A hippy is chased down a darkened street
by a group of 16-year old casuals. In most parts of Britain, what follows
is likely to test his pacifist views sorely. In Liverpool, he’s more likely
to be nagged for tales of the Isle Of Wight Festival. Genesis are big in
Merseyside. So is Zappa. But Biggest of all are Pink Floyd.
“Our little Jimmy he’s only three.
But he’s into Zappa, just like me”
Politics Is Boring (poem from The End magazine,
Vol 14)
“There’s one smoking a joint and another
with spots.
If I had my way I’d have al of you shot.”
‘In The Flesh’ from Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’
(EMI 1979)
As part of a world tour to promote their
LP, ‘A Momentary Lapse Of Reason’, the Pink Floyd machine borrows Manchester
City’s Maine Road football ground for a gathering of the faithful. Everything
is as it should be. The lasers are doing what lasers were made to do, and
lengthy solos sprawl across a marathon set. A crowd made up of students
and social workers applaud the group’s sleepy dexterity. Everything is
as it should be. Except that the students and social workers can’t relax.
A massive contingent of young men from Liverpool slips through the crowd.
The students keep their hands in their pockets. Are these progressive rock
fans about to be ‘taxed’ by casuals from the wrong end of the M62?
The tension is broken by the thick Scouse
accent which confronts one ageing hippy trying to keep track of the 25th
guitar solo.
"Hey, mate. Have you got any skins on yer?"
Hours earlier, dozens of coaches and cars
full of
the kind of young men who the world presumes
must
be into hip hop because they live on council
estates,
are heading for the centre of Manchester.
In the
cars, "Dark Side Of The Moon" provides
a suitable
preparatory experience. Those lucky enough
to
have a seat on a coach are able to chose
between
the visual delights of The Wall and Live
At Pompeii
on video.
Outside the ground, the Manchester touts
recognise that these people - most of
them kitted out
in a variety of expensive trainers - have
little in
common with any artist's impression of
a typical Pink
Floyd fan. Some haven't bothered to buy
tickets. The
touts adopt cup final tactics, keeping
a firm grip on
the valuable bits of paper. "What the
fuck are you lot
doing here?" asks one.
"We're here for the music, la," replies
an unlikely-
looking hippy.
Such events leave a trail of contradictions
which
will have most hip redbrick sociologists,
with their
clearly defined ideas about the haunts
and habits of the post-casual generation, thoroughly confused.
Received wisdom suggests that scallies
go to the
match and listen to Elvis Costello while
hammening a hire car on the way home from Chelsea. In reality, while the
media and the Government wonder what to do about The Lager Louts and how
to introduce membership cards without causing a national Saturday afternoon
riot, an ever-growing section of young Liverpool fans discuss the availability
of king-size Rizla papers while buzzing on the Steve Hillage album "L".
While others are transfixed by acid house,
the
youth of the city have established a deeply
rooted
retro-culture based on cannabis and the
music of
Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix,
Genesis and an idiosyncratic collection of pre-Eighties progressive dinosaurs.
Walls all over Liverpool spray out clues to passing motorists, yet few
inside or outside the city are aware of a massive underground cult which
can be traced back to the early Eighties.
'PURPLE HAZE'
'DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE -SMOKE POT
AND FLY',
'SYD BARRET LIVES',
'FLOYD'
'ZAPPA'
'ROGER WATERS'
It's impossible to travel far through the
suburbs and estates of Liverpool without seeing one or all of these on
a wall, bus stop or shop shutter.
These things wouldn't be worth comment
were it
not for the fact that schoolteachers,
students and
ageing hippies aren't often caught vandalising
pri-
vate property in the name of progressive
rock. The
slogans are mostly the work of 14 and
15-year-
olds, the younger brothers of those at
Maine Road
who were knee high to a pot plant when
Jimi
Hendrix began introducing the music world
to the
joys of distortion and dental soloing.
And such communiques only hint at the strength
of the retro-casual movement. Record local attendances for low-key gigs
by Roy Harper only served to confuse the record companies, who typically
haven't a clue. As usual, they will be the last to find out.
Meanwhile, secondhand record shops and
record
fairs visiting the city are plagued by
pre-teen jazz -
rock fans distinguished by the tribal
call, "Got any
Zappa, mate?" Video hire shops report
pot culture
classics such as Cheech and Chong's Up
In Smoke inconstant demand from kids who in other cities might be waiting
their turn for Robocop or ET. One truly enthusiastic 17-year-old has officially
changed his name from plain David to Floyd, and the major
record retail chains find Roger Waters'
"Kaos" and
Syd Barrett's newly released "Opel" compilation
in
direct competition with the collected
works of
Morrissey, Marr, Stock, Aitken and Waterman.
What's happening is both unique and uniquely
ridiculous. Where will it all end? Some
believe only
five nights at the Empire from Frank Zappa
will heal
the retro hysteria that has gripped the
city.
Have you just got into Genesis/Floyd/Zappa
'cos it's safe to like them now?
Yes ......................................……………200
points
Yes, only when I'm stoned.............,........250
points
No, still into the Jam and The Beat….....minus
100 points.
"Are You A Real Wool?" quiz from The End
magazine, 1982.
Paul Weller has a lot to answer for. Whatever
sense they made in the rest of the country,
The Jam,The Clash, The Beat and similar pop extensions of the punk phenomenon
made perfect sense to the youth of Liverpool. As those groups fought and
fizzled out, these kids could make no sense of the grey overcoat uprising
that was left behind. Groups like Joy Division, Magazine and the whole
Zoo label axis based in Liverpool were ridiculed as "student crap” .
Many of the current crop of Zappa/Floyd
de-
votees mention being 'into' The Jam before
they
discovered a previously neglected music
from the
late Sixties and Seventies. Before The
Jam dis-
appeared into the ether, their sub-stadium
date at
the Deeside Leisure Centre in North Wales
became the last great gathering of pre-retro scallies, who seemed to connect
with the visual and musical sharpness of the group. This marriage made
perfect sense to everyone. This was, all the critics agreed, the music
of the working classes and the streets. In their
wake came the Style Council who, it was
unanimously decided, were "shit".
The resulting popularity of Bob Marley
was an
early indication of what was to come,
though it
remains difficult to discern whether the
music or the draw came first. Either way, one made the other welcome. The
record collections of older brothers (this madness seems almost exclusively
male) were investigated and, as there is said to be at least one copy of
Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon" in every street in the country, the
appreciation of their reflective rock became popular.
Their feelings can be summed up in a statement
by Kevin, a militant short-haired hippy: "I wish I'd been born earlier.
I'd have loved to have seen Zappa in the Seventies, sitting in a field
wrecked out of my face."
Peter Hooton, singer with The Farm and
co-editor
of The End magazine, a Liverpool publication
that
has documented and ridiculed this local
phenome-
non since its inception, remembers certain
pubs in the Netherton area of the city where kids would set up Calor Gas
and use hot knives to prepare
cannabis for inhalation through a 'bong'
or a coffee
jar. At a local club called Gatsby's,
some of the
scallies created their own 'Genesis Corner
(later
renamed 'Zappa's Corner' following the
meteoric
ascendancy of the bearded guitarist).
It became known as a place where you'd find people-staring into smokey
space.
You do buzz off it more when you're stoned,"
explains one 15-year-old whose idea of
a good
time is to lie with the lights out and
his head between
his stereo speakers listening to Pink
Floyd's "Comfortably
Numb". You might laugh at the lyrics
more".
The Farm could have been the most successful
group in Britain were it not for the intervention
of
Bob Marley and Roger Waters. They dressed
to a
tee in the casual style that Liverpool
youth had made
their own, and their music was made up
of short,
sharp pop songs with lyrics that were
cutting and
often politically motivated. For a time
they held ·
sway, but after a while they were obscured
by clouds
of smoke and swallowed up in the shadow
of "The
Wall".
Peter Hooton remembers seeing a friend
on
the terraces at Anfield and enquiring
about the
strange face on his t-shirt.
"Who's that", he asked .
"It's Zappa.", was the reply.
The End had set out to document Liverpool
youth
culture. As the Cannabis conquered the
council estates, itfound itself the reluctant voice of
a unique neo-hippy uprising. Its poetry
pages were
plagued with verse which talked about
the draw,
The Wall", and the ubiquitous Zappa. The
more
Hooton and the The End's writers took
the piss, the
more entrenched this retro-culture seemed
to become. Simultaneously, the musical menu got stranger and stranger-
a
catalogue of artists connected only by
being strongly
associated with the Sixties or early Seventies
and
being well past their respective sell-by
dates. Bob
Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel were strong
early
favourites. A local talk group called
Groundpig
stumbled over this freak phenomenon, and
as
capable old timers, started playing covers
of
records like Peter Gabriel's "Solsbury
Hill", Simon &
Garfunkel's "The Sound Of Silence" and
Super-
tramp's "Breakfast In America".
During 1982, The Farm would play in one
part of
town and draw maybe 200 people. In another,
Groundpig would perform, filling a pub
or club of as much as
600 capacity with more outside queuing
hopefully. Some lads
from the Everton area were inspired by
the music to
form Drama. They would play Gabriel and
Genesis
covers. As part of a council-funded anti-drugs
campaign, Peter Hooton helped organise
a Ground-
pig/Drama tour of comprehensive schools
in the city.
"We didn't really have enough security,"
says
Peter. The kids were going mad to get
in. Older lads
began arriving in vans. We had created
a monster
and we had to stop".
David Miles is 17. He used to ride a BMX
bike and
go to see Liverpool now and again. Then
he heard
Pink Floyd. He is now Floyd Miles, having
changed
his name by deed poll. Though his mates
have
accepted his new name, his mother refuses
to call
him Floyd, thoroughly disapproving of
the whole
idea. The Merseyside Passenger Transport
Executive
are a little more accommodating, having
agreed to changed
the name on his bus pass. He's as proud
of this as he
is of the hundreds of tapes and Cds he
owns, each and every one of them having
some
relevance to the former psychedelic southerners.
Floyd remembers getting into them seriously
seven
months ago, and since then has spent almost
£400
of his YTS scheme earnings on records.
Having been
at the Maine Road concert, he is full
of a new live LP
which documents recent shows. He talks
intensely
about the messages and meanings of the
various
records ("The Wall' means a lot to me");
of his
intention to trek to Europe for future
shows; and of
his plans to visit the legendary recluse
Syd Barrett at
his home in Cambridge.
"He lives with his nurse now," he says
wistfully.
They say he took a jar of acid in the
Sixties and he's
going to be tripping for the rest of his
life."
He doesn't have any great expectations
of the
meeting: "I just want to ask him how he
is, get his
autograph, like."
Floyd pulls out another rare record, a
bootleg
album worth £30. "I got this at
a record fair.", he sayes proudly.
Most
days, he will check through the racks
of Liverpool's
Backtracks - a huge secondhand mecca selling
badges, T-shirts and old music to a new
generation
of short-haired hippies -for the new records
that he
doesn't have. Soon he plans a show on
the local
North Coast Radio, an unlicensed station
which
broadcasts fom the Bidston Estate where
he lives.
Obviously, he will play nothing but Pink
music. Other
projects include recreating the sleeve
from "The
Wall" on the font wall of his home ("I
haven't asked
my mum yet..."), and·perfonning
the self-penned
"Dedicated To Syd" with a local teenage
mod group.
He has no interest whatsoever in other
music.
"Gabriel's not bad," he admits, "but I
don't really
want to listen to anyone else. If I do,
I might stop
liking the Floyd. I went out to buy a
Genesis LP once
but I ended up coming home with a Floyd
record..."
The Night Of The Guitars, a tour based
around a
series of LPs for Miles Copeland's IRS
label, arrives in
Liverpool. Like most, these people have
no idea of
the madness which grips the city. The
posters
announce the 'No Speak' concept as 'Instrumental
Rock For The Nineties', though most of
the artists are
remnants from the Sixties and Seventies.
Steve Howe
from Yes, Robbie Krieger of The Doors
and two
old men from Wishbone Ash relive former
glories on
the stage of The Royal Court Theatre.
Against a wall in the corner, a row of
six scailies -
distinguished by their training shoes
- are in various
stages of the skinning up ritual. The
old men keep
soloing and the scallies keep nodding
their heads in
approval. A member of the road crew -
distinguished by his clip-on pass, leather biker's iacket and grubby
flares - passes and stares for a few seconds,
dazed
and patently confused. He is passing through
a city and a
culture which is unique.
A city where the early Genesis public
school
fantasies of old England seep from bedroom
win-
dows in Kirkby and Croxteth, a city where
Waters is
"well sound" and Led Zeppelin are "a better
buzz"; a
city where "real hippies" are treated
with a mixture
of awe and respect; a city where the music
of the
future is on permanent hold.
This is Liverpool in
1988, a planet in its own orbit, a neo-hippy
settlement spaced out on the dark side
of the moon.
The End Files, courtesy of Peter Hooton.
Records from
Backtrack, Liverpool. king-size skins
available at Frank's Shop, Kirkby.
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