Issue 42 / March 2014

12
Bido Lito! March 2014
Mike
Badger
And The
Roots Of
Liverpool
Words: Richard Lewis
Illustration: Hannah Cassidy / hannahcassidycreative.tumblr.com
Music
In addition to releasing over a dozen albums, co-founding
a record label, regularly touring across the southern states of
the USA and establishing The La’s, MIKE BADGER is the de facto
authority on roots music in Merseyside. Backed by The Shady
Trio since 2010, the singer is preparing the follow-up to 2012’s
Lucky 13 LP with a single for Record Store Day, highlighting an
insatiable appetite for musical activity that runs alongside his
twin occupations as an artist and sculptor.
As part of the Liverpool Acoustic Festival at the Unity Theatre
this month, Mike Badger will appear in conversation with Bido
Lito! Editor-in-Chief Craig G. Pennington to discuss the indelible
influence roots music, country, bluegrass, rockabilly and folk
continues to have on the city’s musical landscape. “With Liverpool
being a Celtic city, country is huge here,” Mike explains. “Everything
to do with Liverpool and its musical heritage is all directly linked
with its geography. The more you read about it, the more you
realise Liverpool was the first place in the country – even before
London, because of the river – to get all that American music, and
it had been since the war. It’s part of the fabric: it’s very heartfelt
music, it’s story music, and that’s a very Scouse thing. It’s working
man’s music and that’s such an important point,” Mike states.
The almost mythologised figure of the ‘Cunard Yank’, workers
on Liverpool’s shipping lines who frequently visited the States
from the 1920s onwards, enabled the city to be ahead of the
curve in picking up music from across the Atlantic via the influx
of records purchased Stateside. “When people had liberty after
World War II and wanted to express themselves, they could do
in America and that’s what started [it all], music that came from
African and European roots,” Mike notes.
Mike can vividly recall his first introduction to country music’s
more rambunctious cousin. “I remember hearing Buddy Holly in
Kirklands [now The Fly in the Loaf] one afternoon being pumped
out through the system when I was about 16. And I just thought
‘Oh my God, what the hell is that?’ It really did shake me up.
bidolito.co.uk
Around that time I was going to Eric’s, seeing The Undertones,
The Pretenders, Madness, The Cure, and you wouldn’t know who
they were, you’d just go along and see what band was playing.
Then, in the early 80s I really got into rockabilly, which is basically
the country end of rock ‘n’ roll.”
Deriving its name from the portmanteau of rock ‘n’ roll and
hillbilly (the name given to Scottish hill farmers who settled in
the Southern states in the 1800s), the genre’s impact on Liverpool
music in the 1950s was colossal. Johnny Burnette And The Rock
N Roll Trio (“fifties punk” according to Mike) were cited by John
Lennon as producing the one album he would play all the way
through without lifting the needle. Influencing US alt. rock bands
of the 1980s, rockabilly found an echo in the groundbreaking
output of The Cramps and The Gun Club, who plaited the form
with a gothic sensibility.
The genre had a huge affect on Mike’s own music from the
off, his original vision for The La’s being “heavily rhythmical,
discordant rockabilly.” Early track My Girl Sits Like A Reindeer
(later reworked as Feelin’) provides a prime example of this
initial idea for the band’s sound. After founding The La’s with Lee
Mavers in 1984, Mike co-piloted the band for two years before an
acrimonious split which saw Mavers effectively becoming sole
proprietor of the group, a situation that continues to this day as
a never-ending series of line-ups make sporadic returns to the
stage, despite the absence of any new material since the band’s
spellbinding 1990 debut LP.
Hunting down the lesser-known practitioners of rockabilly
in the pre-internet era when only the likes of Record Collector
would be likely to feature acts from previous decades was a
vastly more complicated task than in the present age of AllMusic
and Wikipedia. “Once I accessed where all this came from it was
that that did it for me,” Mike says. “I wanted to get as far back
as possible into the origins of it, from 1953 to 1954 when it was
moving from country bop into rock ‘n’ roll. I went out and made
a concerted effort to discover it; it became a passion I had to
spend all my time getting to know. I’ve never found anything that
resonates with me deeper than rockabilly, music-wise.”
Fortuitously, Mike happened to be in the right place for
exploring genres that were outside of the era’s mainstream, due
to the city’s leading music retailer, which provided positive proof
of roots music’s enduring influence in Liverpool. “People came
from all over the north of England and Wales to go to Probe; it was
the only place you could get these records,” he explains. “I used
to walk right through Probe [then located on Button St] and go to
the back and look at the racks there and just try and discover new
compilations. They had a lot of obscure country and rockabilly
comps and I’d just paw through them.” Running the gamut from
the lesser known (Charlie Feathers, Eddie Cletro, Johnny Jano) to
the iconic (Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins),
Mike swiftly became an archivist of the form.
The Viper Label (home to Edgar ‘Summertyme’ Jones),
established by Mike and fellow ex-La and Onset guitarist Paul
Hemmings in 1999, has issued several rockabilly-themed
compilations, a continuation of the collections that formed Mike’s
tastes back in the early 1980s. Assembling the albums linked
directly to the singer’s unabated thirst for crate-digging to track
down more obscure gems from the era. “You keep on finding new
tracks and you go ‘How come I’ve never heard that
before? It’s
sensational!’” Mike enthuses. “I’ve been collecting it seriously for
thirty years and my real interest is the core of all this, the origins
of it, and it’s still a voyage of discovery for me.”
Liverpool Acoustic Festival runs at the Unity Theatre on 21st and
22nd March, with Mike Badger’s keynote discussion taking place at
6pm on Saturday 22nd March.
Action Packed Rockabilly next takes place on 8th March at Camp
and Furnace.
mikebadger.co.uk