Pies and Prejudice
Page 8
Ken Bigley was held hostage for three weeks before he was killed, an agonising sentence for his family, who had to endure occasional videotaped messages from him in captivity and the almost certain expectation of a dreadful outcome. During this time, Billy Connolly had cracked a 'joke' on tour in London to the effect 'Ken Bigley – don't you just wish they'd just get on with it?' There was a brief cappuccino froth of disapproval but nothing more. No calls for an apology, no tearing up of contracts. Which is pretty amazing when you think about it. Silly old Boris makes a reasonable point about sentimentality and victimhood and is forced into the political wilderness in a sackcloth demob suit; LA-based multimillionaire comedian Bill savours Bigley's imminent murder for a laugh and there's a mild tut. The difference is that though Connolly's remark was enormously more offensive, he had the good sense to leave Liverpool out of it.
For the phone-in shows and messageboards, Boris's broadside was a godsend. The BBC received hundreds of messages like this one from Canada: 'Some people have a depressing need to demonise others to bolster their own pathetic self-image. Overt racism is no longer acceptable so people like Johnson must seek other ways to express their bitterness and hatred engendered by their own inadequacies. His use of the word "tribal" implies a sense of belonging that those who live in the commuter towns of the south-east can never experience. Very few Londoners are from London and can never truly feel at home there. I feel sorry for him. Ian Barry, Niagara Falls.' Sarah Dobie from Runcorn said: 'We should count our blessings Mr Johnson is not from Liverpool; if he were he would have been brought up to be a decent human being.' The city's good humour, compassion and resilience were conjured up again and again.
But the phone-ins, the saloon bars and the letters pages were also swamped with messages of support for the errant Boris. 'The article in The Spectator hit the nail on the head,' Jeff Martin in Bolton told the BBC news website. 'Liverpudlians all believe that they have the monopoly on grief. As for city of culture, they are having a laugh.' Ancient prejudices about thievery and work-shy dockers emerged from the recesses of the psyche. The most cherished parts of the city's self-image were challenged. 'Boris Johnson is about spot on this time. Liverpudlians also seem to think they are funny as well!' grumbled Melvyn Packham in Sittingbourne. 'The truth always hurts,' concluded James in Northampton.
It was as if, having held its tongue for generations, the rest of the country, the dull kids who'd been quietly getting on with their work, suddenly got a chance to say what they really thought about that cheeky, attention-seeking, class clown who'd been cracking jokes and showing off since, ohh, 1945 at least. The woollyback north and the benighted south, both fed up of being told (by Liverpudlians) that Liverpool was the greatest city in the world, was having its day in court. Liverpool, in character as ever, was The Accused.
I'd grown up hearing about Scousers and their fabled wit, though sometimes looking for evidence of it without success in the work of Jimmy Tarbuck, Arthur Askey and Stan Boardman. I grew up hearing Tarby and Cilla talk on every chat show about how great Scottie Road was, a kind of Scouse East End, where you could leave your back door open day and night and the worst that could happen was that a lovable Scouse neighbour would drop by returning a cup of sugar or trying out some new skiffle tunes on you or cracking a witticism. Whatever the Scotland Road once was, by the way, it's not much to write home about now. Not the bit I saw, anyway. Just kebab shops and boarded up pubs and the feeling that Liverpool's undoubted renaissance is going on somewhere else and to someone else.
There was in fact nothing new about Johnson's article. Broadsheet journalists had been sneering and railing at the city, often much more vituperatively, for years. Days after the Hillsborough disaster, The Times printed a column by Edward Pearce arguing that 'the shrine in the Airfield goalmouth, the cursing of the police, all the theatricals, come sweetly to a city which is already the world capital of self-pity. There are soapy politicians to make a pet of Liverpool, and Liverpool itself is always standing by to make a pet of itself. "Why us? Why are we treated like animals?" To which the plain answer is that a good and sufficient minority of you behave like animals.'
Four years later in the same paper Walter Ellis, covering the James Bulger murder, said: 'Liverpool lives on emotion; fears and hatreds bubble constantly below the surface. The mob, as selfpitying as it is self-righteous, is a constant presence, whether on tour in the Heysel Stadium, Brussels, or at home among the social dereliction of Liverpool 8, or as this week in the back streets of Bootle.' Alan Bennett had once gently ruminated on the Liverpudlians' 'built-in air of grievance' and the 'cockiness that comes from being told too often that they and their city are special'. Even Sir David Henshaw, the chief executive of Liverpool City Council, at a conference marketing Liverpool as the 2008 European City of Culture, complained that 'sometimes it can still be the most mind-bogglingly awful and whingeing place, where the glass is always half-empty'. With friends like that, who needs Boris?
I love Scousers and I love Liverpool. The years I worked among them in their Skelmersdale exile were some of the happiest of my life. Just like all those hoary old cliches have it, they are warm and funny and hugely entertaining, as well as, yes, devious, truculent and arrogant. Just like the rest of us, in fact. For me, it's entirely possible to read Boris Johnson's article as a snobbish, callous, inaccurate attack on a proud working-class city and also to think, 'You know, he may have a point.' On the morning after Liverpool's heroic comeback and victory over AC Milan in the 2005 European Cup Final in Istanbul (I won't call it the Champions League on the grounds that the teams aren't champions and it isn't a league), the aforementioned Peter Hooton of The Farm was being interviewed on BBC Radio Five Live. The presenter suggested that, this being Liverpool, we would never hear the last of it. Hooton's voice became thick and broken with emotion. 'I'm not going to answer that,' he trembled. 'Put it this way, John Peel would have loved it.'
I laughed out loud. Game over. Hooton slams down the sentimental card, evoking recently deceased national treasure, and defies anyone to have the temerity to take issue with him. The fact that his comment was fatuous and didn't actually mean anything was irrelevant. Like Inter's back four, the presenter was left silently sprawling, beaten but not sure how. It was a golden Scouse moment.
The problem in the end might be that, as someone said to me soon after Ken Bigley's murder, 'It's always Liverpool, isn't it?' From The Beatles to Bill Shankly, Ken Bigley to Jamie Bulger, Hillsborough to Heysel, chirpy comics to inner-city riots, it's always Liverpool. The Icicle Works' Ian McNabb, one of the best songwriters the city has ever produced, got it just right in an anthemic track from the mid-1980s called 'Up Here In The North Of England': 'McDonald's finally found us and we're folklore in Turin/The southerners don't like us... Who can blame them? Seems we're always in the spotlight.'
Liverpool got its charter in 1207 from King John but was merely a sleepy fishing village until the fortuitous silting up of the Dee put Chester out of commission as a port. Liverpool grew rich on both Chester and Africa's misfortune. The first dock was built in 1705 to facilitate Liverpool's strategic importance in the slave trade, part of the triangle that linked Africa, the UK and America. That legacy is still contentious and difficult for sensitive Scousers; Liverpool's black community feel it partly as an open wound, part badge of identity. Some Liverpudlians feel it's a shameful episode to be hushed up, ammunition for those who criticise Liverpool's race relations (both Everton and Liverpool, for instance, were extremely slow to incorporate black players). Others are more rueful. Over a pint in the Philharmonic or 'Phil', one of the city's iconic boozers, a thoughtful middle-aged man from the Dingle explained to me, 'We never had slavery, no. We just made the money from it.'
Daniel Defoe came in the 1720s and loved it; 'a town so populous and rich that it may be called the Bristol of this part of England'. During the nineteenth century it was the embarkation point for waves of migrations. Between 1830 and 1930, a million people left via
Liverpool for the 'New World', the USA and Australia. Many more would-be emigrants never got further than the Pier Head, staying in Liverpool to provide the cheap labour needed in the burgeoning port and giving it a vibrant multi-ethnic stew that few other British cities could match. Carl Jung called it the 'Pool Of Life', a gumbo of Irish refugees fleeing the potato famine, Caribbean families, Chinese sailors and laundrymen.
When The Cavern started to ring to the sound of Merseybeat, Liverpool was still a burly, broad-shouldered, bustling port. But as the sixties began to swing, the pendulum swung away from Liverpool. Mass air travel pretty much put paid to the luxury liner business, and the ports of Kent and the southeast prospered as trade with Europe became our national priority. Liverpool found itself facing in the wrong direction. In the seventies, Liverpool became a caricature: city of 'taches, perms, robbery and signing on. Sporadically, the city immolated itself in rioting, revelling in its own demise. 'They should build a fence around Liverpool and charge admission. For, sadly, it has become a showcase of everything that has gone wrong in Britain's big cities,' claimed a Daily Mirror editorial of 1982. Perhaps the blackest irony of all is that the city's one success story of the era, Liverpool FC's dominance of Europe, ended in tragedy at Heysel and Hillsborough.
The Rough Guide to England begins its section on Liverpool thus: 'If one city in England could be said to stand for a nation in decline it could be Liverpool.' That seems a bit strong to me, especially if, having 'detrained' at Lime Street station, you are taking in the view from the station's steps, the very steps where I once conducted an interview with New Order's Bernard Sumner dressed as Elvis after the 'World In Motion' video shoot in 1990. From here, even on a raw, filthy winter's morning, looking out across the pedestrian crossings to the St George's Hall, you get almost knocked down by a wave of sheer civic machismo from a century and a half ago.
It's a hell of a building. Imagine if the Parthenon had stopped fannying about sunbathing in Athens, done a day's work, got itself a manly patina of grime and then landed in the middle of Liverpool. The fact that it's the first thing you see when you exit Lime Street station is no accident. Back in the 1850s when it was built, this was Liverpool's swaggering announcement to the world that it had arrived; that a Lancastrian backwater was now the second city of the world's greatest empire. Once this is where you came to watch concerts or plays or exhibition snooker tournaments. These days its function has fossilised somewhat but it still opens to the public for craft fairs and the odd special exhibition and every August the famous floor with its 30,000 priceless Minton tiles is uncovered for general public consumption.
This misty morning (J. B. Priestley said that he had never seen the sun shine on Liverpool) a few late rush-hour stragglers are making their way across the wide, breezy piazza: a young woman with a briefcase anxiously checking her watch, a lad in a suit slightly too big for him with his funky hair plastered down into a more conventional style for a day's work in the bank or travel agents. It's eerily quiet this March morning but at different times this is where Liverpudlians have gathered in droves to celebrate and commiserate: the triumphant return of The Beatles from America, Liverpool and Everton's famous victories, the deaths of Gladstone and Queen Victoria, the stunned impromptu gathering after the murder of John Lennon.
Walk a little further along and you come to another prime piece of Liverpool real estate from the days of Victorian Imperial might: the Walker Art Gallery. I've been coming here since I was a teenager when I fell in love with art and, to be honest, with the idea of art and of wearing a second-hand overcoat and sipping frothy coffee in the cafe with a palely beautiful girl and talking about Rossetti or Stanley Spencer. Or maybe David Hockney's 'Peter Getting Out Of Nick's Pool', which you can see upstairs. I actually did this once or twice and am thinking of reliving those days but I'm a bit early for the 10.30 opening and the rumbling of the Gaggia suggests it'll be a while before it builds up a head of steam. I talk to some nice attendants instead who shower me with maps and advice and booklets, quietly radiating a touching pride in their city. For a time in the sixties, the psychedelic summer of The Beatles and the Liverpool Poets, McGough, Patten and Henry, a kind of gentle, wry artiness was what Liverpool was known for, as well as brashness and later the kind of bloke that Harry Enfield would have to tell to 'calm down, calm down'. Well, it lives on in the attendants at the Walker Art Gallery.
If the Walker Art Gallery is old-school, then the next imposing building along William Brown Street, the World Museum Liverpool (The Museum Formerly Known As Liverpool Museum) is defiantly cutting edge with its look-at-me atrium and brushed steel livery. I couldn't quite work out what the new theme of the place actually was, beyond a certain 'Gee whiz, isn't the world a richly diverse, multi-ethnic, scientifically mindboggling free-for-all, eh, kids?' but that didn't seem to bother the junior school class from Fazakerley, who were busy 'interacting' with everything in sight with gusto and at impressive volume. 'Interactivity,' said a drained-looking teaching assistant as she passed by me. 'Basically it's hitting things, isn't it?' I skulked around the Fairtrade shop for a minute, feeling like the president of Rio Tinto Zinc or Rupert Murdoch for not buying anything, before heading back into the foyer to marvel at a spider crab the size of a Shetland pony and an enormous totem pole from somewhere called 'Something Terrible Happened House' in northwest America. From the sounds of screaming nine-year-olds behind me, something terrible was about to happen here as well.
I was en route to my favourite bit of Liverpool, surely everybody's favourite bit of Liverpool, and that way took me down via the offices of Liverpool Vision in The Observatory. I could see a scale model of a futuristic Liverpool city centre in there, and I'm a sucker for futuristic scale models, especially if they've got monorails and little stick people. This was surprisingly sober and realistic; in fact, the whole Liverpool Vision thing seemed remarkably clear-headed. The public were free to wander in and post little biro-ed notices with their feelings about the city's regeneration on the walls. They were amazingly sensible and perceptive. One commented on the 'decline of neo-liberal socialism', others made intelligent points about civic spaces. Frankly, I'd hoped for the odd puerile, blatantly untrue and inflammatory posting, like 'Steven Gerrard Is Gay' and was a little disappointed.
The freshening wind on my face told me I was heading in the right direction. Liverpool has a ton of stuff to be proud of but it has one undeniable 'dah-dah' moment, one bit of sleight of hand that never fails to impress. And that is the moment when the pedestrianised 'everytown' falls away behind you and the drag down from Derby Square and James Street suddenly, inexplicably, becomes the finest waterfront in Britain, the Liverpool Pier Head.
When I was in a band (floppy fringes, semi-acoustic guitars, bootlace ties; the full Aztec Camera obsession) I got so romantically taken by this stretch of the Mersey and those Pier Head buildings seen in the early morning after a wild party on the Wirral that I wrote a song about it. It was called 'That's Birkenhead', which is a bit literal and, unless I'd had a real skinful and was looking backwards, not strictly true. It sure is a pretty sight, though. Finer minds than I have been charmed by this bracing, beautiful part of town. Former Poet Laureate John Masefield said: 'The Thames is a wretched river after the Mersey and the ships are not like Liverpool ships and the docks are barren of beauty . . . it is a beastly hole after Liverpool; for Liverpool is the town of my heart and I would rather sail a mudflat there than command a clipper out of London.'
The famed highlight of the Pier Head is the Three Graces, the trio of monumental buildings comprising the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building, and the Port of Liverpool Building, The official guide says that after Big Ben, the Liver Building is the most recognisable building in Britain. Now Westminster Abbey or Edinburgh Castle may have something to say about that but I wouldn't say anything to the Liver Building's face. A rugged, handsome face it is too, in a style and scale inspired by Chicago, a city itself on the dizzying rise at the same time as Live
rpool. This morning, judging from the hordes of besuited Scousers stamping their feet on Canada Boulevard and taking the opportunity for a quick B&H, it seems to be in the throes of a fire alarm. The famous birds, by the way, are made of hammered copper and three times the size of a man, though possibly five times the size of Polly James. In case you didn't know or have somehow forgotten, Polly James and Nerys Hughes played the titular Liver Birds in Carla Lane's seventies comedy. Mingling with the fire-alarm evacuees and looking up at those funny haughty birds, it strikes me that Carla Lane's two best-known comedies reflect just how Liverpool's image changed between the seventies and eighties, from home of mini-skirted singletons with heads full of pop to home of curly-permed doleites on the make with no hilarious consequences.
In the early part of the twentieth century, the Cunard Building, the American eagles on each corner reflecting Samuel Cunard's nationality, was the hub of Britain's cruise ship industry, intended as a dry-land echo of the magnificence of the cruise liners. It's still an impressive edifice but imagine what it must have been like eighty years ago when film stars, comedians, hopeful migrants and well-heeled tourists took their papers and luggage down there in preparation for that choppy, churning 3,400-mile ocean crossing, then the only way to America. The Scousers themselves worked here or on the liners in their hundreds, an army of painters, cleaners, plumbers, electricians and maids. In the 1900s there were approximately 300 laundries in the city simply to clean the tablecloths and bed linen for the big ships and when a liner docked for an overhaul it would take four weeks and 2,000 people to spruce it up.