Issue 84 / Dec 2017/Jan 2018

In late November I was lucky enough to be asked to host
a Q&A with the directors of seminal Liverpool music
biopic You’ll Never Walk Alone. Filmed in 1992, the film
is a portrait of Liverpool at the lowest of ebbs: a grey,
decaying, battered city that, somewhat paradoxically, plays
host to a buoyant and scintillating music culture. It drips with
romance. It drips with pain. It’s the quintessential Liverpool
depiction; irrepressible beauty in the face of abject misery.
Despite its name (the film’s producers were French so we’ll
forgive them the partisan slip up) the film represents essential
viewing and the manner in which it has attained a somewhat
iconic status in the intervening years is unsurprising. Dig it out
on YouTube.
Explored through the lens of characters such as Ian
McCulloch, Mick Head, Edgar Summertyme and regular
contributor to these pink pages Paul Fitzgerald (the film
includes a beautiful scene from the Fitzgerald family home
featuring a moving vocal performance from Paul’s Nan),
the documentary captures a city that – on the face it – is
unrecognisable from the resurgent, optimistic place we
find today. But, beneath the concrete and glazed veneer
of progress we see in our city centre, how much really has
changed?
The opening sequence to You’ll Never Walk Alone carries
a poignant and sobering observation; in 1960, Liverpool
was the second largest city in the UK, but, by 1992, half
the population had left. It also features a sequence shot at
the top of Granby Street with Sheldon Rice, a young black
MC, delivering a withering freestyle takedown of police
persecution, corruption and forgotten areas of the city being
left to their own devices. Somewhat poignantly, this quickly
cuts to a Beatles tour bus heading up to Penny Lane.
People being driven away from the city?
A city that doesn’t work for everyone?
Black artists pushed to the margins, a tragic lack of diversity?
Swathes of the city forgotten and left behind?
The idea that heritage tourism will save us all?
Sound familiar?
24 Kitchen Street Meraki
OK, so Liverpool isn’t as bleak as it was in 1992. I
completely accept and wholeheartedly welcome that. There
is opportunity here. There is work. Admittedly much of that
work is low paid and irregular, but there is work. Yet, we
face many of the same challenges as those grappled with
back in 1992. And music is an acute way of demonstrating
those challenges. Since 2008 we have lived in a new age of
‘Culture’. Whereas we once ran the docks of empire, Liverpool
now positions itself as a global titan of ‘Culture’. Given our
history, music should be our prized cargo. But is it?
We see music venues and clubs closing around us. We
see the influence of developer power and money riding
roughshod over our cultural heritage and creative community.
We see a vision of Liverpool based on Fab Four cotton candy
sold around the world, while, at the same time, a buoyant
international music subculture bubbles here away from
the Beatles tourist’s gaze. We see an absence of structural
support for Liverpool’s embryonic music industry. We see
emerging artists, cut adrift by a collapsed music industry,
needing help and support to flourish, and an opportunity to
embed them here as part of the city’s future. We see a music
sector cut-off from our education system.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
A buoyant Music Cities movement has gathered pace
over recent years, a new sphere of thinking that intersects
music, urban policy and planning. We see cities across the
world – from Groningen to Adelaide – creating innovative new
frameworks which place support for and the development of
their music sectors and communities at the heart of their city
vision. In contrast, we have, until now, witnessed an absence
of strategic planning around music policy in Liverpool.
As a reaction to this, in April this year we launched
Liverpool, Music City?, a project in partnership with Liverpool
John Moores University, designed to ask some pretty
fundamental, searching questions; is Liverpool a global music
city? What does music really mean to Liverpool? How is
music valued? How healthy is Liverpool’s music ecology? Is
Liverpool’s music tourism offer truly world-class and what role
does new music play within it? In terms of its policies around
noise, planning and the role of music in the built environment,
does Liverpool have a global music city outlook? How good
are we at developing the next wave of artists in the city? Is
Liverpool an international hub for music business? How joined
up is the city’s music industry and music education offer?
“Given our
history, music
should be our
prized cargo”
Invisible Wind Factory
FEATURE
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