The Music of Liverpool

The Music of Liverpool

Liverpool’s importance on the British music map was secured in the early '60’s when four local mop-topped characters took the music world by storm, giving birth to Beatlemania and inspiring millions of people with songs that sound as great today as they did then.

From '70’s artists like Elvis Costello, the Teardrop Explodes with Julian Cope, and a flurry of bands in the '80’s with smash hits from bands like Echo and the Bunnymen, Half Man Half Biscuit, Frankie goes to Hollywood and The Christians, turned people on to new diverse sounds from the city.

During the '90’s The La’s and the Lightening Seeds and other Britpop favourites like the Boo Radleys, Shack, Cast and more all proved there must be something in the water in Merseyside. The current scene is as essential as ever; bands like The Coral and Ladytron and newcomers The Zutons, The Dead 60's and The Black Velvets are once again proving Liverpool’s status as the cultural home of British music.

Interesting Facts

Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane – two of the best songs never to make it to number one. Penny Lane is actually a real street in the suburbs of Liverpool. Strawberry Fields also exists and until very recently was a childrens' home near John Lennons' home in Liverpool.
OMD’s (Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark) single, Stanlow refers to a Mersey oil refinery that was always a welcomming site as they saw it upon their return home after performing around the country.
Elvis Costello wrote his classic song, New Amsterdam after his first visit to New York as his thoughts wandered back to Liverpool’s docks.
Liverpool’s International airport was reopened in 2001 by Yoko Ono and renamed Liverpool John Lennon Airport as a tribute to the local pop genius. The airport was the first in the UK to be named after an individual.
Suzanne Vega’s song In Liverpool was written after staying in Liverpool one spring day in 1990, inspired by listening to the ringing of church bells and looking over the river.

The Mersey Beat

Virtually every major British city in the early Sixties had its nucleus of rock musicians dedicated to playing rougher and more rewarding music than the current Top Twenty. What made Liverpool different was the size of its beat group population and the richness and variety of their American musical influences.
As a port, Liverpool had strong connections with America, and local seamen would return from New York with ciggies, comic books and the latest R&B and pop records.
Thus local groups were able to graft on to their rock'n'roll repertoire the music of early Motown, the Shirelles, the Isley Brothers and Ritchie Barrett (whose Ray Charles-styled "Some Other Guy" became a Merseybeat standard).

By 1960 local entrepreneurs like Alan Williams were booking Liverpool groups led by Kingsize Taylor and the Dominos into the clubs along Hamburg's notorious Reeperbahn and on Merseyside, folk and trad jazz clubs were switching to beat music.

By 1962 the Cavern, opened four years earlier as a jazz cellar, was given over to the pounding rhythms of the Big Three, the Beatles, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Faron's Flamingos and many more other 350 groups which Liverpool's own music paper, Mersey Beat, estimated were operating in the area. The same thing happened at the Iron. Door, the Jacaranda, the Beachcomber, the David Lewis and Litherland Town Hall.
All this activity made little impact outside Merseyside and Hamburg until local record-shop owner Brian Epstein got the Beatles their EMI recording contract. The success of "She Loves You" in early 1963 sent recording managers scurrying from London to find their Liverpool group.
Pye signed the Searchers, the Undertakers, black vocal group the Chants and Johnny Sandon and the Remo Four.

Decca had the Big Three, the Clayton Squares, Lee Curtis and the AII-Stars, Freddie Starr and the Midnighters and the Dennisons. Philips/Fontana grabbed the Merseybeats, Earl Preston and the TTs, Ian and the Zodiacs EMI (Parlophone and Columbia) released the records of the Epstein stable.

Over 200 singles by Liverpool groups were released in Britain over the next few years. Most were sloppily produced and undistinguished and no groups outside the charmed circle of the Epstein stable and the Searchers and Swinging Blue Jeans established themselves on a national or international scale. When the first or second single failed, most Liverpool groups were dropped by the record companies as quickly as they had been snapped up. Merseybeat was, in any case, essentially created in live performance. It was captured best on live recordings, notably those of the small Oriole label, which recorded a dozen or so groups in a short recording session at the Cavern under live conditions (some of the tracks are now available on a British United Artists album, This Is Mersey Beat).

At its best it represented an exciting collision between the enormous enthusiasm of the musicians and their fairly rudimentary technique. Its essence was in the chugging rhythm section, with metallic guitar chords cutting across thumping bass lines and solid four-square drumming. Few of the groups could reproduce the atmosphere and energy of a packed night at the. Cavern in a London recording studio with an unsympathetic producer, and hardly any wrote their own songs.
By 1965, the Liverpool music scene was almost dead. Drained of its best musicians by the record companies, yesterday's trend, its only consolation was that the graduates of Merseybeat had changed the face 0{ pop music internationally. Today the city is full of ex-musicians and kids who know more about the local soccer team than the Beatles.