God is a DJ

Kenn TaylorLeave a comment

“Sorry mate, can’t help you there”

“Arrr ‘kinell, then…have you got…erm”

His eyes glaze over momentarily, eyelids tremble a little, his feet still tapping away, and he swings his head up fast with a mad smile, eyes like piss holes in snow.

“Yeah, howabout…?”

He mumbles another request, one I can help him with.

“Sure boss man” I say and I give him a little smile

He bounces off across the floor like Zebedee and excitedly gives the good news of my approval to his waiting group of mates who all punch the air on receipt.

Ahh de kidz, I scribble it on the list covered with stains of indistinguishable origin and take a swig of water. Slowly sliding the battered faders down and up as the last song disappears from the speakers and the needle moves onto the already spinning record on the other deck. The momentary quiet is filled with the chorus of ever present background of life usually drowned out by my selections.

“A pint of Snakebite cheers”

“S/he’s fit”

“Yeah every Friday, what’s your name?”

“Upstairs, really?”

“Can’t do that mate sorry”

“The DJ was better yesterday”

“Mark, let me guess you look like a Sarah”

“Yes S/he is”

“Ah SHIT, who is that one by?”

“IAMFUCKINGBUZZZINMATE”

“Nah its Lucy, what do you mean I look like…”

“Don’t fancy his/her mate much though”

“Isn’t it…The Cure?”

“Too many students in here for my liking”

“I reckon I would be a great DJ, I’ve got all the records”

“And poseurs”

“Why?”

“Just going for a piss, can you hold this?”

“What was I thinking, Lucy, of course, weren’t that an ace fucking song?”

“S/he’ll do”

“I’m going to make you my bitch”

“Yeah, imagine that getting paid to play records”

“That’s not very ladylike”

“Well I think it’s a bit derivative to be honest”

“I…cos…phew, yeah, yeah hang on…I better sit down for a bit”

“Do you want to get off with us then?”

“Would beat being a bloody phone jockey anyway”

At least I reckon so, I aint been down on the floor in years now and you can’t here that much up here unless they bother to come up and talk to you.  But the song usually remains the same, especially if it’s a good one.

I let the music rise through the cabs again; a hundred battered ears turn their radar looking for old recognition or new excitement.

“Now this is a good song, yeah ok”

“BOLLOCKSTOSITTINGDOWN!”

“Christ, just, made it wouldn’t have wanted to miss this one”

“See, I would have played that one next too, it’s a piece of piss”

“Come on he/she and her mate are dancing now, get the fuck in there”

“No it’s not them…that was…ah fuck it, lets dance”

“Apparently they can’t do snakebite anymore…bugger”

I rummage amongst the world-worn flight case for the next selection and take a another swing of lukewarm water as the guy who requested this tune looks over gives me a quick smile of recognition before losing himself in his own world.

And that, is the fucking point.

By Kenn Taylor

Sigur Ros

Kenn Taylor

We weave through those assembled till we find an agreed good spec and stop, the crowd already closing in behind us. The balls of my feet ache for rest and the gorgeous haze of too much red wine dizzies my head. The calm cool of the night though is a welcome rest from the skull-cooking heat of the day. Waiting and swaying in the rising sweaty mass my eyes turn to some white fabric pipes hanging from the roof like frozen stalactites. “Appropriate for a band from Iceland eh?” I remark to The Cat, but he’s more gone than I am and my wonderful witticism is lost in the increasing volume of international chatter.

The tent is bursting by the time the lights fall and that wonderful first cheer of satisfaction and anticipation rises. A white mesh screen on stage lights up and the first bars of music pipe out from behind it. They appear only as shadows behind the screen till, knowing that we are all now tuned in, they lift the curtain to move us all the greater. The slight presence of these musicians is far outweighed by the force of their sonic power. These people who create that hard to find point of wonder, mine depths and utilise all that they can muster to fill us with faith that there is hope, beauty and truth of a kind in the world.

They take us on a rare cathartic journey into ourselves and resistance in such a setting is futile. There are few formalities and graces to hide behind in the brief community of the festival. Not all will be taken, the cynics and those so consumed by bitterness as to be blind, but they are few, and piece by piece the music, the magic, moves from the air to inside you till your spine is mainlined directly into the grid. I look around, slowly, and, other than the couple who kiss in front of me – what else would you do with your nerves on overdrive – everyone is watching. Our heart soars in the presence, not just of these mere exquisite layers of emotional noise but in the display of unity that it helps to create. Bringing people together whose only commonality is the sweat and drink of the day, and of course, a love of MUSIC.

In a break I ruffle the hair of The Cat, now unbothered by convention. “Told you it would be a good one eh?”

Another song and they go even further. Our hearts feel as if it is about to burst and the music moves around the body till deeply buried, long forgotten, anodes in the deepest recesses of the brain start to glow once more. Unable to contain it anymore, I cry gently and without shame.

The Cat too is moved by the Lightandmagicandbeauty but with his weary bones it is too much, “I’m just going for a piss, I’ll meet you by that tree”. But despite my usual nerves, I don’t mind the loss of company and I pathetically attempt to drink it all in, try and preserve what I know can not last indefinitely.

Once more they bring out melodies and emotions that I did not think existed. The swirls and chimes they emit form together in the air and rise in all of us. In the midst of this I feel an arm on my shoulder and think it’s The Return of the Cat but when I swing my head around to see a blonde girl in a black top. She is alone, and it is her hand on my shoulder and I tense in shock and fear. But she’s not looking at me. She is looking up at them with her eyes are closed. It is then I notice how the cold the rest of my body is other than in that one space were her hand is and all that exists beyond the moment crumbles away and I know why she has done it. Yes, perhaps she has had too much to drink and wants someone to lean on, but it also the desire for a connection, the need to share the force of the feelings that this music is generating and heighten them all the more. It is too much and not enough to feel all this on your own and so she touches someone, anyone, just as much as her breaking of conventions will allow. This much even, would not happen anywhere outside the transitional freedom and allowed at this festival. Outside it grim realties and all too human divisions would never permit such a thing.

I revel in the moment as it continues and  all is well in the world, till the thought of possibilities of further connections seep out from my ego, always wanting more wanting too feel MORE. I place my hand on hers and she does not move. I turn around but still she does not look and for a second, I don’t dare imagine what might happen next as a darker undercurrent begins to come from the stage, shades of pain are contained in the sound and they build, threatening to overpower the joy and then I feel her hand break away from mine and I look around to see her back moving away through the unaware crowd. She has gone and I am to scared to follow

I light a cigarette to try and raise myself once more. But with my parched throat and sun weary eyes it only cheapens the moment, dam those addictions and petty highs for they are nothing compared with real beauty and passion in all its forms.

For a second I feel a hole in my stomach but it quickly refilled by the music and without her hand I have to grit my teeth to contain it within myself.

But like all moments when you are free of all the shackles it can only last a short time.

Noticing the long absence of The Cat I jump ship early, stagger through the throng who still focused on the fading lights of the stage and the dying embers of the spell as I force myself through to the outside to find my associate sleeping under a tree oblivious. Rapturous applause echoes from the tent something far beyond a polite salute.

Nerves still sparking I try to verbalise the event to him:

“That was, that was….Transcendental”

A passer by smiles at us and in broad Cockney: “Nah mate, that was fucking brilliant.”

By Kenn Taylor

Liverpool’s modern music scene: the class of 2008

Kenn TaylorLeave a comment

This was my own personal ‘Capital of Culture’ project, and was published in two parts on Drownedinsound.com

According to the Guinness Book of Records, Liverpool is the world capital of popular music, with more number-one hit singles produced by it than any other city. On closer inspection, a lot of these records are absolute shite. Atomic Kitten anyone? But, nevertheless, Liverpool has produced a fair few important musicians over the years.

The city’s musical vibrancy has gone up and down throughout the history of pop. Top of the world in the early ‘60s, by the hippy era the scene had lost its spark. It didn’t recover again till the late ‘70s, when a strong scene emerged out of the famous Eric’s nightclub that was the inspiration for Tony Wilson’s Factory. But whilst Factory and Manchester went on to change the face of popular culture, Eric’s was closed by the authorities, and in the face of continued economic stagnation and social decay, the music declined once more, driven underground and fragmented.

By the ‘90s, venues had dwindled and the music scene in Liverpool was dominated by people getting fucked in generic dance clubs where Scouse House ruled. During this period, only The Lightning Seeds, Space, Shack and Cast made any sort of impact in the mainstream. With some noble exceptions such as Clinic, most local musicians formed generic Oasis/La’s-style rock and roll combos and did little other than mooch about local venues looking for blow jobs.

There was a brief resurgence of the city in the national musical consciousness a few years ago when The Coral, a band from nearby Wirral, created some brilliant, surreal prog-pop, and spearheaded a scene based around a series of gigs with like-minded bands at The Zanzibar venue. The Coral and The Zutons continue to plough their own furrows with a dedicated fanbase and a measure of fame, all the other bandwagon riders long since disappeared in a puff of media overexposure.

But, it seems, things are on the up once more. Musically, in the last year alone, The Wombats have stormed that archaic thing, the pop charts, with their witty, indie-dancefloor anthems. Hot Club de Paris have won both critical acclaim and a dedicated fanbase with their poetic and dynamic sound, while long-time local resident Eugene McGuinness’ debut album has had DiS readers salivating. None of those artists worked together much. There’s is no ‘movement’ there. But that’s the point; there’s a lot of good music coming out of the city and there are many other musicians biting at their heels.

One guy who’s been a driving force in local music for the last few years is Stevie Law, sometime music journalist, DJ, promoter and band manager. Originally from Essex, Stevie, like many, originally came to the city to study, but stayed for the music.

“The music scene in Liverpool is like no other in the country,” he says. “For a band to make it in Liverpool they have to have songs and they need to be tight. You can’t pretend to be a rock star here. Everybody really knows their music and everybody can REALLY play. I mean, you can be sat at a house party and be sat next to a rocky-burned shell-suited scally and he’ll pick up an acoustic guitar and play the most beautiful piece that you have ever heard. That was probably the biggest shock to me.” Dave McTague, another local promoter whose Mellowtone acoustic night gave an early leg-up to Eugene McGuinness, The Wombats and John Smith, also sees music as something intrinsic to the fabric of the city itself:

“I suppose it can be attributed to some extent to Liverpool’s links with Ireland, where you go into a bar and someone will be in sat in the corner playing the guitar, playing the fiddle, whatever. And while it’s not quite as extreme as that in Liverpool, if you walk down the street you’ll be ten buskers, music coming out of all the bars. There’s a real buzz about the music here, so while other cities have more venues and bigger venues and better venues, there’s something about the music scene here. I suppose the key points are the vibrancy of it, and the frequency of it, it’s all the time, not just at weekends: it’s embedded in the culture.”

One of Stevie’s charges, and one of the hottest-tipped of the current crop of local bands, is Elle S’appelle. Since their June 2007 debut, the trio have quickly gained popularity for their surreal, giddy pop. They’ve been tipped by the likes of DiS, Zane Lowe, Steve Lamacq and had their first single out on trendy Moshi Moshi records. They’ve also just completed a national tour with another fresh local act, goFaster >>. The tour went under the name ‘Bosspop’, a banner under which both bands are happy to unite. They see it as the perfect description of the sound that them, and others like them, are currently creating in the city.

Elle S’appelle’s co-singer and keyboardist Lucy Blakely explains the thinking behind the label: “I think a lot of people are scared of pop music because they think it makes them less credible, but I think ‘It’s pop, it’s great, you’ve got to embrace it’. We’re having such a good time. And I think the phrase ‘Bosspop’ is great, ‘boss’ is such a Liverpool word and I think if we didn’t coin it ourselves, the NME, or someone just as cool would have come up with something worse.”

“It’s not like we’re trying to adhere to anything,” continues Andy Donovan, singer/bassist of Elle S’appelle. “It’s completely genuine, it’s not like, ‘Oh, we should sound like goFaster >>, how did they get that sound?’ If we influence each other it’s happening because we’re literally in each others houses and flats listening to the same music.”

Chris Smith singer, guitarist and synthman for goFaster >>, details when he felt that the Bosspop ‘thing’ was coming together:

“[The band] 28 Costumes have got a practice room, and they started putting on warehouse parties and stuff and pretty much everyone who went was in a band who played on the night, it was just great fun. I think at that point, everybody realized that there was, not so much a scene, but a big group of like minded people. That was October/November last year. It was in the run-up to Elle S’appelle’s single coming out, and ours had been out not long before, 28 Costumes has released and EP, and at that moment, that’s when it all came together, I think personally like.”

But, although they may all know each other, Hot Club de Paris’ Paul Rafferty is extremely wary of calling it a scene.

“I don’t know,” muses the frontman, “it’s one of those things, I’ve been in Liverpool eight or nine years and I’ll go to [trendy local venue] Korova and I’ll know a bunch of people there, because my band’s played there loads of times before. I do a lot of music with a lot of musicians in Liverpool. We’re all mates, but then again, the only reason I can work is that people aren’t self-consciously assuming they’re part of a scene or a movement. In my experience, the only way that scenes exist is in retrospect. And then when people form a movement, it looks shit, and it is shit and flawed. If you look on a larger scale at New York in the ‘70s, you’ve got The Ramones, Blondie, Television and Talking Heads, and it’s like ‘fuck man, those guys all played together.’ But you think, that’s four bands from that time, there must have been 40,000 piece of shit bands were everyone knew each other and stuff. It’s only when all those bands got really fucking massive that you could take a step back say, ‘right, okay, that’s the New York scene of the ‘70s’.”

He’s also keen to point out that geography can only be a small part of the myriad of influences of the individual creative:

“Just because The Wombats are getting all massive now, it doesn’t mean that because we’re from Liverpool as well that we have anything in common. It’s a shame when journalists are more interested in geography than music, when people don’t have their own frame of reference to measure bands on their own merit.”

Ouch, but despite this understandable fear of scenedom, there’s an undeniable level of friendly collaboration in the city. Liverpool is a small city, but a small city where a lot of people like music and don’t have much money. This means people meet, hang out and play together. This creates a culture of record swapping and cross-pollination, as different random bands and sounds discovered by one individual one crazy evening filter out into all the other music makers.

It is this friendliness which is consistently what people say they like the most about making music in the city. Despite the difficulties of working in the arts outside the capital, it is this attitude which keeps people like Dave McTague working in Liverpool: “What I like is that, although it’s a big city, obviously one of the biggest cities in the country, but it still retains more of a villagy sort of feel, especially within the wider creative industries, the arts, and the smaller scenes within the music scene: ‘everybody knows everybody.’ Whereas in other places, you find people are cagey around each other and treat each other as competition, here people are much more willing to just help each other out to make it be a good event or a good party, they’re not as bothered seeing who’s better than who.”

Nik Glover, frontman of The Seal Cub Clubbing Club, prog-pop masters who are one of Merseyside’s most original acts of the moment, leads a band that like The Coral comes from ‘over the water’ on the Wirral peninsula. They still class themselves as a ‘Liverpool band’. But, he also thinks that the ‘friendly’ scene in the city can also have the air of an exclusive club about it sometimes, for those outside this tight-knit circle:

“There’s the whole lifestyle thing about Liverpool,” says Nik. “I’ve got no problem with that, I wouldn’t mind being part of that if they actually had a good venue to play at. But we’re actually quite choosy about the venues that we play at, because we want really, really good sound. But we can’t be part of that scene whether we want to be or not, but I don’t think we really sit in with any of the Liverpool groups. We’re not weird enough to play at Class A Audio (more of them later) and we’re not cool enough to play at Korova really.”

Unlike many of the currently successful local bands, recent press and pop chart darlings The Wombats operated largely on their own, being graduates of LIPA, the city’s often mocked school of performing arts and an institution of which many in the music scene are suspicious. This despite the fact that LIPA graduates are responsible for many positive things in the city’s music scene, including adding exponentially to the skills base in booking, programming, sound engineering, PR etc.

“We didn’t feel part of anything,” says Wombats frontman Matthew Murphy. “I felt there was a scene but we never felt like we fitted in, or wanted to fit in. We played with other bands, but we never got really suited with anyone.”

But Nik Glover also thinks that the city has improved immeasurably over recent years in terms of musical diversity: “Liverpool’s got a great thing at the moment, that there’s so many different bands that play in the city. When I started going to see gigs like six or seven years ago, there was like the future Emo scene, then on the opposite side of that The Coral and The Zutons, and there wasn’t really a great deal else on then.”

Indeed, despite appearances, the city does produce more than catchy and witty guitar pop. Class A Audio is a night of… well, alternative music doesn’t cut it. They’re constant champions of underground esoteric sounds, and their gigs have been some of the only shows at which this writer has been genuinely lost for words. Certainly it’s a million miles away from Bosspop.

One of the key acts to grace the stage of Class A is a.P.A.t.T.. One of the most interesting and idiosyncratic bands ever to emerge from Liverpool, a disturbing and wonderful musical project, utilising laptops and violins and many other things: they will blow your mind. They epitomise the maverick and uncompromising spirit of music in the city, perhaps the same spirit that saw Lee Mavers of The La’s reject what is still one of the most popular indie records ever released because it wasn’t quite good enough. General MIDI, a.P.A.t.T leader, elaborates:

“The minute we started it, it was slightly anti-music or something like that, but it’s absolutely guaranteed, set on, to be our life’s work, whatever goes on with it, this is what we’re going to do, even if it’s just goes back to giving out CD-Rs to our friends or something. And it’s me learning, the band learning, it’s us all learning together, and that’s why we enjoy it loads.”

People work incredibly hard to make music work in the city, even though they almost certainly have to have a second, often shit, job, and even though any financial reward, or even any measure of recognition, is also hard to come by, especially, when infused with that maverick spirit.

“[Class A Audio is] basically a small circle of people who work hard to promote music that they enjoy,” General MIDI explains. “And you’ve got to appreciate that. We’ve got a split 12″ coming out that we’re doing with Stig, and that’s being done with funding we’ve got from the nights, so it’s a self-funding little vehicle for us all. Being creative is the only thing that stops us killing people with biros.”

But does MIDI feel any connection with bands like Elle S’appelle or The Wombats?

“I don’t know, I suppose not,” he says. “But, even though we make oddball music, we don’t try and isolate ourselves into an oddball music bracket, we want to be on lunchboxes,” he laughs. “we’ve got no qualms about playing Pebble Mill at 1 or the National Lottery or something like that, it would be great.”

Music journalist and occasional DiS scribe Joe Shooman is sceptical about talking about any sort of ‘scene’, but in general terms of people making music in Liverpool he sees the culture of ‘getting on with it’ and the general anti-authoritarian and non-deferential nature of the city as something which helps to create good music:

“There’s a kind of bullishness to just DO stuff. Everyone seems to be always scheming things which is a very healthy sign. Of course, there’s the occasional whinger but they seem to be outvoted by those who just go out and grab some action – that’s very inspiring sometimes.”

But are the ‘doers’ like that because of the difficulty of doing cutting-edge stuff in the regions and perhaps more controversially, because the general population are uninterested in cutting-edge music?

“Perhaps,” he retorts. “Or maybe just that people don’t give a fuck about people telling them what to do. As in, if someone wants to do something they will; as regards the regions I think it’s easier to do cutting-edge stuff because culturally and traditionally there’s less media and cultural pressure to conform.”

One man who almost epitomises the DIY nature of music in Liverpool is Foxy of growing thrash/hardcore crossover act SSS (Short Sharp Shock) who have recently returned to the city after supporting Gallows on tour.

Foxy is also the man behind Thrashgig, one of the city’s finest underground promoters and constant champions of good new grassroots music. And he’s been doing it for a long time:

“You’re going back about 20 years. Thrashgig is me, and whatever I want to do in terms of music, the music that I like is what gets put on at the gigs. It’s not a question of putting a band on for popularity; it’s a question of the quality of the music. A lot of the time it’s a good mix of bands. If the passion is there, they’ll get a gig. It’s a personal interest in helping people out who are worth helping, not just people who just want popularity or girls or money or anything like that.”

“You’ve got to do it yourself to do it right,” he continues, “because otherwise someone’s going to suddenly say, ‘Right, I’m going to take this off you, what you’ve started and make money off it’. You’ll never fill a bigger venue with it, and if it does get to that stage, you’ll just get dropped. So many things I’ve got into, it just got too big for its boots. You’re talking two thousand people, and all kinds of drinks companies, shoe companies, all kinds of sponsors wanting to get involved, and I just couldn’t be bothered anymore. I just don’t need it. I think it just dilutes everything. This is for us, this is ours, this is what we’re going to do, so some sponsor is not part of what we’re involved in.”

There isn’t a big metal or punk scene in the city, but SSS have gained fans across the music scene for their quality and incendiary live shows. If there is ghettoisation, it’s not along musical lines:

“Again, it comes back to everyone being friends,” says Foxy. “It’s a little bit incestuous and we all know each other and have been in all kinds of bands together. Hot Club [de Paris] have been saying to us, ‘do you want to do a tour with us?’ and we can see were they are coming from, even though we’re going to stick out like a sore thumb. And we do feel part of that, and that’s kind of reflected in the gigs that go on, because they’re not afraid, SSS want to play on this gig, which is poles apart from their musical style, but they just look it as I look at it: you’ve got four different bands and each of those bands has got something good going on.”

One of the aspects of Liverpool’s current changes via urban regeneration has been the transformation of whole areas of town that were considered derelict and dangerous (and thus home to venues, record and second-hand clothes shops, practise rooms and nightclubs) into areas full of trendy bars, expensive restaurants and bland flats. While many accept that without some form of economic renaissance the city will continue to slowly die, the fear of gentrification is strong in this place that is about as far from middle-England, middle-class respectability as you can get, as is the loss of available space for ‘underground’ activity in this compact city. This has provoked a fierce resistance movement that many elements of the music scene have been involved with. Cultural resistance, as often happens, has created some great art, but sadly, has done little to stop the onslaught of pavement cafes.

SSS’s Foxy, has been at the forefront of this resistance in his promoting: “To do gigs in Liverpool is getting really hard. They banned flyposting, clamping down to make the city nice and tidy, new shopping centres, bang. It’s just going to drive everything back underground, where people are just going to do it in little crappy pubs, people doing gigs in their practise rooms and houses. No one will touch it because it’s not an accessible kind of music for anyone. The city as a whole doesn’t want to deal with it; there’re only a couple of places that will entertain it, and then you’re paying through the nose. I think some of the tarting up is a positive thing, but the whole underground is just grinding to a halt, because people are putting up so many fences that people will just give up. Or there’ll be a migration to another area and it won’t even touch Liverpool city centre: people who are interested in it will find out by word of mouth.”

But this drive for authenticity can be as self-destructive as a drive for fame. Refusing to compromise is a quality in Liverpool that is to be admired in people doing creative work, but like so many of the city’s qualities it is an extreme one, which can alienate and disenfranchise others.

Dave McTague, Mellowtone promoter, sees a negative side to the city’s maverick attitude:

“It’s almost a double-edged sword, that the things that are really good about the industry in Liverpool are also the things that hold them back. Opportunities that exist in London aren’t available in provincial cities, so it’s always harder to make a break in that sense. But in Liverpool, there’s almost a bit of a maverick attitude and a dissenting attitude, and I think that unwillingness to fit the mould and do whatever for ‘The Man’ will hold people back. I do know that people in London, and maybe say the bigger Northern cities like Leeds and Manchester, often think that people in Liverpool are quite difficult to work with because they’re quite outspoken and they’re unwilling to do as they’re told, there’s a certain attitude that people in other cities pick up on when dealing with people from Liverpool, that they’re a bit of a pain in the arse.”

At some point we have to poke the elephant in the room. The Beatles ‘thing’ must always be mentioned. The fact that the biggest act in popular music history, a group of people who, whatever criticisms you can throw at them, changed the face of western culture, came from this little port city. That fact is both an inspiration and an albatross. Any musician working in the city knows that they will never match the significance of what went before them. In fact everyone doing anything in the city, art, science, sport, commerce knows that they will never match the ground shaking significance that those four lads had. The Beatles changed the world and they are far more significant to the world than the city itself. But what do they mean to musicians working in the city today?

The Wombats’ Murph seems to sum up the general consensus: “I don’t know, I think the Liverpool music heritage should only really be used as a positive thing really. No matter if you’re from Liverpool or not I think everyone in a band is subconsciously influenced by The Beatles. I don’t know, it seems a case the press are always, ‘Ooh, you’ve got a lot to live up to’. As if any band from anywhere in the world is ever going to be as big as The Beatles. I will just use the rich heritage to spur you on even more.”

And a.P.A.t.T’s General Midi has a parting shot for any musos ready to shoot down The Beatles significance: “There’s always somebody trying to be confrontational somewhere, and if you want to say something profound, you say it against God or The Beatles, it’s an idiot’s profundity.”

So, beyond the Beatles, how much influence does the fabric and culture of the city actually have on the people who create music in it? There’s often talk of a ‘Liverpool sound’, jangley and accessible, with lyrics that are often both humorous and surreal. You can, if you wish, see it in everyone from The Beatles to Half Man Half Biscuit to The La’s, The Coral and The Wombats. Most of them would probably disagree, but to this writer at least, there seems to be something there. The taking of, often obscure, sounds from around the world and putting a unique local spin on them seems to be something that the city does well. American blues rock with The Beatles, The Doors with Echo and the Bunnymen, Beefheart with The Coral, Joan of Arc with Hot Club, Mates of State with Elle S’appelle. This Liverpool filter were things always seem to turn out catchy, surreal and slightly comic whatever you put in at the other end.

General Midi isn’t sure:

“If you could possibly nail what a city sounds like. I could possibly answer that.” But he does think it has a linguistic influence: “I suppose, we’ve got quite a few songs, were there’s maybe a play on, the language in Liverpool is great. You can mock it all day long if you want, but it’s quite enjoyable as well to use. And it’s used in a very different way in Liverpool and it’s demonstrated time and time again by a variety of artists. And I think we do quite a similar thing that pops up now and again. We’ve got one track which is just, you know when you’re walking down the road and you just hear the ends of people conversations and various and it’s made up of just those kinds of things in Liverpool city centre and we’ve got loads of them, so I suppose in that sense yeah, the language impregnates into my mind, every single day that that I’m on the bus in this, place.”

How about the tendency towards surrealism, or at least an off-kilter view of things? The Wombats’ Matthew Murphy has as a viewpoint that seems to some up the attitude of many people in the city:

“Maybe we’re just afraid to kind of say exactly what we see in straightforward terms down a microphone; we like to spin it around a bit. I don’t know, it’s better to laugh in the face of disaster than just shit yourself isn’t it?”

But Murph again, disputes the influence of geography: “I don’t know if physical geography plays that much of a part. Despite what a lot of people think, Ian Curtis wasn’t born in the middle of an industrial estate, [his hometown] Macclesfield is quite pleasant.”

The Wombats seem to the latest in a line of bands from Liverpool to whom quality shiny pop is key. Does Murph, like the Guinness Book of Records, think that pop is in the veins of the city?

“Maybe we’re all just after the buck and we just write three minute pop songs and fuck it. But I’ve never found that myself, there seems to be a pop sensibility all over the UK at the moment. I think the question should be rather, why are the Canadians so weird?”

A fair point. And so to the future, will The Wombats carry on up the charts, will Eugene McGuinness become a troubadour extraordinaire, will ‘Bosspop’ conquer the world, or more likely, will a.P.A.t.T.?

Chris from goFaster >> is upbeat:

“Yeah, the last year or so, there’s been loads of brilliant new bands that have come out of Liverpool, and people are starting to take notice. So I think that fact that we’re going on tour underneath the Bosspop label, is that hopefully if we go to these towns, and play, people will go, ‘Ooh Bosspop, we’ll have a look at that’. And if people enjoy the show, hopefully they’ll look further and to what’s going on in Liverpool, and they can discover a few of the other bands that are just starting up at the moment. I think it’s great that we’ve got to the point were we’ve got to a place were there is a kind of a scene we can go out and advertise, I think we’re glad that people have just started taking an interest in it. Hopefully through this tour, a lot of other bands will be discovered from Liverpool.”

I’d advise you to take his advice and go and check them out, along with links at the bottom of this article. Whatever way you spin it, now and again, some good tunes come out of this town. Who knows what will happen to our music beyond 2008. It could all come crashing down around our ears again. But the city will likely survive and continue to make music and, just occasionally, we’ll get the rest of the world to listen.

By Kenn Taylor

Come on feel the noize

Kenn Taylor

There is currently a minor war taking place between the owners of one of Liverpool’s oldest nightclubs, the Blue Angel, known to many as ‘The Raz’, and the occupants of the block of flats which back onto it.

The situation has been rumbling on since the apartments were put up several years ago, with the residents unhappy about the level of noise being generated by the club. But a Facebook group in the club’s favour has attracted 5,000 members, and nearly 900 people have signed a ‘Save The Raz’ online petition.

Things took another turn this January, when the nightclub’s decks were seized by the Council. With no sign of them being returned, the Blue Angel’s owners were forced to expensively reinvest in a new soundsystem. If moves like this continue to hamper the club’s operation, it could be forced to close, ending a nightclub presence on the site of nearly 50 years.

The club’s appeal against the council order started yesterday (May 12). Solicitors representing the club argued that levels of noise coming from the venue have not been measured in a scientific way and that it is impossible to distinguish between the establishment and others in the area, which as a whole is always very noisy.

But Jonathan Eaton, representing the city council, said: “Although we accept residents can’t expect a Liverpool of tranquility associated with Belgravia Square or the open countryside, we have produced enough evidence to show it is a significant noise and interrupts sleep patterns. On no basis should these people expect to put up with it.”

Fun, cheap, tatty and unpretentious, the Blue Angel is unmistakably part of Liverpool. And when nowt but a few arty types and squatters lived in the city centre, such a complaint would have been unheard of. But as down town becomes full of apartment blocks, this could become and increasing problem – as the young urbanites living in these flats find that they aren’t getting enough sleep to be able to cut their big deals in new media public relations and city centre rental marketing in the morning.

Thing is though, what seemingly attracts people to living in town is the easy availability of thrills and entertainment, the vibrancy, the buzz, the bright lights and excitement. Well, all of that is generated by people having a good time, hitting the town and letting their hair down. And the thing is, it ain’t pretty, and it certainly ain’t quiet. Especially in this city were not only do we really know how to party, but where often the harshness of life means we need to party.

Worst case scenario – could we see these residents getting all the clubs in town closed, or forced to be quiet. Where would we go out ofnthe tiles then? Set up discotheques in West Derby? Night spots in Tuebrook? Town is ultimately for mixing, be that to buy and sell goods and services, or to find your life partner. And anyone who wants to buy into city centre living should accept that, though they may officially be residents, the central area belongs to everyone in the city.

If you want peace, go and rent a house off Lark Lane and pretend that the world is full of wine bars, trees and birdsong. If you want the excitement of living in town, accept that its going to involve putting up with a lot of cheesy disco tunes and relationship arguments at 3am, and broken glass and vomit when you go out for a pint of milk in the morning.

You can’t have it both ways.

Where It All Began

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As anyone involved with music in Liverpool since about 1975 has been keen to point out, there is a lot more to Liverpool culture than the four lads who shook the world. Even so, there’s still a great deal of pride that the single most important band in British popular music came from round ‘ere la. And of course, many, many people come to visit the city because of this, to see Where It All Began™, and this usually means a trip down to Matthew Street to see The Cavern.

But that’s not where it all began. The Cavern was a dingy dive The Beatles only played because they could get booked. It was only one of DOZENS of venues from Church halls to Ballrooms they played throughout the North-West. And by the time of their Cavern residency they’d already been to Hamburg and changed immeasurably from their native origins.

And this is quite apart from the fact that the place that currently calls itself The Cavern it’s even the real Cavern anymore. The original club was demolished in 1973 to make way for an extension to the city’s underground railway and the present building is a 1980s copy built to cash in.

To really understand what The Beatles were all about you’d also have get to Hamburg too, and India, New York and virtually everywhere else and perhaps especially to a small town in Denmark where this writer once spoke to an old man in a pub who, on hearing where I came from, said: “I remember hearing The Beatles for the first time when I was 15, everything changed after that. Everything”

But yeah, the ‘pool is where it all kicked off at least, but not in Matthew Street. If anything was born in that back alley near the business district it was Liverpool’s new wave music explosion in the 1970s and 1980s.

Along with The Cavern, Matthew Street was home to one of the first real punk clubs, Eric’s, where Joy Division, The Clash, Sex Pistols, Devo, XTC, Blondie and countless others played and even more were formed, with Echo and the Bunnymen, OMD, The Teardrop Explodes and The Icicle Works all emerging from its darkened corners, while nearby was the original Probe Records (Now Ted Baker) where the infamous Pete Burns once flogged vinyl in pre ‘You Spin Me Round’ days. Sadly, with drug and money problems this little enterprise was slammed shut by the police in 1980.

However, its brilliant yet short-lived combination of an independent club, record label and fanzine would be of great inspiration to a certain Anthony H. Wilson and friends at the other end of the East Lancashire Road. Yet its memory has largely been buried by a ’boutique’ shopping centre and a vast array of ‘McCartney’s Place’ type bars. Worth visiting still though, just to ponder how the celebration of one great history can so easily lead to the forgetting of another.

If you really want to see Where It All Began™ Beatleswise in Liverpool, then get the bus out of town to the suburbs in the south of the city, where most of them grew up, the home of Penny Lane and the recently-closed Strawberry Field Salvation Army Home. Like most of the people who travel from Havana and Tokyo and Cincinnati and God-knows where else to see the high street and the roads that run off it, filled with pleasant 1930s semi-detached houses, you’ll probably comment, “There’s nothing special about it is there?”

Indeed, apart from a good branch of Oxfam and a Beatles-themed cafe in an old public convenience, Penny Lane and its environs is just a middling, leafy suburb. No difference between it and any other in Liverpool, no different to any other in England in fact other than having the sort of quirky names that would appeal to a songwriter.

But before you ride the bus back into town, look across the road to the Emo kid with the silly haircut and the miserable demur and Americanised clothes holding a guitar case and waiting for the bus to take him to college in town to do his A-Levels, which he’ll probably sack off and go a cool poky pub with his mates and have daft conversations about Hunter S. Thompson and The Mighty Boosh and the latest sounds to the amusement of the locals and there, you’ll be looking at where The Beatles came from. Suburban teenage angst and the desire for the perceived glamour, freedom, understanding and identity offered such kids by rock music.

And instead of an Emo kid imagine the pretentious, witty, troubled, genius, lower middle class working class hero that was John Winston Lennon with a moody look and an odd haircut and his Americanised clothes and guitar case thinking similar thoughts and dreaming of taking on the world while waiting for the bus to take him to the art school in town and thinking of sacking it off and go to a cool poky pub with his mates and have daft conversations about Allen Ginsberg and The Goons and the latest sounds to the amusement of the locals.

That is where it all began, and where it all still begins.

By Kenn Taylor

Elysian Fields and Capitalist Vultures

Kenn Taylor

Ominously a wrecking crane swings past my window. There to tear down another mistake-in this case the 1960s Colquitt Street College-an ugly example of the past, now surplus to requirements and unfit for conversion.

In its place will rise ‘Elysian Fields’ – named after the resting place of the gods in Greek myth. A moniker that may be a little over the top for what is just yet another one of the many identikit blocks of apartments that are springing up around Liverpool. And it’s symptomatic of everything that is happening in the city centre today.

Originally from the stix on the edge of the city, I’m now lucky to live right in the heart of town – and in somewhere remarkably cheap – as Liverpool celebrates its year as the European Capital of Culture. However, things are changing at an astonishing rate and my digs will probably not remain in my income bracket for much longer.

Every time I leave the house it is a step into the middle of the frantic pace of change. Every day another half-decayed house is surrounded by scaffolding, or a former scrap of wasteland masquerading as a car-park gets a billboard promising a future light and airy block. Walk past a building one day and by the next it will have disappeared. A street that you can get down on Monday will be, by Wednesday, roped off as behind it a white tower crane and another framework of grey and crimson girders rises up-Because all modern buildings look the same on the inside.

There is a palpable sense that the very fabric of the city is being transformed, and it is both frightening and exciting in equal measure. Every part of the town center from the waterfront to cheap shopping area of London Road, from the business district to the edge of Everton, from the cultural quarter of Hope Street to where I live, an area now marketed as ‘The Ropewalks’. By the time I’d first began to hang around this part of town a few years back, its former grandeur had long since succumbed to the passage of time and the pace of change. In all its variety, it was crumbling and semi-derelict. This meant low-rents, and so many of the buildings found new lives as artists studios, independent shops and markets, not to mention some of the best clubs and venues in the city nestling next to the odd traditional business clinging on; from sign writers to drinks wholesalers.

Despite its artistic community the area remained unpretentious, anywhere with so many lock-up garages had to be. The buildings, even as they began to rot, had their decaying brickwork buried under a healthy covering of fly posters, graffiti and the slow reclamation of nature as green growth poked through every crack. The area was falling down, no one can deny that, but it had a great variety of life in it. With Liverpool’s slow economic renaissance – and the rise in the fashion of inner-city living in Britain – some wealthier people began to move into this slightly ‘bohemian’ area and a few apartment blocks sprang up. They were praised – these flats where usually conversions, saving buildings that would have otherwise collapsed.

Their occupants were no doubt attracted to an extent by the rough charm of the area and its rich heritage. The area once housed some of the city’s richest merchants, it contained the city’s first library, and was before that it was an important industrial area, were rope was made – hence, ‘Ropewalks’.

One site in the area, my current home, is the former Royal Institution building on Colquitt Street. This organization was founded by poet, anti-slavery campaigner and businessman William Roscoe in order to bring art and learning to the giant industrial city Liverpool had become by the 1850s; Liverpool University was later to emerge from this. Before that the building had been the home and warehouse of Thomas Parr, the merchant who built it in 1799. It is a unique surviving example of this kind of structure in the UK, it is grade II listed and was a key building listed in Liverpool’s successful bid to become a World Heritage Site of UNESCO. In addition to hosting my digs it is also home to two nightclubs, Barfly and Bar Fresa, thus making it probably one of the few World Heritage Sites to have its own disco.

This sort of unpretentious mixture of rich heritage and modern life in the area is what made it special. But with Liverpool’s resurgence via regeneration, and the subsequent rise in property prices which was massively speeded up by it winning the title of European Capital of Culture for 2008, I wonder how long, I, or people like me, can afford to sleep, drink, dance and work around here.

With the mass of new property being constructed, the city is being cleaned up. The cracks and weeds and graffiti and posters are disappearing, as are the clubs and studios. Replaced by new buildings; for the most part those ‘Elysian Fields’ style apartments with a restaurant/cocktail bar at the base. Over and over again the same mediocre, foursquare structures are repeated, with only different balcony railings to distinguish them if at all. Some older buildings are retained, those with ‘character’, to be converted for similar uses.

The wild reclaiming growth coming out the buildings is replaced by neat but emaciated looking trees in metal-containers. And in between the flats, desolate squares are created complete with imitation marble and uncomfortable benches. Skinny saplings and asymmetric paving may look good in scale models and artist’s impressions but these soulless, dead spaces remain conspicuously empty throughout the day save for the odd homeless alcoholic or skateboarder. People would rather eat their pasties on nearby dirty, busy Bold Street.

One development in particular, the ‘East Village Private Estate’ on Duke Street, must rank as one of the most depressing sites in the city. Its gray apartments surround a dank square, with a pathetic fountain at its center. Hard wired with CCTV everywhere and covered with PRIVATE PROPERTY. CHILDREN MUST BE ACCOMPIANED NO DOGS. NO CYCLING OR SKATEBOARDING signs. It is a bleak place even in the sunshine, even the residents of the building hardly ever sit there. The East Village is actually quite lucky in one respect in that at its base it has restaurants. Many of these blocks simply have un-let, boarded-up voids under them. And with their secure underground parking, razor-wire topped gates and balconies far above the street below they give a sense of being cut off from the street, and the city, and life. This side of Liverpool is becoming a city of straight lines and security measures.

Just across the road however there is a different prospect, showing the city is still at the point of change. It is a row of decaying buildings full of cracked windows. But at its center is the WAH SING CHINESE COMMUNITY CENTRE, while next door is The Big Issue Liverpool office, both with their varying mix of punters usually floating about outside keep some life in the area. But how long will they all be able to stay where they are with the rising rents? The redevelopment now approaches the 1980s social housing between Chinatown and the waterfront with its small community and own schools. Will they too one day find themselves moved on as the land the homes were built on, once virtually worthless, rises?

‘The Ropewalks’ is just one area, but the same story is being repeated all over the city. Slow, organic change has been overtaken at an astonishing rate by mass re-development.  Down on Princess dock, once home of the Irish sea ferries, more new offices and flats are being put up right next to Liverpool’s famous waterfront buildings. Walking around there the thing that you notice-other than how crap the buildings look in comparison to the adjacent famous ‘three graces’-is the silence. There’s nothing above the wind and the vague hum of the air conditioners in the area, despite the fact that so many people live and work there. Another dead space, symptomatic of much of the inner-city regeneration in the UK. Anyone who has spent time in the regenerated docklands of Manchester or Glasgow will attest that even though the imaginative post-modern museums, galleries and flats that fill these spaces look nice sunlit in two-page spreads in The Guardian, in the flesh they seem desolate, cold and patchy, with dereliction still visible just on the edge of the picture.

Not only is much of the new city cut-off, cold and dead, but a lot of it is no more than a façade. I have mentioned the tellingly empty shops under the apartments before and even many of the flats themselves remain un-let. The new cocktail bars and restaurants often close quietly not long after they are launched in blazes of glory, though the local media and dignitaries that were there at the opening are conspicuously absent as the bailiffs move in. And, with the world economy seemingly in downturn, how much more growth can be expected in expensive shops and restaurants?

The key thing at the moment is creating a new image of the city rather than a new city. Liverpool’s administrators are keen to have the city seen as go-ahead place to do business and therefore move it firmly away from the stereotypical 1980s images of militancy, strikes and despair that were only partially consigned to the dustbin with the Capital of Culture win, and that even today dog the city to an extent. But sometimes it is getting forgotten that the city is still not as wealthy as it appears on the surface. Image is important, but there must be something underneath if it is to be sustained. Whilst the new buildings themselves often have a look of being temporary and cheap, flimsy facades hung off steel frames, with the distinct impression given off that they could fall down as quickly as they are rising up.

But perhaps I’m getting a little too Joni Mitchell here-luxury apartments replacing parking lots. It’s easy to be cynical. Things are far from all bad in the Liverpool, and many new developments such as the new arena on the waterfront and the FACT multimedia complex have both been welcomed with open arms. Even some of the flats, cocktail bars and chic offices of graphic design companies have been single-handedly responsible for saving fine, old buildings that were on the slow, painful road to collapse while the council dithered. Much too has been learned from the mistakes of the past, and Liverpool’s last great re-development in the 1960s when vast swathes of the city were demolished at the behest of planners’ grand designs-to many peoples eternal regret. Actions such as the saving of the well-known biker’s pub The Swan-now sandwiched loud and proud between a luxury apartment block and the FACT center, jukebox blaring out. By the same token we are also seeing some the atrocious 1960s and 70s structures that litter Liverpool being torn down; few people lament the loss the Duke Street multi-storey car-park, the Moat House hotel or the Paradise Street bus station.

These changes have also had a strangely positive effect on artists in Liverpool.  Many can scarcely believe that after so many years of stagnation that the city is changing so fast. It is impossible to ignore and for all the artists in the city, from musicians to photographers, it is a subject that many feel compelled to discuss; much as many of Liverpool’s creative people in the 1980s could not help but be influenced by the decline of the city.

Art is often at its best when it is reacting against something and in the wake of these disliked developments and the Capital of Culture win promoting principally the more marketable aspects of culture, a reaction against it has been created and a definite counter-culture has emerged, causing a wholesale examination of what exactly this ‘culture’ thing is. And I can’t imagine that if any other city in Britain had won this title that this would have happened.

One example would be Mercy, an award winning fanzine and independent artistic collective. It had humble beginnings, originally founded by a couple of art students as a way of getting their work noticed. But on its arrival in 2002 it inadvertently became the focal point of a reaction against the creation of the image of the shiny, clean, new Liverpool; a good place to do business populated by well-mannered, educated people. Mercy pointed out that the homeless alchy’s who hang around the Bargain Booze on Hardman Street are as much of a part of the culture of Liverpool as the art-deco Philharmonic Hall up the road. There have been many other reactions. A punk band night was formed under the banner ‘City of Capitalist Vultures’. Massive campaigns were mounted to save the Quiggins alternative shopping complex, the Parr Street Recording Studios and The Flying Picket music venue that were all threatened by new developments, meaning that Parr Street Studios was saved from closure and alternative premises were found for the other two.

And maybe as the city moves into the future it is simply returning to the old. ‘The Ropewalks’ was once home to Liverpool’s wealthy merchant class in the nineteenth century, so why not in the 21st century its wealthy new-media class? The urbane, sophisticated businessmen and women: those who like to eat sushi, buy paintings and attend the theatre. To simply be against these kinds of people or having private apartments in general is nothing more than inverted snobbery. Let them have their apartment blocks with silly, pretentious names. All major cities have these kinds of people, and what many artists find it hard to admit is that it is often these ‘bourgeoisie’ with their spare cash and time help to keep theatres and galleries in business, however unfashionable that may be.

It is also true that it is important for the whole life of the city for it to have successful businesses, because without a strong economic engine underneath, everything else falls apart-as Liverpool found in the 1980s. So it is also daft to be totally anti-business and anti-development. Indeed the buildings that symbolize Liverpool, the famous ‘three graces’ on the waterfront, are all palaces of commerce; insurance, shipping and docks respectively. Not to mention the fact that much of the city’s fine public buildings – from St Georges Hall to the Central Library, Walker Art Gallery and Sefton Park – were all paid for by private capitalist benefactors in their day.

But therein lies the problem.

Because most of Liverpool’s previous wealthy residents, the patrons of arts and charities and benefactors of public palaces quickly buggered off when the going got tough and the city ceased to be a profitable place to live. They abandoned their houses and business and distanced themselves from the city they had once proudly run, leaving only those who could not afford to go behind to try and rebuild something.

So the empty warehouses and homes were turned into markets and studios and clubs and some new life rose out of what was left to rot. But now Liverpool is again, to an extent, a profitable place to be, and the indigenous and independent culture that survived, created by those who stuck by the city and kept the heart of it alive, is being pushed aside and forgotten in the rush to bring in the money. This fiercely independent culture of the city, that stood the years of knocks and ridicule, the culture that made the forgotten ‘Ropewalks’ fashionable, is being pushed out to the fringes again and potentially crushed in a desperate, grasping attempt by the city to become accepted. The strong willed Liverpool that is being lost, though at times arrogant and self-important, was nevertheless honest. But now the city that once defied central government and tried to take on the world (people forget that the dockers strike of a few years ago managed to cripple half the ports in the world before its collapse) now seeks the simpering approval of the South East and the tourist Dollar.

Of course this is not unique to Liverpool. The same thing happens the world over, form New York to London, once an area becomes a fashionable and desirable place it immediate begins to lose something of what made it that way. And there is always that nagging thought; is this brave new luxury apartment filled world is still better than riots, dereliction, despair, ridicule?

Perhaps. But we may find out to late that there was actually more life in Liverpool 1 when it was decaying. Maybe what is being created will become resented as being dead and soulless, the money will leave just as quickly as it came and once again it will be up to those left behind to start again. As much as I hope it won’t, it may come to pass that this new dawn for Liverpool will just be another mistake that we will have to tear down.

By Kenn Taylor

Don’t Whitewash The Whitehouse

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There was much controversy at the start of Liverpool’s Capital of Culture celebrations in January, when the much loved rat mural on the corner of Berry Street and Duke Street appeared to be getting covered up. It seemed as if  the work by the infamous and shadowy graffiti artist Banksy was to be blotted out with hoardings emblazoned with ‘Liverpool 08’ advertising.

For many people this action seemed to represent all that had gone wrong with Capital of Culture. The erasing of real underground artistic expression with bland, generic, gentrified ‘regeneration’ that might look a lot nicer and cleaner, but was ultimately dead. The move was even mentioned on BBC’s Newsnight as a symbol of the Culture Company’s ineptitude, while local leaders were desperately trying to get the media to focus on the big opening spectacular at the other end of town.

The Council argued that the mural and the building had faillen into severe disrepair, and was beyond saving. But amid the protests, they halted the erection of the offending advertising hoardings and ultimately, quietly, removed the frames. Though it appears whichever contractor they commissioned to paint around the rat and improve the appearance of the structure either wasn’t very good, or a little annoyed at their was job being made harder by some artsy upstart, as they painted over a bit of the rat’s head.

The rat was originally commissioned as part of the 2004 Liverpool Biennial, and in the intervening period Banksy has gone from an underground name mentioned in trendy art circles, to one of the most famous and admired contemporary artists in the UK. Last April, a new record price was set for a piece by Banksy when ‘Space Girl and Bird’ reached £288,000 at London auction house Bonhams. Shortly afterwards he was given the award of Art’s Greatest Living Briton.

In the same time period Liverpool, and in particular the area where the work was sited, has also been transformed. The once mostly derelict and neglected area has since become filled with swank bars, flats and shops, often at the expense of more alternative and underground activities and establishments in the area. The abandoned Whitehouse pub and its rat decoration however, remains as it was.

The Council perhaps do have a point; the building is clearly a decaying shell and looks dangerously close to collapse. But council’s in London and Banksy’s native Bristol have ordered operatives not to remove Banksy’s work in their duties, no doubt sniffing the tourist potential in hosting work by an artist so popular with the public. From a pragmatic point of view, if Liverpool wants to market itself as ‘Art City UK’ this should be bore in mind. But there is I believe a deeper reason why The Whitehouse and its rat should not be covered up, demolished or re-developed.

As the area around it continues to be transformed, more and more buildings like The Whitehouse that have lain derelict for up to 40 years are either being demolished or converted, and as the area is ‘cleaned up’ its history is being erased, or at least the undesirable aspects of it. Although some of the developments have been give ‘characterfull’ and thus value-adding names like ‘the foundry’ or the ‘the box works’, it’s funny how no one has called a block of flats ‘the abattoir’ or ‘the crack den’ yet isn’t it?

So far though, The Whitehouse remains untouched, a big, fat sore-thumb of failure, a symbol of nothing more than decades of economic malaise. No wonder our leaders want to cover it up. And there in lies the point. Just like the International Slavery Museum down at the Albert Dock, and the bombed-out-in-the-blitz St Luke’s Church just up the road from it, The Whitehouse is a prominent symbol of one of the darker aspect of the city’s history and, as we all know, those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.

The Whitehouse should be allowed to remain in as near as possible its current state, even if all around it is transformed into a shinning masterpiece of regeneration. It should remain as a memorial to the long recession that has so shaped our culture and the people who lived through it and kept our city alive through the bad times.

Shore it up, stick some Perspex around it and watch the tourists come and shake their heads at the horrors of the past before they move onto the other landmarks. Perhaps too the city’s leaders will walk past occasionally and shudder, and maybe we won’t get as cock-sure of our position in the world as we did in the past. This is what happened to our city before and it will happen again if we’re not careful.

Let’s not whitewash The Whitehouse, because amidst all the artist’s impressions of glittering tower blocks lining the waterfront and talk of monorails and restaurants in the sky, it should be kept to remind us that, although there are positives, the whole edifice of the new Liverpool could so easily come crashing down around our ears if we’re not careful.

And anyway, the rat’s fucking cool.

By Kenn Taylor

Red Wire Open 2007

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Red Wire Gallery

This is the ninth exhibition to be held at the relatively new Red Wire gallery, located in the historic Carlisle Building on Victoria Street. It was first utilised as artist studios in 2005 and the exhibition space, named after the fire alarm cable that runs around its otherwise white walls, opened in 2006.

This show is the result of an open submission process and the relatively small gallery is crammed with the selected pieces. It is an eclectic mix of work from a range of young artists, encompassing everything from photography to sculpture and even a mechanical contraption.

One of the stand-out works is ‘Xerox F**k’ by Ania Bas and Adam James. This piece is a collage of overlapping photocopied body parts, with more images projected over it in green. The featured bodies appear almost trapped under water or in plastic. With squeezed-shut eyes, squashed flesh and string-like hair, their features are reduced to basic shapes and tones. An original and unusual form of bodily representation

‘Barbi Hystricula’ by Patrick Semple is a peculiar artwork constructed from bone, hair and other materials. Resembling both an artefact from an archaeological dig and something alien from a science-fiction film, it is a creepy and fascinating piece.

A more conventional work of note is Helen Blejerman’s picture depicting an upside-down suburban neighbourhood, part of her ‘Inversions’ series. The piece really brings out the basic forms and shapes that make up these familiar structures in a visually arresting way.

This is an excellent and eclectic exhibition. The pieces are perhaps a little too closely grouped in the small and sometimes overlap on each other, but this has at least allowed a good cross-section of new artistic works to be displayed when so many independent galleries seem to be closing in the city centre.

By Kenn Taylor

The Last Ever Munkyfest 2006

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Kinglsey, nr Frodsham, Cheshire.

In a little known corner of North West England, surrounded by rolling fields and the towering chimneys of chemical works there is a farm and on that farm is the Lord and protector of all DIY music festivals. Beginning 8 years ago in someone’s back garden it now reaches its pinnacle. But alas, it is also the last ever Munkyfest.

Musical fun on the two hotch-potch stages varies from Honey, Ride Me A Goat’s concentrated, confused and gripping jazzrock in aprons, Get Chevyed’s Yank, infected, Scouse tinged jokepunk that bounces about beer bongs and the Jamaican bobsleigh team, the duo of National School who play squeaky keyed witty genius and Dave from Stoke doing a 40 minute drum solo which is actually REALLY FUCKING GOOD.

We lose the ‘Musical Bingo’ – ah if only ‘Ebenezer Goode’ had come up we could have won a DVD about Margaret Thatcher. But no matter, as we sit on a tractor tyre and watch people mingle over Crepes and booze and football a local brass band play the theme from the A-Team and all is good in the world.

Voo play a sadly shortened set, but their knack for powerful harmonic grooves is still evident. Gareth S. Brown fills proceedings as day turns to night with some majestic ambient sounds before Hot Club De Paris pull us up and down on their mad lyrics, madder time signatures. All finished off by the last ever gig by polished pop punks Tokyo Adventures.

There’s time left for more drink and a shuffle in the rave tent before we sit by the dying embers of the crackling camp fire and think. Munkyfest is no more but we’ve seen the light. Go forth, set up your own music festival in your own town. It will be good.

By Kenn Taylor

Accelerator Festival 2007

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Stockholm University, Sweden

There is a country and in that country there is an archipelago and in that archipelago there is a city and in that city there is a university and on its pleasant grounds The Fly is mashing its already tired bones in a frantic attempt to ride The Gossip’s groove. Those behind this small but oh-so-perfectly-formed festival have seemingly rounded up three-quarters of all interesting alternative acts in the world onto this compact site. We move with ease from the five horsemen of the rockapalpyse that is Modest Mouse and the scratchy, soulful layers of TV On The Radio to the weird Welsh wonder of Gruff Rhys, and much more besides. Our only hesitation in recommendation is that there may be less room for us next year.

By Kenn Taylor