1. Billy Fury – Wondrous Place
Fury didn't really hit paydirt until 1961 with his yearning top ten hit, Halfway To Paradise, but a year earlier his first version of songwriters Jeff Lewis and Bill Giant's understated paean to the transcendent powers of intimate exchanges of the flesh was delivered with quietly knowing ineffable matinee idol cool.
Fury recorded the song several times during his fleetingly brief time at the top before the 1960s beat groups took over the world. Fury continued to release records, and played holiday camp rocker Stormy Tempest in David Essex film vehicle, That'll Be The Day before dying at the tragically young age of forty-three in 1983. Wondrous Place has been covered many times, and gifted writer Paul du Noyer the title of his lovingly observed history of Liverpool music.
2. The 23rd Turnoff – Michelangelo
The 23rd Turnoff's name, incidentally, may well have sounded suitably 'delic, but was actually taken from the twenty-third turn-off of the M6 that took you back home to Liverpool. As mundane as that sounds, Bill Drummond's Illuminatus!-inspired obsession with the number twenty-three would almost certainly beg to differ.
3. The Real Thing – Children of the Ghetto
Rather than follow-up with another selection of feelgood dancers, The Real Thing's follow-up was a concept album based around the Amoo brothers background in the multi-racial Liverpool district, which would forever be known as Toxteth following the riots that exploded onto the streets in 1981.
Released in 1977, 4 From 8 (the band's record company had rejected the proposed title of Liverpool 8) came wrapped in a gatefold sleeve featuring a photographic montage of images from the neighbourhood that inspired it. The centrepiece of the album was the eleven-minute Liverpool 8 Medley, which fused three tracks, Children of the Ghetto, Liverpool 8 and Stanhope Street.
Influenced by the likes of Donny Hathaway and Sly Stone, the album may have confused audiences in search of something more obviously commercial, but Children of the Ghetto in particular has made quietly political waves in versions of the song by Courtney Pine, Philip Bailey from Earth, Wind and Fire and more recently by Mary J Blige. The song's deep-set sentiments of unity and pride in the face of adversity reflects the stance taken by era's civil rights movement, and remains the most understated of anthems.
4. Deaf School – What A Way To End It All
This debut single also introduced the band's first album, 2nd Honeymoon, to an eclectic and theatrical mix that finds Mr Cadillac Junior cast as a faux 1930s crooner about to do away with himself to a banjo backing. With the band giving the Palm Court Orchestra a run for their money before morphing into the jauntiest of show-time pastiches that counteracted the track's dramatic denouement, the song is an apposite joy.
With co-vocalist Bette Bright also in their ranks, Deaf School were named by both Dexy's Midnight Runners and Madness as their favourite band. With Deaf School sidelined by punk, for Langer went on to produce both bands, as well as co-writing Shipbuilding with Elvis Costello. More recently, Langer has since given a Deaf School style sheen to Dogs Die in Hot Cars and others, while a reconstituted Deaf School are now back out touring.
At one point every cool club in town played What A Way To End It All as the last song of the night. This is clearly a tradition that should be revived with immediate effect.
5. Big in Japan – Big in Japan
The band that formed out of Langer's suggestion may have more resembled a shambolic live art happening than anything resembling pop music, but the band were significant, both in heralding the first wave of new bands to come out of eclectic Mathew Street basement club, Eric's, and for who was in them. A supergroup in reverse, as well as Drummond, Big in Japan featured future Lightning Seed Ian Broudie, who had been in the Illuminatus! house band, future Frankie Goes To Hollywood shockmeister Holly Johnson, and future Siouxsie and the Banshees drummer, Budgie.
Vocals were led by Jayne Casey, who had ran the Aunt Twacky's vintage boutique, appeared in Illuminatus! and performed with a lampshade on her head. Casey went on to front Pink Military Stand Alone, and later Pink Industry, before going on to become an arts consultant for superclub, Cream, and Liverpool's 2008 tenure as Capital of Culture. Bill Drummond's done one or two things since as well, subverting the music industry with the KLF and the art-world with the K Foundation, all with the wilfully anarchic spirit picked up from Ken Campbell.
Big in Japan was released as one side of a split single with The Chuddy Nuddies (a contract-obliging pseudonym for The Yachts), Brutality, Religion and A Dancebeat, on the Eric's label, with a posthumous EP, From Y to Z and Never Again being the first release on Zoo, the label set up by Drummond and Big in Japan's final bassist, Dave Balfe.
The band had split in 1978, though whether this had anything to do with the petition pinned up in nearby record shop Probe requesting them to do just that isn't on record. As most of the petition's signatories were the band themselves, it remains unlikely.
Treason was the Teardrops third single, and the first real sighting of Cope's melding of mighty pop hooks with arcane English whimsy. The song only became a hit after being re-released following success of the horn-led Reward and its accompanying video chock-a-block with city scenesters suggested great adventures lay ahead. The of-its-time video for Treason, meanwhile, pointed to Cope's possible embracement of hallucinogens after American wild child Courtney Love, then resident in Liverpool, allegedly turned on the entire city to all manner of creative possibilities.
Ocean Rain was both the title track and the final song on the Bunnymen's fourth album, a shimmering, string-led affair that looked to the high drama of Jacques Brel and others in its quest for redemption. As its title implies, Ocean Rain ebbs and flows, with McCulloch confessing his own vulnerability by way of a series of extended sea-bound metaphors and melancholy introspection before the song erupts into emotional grandeur. With Will Sergeant's guitar patterns understatedly tasteful, Les Pattinson playing an upright bass and the sainted Pete de Freitas using brushes on his drums, this was the sound of a band that had done its musical growing up in public, and, having reached its peak, also seemed to be marking the end of something that would never be the same again.
This sole release by the Wild Swans original incarnation other than a John Peel session released on Strange Fruit a few years later was a double A sided 12'' which Bill Drummond said was the best thing ever released as part of Zoo's small but (im)perfectly formed catalogue. The flipside, God Forbid, was an urgent quest for truth led by Jeri Kelly's chiming guitar jangles and Simpson's yearning voice and was already bathed in glory.
From the title onwards, The Revolutionary Spirit was something else again, a brooding epic that seemed steeped in history and metaphysical mythology, with Simpson's poetry sounding both wise and troubled way beyond his tender years.
The Wild Swans imploded following a tour supporting the Bunnymen, effectively splitting in two. Simpson joined forces with Ian Broudie for the far glossier Care, while Kelly and keyboardist Ged Quinn joined forces with Bamboo Fringe vocalist Peter Coyle as the Lotus Eaters, who scored a summer hit with The First Picture of You.
A reconvened Wild Swans released two major label albums in the 1980s, but it wasn't the same, and Simpson retreated into a new guise, making lush electronic instrumentals as Skyray before a new version of The Wild Swans laid old ghosts to rest with very personal album, The Coldest Winter For A Hundred Years, a couple of years back.
As majestic as it is, the Wild Swans remain defined by The Revolutionary Spirit. Financed and produced by Bunnymen drummer and Simpson's flatmate Pete de Freitas, even the fact that studio-based acid intake caused the record to be recorded in tinny mono cannot diminish just how heroic this song remains.
Michael Head has charted a similarly peripatetic path, from The Pale Fountains early melding of Forever Changes era Love, Sergio Mendes and Simon & Garfunkel, to being signed to Virgin for a quarter of a million pounds within a year of the Orange Juice show and beyond. Two under-achieving albums later, the Palies morphed into the equally neglected Shack, led by Head and brother John.
Shack were blighted by the death of original bass player Chris McCaffery, studio fires, labels going bust and Head's heroin addiction, but still produced some of the most sublime 1960s-tinged pastoral Scouse psych which could have shown Brit-pop's young pretenders a thing or two. Shack even performed as backing band for their beloved Arthur Lee at a 1992 Liverpool show.
Somehow Head survived, and on Newby Street, one of the stand-outs from his tellingly named Artorious Revisited EP, sounds like a man reborn, harnessing a Love style horn section to a simple love song that sounds like pure joy.
8. The Cherry Boys – Kardomah Cafe
Featuring violin and percussion wrapped around a spirallingly spindly guitar line and crashing symbols, this piece of culture-clashing proto World Music was released in 1981 on the long lost Chicken Jazz label, run by future Waterboy Mike Scott, who co-produced, sang backing vocals and recently put up the song on his Soundcloud page following a previous release on the Liverpool Cult Classics Unearthed collection released by the Scouse archivists at Viper Records.
By the time of the single's original release, alas, the band had split up not long after an all too appropriate support slot with the somewhat strung-out ex Velvets chanteuse Nico when she played Liverpool. Vocalist Dave Dickie rather oddly opted to play keyboards as one half of Black alongside nouveau crooner Colin Vearncombe, who would later have a solo hit with Wonderful Life.
Following a decade of could've been classic albums by other bands ruined by hi-tech over-production, Mavers quest for raw authenticity saw umpteen protracted recording sessions leave him unsatisfied. The band's record label mixed what they had and released it as the band's sole album anyway. Mavers may have subsequently disowned the eponymous album that resulted, but if you're not steeped in its messy back-story, it might just sound like a masterpiece.
If The La's looked to Merseybeat, The Stairs plundered a more scuzzed-up sixties sound culled from Nuggets psych-garage band compilations and early Rolling Stones records. Led by Edgar 'Summertyme' Jones, who would go on to record several solo albums, The Stairs were dope-obsessed psychedelians looking for their own way out in an entirely different way to The La's.
Weed Bus, taken from debut album, Mexican Rn'B, shows off a sly humour behind the snarling, as it charts the ride of a lifetime past assorted inner city drug dealers abodes with the jaunty brio of a Get Off My Cloud style standard.
When teenager Ronald Wycherly turned up
to a Marty Wilde show in the late 1950s with the hope of showing the
older singer some of his songs, little did he know that he'd end up
not just onstage but on tour with Wilde as he was given an infinitely
more mercurial name by showbiz svengali Larry Parnes.
Fury didn't really hit paydirt until 1961 with his yearning top ten hit, Halfway To Paradise, but a year earlier his first version of songwriters Jeff Lewis and Bill Giant's understated paean to the transcendent powers of intimate exchanges of the flesh was delivered with quietly knowing ineffable matinee idol cool.
Fury recorded the song several times during his fleetingly brief time at the top before the 1960s beat groups took over the world. Fury continued to release records, and played holiday camp rocker Stormy Tempest in David Essex film vehicle, That'll Be The Day before dying at the tragically young age of forty-three in 1983. Wondrous Place has been covered many times, and gifted writer Paul du Noyer the title of his lovingly observed history of Liverpool music.
2. The 23rd Turnoff – Michelangelo
Contrary to popular belief, Liverpool's
best 1960s songwriter was actually Jimmy Campbell, who came up
fronting The Kirkbys on trio of fag-end Merseybeat singles before
embracing psychedelia with this of-its-time slice of woozy
melancholia released in 1967 and named by Echo and the Bunnyman
guitarist Will Sergeant as one of the top one hundred psychedelic
singles ever. Campbell released one album with his next band, Rockin'
Horse, before three low-key solo albums led to diminishing returns.
After 1972, Campbell never released another record, and died in 2007
aged sixty-three.
The 23rd Turnoff's name, incidentally, may well have sounded suitably 'delic, but was actually taken from the twenty-third turn-off of the M6 that took you back home to Liverpool. As mundane as that sounds, Bill Drummond's Illuminatus!-inspired obsession with the number twenty-three would almost certainly beg to differ.
3. The Real Thing – Children of the Ghetto
Liverpool's black music scene has
largely been undocumented, but The Real Thing, formed by Chris Amoo
in 1970, scored a hit in five years later with soul disco
smoocheroonie, You To Me Are Everything followed by two more singles
from the band's eponymous debut album. By that time Chris's elder
brother, Eddie Amoo, who had released several singles in the 1960s
with his own Brit-soul combo, The Chants, had joined the band.
Rather than follow-up with another selection of feelgood dancers, The Real Thing's follow-up was a concept album based around the Amoo brothers background in the multi-racial Liverpool district, which would forever be known as Toxteth following the riots that exploded onto the streets in 1981.
Released in 1977, 4 From 8 (the band's record company had rejected the proposed title of Liverpool 8) came wrapped in a gatefold sleeve featuring a photographic montage of images from the neighbourhood that inspired it. The centrepiece of the album was the eleven-minute Liverpool 8 Medley, which fused three tracks, Children of the Ghetto, Liverpool 8 and Stanhope Street.
Influenced by the likes of Donny Hathaway and Sly Stone, the album may have confused audiences in search of something more obviously commercial, but Children of the Ghetto in particular has made quietly political waves in versions of the song by Courtney Pine, Philip Bailey from Earth, Wind and Fire and more recently by Mary J Blige. The song's deep-set sentiments of unity and pride in the face of adversity reflects the stance taken by era's civil rights movement, and remains the most understated of anthems.
4. Deaf School – What A Way To End It All
Without this song and Deaf School's
three late 1970s albums, pop music would have turned out very
differently indeed. Formed in 1973 at Liverpool Art School by Clive
Langer and Steve Allen, aka Enrico Cadillac Junior, Deaf School
evolved into a large-scale pop-art cabaret troupe whose extravagant
stage shows took a moribund post Merseybeat, pre-punk Liverpool scene
by storm.
This debut single also introduced the band's first album, 2nd Honeymoon, to an eclectic and theatrical mix that finds Mr Cadillac Junior cast as a faux 1930s crooner about to do away with himself to a banjo backing. With the band giving the Palm Court Orchestra a run for their money before morphing into the jauntiest of show-time pastiches that counteracted the track's dramatic denouement, the song is an apposite joy.
With co-vocalist Bette Bright also in their ranks, Deaf School were named by both Dexy's Midnight Runners and Madness as their favourite band. With Deaf School sidelined by punk, for Langer went on to produce both bands, as well as co-writing Shipbuilding with Elvis Costello. More recently, Langer has since given a Deaf School style sheen to Dogs Die in Hot Cars and others, while a reconstituted Deaf School are now back out touring.
At one point every cool club in town played What A Way To End It All as the last song of the night. This is clearly a tradition that should be revived with immediate effect.
5. Big in Japan – Big in Japan
Big in Japan were formed at the
suggestion of Deaf School guitarist Langer to Bill Drummond before
Langer went on tour to America. Drummond had been a stage carpenter
who went on to design the set for Illuminatus!, Ken Campbell's
twelve-hour staging of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's epic
science-fiction hippy conspiracy novel at the Liverpool School of
Music, Language, Dream and Pun, an arts lab set up in an old
warehouse on Mathew Street by poet Peter O'Halligan.
The band that formed out of Langer's suggestion may have more resembled a shambolic live art happening than anything resembling pop music, but the band were significant, both in heralding the first wave of new bands to come out of eclectic Mathew Street basement club, Eric's, and for who was in them. A supergroup in reverse, as well as Drummond, Big in Japan featured future Lightning Seed Ian Broudie, who had been in the Illuminatus! house band, future Frankie Goes To Hollywood shockmeister Holly Johnson, and future Siouxsie and the Banshees drummer, Budgie.
Vocals were led by Jayne Casey, who had ran the Aunt Twacky's vintage boutique, appeared in Illuminatus! and performed with a lampshade on her head. Casey went on to front Pink Military Stand Alone, and later Pink Industry, before going on to become an arts consultant for superclub, Cream, and Liverpool's 2008 tenure as Capital of Culture. Bill Drummond's done one or two things since as well, subverting the music industry with the KLF and the art-world with the K Foundation, all with the wilfully anarchic spirit picked up from Ken Campbell.
Big in Japan was released as one side of a split single with The Chuddy Nuddies (a contract-obliging pseudonym for The Yachts), Brutality, Religion and A Dancebeat, on the Eric's label, with a posthumous EP, From Y to Z and Never Again being the first release on Zoo, the label set up by Drummond and Big in Japan's final bassist, Dave Balfe.
The band had split in 1978, though whether this had anything to do with the petition pinned up in nearby record shop Probe requesting them to do just that isn't on record. As most of the petition's signatories were the band themselves, it remains unlikely.
6. Wah! Heat – Better Scream / The
Teardrop Explodes – Treason / Echo and the Bunnymen – Ocean Rain
/
Three shades of post-apocalyptic pop
euphoria from the holy trinity of the post Big in Japan Eric's crowd
whose trio of vocalists may or may not have rehearsed but never
performed together as the much-mythologised Crucial Three. Teardrop
Explodes singer Julian Cope was an over-excitable teacher-training
student who muscled his way into both the Eric's scene and literally
into Wah! Heat mouth-almighy Pete Wylie as he scrambled his way
through the crowd the night The Clash played. Myopic David Bowie
obsessive and soon to be Echo and the Bunnymen sex on legs Ian
McCulloch was also in situ, and, before each went their separate
ways, a legend was born.
After their early singles were released
on Zoo, both the Bunnymen and the Teardrops were well on their way to
becoming pop stars by the time Wah! Heat released their debut single
in 1979, an insistent and strikingly mature statement of intent that
was both portent of doom and call to arms in a Cold War infected
world. Wylie would go on to score hits of his own with the
chart-busting The Story of the Blues before becoming a kind of Scouse
Springsteen, keeping the city's flame alive through good times and
bad.
Treason was the Teardrops third single, and the first real sighting of Cope's melding of mighty pop hooks with arcane English whimsy. The song only became a hit after being re-released following success of the horn-led Reward and its accompanying video chock-a-block with city scenesters suggested great adventures lay ahead. The of-its-time video for Treason, meanwhile, pointed to Cope's possible embracement of hallucinogens after American wild child Courtney Love, then resident in Liverpool, allegedly turned on the entire city to all manner of creative possibilities.
Ocean Rain was both the title track and the final song on the Bunnymen's fourth album, a shimmering, string-led affair that looked to the high drama of Jacques Brel and others in its quest for redemption. As its title implies, Ocean Rain ebbs and flows, with McCulloch confessing his own vulnerability by way of a series of extended sea-bound metaphors and melancholy introspection before the song erupts into emotional grandeur. With Will Sergeant's guitar patterns understatedly tasteful, Les Pattinson playing an upright bass and the sainted Pete de Freitas using brushes on his drums, this was the sound of a band that had done its musical growing up in public, and, having reached its peak, also seemed to be marking the end of something that would never be the same again.
7. The Wild Swans – The Revolutionary
Spirit / Michael Head & The Red Elastic Band – Newby Street
Doomed romantic starving artist chic
was the order of the day for the band formed by original Teardrop
Explodes member Paul Simpson, who made their live debut alongside
Michael Head's equally fledgling Pale Fountains supporting Orange
Juice at a chicken-in-a-basket cabaret club called Mr Pickwick's that
was renamed Plato's Ballroom for such occasions.
This sole release by the Wild Swans original incarnation other than a John Peel session released on Strange Fruit a few years later was a double A sided 12'' which Bill Drummond said was the best thing ever released as part of Zoo's small but (im)perfectly formed catalogue. The flipside, God Forbid, was an urgent quest for truth led by Jeri Kelly's chiming guitar jangles and Simpson's yearning voice and was already bathed in glory.
From the title onwards, The Revolutionary Spirit was something else again, a brooding epic that seemed steeped in history and metaphysical mythology, with Simpson's poetry sounding both wise and troubled way beyond his tender years.
The Wild Swans imploded following a tour supporting the Bunnymen, effectively splitting in two. Simpson joined forces with Ian Broudie for the far glossier Care, while Kelly and keyboardist Ged Quinn joined forces with Bamboo Fringe vocalist Peter Coyle as the Lotus Eaters, who scored a summer hit with The First Picture of You.
A reconvened Wild Swans released two major label albums in the 1980s, but it wasn't the same, and Simpson retreated into a new guise, making lush electronic instrumentals as Skyray before a new version of The Wild Swans laid old ghosts to rest with very personal album, The Coldest Winter For A Hundred Years, a couple of years back.
As majestic as it is, the Wild Swans remain defined by The Revolutionary Spirit. Financed and produced by Bunnymen drummer and Simpson's flatmate Pete de Freitas, even the fact that studio-based acid intake caused the record to be recorded in tinny mono cannot diminish just how heroic this song remains.
Michael Head has charted a similarly peripatetic path, from The Pale Fountains early melding of Forever Changes era Love, Sergio Mendes and Simon & Garfunkel, to being signed to Virgin for a quarter of a million pounds within a year of the Orange Juice show and beyond. Two under-achieving albums later, the Palies morphed into the equally neglected Shack, led by Head and brother John.
Shack were blighted by the death of original bass player Chris McCaffery, studio fires, labels going bust and Head's heroin addiction, but still produced some of the most sublime 1960s-tinged pastoral Scouse psych which could have shown Brit-pop's young pretenders a thing or two. Shack even performed as backing band for their beloved Arthur Lee at a 1992 Liverpool show.
Somehow Head survived, and on Newby Street, one of the stand-outs from his tellingly named Artorious Revisited EP, sounds like a man reborn, harnessing a Love style horn section to a simple love song that sounds like pure joy.
8. The Cherry Boys – Kardomah Cafe
Homages to greasy spoons don't come any
more evocative than this one by an early 1980s power-pop quartet with
a common touch enough to appeal to the Scallies and with melodies
aplenty. Awash with 1960s harmonies and carried by a mighty
harmonica, this nostalgia-tinged paean to one of many cafés within
spitting distance of Mathew Street fused Merseybeat sensibilities
with a 1980s production big enough for it to go top ten in Spain.
Singer John Byrne, aka John Cherry went on to join the La's and
co-write There She Goes, and is now a highly respected classical
guitarist.
9. The Last Chant - Run of the Dove
When Liverpool's dole queue underground
turned on, tuned in and dropped out to 1960s psychedelia, the likes
of The Doors, Love and the Velvet Underground were regularly
name-dropped by local scenesters, few tapped into the spirit of the
originals with such determined aplomb as this one-off single by a
troupe who were clearly acquainted with the dronier, raga-influenced
tracks on the first Velvets album.
Featuring violin and percussion wrapped around a spirallingly spindly guitar line and crashing symbols, this piece of culture-clashing proto World Music was released in 1981 on the long lost Chicken Jazz label, run by future Waterboy Mike Scott, who co-produced, sang backing vocals and recently put up the song on his Soundcloud page following a previous release on the Liverpool Cult Classics Unearthed collection released by the Scouse archivists at Viper Records.
By the time of the single's original release, alas, the band had split up not long after an all too appropriate support slot with the somewhat strung-out ex Velvets chanteuse Nico when she played Liverpool. Vocalist Dave Dickie rather oddly opted to play keyboards as one half of Black alongside nouveau crooner Colin Vearncombe, who would later have a solo hit with Wonderful Life.
10. The La's – Way Out / The Stairs –
Weed Bus
There She Goes may be the La's song
that went global, but this earlier single was an equally evocative
expression of nouveau Merseybeat, in which the band's mercurial
vocalist Lee Mavers searched for some musical holy grail lost in the
dust of the 1960s. A spiralling back-street waltz that turns in on
itself, even as the song's restless protagonist can't wait to do a
runner, Way Out captures the spirit of working-class auto-didacts on
the run from dole queue culture with a masterly way with pop
melodies.
Following a decade of could've been classic albums by other bands ruined by hi-tech over-production, Mavers quest for raw authenticity saw umpteen protracted recording sessions leave him unsatisfied. The band's record label mixed what they had and released it as the band's sole album anyway. Mavers may have subsequently disowned the eponymous album that resulted, but if you're not steeped in its messy back-story, it might just sound like a masterpiece.
If The La's looked to Merseybeat, The Stairs plundered a more scuzzed-up sixties sound culled from Nuggets psych-garage band compilations and early Rolling Stones records. Led by Edgar 'Summertyme' Jones, who would go on to record several solo albums, The Stairs were dope-obsessed psychedelians looking for their own way out in an entirely different way to The La's.
Weed Bus, taken from debut album, Mexican Rn'B, shows off a sly humour behind the snarling, as it charts the ride of a lifetime past assorted inner city drug dealers abodes with the jaunty brio of a Get Off My Cloud style standard.
Product magazine, March 2015
ends
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