S
O POWERFUL IS THE BEATLES’ imprint on Liverpool it has become a virtual Beatles wonderland where Beatle maniacs gorge daily on guided
tours, museums, exhibitions, souvenirs, hotels and music festivals all dedicated to the greater glory of The Fab Four. From stomping down The Cavern to standing in John Lennon’s bedroom it’s every fan’s dream come true… the only surprise is they haven’t re-named the city Beatlesville.
But to do so would be a travesty. From way back then to right here and now Liverpool has always been so much more than just The Beatles. Fuelled by an innate sense of humour and a mighty capacity to dream, the city is a rich and diverse cultural melting pot that thrives on word play and song; from which great talent has always sprung.
That things kicked off so spectacularly in Liverpool in the 1960s was partly because its western outlook directly exposed it to American influence. Often compared to New York, Liverpool is similarly ethnically diverse: a place where rich rubs up against poor, the rough with the smooth, the good with the bad thus providing the ideal mix with which to spark creative inspiration and invention.
Intoxicated throughout the ’50s by the constant flow of American popular musical forms Liverpool eventually came up with its own beat heavy hybrid labelled the Mersey Sound and almost overnight the city became a musical Mecca. If you could fart in a Scouse accent you could get a record deal. For Brits this was totally inspiring as Liverpool played the USA at its own rock ‘n’ roll game and won – big time!
Even those in the south of the UK who scornfully viewed the port as the home of adenoidally challenged socialist ruffians were moved to think again when, in 1964, The
Beatles “conquered” the USA and in the process turned Liverpool and then the UK itself into the hippest place on Earth.
In fact the fabled ’60s “Mersey Sound” was just part of a much broader cultural awakening taking place within the city. Up the hill from The Cavern lay Liverpool 8 (AKA Toxteth); a bohemian oasis where a weird and wonderful American influenced Arts quake was happening. Encompassing the university and Art College the area’s run down but once resplendent Georgian houses provided homes for Liverpool’s student/intellectual/artistic and black communities. It exuded “different” – a scary and exhilarating place to be where the rules and conventions of straight society seemed obsolete: after the moral and social austerity of the ’50s it really was something else.
There, in the shadows of the Anglican Cathedral in the theatres, pubs, galleries, clubs, cafes and bed-sits of Hardman, Hope and Canning Streets poets, painters, writers, musicians, jokers and dreamers mingled to trade ideas, hold “happenings”, stage events, mount exhibitions, experiment with sound and read poetry to music. Back then this was unheard of stuff in the UK – as jazz singer George Melly astutely observed: “The crater of the volcano was not London but Liverpool… Liverpool 8 had a seedy but decided style… it was small enough to provide an enclosed stage for the cultivation of its own legend.”
Dubbed the equivalent of San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury by American Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg, its chief guru was painter and poet Adrian Henri but among its most famous sons were John Gorman, Roger McGough and Mike McGear, a madcap trio who called themselves Scaffold. Formed in early ’63 they captured the experimental irreverence and wit of that alternative scene.
To catch a glimpse of how things were back then Mike McGear kindly agreed to be Shindig!’s official guide to Scaffold’s story...
Son of Jim and Mary McCartney and brother of Paul, McGear’s recollections paint a fascinating portrait of early ’60s Liverpool and how being the talented sibling of a famous brother made achieving success in one’s own right tricky. Most of all it shows how once an act is lured away from its source of inspiration into the heady world of “pop” something vital can be lost in translation…
A fast-talking, sharp-witted satirical comedy and poetry group, Scaffold were more fringe theatre than mop top wannabes. They occupied a space at the end of a line that linked Music Hall and The Goons to television’s landmark satirical show That Was The Week That Was and London’s West End smash-hit revue, Beyond The Fringe.
One thing Scaffold did not do when they were filling theatres up and down the land was sing but, ironically, mention their name today and the response is usually a burst of either of their two best remembered hit singles: ‘Thank U Very Much For The Aintree Iron’ and ‘Lily The Pink’. Comedy – some might even say “novelty” songs – they have mischievously etched themselves into the collective consciousness but, as McGear reflects, neither accurately portray just what Scaffold were actually all about: “Certain things in life you always regret and one of the big things I regret is getting Scaffold – who can’t sing! – into the pop world by writing, ‘Thank U Very Much For The Aintree Iron’. That was just a little one-off song – our only song – that we did it at the end of our show to thank people for coming. We didn’t do music for obvious reasons: Beatlemania was raging and being Paul’s brother it could have been embarr- assing. At first we steered clear of music.”
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