THE SOUND OF TRUMPETS
cheering and shouting in the distance
children running
icecream vans
flags breaking out over buildings
black and red green and yellow
Union Jacks Red Ensigns
LONG LIVE SOCIALISM
stretched out against the blue sky
over St George’s Hall
now the procession
THE MARCHING DRUMS
– Extract from Adrian Henri, The Entry of Christ into Liverpool (in The Mersey Sound, Penguin 1967)
In this article I’m going to look at Liverpool, and the connection (or lack of, for a long period) between poetry, music and working-class revolt. As a lifetime Red, the city is never far from my thoughts, particularly in a year when we’ve just won the league for the 20th time. Rather than simply bang on about that (as if I ever would) I want to look instead at the forms of grassroots cultural and community rebellion that have been played out in the city since the 1960s.
The connections between the Mersey poets Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough and the scene around the Beatles is probably well-known. The original Merseybeat sound had been based in part on adrenaline /amphetamine driven covers of Motown hits (the “Mersey-Motown sound” as Merseybeat magazine founder Bill Harry described it).
Culturally democratising, anti-establishment fury
The Mersey Sound anthology which brought the Liverpool poets to a wider audience was first published in 1967, by which point the Merseybeat scene formed around bands like the Beatles and the Searchers had come to appear played out. The anthology, number 10 in Penguin’s Modern Poets series has sold over 500,000 copies, more than any other poetry anthology. Henri, Patten and McGough were as much a part of the Liverpool scene as their musical counterparts, just as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and later, Jim Morrison and Patti Smith, were driven by the same culturally democratising, anti-establishment fury that animated the Beat poets.
John Lennon, Stuart Sutcliffe and Bill Harry had begun to frequent local poetry nights and Lennon in particular thought that too much of what they heard was simply copying the San Francisco Beats rather than making any attempt to develop a local poetry culture. Henri, Patten and McGough, while showing a love for and fidelity to bebop and the blues, clearly agreed with this critique, as their own work is influenced as much by surrealism and by the developing British satirical/whimsical tradition represented by The Goons. All of this, at the same time, written in the shadow of, and marked throughout by, a fear of the bomb and of the willingness of politicians to consider mutually assured destruction.
This sense of dread – both in relation to the prospect of living with the bomb, and also that the days of “never had it so good” , (the “ state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime – nor indeed in the history of this country” heralded by Prime Minister Harod Macmillan in 1957) were bottoming out by 1967, is a commonality between the “Mersey Poets“ and the post-1967 Beatles.
In his Diary Poem from 1966, Brian Patten describes how:
We sit here, twenty; drunk. Wind and stars
gush in through the skylight. We sense
in the air how winter’s coming
and how our lives and those that surround them
have frozen. We sit, neither sane nor mad,
outside in a room we’ll never enter
our first crime, a child, bawls out,
shakes a fist in anger
And, again, in You Come to Me Quiet as Rain Not Yet Fallen:-
Into the paradise our younger lives made
of this bed and room
has leaked the world and all its questioning
and now those shapes terrify most
that remind us of our own.
And all of this reminiscent of a similar sense of the old world decaying, (and the new still being denounced by the Daily Mail as a cesspit of promiscuity and trade union tyranny) which drifts into the songs of Lennon and McCartney at around the same time. A Day in the Life, for example shares a mood of looming despair and a plaintive simplicity with the Mersey poets:-
I read the news today, oh, boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad
Well, I just had to laugh
I saw the photograph
He blew his mind out in a car
He didn’t notice that the lights had changed
Adrian Henri’s poetry is more defiant, carnivalesque, more willing to map out a portrait of resistance on the canvas of his times. From I Want to Paint:-
I want to paint
The assassination of the entire Royal Family
Enormous pictures of every pavingstone in Canning Street
The Beatles composing a new National Anthem
Brian Patten painting poems with a flamethrower on disused ferryboats
But for all the times that Henri’s words sound like a working-out in prose of the joyous riot of Peter Blake’s Sgt Pepper LP cover, the darkness creeps repeatedly into his poems too. There is the permanent threat of death that is the background noise to the Atomic Age:-
4 A. Everyday in cities all over England people are breathing in Fall-out
B. Get the taste of the Bomb out of your mouth with Opal Fruits
– (Bomb Commercials for two voices.)
Then also Henri’s reaction to the hysterical manipulation of desire which is becoming the hallmark of a nascent pop culture which is strangling any countercultural possibilities:-
At the inquest on Paul McCartney, aged 21, described as a popular singer and guitarist, PC Smith said, in evidence, that he saw one of the accused, Miss Jones, standing waving bloodstained hands shouting “I got a bit of his liver.”
– (The New “Our Times.”)
It is striking how death-haunted Henri’s poems are. The Dance of Death gives us
Death the Politician
polished white face carefully sipping water
adjusting his fireside manner
In Metropolis he writes of “apocalypsis of weirs foaming into polluted canals” and “concrete empty electric hallways / echoing with the sound of Muzak.” In the Triumph of Death, “Fanfare of French horns/cars pile relentless into each other at traffic lights / grinning skeletal policemen /ride ambulances over pedestrians/ klaxon horns blaring.”
Roger McGough once said of Henri that “when he wrote “Don’t worry, everything’s going to be alright” he didn’t really believe it.” This is true for all the Mersey poets. They carry a range of influences from Charles Mingus, Allen Ginsberg, Alfred Jarry, Apollinaire, blues and bebop into battle against an age of post-war optimism turned sour, with inflation on the up, Vietnam, the civil rights struggles in the US and the Six Counties all about to explode, and consumerism becoming a secular religion.
Brian Biggs, director of Liverpool’s Bluecoat Gallery , has written of Henri that his:
….enduring legacy is in imbuing the local with a melancholic sense of its connected cultural past – a psychogeographical continuum in which the ghosts of Mikhail Bakunin, Alfred Jarry, Kurt Schwitters, William Blake, Malcolm Lowry Allan Ginsberg and the Beatles stalk the streets of Liverpool – and as a fertile site for creative exploration, drawing on the vernacular and the quotidian.
The overlap between poetry, music and politics that Liverpool in the 1960s brought about, then carried over into John Lennon’s more strident, confrontational solo work and he and Yoko Ono’s speaking-out against the Vietnam War, supporting the Clydeside UCS work-in, condemning the British Army‘s presence and actions in the Six Counties, and with Lennon concluding “the same people who are running guns to South Africa and killing blacks in the streets … The same bastards are in control, the same people are running everything, it’s the whole bullshit bourgeois scene.” (Although it has to be said re. Lennon that if you’re going to write a song called Woman is the Nigger of the World it helps if you don’t sometimes behave like the Klan to the women in your life.)
The Liverpool poets of the 1970s and 80s had neither the fascination with Liverpool as a city of possibilities or the anti-capitalist politics of the Mersey Poets. In his 1996 anthology Liverpool Accents, published by Liverpool University, John Kerrigan dismisses that earlier era as:
During the 1960s, Liverpool enjoyed a few late glory days as the home of the Beatles. But the city’s reputation for proletarian vibrancy was not a bankable asset, especially since it was associated with images of trade union militancy. In the eyes of the nation the city became a conservation zone for cliches about the North.
This sounds like exactly Thatcher and Heseltine getting ready to try to redevelop the city over the heads of and against the interests of the working class – so that it would, like Manchester, become a base for culture industry and heritage industry colonisation, with the Georgian Quarter (or Liverpool 8 as it’s known to the rest of us) turned into a real estate asset-cum-permanent film set.
The poetry anthologised in Liverpool Accents is relentlessly suburban. Grevel Lindop admits to leaving Liverpool at 18 because “real life and real poetry…were elsewhere.” Elaine Feinstein admits that “the landscape of Liverpool was almost missing from my poetry”. Jamie McKendrick confesses to “feeling lamentably ignorant about much of Liverpool”, and Deryn-Rees Jones is amused that “Liverpool has, even now, such a mythological status.”
Much the same could be said of the Liverpool music scene of this period. The Eric’s / post-Eric’s scene purportedly generated the next great era of Liverpool bands. But you would be hard-pressed to find any sense of the fabric or the politics of the city in their output. Big in Japan, and subsequently Pink Military / Pink Industry, gave a platform for the Piaf-meets-Nico defiance of Jayne Casey, singing death songs over dub and piano ballads and guitar noise. Beyond that? Teardrop Explodes? Julian Cope was a Tamworth-raised student teacher experimenting with acid. Echo and the Bunnymen were Doors-clones who just wanted to be famous. Bands who represented some of the grit and militancy of the city – Ellery Bop and the High Five – were simply passed over.
It’s Immaterial captured a Bohemian melancholy rooted in dense assemblages of pop culture detritus, road movies re-set in Northern de-industrialising twilight. They too were ignored both in the city’s scene and without. Not until the Christians and Frankie Goes to Hollywood emerged was there any sense of there being vibrant, defiant black and gay communities in the city.
Bizarrely, this depoliticisation occurred during the same period as the Toxteth uprising, the deindustrialisation of the city, the election of a Militant council, the anti-poll tax movement, the Miners’ Strike (with a strong miners’ solidarity network in the city) and the Hillsborough disaster.
The only band that played any real role in joining with and seeking to unite and inspire this wide-ranging oppositional politics was Pete Wylie’s various Wah incarnations – most vitally with the Word to the Wise Guy album, a psychedelic soul symphony about trying to keep hope alive in a city being forced to its knees (Wise Guy is a lost Scouse soul classic – as also is the Real Thing‘s 4 from 8).
A localised apartheid state
One of the things that impacted adversely on the Liverpool music scene was Eric’s founder Roger Eagle warning local kids not to listen to The Beatles. This meant in fact that the city then grew a generation of musicians who had no context for what made The Beatles so special – drawing on both Motown R&B rhythms and the Civil Rights anthems of Motown songwriters – so that the post-Eric’s bands had no sense of drawing on black musical forms, or any sense of what was happening in relation to the black community in Liverpool, despite that community being a focal point for both artistic and political resistance to a city being transformed by Chief Constable Kenneth Oxford into a localised apartheid state.
Word to the Wise Guy is distinct because as well as Wylie’s songs, it features the poems and raps of Toxteth’s Eugene Lange, one of a number of dub poets to emerge at this time (and passed over by the Liverpool Accents anthology even though Liverpool University stands on the edge of Liverpool 8.) Eugene was a founder of the Delado School of Africa poetry / drum workshop, and he worked towards the opening of the Transatlantic Slavery Museum. He is a real hero of the arts and of the politics of resistance in Liverpool. (His many books can be purchased online.)
Alongside Eugene stands Levi Tafari, whose excellent new book, Being Human, has recently been published by Hawkwood Books. The two have always been Liverpool’s griots, exposing the city’s slaveport history and how that manifests in current racism and police oppression. Levi attacks all this with wit, sly mockery, relentless optimism and an environmental consciousness rooted in his Rastafarianism. (He’s also another proud Red – his new book has the fantastic poems LFC Poetry in Motion and Brilliant Bobby Firmino).
The key for Levi Tafari though, is to educate, to raise consciousness – he puts the message before the aesthetics. In this he’s reminiscent of Benjamin Zephaniah, and is keen that his audience ought to be one that wouldn’t typically engage with modern poetry at all:-
My community is precious to me,
I embrace her spirit,
I always write with her in mind-
This is how we do it.
Toxteth is my neighbourhood –
It’s the place where I was raised.
I deal with the drama of the ghetto
And I never get fazed.
– (A Creator of Unity.)
Dealing with the drama of the ghetto (or even giving a toss about it) hasn’t been a strongpoint of the left. Liverpool has many “ghettos.”
There are a few key things to note here. As a port, Liverpool is a good place to bring things in. There has been a long tradition of robbing from dock lorries and containers as well as importing drugs into the city. Deprived of a functioning economy, people have been forced to create a counter-economy of their own. Academic Marxists would call this the primitive accumulation of capital. The rest of us would call it surviving.
In the 2000s the drugs economy in Liverpool encompassed the Grizedale area of Everton, and estates in West Derby, Norris Green, Bootle, and Kensington. A number of turf wars broke out. The police response was to create Operation Matrix, ostensibly to crack down on guns and drug crime, but in reality a rollout across Merseyside of the 24/7 police oppression practiced in Toxteth, but now armed and para-militarised. On their own admission, Matrix was “forced to ‘break the rules a bit” and “In the station we referred to this kind of policing as ‘the Lord’s work.’ It was a kind of code for what we were doing. So yes we were unorthodox, but for all the right reasons.”
It’s fair to say that at times Matrix got more than they bargained for. A massive bomb was exploded outside Tuebrook police station. The blast, on May 13, 2004, created by packing industrial fireworks into a petrol container, was the biggest bomb on the British mainland since the IRA ceasefire. Bomb disposal experts said more than 20 shock rockets were used.
Some of the footsoldiers of the period received sentences over 10-15 years and began to hone their rap skills while in jail. A number have now been released and display considerable lyrical ability and a wry take on the lives they and their families have lived, seeking to escape poverty at a time when several generations were simply written off as “no longer required”. One such is Mazza L20 (Malcolm Graham-jailed in 2016 for 11 years for firearm possession.) Scouse Drill shows a good deal of wit and insight into working-class life at its most desperate and determined.
Other up and comers include Vinny, BReal 11, Young LS, Wesavelli, LBfromthe35, and Tremz (Jordan McCann, from Salford has a similar, if anything, more militant, take on street life). The point is that all of these will at some point catch some of the same kind of flack that Kneecap have. The other point is that some of the poorest areas of the UK function in a kind of low-level insurrection against the police that the left simply ignores. (Bobby Seale and Huey Newton built the Black Panther Party on politicising what they called “the brothers on the block”, not by disregarding them.) Even if we don’t like everything that’s said by these new poets of urban life, we have to engage with it, defend its right to be heard, and help resist the criminalisation of the “drama of the ghetto.” The last words go to Mazza L20:-
Free bro, man it’s torturin’
He was in the block and they tortured him
In a old cell, it’s Victorian
Had to read books, historian
No food and they taunted him
Seen people die and it haunted him
Can’t break us, we’re not porcelain
Free Ste, I went to war with him
And I’ve been at war, I’m survivin’ it
Real shit, I coulda’ died in it
– (from Mazza L20’s Fire in the Booth session.)
