, stood outside the usual framework. Suzanne Vega’s  In Liverpool brought an outsider’s –and fresh – view:” In Liverpool, on Sunday, No traffic  on the avenue. The light is pale and thin…No sound down in this part of town, except for the boy in the belfry”. It was apparently inspired by finding the city not as glamorous as she thought it would be. There were also  a few that avoided the dangers of over-romanticising and  reminded the listener of Liverpool’s history as a major slaving  port, portrayed at the International Slavery Museum on the Albert Docks where nearby you can also see the Beatles Story or go on a Yellow Duckmarine ride. Again as previously mentioned in the Manchester column,  Liverpool’s The Real Thing brought out their 4 from 8 album with its trilogy of ghetto songs, including Children of the Ghetto, in 1977--- to lack of commercial success  after  their pop hits and , as Eddy Amoo remarked in a recent interview, “Children of the Ghetto finished us”  It was a step too far from the  image of the city that people wanted to see. Another Liverpool group, Amsterdam, however, had more success with  Does This Train Stop On Merseyside in 2005, “See 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”.

The song here, 100 Miles From Liverpool, from 1995 but  originally recorded as a group track in 1986,  comes from perhaps an unusual direction -  from Alan Hull of  Lindisfarne, a group  closely associated with Newcastle ,on the opposite coast of England ,with songs like Fog On The Tyne and Run For Home. It chugs along as a road song like Driving Away From Home, with Liverpool the equivalent of Phoenix or Tulsa. It probably says more about Alan Hull than Liverpool  and there is a poignancy that comes not just from the regrets of some of the  lyrics but the awareness that the recording was done shortly before his death. Liverpool appears almost as a mirage, perhaps as Suzanne Vega had seen it: “But in my dreams I see Liverpool in lights, dancing in the streets 'til the early morning light. The tug boat on the Mersey joining in the Jamboree” .

You  realise things aren’t always as they seem. The Dakotas, who backed Liverpool singer Billy J Kramer on his hits as part of the ‘Liverpool Sound’ actually came from Liverpool’s great rival, Manchester. The Cavern Club that  the tourist sees today isn’t the original one but a rebuilt construction, like  Warsaw Old Town. Many of   the  grand and imposing buildings in the city centre weren’t philanthropic projects but built with the wealth of the slave trade and Caribbean plantation owners. As with most places, I suppose, we end up seeing what we want to see.

38 comments:

  1. Inevitably we do all end up seeing what we want to see, as most of us choose to remember happy memories. Or to put it another way, each of us absorbs the influences and subconscious stimuli that create our cultural identity. As I read this section of your blog on Liverpool, it evoked feelings and vivid scenes appeared in my mind of a 'lost Liverpool'. The intensity of seeing Liverpool through a child’s eyes once again returned to me. I found myself, staring out of a car window at the blackened Victorian and Georgian buildings in the rain, as my Father drove about his business with me as a co-pilot on a ’Magical Mystery Tour’ of his own design. Sounds of the Beatles singing ’We all live in a Yellow Submarine’ resounded from the car radio. He would take me to visit some of the amazing Liverpool parks, such as Stanley park and Walton Park and Newsham Park. Joyously feeding the ducks, feasting on Sayers ham barm-cakes I would watch people rowing on the boating lake, as I dreamed of floating in a boat to the island in the centre. The huge mansions surrounding the lake looked like foreboding haunted houses, and my overactive imagination wove stories about the inhabitants. In my childish mind I had no perception of the source of the riches that created such handsome villas. As we drove along Everton Brow, surrounded by green rolling hills I was astounded by the view for in the distance I saw the glistening, blue, muddy jewel that is the River Mersey, my oasis in a metropolis of grime. Smoking chimneys, funnels of ships and cranes, evidence of a thriving port and industrial growth. The sound of foghorns as I lay in my bed, whilst the mists rolled in from the sea. Always, the biting wind that blew and seemed to cut me to the bone, and turned my knees blue. On every street corner was a public house, the smell of beer pervaded the air, and the sound of drunken men singing ‘In my Liverpool Home' and ‘You’ll never walk alone’. I am sure that when Rogers and Hammerstein wrote the song for Carousel in 1945, they had no conception that it would become the anthem of Liverpool Football Club, and in a way it has become the anthem of Liverpool. For throughout centuries of turmoil, disease,oppression, poverty and hardship Liverpudlians continue to 'Walk on' not just with hope in their hearts but a warmth and humour and an individual creativity that I think is reflected in their music.

    Helen Adamson

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for this very evocative description of a 'lost Liverpool' from a child's eyes-a great example of music and memory..

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ha - my first thought on seeing this post title was 'Amsterdam - Does this train stop on Merseyside?' so absolutely delighted to find it discussed here. Bravo!

    ReplyDelete
  4. That's an amazing stat, about the 56 number ones coming out of Liverpool!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Drummer number 2 is clearly the best:)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Was it really discussed, the idea of shutting Liverpool down and moving the population somewhere else?? That seems crazy - surely it was greeted as a ridiculous idea at the time?????

    ReplyDelete
  7. I am from deepest Dorset, and I do believe a bloke on my street did say “It’s fab gear, wack” without ridicule for a period in the 1960s.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Haha, but Geoff, if you got out more, maybe you'd blog less, which would be a shame all round!

    ReplyDelete
  9. "Try transposing Ferry Cross the Mersey to the Woolwich Ferry and it wouldn’t work" - you're right, I just tried this and it definitely doesn't work:)

    ReplyDelete
  10. Great column and cheers for mentioning Does This Train Stop On Merseyside! I've written at length elsewhere (http://amsterdam-music.com/discography/does-this-train-stop-on-merseyside/) about how the song came about, but just to explain more briefly, it's about the pyramid at the junction to Rodney Street and Maryland street. In an old abandoned graveyard. There's a great story behind it, which you can find at the link above that I included. The title is a reference to a very old Springsteen song from 1972 and the rest of the lyrics are just general observations and events both good and bad that are connected with this part of the river.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Here's a pretty cool clip of Gerry and the Pacemakers singing Ferry Cross The Mersey:)

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loyRYFUYg9g

    ReplyDelete
  12. I love Suzanne Vega’s In Liverpool - here it is for anyone else who wants to hear it! This is definitely the song that would go through my mind if I ever went to Liverpool!
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0df0racc3vk

    ReplyDelete
  13. Wow, somehow the kid singing Long-haired Lover from Liverpool totally passed me by as a phenonemon. This is a very weird song for a child to be singing!
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YriPIujLtsA

    ReplyDelete
  14. My biggest fear was always performing. I hated being on or near a stage in front of people. That was bad enough, but to then have to act, or worse, sing or dance - that would do it for me. Until a couple of Christmases ago. I took my wife and family, for my wife's birthday, to see Jimmy Osmond's Christmas show. We were fortunate enough to have seats front row centre. Jimmy begins a refrain of "Long Haired Lover From Liverpool". Then he does it. Halfway through it he shakes my hand. But he does not let go. HE PULLS! He pulls me out of my seat and up on to stage. He then puts the microphone to my mouth for me to sing the chorus to the audience:
    "I'll be your long haired lover from Liverpool You'll be my Sunshine Daisy from LA"
    And then as there is an instrumental break in the song he turns to me and says "Go o, just boogie"
    I had two choices - run for the exit, or do what he said.
    I did what he said and for a minute or two did a refined foot shuffle that was a pale imitation of cool. My family were in tears, of laughter, in front of me, practically rolling on the floor. Eventually my ordeal ended and to rapturous applause from the 2,000 plus people, I returned to my seat. But I returned a changed man. Little did Jimmy Osmond know what he had done for me. He had made me confront my biggest fear. I had faced up to it and done what I had spent 40 years avoiding. And I walked off with my head held high. If I can sing Long Haired Lover in front of all those people, and dance to it too, then that is it. There is nothing that I would not be able to do now...

    ReplyDelete
  15. Here are the great lyrics to Does This Train Stop On Merseyside, which Ian is referencing above and Geoff quoted too!

    McKenzie's soul lies above the ground in that
    pyramid near Maryland (Street)

    Easyjet is hanging in the air
    takin' everyone to everywhere

    See the slave ships sailing into port
    the blood of Africa is on every wall

    Now there's a ley line runs down Mathew Street
    it's giving energy to all it meets

    Hey does this train stop
    does this train stop on Merseyside?

    Alan Williams in the Marlboro' Arms
    giving his story out to everyone

    Famine boats are anchored in the bay
    bringing in the poor and desperate

    Hey does this train stop
    does this train stop on Merseyside?

    Boston babies bouncing on the ground
    The Riggers beamin' out to every town

    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

    Why don't you remember?

    ReplyDelete
  16. Thank you for mentioning our International Slavery Museum! Here is a link to our current exhibitions, should any of your readers be interested: http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/events/ism/exhibitions/current.aspx

    As you noted, we are located in Liverpool's Albert Dock, at the centre of a World Heritage site and only yards away from the dry docks where 18th century slave trading ships were repaired and fitted out.

    ReplyDelete
  17. I love Heart As Big As Liverpool by the Mighty Wah!

    Here's the song, with some great photos of the city too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_aaGT5ywKg

    ReplyDelete
  18. For the pure pleasure of the amazing Searchers, here are the two songs Geoff mentioned by them:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unwa_XQKc4A
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XWQCLqab4o

    ReplyDelete
  19. I hadn't heard about the version of Ringo, I Love You" by Stereo Total, but here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Yen8EyuqLA

    Talk about making a bad song worse! The original wasn't that great either:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIQ8coQX9mg

    ReplyDelete
  20. The Merseybeats were one of the better quartets to come out of the British Invasion without ever making a dent on the charts in the United States -- along with the Roulettes, the Chants, and the Undertakers, they represent an undeservedly lost chapter in early-'60s British rock & roll. Although they enjoyed a little less than a year of serious chart success, the Merseybeats were unable to pull together the various facets of their sound into a cohesive, coherent whole in the manner of the Beatles or the Hollies, and into something lasting, in part because of a lack of original songwriting ability in their ranks.

    It's impressive though that - after being called "the Pacifics" for a bit - evidently their timing was such that they grabbed the name Merseybeats instead, previously a local music reference, ahead of anyone else in a city boiling over with musical activity.

    ReplyDelete
  21. Don't forget the Seekers' version of Leaving of Liverpool too!
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfYTEiFIZik

    ReplyDelete
  22. Here are the lyrics to the song Geoff posted (100 Miles to Liverpool):

    Sue and Annie wrote me, they're coming down to quote me
    know every word to every song.
    Rod N' Ray are talking, the radio is squawking
    me I'm wondering what the hell went wrong.

    Chorus:
    100 miles more to Liverpool, 100 more miles to go
    been down this road in sunshine and in snow
    and it don't get any shorter
    and the water under the bridge has got to flow, oh no.

    Funny how a mile can go on forever
    funny how a day can be an age
    funny how a smile can face the stormy weather
    funny how a house can be a cage.

    Chorus:
    100 miles more to Liverpool, 100 more miles to go
    been down this road in sunshine and in snow
    and it don't get any shorter
    and the water under the bridge has got to flow.

    John and Paul are sleeping, a streetcleaner is sweeping
    the moon is on his own no place to go.
    Me, I'm cracking jokes in the bar with all the blokes
    toasting the end of another show.

    Chorus:
    But in my dreams I see Liverpool in lights
    dancing in the streets 'til the early morning light.
    The tug boat on the Mersey joining in the Jamboree
    well a man must have his dreams
    even though his dreams might never come to be.

    Chorus:
    100 miles more to Liverpool, 100 more miles to go
    been down this road in sunshine and in snow
    and it don't get any shorter
    and the water under the bridge has got to

    ReplyDelete
  23. If the singer is 100 miles from Liverpool, he must be in Warwick:)

    ReplyDelete
  24. I still think the Pogues version is better: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnTmVirM8sY. Although the Dubliners is a close second!:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXVnmL1Kvmg

    ReplyDelete
  25. He could also be in Scunthorpe- or possibly en route from Newcastle!

    ReplyDelete
  26. Somehow the photos that accompany this version of Liverpool Lullaby make it hard to feel sentimental about Livepool - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mwPuardvZU - which is a good thing I think!

    ReplyDelete
  27. It's interesting you mentioned Liverpool being like Memphis - because the two cities are working together on joining forces with their various museums and music sites! - http://www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/liverpool-news/regional-news/2011/06/21/liverpool-and-memphis-become-rock-n-soul-mates-in-music-business-partnership-92534-28911689/

    ReplyDelete
  28. Here is the actual website about the joint venture: http://www.rockandsoulmates.com/

    Liverpool & Memphis are apparent two halves of one great experience!!

    ReplyDelete
  29. I didn't know that Children of the Ghetto finished off The Real Thing - fascinating!

    Also, here's the song for anyone who wants it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hhyVNwIiek

    ReplyDelete
  30. I love Lindisfarne. I got their release last year, the album The Charisma Years, which as the name suggests, refers the the music Lindisfarne released on The Famous Charisma Label, and basically contains all the material that was released in that era. (With the addition of a few bonus tracks, which have never been available on CD before!).

    I recommend it. From what I’ve read on the web, this particular release of Lindisfarne’s début album has been newly remastered at Abbey Road Studios, and upon hearing it, I have to admit, it sounds really good. This release is about as faithful to the original LP release as you can get. The music has a nice mellow, analogue sound, which is quite rare to find on remastered albums on digital media.

    Also, after the original album finishes with “Scarecrow Song”, we are treated to an exhaustive collection of bonus tracks, including 3 tracks that were used on the US release of Nicely Out Of Tune - one of which is We Can Swing Together – this seemed to have been a totally different take, the song is more up-beat than the original UK release, with the line “Some were smoking roll-your-owns” replaced with “Some were smoking, choking, smoking”. This was probably a decision by the producer of the American release, to attempt to hide the song’s theme about drugs. As a side note, it’s interesting that the lyric sheet included with the US album has the original line in place!

    ReplyDelete
  31. Nice stuff. I was a fan of Alan Hull and that whole crew of British folk/rock, but I never heard this. Also a big fan of the split off band from Lindisfarne, Jack The Lad.

    ReplyDelete
  32. Good to see Lindisfarne given their due. Alan Hull was a great songwriter who died woefully young. His best songs haven't dated in the slightest.

    ReplyDelete
  33. Geoff, probably you will recall the seventies British situation comedy Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads. In their original sixties incarnations Rodney Bewes’ Bob Ferris and James Bolam’s Terry Collier were appropriately laddish swingers of the Men Behaving Badly variety, but when they returned in a different decade they found that their world had changed. Bob had moved steadily upward into the white-collared middle classes of Newcastle, but Terry had been away in the Army and comprehended almost nothing about the city and the people to which he had returned. Things hadn’t really worked out for Terry, but he seemed infinitely more assured (and resigned) about his current station in life than his ostensibly better-off mate.

    Much of the comedic content of the series has not endured; it is largely typical fear-of-mother slapstick which has dated badly. But the elements which have remained with me are the lengthy, non-comedic interludes where Bob and Terry walk around their city, watching the haunts of their younger days, the buildings and things they assumed would always be there, being demolished and destroyed, with nothing much (as yet) to rise in their place. The feeling would be familiar to almost any British city dweller of the period but the remembrances are auburn and rueful; where are our roots now, where exactly do we go from here? The British economy was in almost as bad a state as now, and familiar mutterings about cuts to public services were in effect. Is anything, you wonder while watching these virtual documentaries, going to survive?

    I say this because it may go some way towards understanding why Lindisfarne – on the face of it, an unpretentious, good-time folk-rock group from Newcastle – became so popular during this period. Folk music is about the most difficult of musics to categorise, since there is a different strain of folk which applies to every different village, and in some cases every different street. But something about Lindisfarne seemed to brush the rawest of nerves in many British people of this time. I’m not sure who might qualify for the present day title of “people’s band” in Britain – the Arctic Monkeys briefly came nearest to qualifying, and Mumford and Sons most certainly do not qualify (do you hear their songs being hummed on the bus, or in the pub?) – but Lindisfarne assumed the role of people’s band over the period 1971-2; Fog On The Tyne was one of the largest-selling albums by any British act released in 1971, and took its time climbing to the top (reviving its previously uncharted predecessor Slightly Out Of Tune in the process). The sepia-pink cover struck its own chord; an engraving – real or fake, it doesn’t matter – of Newcastle as its inhabitants might have known it in the days of Jane Austen, a peaceful but defiantly working-class city, and there is that same air of quiet defiance about the group’s music.

    Their music tells us that this is what they want – the crappy sausage rolls, the pub, themselves and their own kind; it’s what they know and clearly what much of their audience knew and craved. Understand us, they are saying, and you might understand yourselves. Whatever was going to happen to the likelier lads of Tyneside in times to come, the band, entirely lacking in side or irony, told the people who needed to hear and know it: we are still all in this together, and in a much more touchable and workable sense.

    ReplyDelete
  34. I am a nun (a Benedictine nun from Holy Trinity Monastery, East Hendred).

    From time to time, and especially when I am feeling cold, discouraged, or just plain curmudgeonly, I allow myself a little time to read your blog, which I very much enjoy.

    For me it stops me having a grumble. Because grumbling changes nothing: it merely makes us and those close to us more wretched. (Although sometimes I grumble to Brother Duncan, who being a dog, allows nothing to interfere with his happiness unless one mentions baths or cuts off the supply of dog biscuits, so he is a safe audience for dyspeptic monologues.) Benedict, as so often, seems to have been right: most grumbling is not justifiable and is corrosive of community. Whereas you seem to have a lovely community on here. I suppose being nice to be near isn’t just a question of which soap one uses.

    ReplyDelete
  35. There is also me, Scott Ottaway, I replaced Eddie a couple of years ago in The Searchers as the drummer!

    ReplyDelete
  36. Yes- I couldnt find a clip of you playing on Love Potion Number 9 though!

    Thanks for your lovely comment, Digitalnun...its a wonderful image you paint..

    Those are very interesting comments on the Likely Lads and Lindisfarne, Marcello. Both celebrated working class life and culture and it is hard to imagine the Likely Lads being made now, when working class characters in comedy are either dysfunctional or inviting ridicule. Both also were popular in the last decade before the country became warped by Thatcherism and neo-liberalism.

    ReplyDelete
  37. Bingo. A final version of the Searchers and Love Potion Number 9 with 5th drummer, Scott Ottoway
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg4xGszo-E8&feature=related

    For good measure, 2 clips by spin-off groups led by ex-Searchers, Tony Jackson and Mike Pender - both playing Love Potion Number 9!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdjzLl5qfgI

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Bbc3cxFqpA

    ReplyDelete
  38. Thank you Geoff! I did look for that clip to post and couldn't find it. Appreciate it! And the 7 clips of the song, which are kind of educational to look at and see the differences.

    ReplyDelete