by Paul Morley
Under the Volcano (1947) is now widely accepted not only as Malcolm Lowry’s masterpiece but also as one of the great works of twentieth-century writing. It exemplifies Lowry’s methods as a writer, which involved drawing heavily upon autobiographical material and imbuing it with complex and allusive layers of symbolism. Under the Volcano depicts a series of complex and unwillingly destructive relationships, and is set against a rich evocation of Mexico. The great Liverpool writer sets his visions outside Liverpool, but the road began there, the road that went to sea, the road that travelled to and through Kerouac and Ginsberg, into the beat that rattled under the rough, smooth skin of the Beatles.
A sinister ferry opened Lowry’s first published tale, the short story ‘Goya the Obscure’, in which the hero crosses to a shadowy Liverpool of sexual sickness and fear: ‘Imprisoned in a Liverpool of self, I haunted the gutted arcades of the past.’
In Under the Volcano a sinister little rhyme incorporating a children’s chant plays in the mind of the consul as he sets off with his brother:
Plingen, plangen, aufgefangen
Swingen, swangen, at my side,
Pootle, footle, off to Bootle,
Nemesis, a pleasant ride
Liverpool, everyone has an opinion. Liverpool, in excess. Liverpool, Alexei Sayle, born in Anfield, 7 August 1952, humour not a priority in working-class fifties Liverpool dominated by Stalinist communism and political activism. ‘I think that my idea of the world is that it’s random and cruel but quite sort of comical really. If you stand in the beating heart of Liverpool on the waterfront and look west you can almost see Dublin, and beyond that New York, hunkering just over the horizon. To me, Liverpudlians have broader horizons, and the characters in a city are formed by what the city does. In a place like Birmingham people have spent the past 300 years taking apart and putting together tiny little machines; if you stand in the centre and look west from Birmingham you can almost see Wolverhampton.’
Liverpool, 1955: Bill Haley appears at the Odeon, resulting in disturbances in which 150 seats are wrecked. Liverpool, the Merseysippi Jazz Band sharing the stage with Louis Armstrong at the Liverpool Stadium in 1956. ‘I was born across the river in Birkenhead, brought up from the age of five in north Wales, trained as a painter in Newcastle upon Tyne; the reason I moved back to Liverpool in 1956 was because it was an artist’s town, cheap to live in, with a thriving bohemia based in the inner-city Georgian/Victorian area.’ Adrian Henri. In his poem ‘Liverpool 8’ he writes of it as a place
where you play out after tea . . . back doors and walls
with names, kisses, scrawled or painted
. . . a new cathedral at the end of Hope Street . . . wind
blowing inland from Pierhead bringing the smell of breweries
and engine oil from ferry boats.
Liverpool, hire purchase is invented. Do you do terms?
On 31 October 1956 Paul McCartney’s mother Mary, a heavy smoker, died of an embolism after a mastectomy operation to stop the spread of her breast cancer. Liverpool, 1957: the first rock and roll record from the city, Johnny Guitar and Paul Murphy’s ‘She’s Got It’. Liverpool, town. Liverpool, ringleaders. The Cavern Club opened in Mathew Street on Wednesday 16 January 1957 days after Anthony Eden resigned as prime minister following the Suez Crisis, to be replaced by Harold Macmillan. It aimed to put Liverpool on the map by having the leading jazz cellar in the country outside London. Opened and owned by Alan Sytner, it was named after the Parisian jazz club Le Caveau. Liverpool, Woolton parish church garden fete, 6 July 1957, 6.48 p.m., Paul McCartney introduced to John Lennon by Ivan Vaughan. Paul realised John had been drinking: ‘he was a little afternoon-boozy, leaning over my shoulder, pissed’. McCartney said that sailors and immigrants made Liverpool a ‘melting pot’ of different ethnic sounds and added, ‘We took what we liked from all that.’
Liverpool, Jacaranda Coffee Bar. Liverpool, these are places I remember. Liverpool, 1958, Ronald Wycherly aged eighteen of Garston becomes Billy Fury; John Lennon asks for his autograph. After leaving school at the age of fifteen, Ronald was a rivet thrower in an engineering factory and a deckhand on a tug in the Mersey estuary. He suffered intermittent health problems following a bout of rheumatic fever at the age of six, which damaged his heart valves. He spent a great deal of his early life in hospital. He later recalled, ‘I was always sick, I was always in hospital, lying in bed somewhere, and I missed a hell of a lot of my schooling. And every time I got back to school, I didn’t know the kids – I was always the stranger.’ Liverpool, Her Majesty’s decayed town. Liverpool, the muddy pool. Liverpool, a good place to wash your hair. In 1958 Ingrid Bergman shot The Inn of the Sixth Happiness in Snowdonia, using hundreds of British-Chinese extras with most of the children coming from the Liverpool Chinese community. On 15 July 1958, when John Lennon was seventeen, his mother died on Menlove Avenue shortly after leaving his Aunt Mimi’s house, while crossing the road to get to a bus stop. She was struck by a car driven by a drunk off-duty policeman, PC Eric Clague, a learner driver. He was acquitted of all charges and later left the police force to become a postman.
When Stuart Sutcliffe sells a painting in 1959 for sixty-five pounds, an unheard-of sum for a student’s painting in those days, John convinces him to buy a bass guitar and join the band, never mind that he can’t play. Before their first big break, a two-week tour to Scotland backing Johnny Gentle, Stu (almost) comes up with a new name for the group, jokingly suggesting ‘the Beetles’ as a play on Buddy Holly’s Crickets. In 1960 the Beatles are George, Paul, John, Stuart and ‘very shy’ drummer Pete Best, whose mother Mona effectively manages the group as a vehicle for her good-looking son before Brian Epstein takes over. On 29 October 1961 Raymond Jones supposedly walks into the NEMS record store in Liverpool’s Whitechapel shopping district and asks proprietor Brian Epstein for a copy of ‘My Bonnie’. Alistair Taylor, Epstein’s assistant, explains: ‘I got fed up with youngsters coming in asking for the Beatles record. So I put a name, Raymond Jones, in the order book. I just made it up. Otherwise Brian wouldn’t have paid any attention.’
Liverpool, rolling the dial on the radio. Liverpool, November 1961. Brian Epstein meets the Beatles – everyone from south Liverpool – in a dressing room as big as a broom cupboard at the Cavern Club; by Christmas he is their manager. Liverpool, place of slogans. Brian Epstein gives Pete Best the bad news: Ringo Starr is to become the Beatles’ new drummer. Best is sacked not necessarily for drumming reasons. Neil Aspinall would later recall how it came about: ‘. . . so I drove him [Pete Best] into town to see him. I was in the record store looking at records, and he came down and said he had been fired. He was in a state of shock, really. We went over to the Grapes pub in Mathew Street, had a pint.’ Pete continued his musical career and tried to piggyback on the Beatles’ success. In 1964 the Pete Best All Stars were signed to Decca, the label that originally rejected the Beatles. Their one single, ‘I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door’, was a flop, and Decca dropped them. Pete then spent some time touring with his Pete Best Combo, to middling success if that, and retired back to Liverpool in 1966, taking a job in a bakery.
Liverpool, swarming city of dreams. Liverpool, a view of the Mersey until the cathedral gets in the way. Liverpool, dead sea. Liverpool, not London. Liverpool, carnival of the mind. Liverpool, a makeshift mythological aura. Liverpool, 1961: poets Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough meet almost on the same day that Andy Warhol directs his first film, Ornette Coleman releases Free Jazz, and Joseph Beuys is made professor of sculpture at the Academy in Düsseldorf. Liverpool, Bob Shankly’s Liverpool FC are promoted from the Second to the First Division at the end of the 1961/2 season. Liverpool, Carl Jung, 1961: ‘I had a dream. I found myself in a dirty, sooty city. It was night and winter; and dark and raining. I was in Liverpool. In the centre was a round pool; in the middle of it a small island. On it stood a single tree; a magnolia in a shower of reddish blossoms. It was as though the tree stood in the sunlight, and was, at
the same time, the source of light. Everything was extremely unpleasant; black and opaque – just as I felt then. But I had a vision of unearthly beauty . . . and that’s why I was able to live at all. Liverpool is the pool of life.’
Liverpool, 1961, population 745,114. Liverpool, like New Orleans at the turn of the century, but with rock and roll not jazz. On 6 July 1961, in the first issue of Mersey Beat magazine a feature headlined swinging cilla begins, ‘Cilla Black is a Liverpool girl who is starting on the road to fame.’ The editor, Bill Hary, had run a piece written by Cilla White, who worked in the cloakroom at the Cavern Club, but could not remember her surname other than it was a colour. Looking at the piece, he plumped for Black.
Her piece appeared on page 6, four pages after John Lennon’s biography of The Beatles:
FASHION NOTES BY PRISCILLA WHITE. The knitted crochet look, which started in Italy, has at last reached our shores, and you can find it in cotton, silk, ribbon and even straw.
GREY. No longer is grey a dismal, formal form of office wear to be worn only during the day. Grey is now the colour for evening wear.
RED. To be worn at any time of the year, in blazing tones for the autumn, and in various tones during the other seasons.
BLACK. The slickest word in fashion. This year’s bare-armed dresses are ideally suited to this colour, and for lighter relief a touch of white is elegant and dramatic.
Liverpool, 1961. Gerry and the Pacemakers’ version of Ray Charles’ ‘What’d I Say’. Liverpool, 25 January 1961. ‘It was a damp and foggy night as I nervously approached Hambleton Hall, a miserable little dance hall on the outskirts of Liverpool. I was tense because a gang of “Teddy Boys” were following me to the same little dive. They were putting the boot into cars, lamp posts and the occasional cat. We were all going to see a new group called the Beatles, who had just come back from Hamburg.’
Liverpool, 1962, happening, pre-scene, public event as work of art, mixed-media event, Merseyside Arts Festival, find a flower, hold it up to the light. Adrian Henri claims to have organised the first happenings in England in Liverpool after reading a piece by the American painter Allan Kaprow. ‘We did mixed-media events – happenings – with titles like City, Death of a Bird in the City, City and Blues, eventually incorporating live music from some of the local Merseybeat groups.’ Liverpool, 1962. American singer Bruce Channel is on tour with the Beatles, supported by local bands the Four Jays and the Statesmen. Channel describes Liverpool as a bleak lonely place, with Bible-black buildings, light shafts and a memorable seawall. Liverpool, the outlook had not improved. In 1962 the North West Regional Board for Industry says, ‘The amalgamation and rationalisation of firms in Merseyside was resulting in a loss of employment opportunities in an area where unemployment was a serious problem.’
Liverpool, Allen Ginsberg walking down Mathew Street, like a bloody saint, holier than Ringo or John. In 1962 teacher Roger McGough appeared at the Merseyside Arts Festival as part of the Liverpool Oat-Lady All-Electric Show, with Post Office engineer and sometime comedy actor John Gorman, and Michael Blank, as he was credited in the programme, hiding the fact he is the younger brother of Paul McCartney. Mike McCartney’s first published photo – in Mersey Beat – calls him Francis Michael. The trio decide to stick together and perform as The Scaffold. Granada Television records the Beatles – with Ringo Starr on drums for the first time – playing at the Cavern in August 1962.
When in 1962 writer Troy Kennedy Martin was confined to bed with mumps, he decided to pass his time listening in to the police wavelength on his radio. What he heard was a far cry from what was being depicted on television. As a result he created Z Cars, a series set on Merseyside at a time when Liverpool was on the verge of significant social changes. To combat the growing crime wave policemen were taken off the beat, placed in fast-response vehicles, the Z cars of the series title (so called because the cars were Ford Zephyrs), and put on patrol around the old district of Seaport and the modern high-rise development of Kirkby Newtown. Z Cars mirrored its era and dared to push the depiction of the police and their role in a rapidly changing society to starkly realistic new heights.
The River Mersey as it passes between Liverpool and the Wirral
To the surprise of the BBC, the show was an instant hit, with audiences rising to fourteen million before the end of its scheduled thirteen-week run, which was hastily extended to thirty-one episodes. The Z Cars theme was based on the old Liverpool sea shanty ‘Johnny Todd’. A children’s skipping song in Liverpool, the lyrics were filled out by Frank Kidson, who collected it from a singer who couldn’t remember all the words. The tune was revived when Fritz Spiegel, sometime flautist with the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and his ex-wife Bridget Fry arranged the melody as the signature tune for Z Cars. The effect aimed at was that of the fife-and-drum band playing in an Orange Day parade. The section of the Liverpool Phil that recorded the tune had some difficulty playing the off notes.
The Everyman was born as an alternative to the Playhouse theatre in 1964, when idealistic Liverpool University students Martin Jenkins, Peter James, Susan Fleetwood and Terry Hands founded a new company on a shoestring budget operating out of a run-down building licensed as a cinema and nightclub at the weekends. Hope Hall had originally been a chapel, built in 1837 and closed in 1853, when it was turned into a concert hall. In 1912 the hall was converted into the Hope Hall Cinema, which lasted until 1959. Knowing that the venue would still be used as a cinema on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, Jenkins, James and Hands had to find other ways to draw in audiences. They decided to put on matinee productions of plays on the syllabus of schools within a thirty-mile radius of Liverpool, while also staging evening performances aimed primarily at adult audiences. In 1965 a Conservative councillor begged, ‘Let this thing die now.’ In 1967 the theatre refined its role as a voice of the local people, reflecting the city’s sense of itself, developing plays written by local writers such as Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell. Actors who started their careers with the Everyman include Alison Steadman, Anthony Sher, Trevor Eve, Bernard Hill, Jonathan Pryce, Bill Nighy, Pete Postlethwaite, Barbara Dickson, Julie Walters and Matthew Kelly.
Liverpool, a goal to the good. Liverpool, Liverpuddle. Liverpool, Liverpolitan. Liverpool, resisting. Liverpool, dissenting. Liverpool, booming. Liverpool, pop groups that demand perfection, setting out to make an impression on the whole world, which they can glimpse from their bedrooms, from the waterfront, from the inside of bars and clubs. Liverpool, Teardrop Explodes, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Echo and the Bunnymen, Wah! Heat. Liverpool, a cosy anarchy of pilfering, gossip, giddiness and love. Liverpool, championing the demotic in language, and in everything. Liverpool, underdog. Liverpool, you can put your finger on it. Liverpool, a cathedral to spare. Liverpool, moving things around from place to place, around the world, across the universe. Liverpool, stew, hotpot, hash, scouse. Liverpool, Hairy Records, the divine smell of vinyl. Liverpool, the nervous skin of sensation just this side of darkness. Liverpool, rising through the mist. Liverpool, nothing is real. Liverpool, a seaport spun from the blood of slaves, in the pool of life a macabre parade, slave city in a society built on a truth that’s cruel, once upon a time you were the nation’s jewel. Liverpool, a dark lightless white netted over with grey. Liverpool, the enchantment sours. Liverpool, little boxes, little boxes. Liverpool, the immaterial sphere of our furious and outreaching emotions. Liverpool, collapse of the capitalist system. Liverpool, earthy mysticism. Liverpool, cabs that smell like people have stopped wiping themselves. Liverpool, a goddess in disguise. Liverpool, Ken Dodd, Jimmy Tarbuck and Arthur Askey – in his autobiography he recalled a visit back to Liverpool: ‘They’ve put a plaque on the wall of the house where I was born. It says condemned.’
Liverpool, passion. Liverpool, moving. Liverpool, moving cotton, sugar, slaves, invoices, music, ideas here, there and everywhere else. Liverpool, import, export. Liverpool, a bit raw. Liverpool, rich, richer, richest. Liverpool, slum, slummie
r, slummiest. Liverpool, shady. Liverpool, good old-fashioned genuinely likeable, salt of the earth, with this and that thrown in for good measure. Liverpool, the problem with demoralised cities. Liverpool, 190,000 cousins. Liverpool, in my eyes and in my ears. Liverpool, people fleeing social reforms and economic decline. Liverpool, what about us? Liverpool, a post-war anglicised Siberia, out of sight, out of mind, unloved, unwanted. Liverpool, Hamburg. Liverpool, gossip. Liverpool, history. Liverpool, the Kop. Liverpool, drug addict, shoplifter and burglar. Liverpool, oh you are a mucky kid, dirty as a dustbin lid. Liverpool, John Lennon’s urgent urban harmonica introduction to ‘Love Me Do’. Liverpool, the opening chord to ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, which became the magical mystery chord, the wake-up chord, as restless as progress, the summation of everything they knew, with the excitement continual discovery provides, recognised in about 1.4 seconds, which may or may not have taken a combination of: producer George Martin glancing against a Steinway grand piano just to sweeten things a little, Paul McCartney on Hofner bass with pillow-muffled speaker, George Harrison on his prized new Fireglo twelve-string Rickenbacker 360, the second one ever made, ringing the changes, charging into being a sound of the sixties, a different kind of continuity, putting the world on edge, John Lennon on a six-string Gibson J-160E flat-top acoustic-electric guitar, Ringo Starr, drum of the people, with his standard 1963 Black Pearl Ludwig drum kit, tapping the snare, grazing the Zildjian ride cymbal, maybe a tip of the bongo, and sundry other sonic colour, acoustic cut and space, metallic accents, and speeded-up half-speed interplay, and a Liverpool kitchen sink, so that the chord sounded like some sort of exotic percussive electric organ being played in the Church of Time, where the world breathes in, and the world breathes out. Liverpool, if I gave marks out of ten for towns then Liverpool would get thirteen, said Lux Interior of the Cramps some time between 1852 and 1988. Liverpool, John Peel, Rex Harrison, who talked to the animals, Harold Wilson and Tom Baker. Liverpool, in the town where I was born, lived a man, who sailed the sea.