Coffee-Table Notes

Choose Life Earlier this week, the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party tried to get down with the kids by co-opting the much imitated Choose Life mantra from Trainspotting. With the Scottish council elections pending in May, this was turned into an anti SNP rant. While the result suspiciously resembled an April Fool that got lost in the post, more likely it was the last gasp antics of a worn out comms team bereft of ideas. Their semantic wheeze was the press release equivalent of dad-dancing, that painful, try-too-hard shuffle by those who long lost sight of the zeitgeist, but who are still desperate to be hip.   The deliberate Trainspotting reference might arguably have also been a potential breach of copyright.  The original words are the intellectual property of Irvine Welsh, author of the era defining Edinburgh-set 1993 novel where they first appeared. Writer of the equally audacious 1996 film adaptation, John Hodge, director Danny Boyle and producer Andrew Macdonald could als

Liverpool Rising   ‘LIVERPOOL LIKE BRISTOL 1980 - RISE UP!’   No-one seemed that bothered by the chalked on words scrawled on a wall in the centre of town. That’s if they even noticed them as they bustled past on that busy week day lunchtime. The words were easy to miss if you weren’t looking for them, but for those who knew what was going on, and others like me whose eye accidentally caught them, they read like a call to arms.    I’d left school that summer, and had stumbled into a Youth Opportunities Programme with British Rail for £23.50 a week. The YOP scheme had been set up so Thatcher could massage the dole queue figures down to below the million they really were. I spent most of my £23.50 at Probe, the punky-hippy record shop where I’d probably just been when I saw the chalked on words, which stopped me in my tracks.   That April in Bristol there had been what came to be known as the St. Pauls riot, which happened after police raided the Black and White Café on Grosvenor Road in

Going Up   Sheil Road flats were considered to be the best high rises in Liverpool when me and my mum moved into the 16 th floor of Kenley Close. Kenley Close and the other two blocks beside it that made up Sheil Park – Kenley Parade and Linosa Close - went up in the mid 1960s, around the time I was born. We were allocated the flat at the start of 1982, which meant we could move out of the temporary hostel we’d been put in a few weeks before Christmas.   That was after the house I’d grown up in had been sold. The house was next to Anfield Cemetery, with my back bedroom overlooking the gravestones that loomed in the moonlight as I read in the dark by the window. The sale was part of the deal after my mum and dad’s divorce came through, which stipulated the house couldn’t be sold until I left school. Unfortunately for us, it all went through when the council was on strike, and we couldn’t be rehoused till they went back to work.    If I’d had any balls I would’ve moved out and found a fl

I Read the News Today. Oh, Boy!   When The Clash released London Calling at the end of 1979, the politically charged title track of the first generation punk band’s third album sounded like one more much needed call to arms. Coming at the end of a year in which Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party was elected to government for what turned out to be eighteen years of misrule, the lyrics to Joe Strummer and Mick Jones’ composition were a lot to take in.    Police brutality, the partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island earlier that year, and the potentially apocalyptic consequences of the River Thames flooding were all in the mix. The song’s line ‘Phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust’ also pointed up what was probably a first hand observation of the impotence of a rock band to be able to change things in the face of those who put faith in them.    Coming less than a decade after Liverpool’s 1960s pop saviours split up, the line was in keeping with punk’s willingness