I went to Liverpool on Saturday. Five to seven on a coach at Newcastle University, ten past eleven arriving back. That's lot of time on a coach, I felt slightly disorientated to say the least. Seven hours in the Little Apple itself.
I haven't been there for years, since a university interview almost thirty years ago exactly, in 1984, when the city felt so rundown I decided not to even attend the interview, as I already had a place at Norwich, my first choice. Liverpool is no longer run down. Quite the opposite. Built up by the Blair government and Lottery Money it was also European City of Culture in 2008 and its Dockland and City Centre now seem gleaming and opulent.
I was always likely to do The Beatles thing on going back there. It seemed apt really. Never a fanatical fan of the group, that part of me is really given to the bands that I discovered for myself in my teenage years, R.E.M., The Smiths, The Go-Betweens, The Triffids, Aztec Camera, Dexys Midnight Runners, Lloyd Cole & the Commotions, Prefab Sprout and my own favourite Liverpool bands of that era, Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes.. Nevertheless, I do revere and love The Beatles, alongside The Byrds, Love, Velvet Underground and The Doors, The Stones and The Kinks from the Sixties generation I was born too late for but discovered for myself as the antecedents of .those bands all of whom with the possible exception of Dexys would be difficult to imagine without The Beatles and owe at least some of their DNA too.
I have a couple of friends whose taste in music I greatly respect who absolutely revile this band more than any other. I have to say I can't quite understand it. To me The Beatles pretty much invented the whole ballgame. It's difficult to think of many bands or even artists who don't owe them something with a very few exceptions such as The Cramps who drew on a different tradition.
Each to their own. I kind of think that Pop History is completely unimaginable without The Beatles. To say they changed the world in a way that little before or since in popular culture can even dream of comparing to seems absolutely true. As Stuart Maconie wrote:
'If your city had produced one of human civilisation's most important cultural forces ever; a group of individuals who in their global significance almost transcended the bounds of the human; who became demi-gods, responsible for changing not only the sound of a planet's music and the shape of its culture but the look and structure of its societies, then you could be forgiven for making a bit of a fuss about it. Yet you can't help thinking that Liverpool does go on a bit about The Beatles.'
I don't think Maconie's comments about The Beatles significance are remotely overstated, nor is his judgement of the relationship between the city and the band. I found Saturday to be quite a surreal experience. Nevertheless I spent a good proportion of the few hours I had in the city itself on another quite lengthy coach journey then another hour when that was done in a bizarre tomb shrine to the band way underground. I'm a sucker for nostalgia but much of this was too much, even for me.
Having done a cursory tour of the Albert Dock, the Liverpool Museum and Tate Modern and had a pint I bought my ticket and got on the Magical Mystery Tour coach bus after fifteen minutes left buffeted by the wind outside its closed doors. The tour guide was Holly Johnson's (Frankie Goes to Hollywood), little brother. Frankie Goes to Hollywood had enormous hit singles and sold a lot of records, but no-one will ever get on a tour bus to see the sights of Frankie's Liverpool. The Beatles in contrast are enshrined in the bricks, streets and leaves of the city. More than a group. Liverpool's other considerable musical legacy, Billy Fury, Elvis Costello, Echo & the Bunnymen, Teardrops, Frankie, The Las et al are utterly irrelevant in comparison.
I'd recommend the tour as as good a way as any of getting to know the city. It takes you past beautiful Georgian inner city streets into leafy, evocative suburbs and you see the parts of town still desperately in need of complete restoration and restoral. Toxteth particularly. Where Ringo Starr was born and brought up, it has block after block completely boarded over. There are still functioning pubs, one of which was used as the backdrop for Starr's first solo album Sentimental Journey but now there seems precious little to be sentimental about.
George Harrison's background and neighbourhood seem similarly humble, six people in two rooms, outside lavatory, terraced housing and so on but by now we're getting to the heart of the tour which of course is Lennon and McCartney. To Penny Lane, the Church Hall where they met in the late Fifties, Strawberry Field and their childhood homes.
Penny Lane / Strawberry Fields Forever the 1967 single, (which ironically only got to Number 2 after a long, unbroken run of Number 1s), is the record which guarantees and justifies the Liverpool Beatles Tourism Phenomenon. It's the only one of their records, to my knowledge, to directly reference their home town. At a mid-point of their career, it's Lennon and McCartney digging deep back into childhood memory and the child's experience. Drug saturated of course but so much of that kind of indulgence is fixated on rediscovering the childhood state, place and perspective. Nothing does it as well for me as these two records.
Penny Lane, the shopping arcade rather than the lane itself, and Strawberry Field, are where the tour kicked in for me. I've been round my own childhood haunts recently in Nottingham and London and similar emotions crowded in there. That whole thing about memory. In this case cultural but also personal because we've all got relationships with these songs whether good or bad and I felt my own to Strawberry Fields Forever particularly start to work within me. Lennon climbing over his back wall heading up Beaconsfield Road and sitting up in a tree at Strawberry Field trying to catch a glimpse of the Salvation Army Reform School girls. 'Nothing to get hung about...'
And then to Lennon's childhood home he shared with Aunt Mimi, the road where his mother was killed and McCartney's home close by where the two of them wrote so many of their early songs. And then into town past the Cathedral where McCartney was turned down as a choirboy for not having a good enough voice, The Philharmonic Pub, one of so many in town where Lennon regularly enjoyed a pint.
Onto Mathew Street the home of The Cavern, the home for so much relentless squeezing of the tourist dollar. I watched a bunch of grinning, gurning fifty plus Merseybeat revivalists rattling in every sense through She Loves You. Mathew Street frankly was all a bit too much and I headed round the corner to an old school Liverpool pub. When the Sky Football game came to an end, A Little Help From My Friends, was the first song that chimed up over the tannoy.
Like I said, I enjoyed it and found parts of the tour genuinely affecting because this is genuine shared cultural memory. But Maconie is right 'You can't help thinking that Liverpool does go on a bit about The Beatles.' For a day I appreciated it and it was a great way of seeing and getting to know the city. Next time I'll go looking for something else.
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