An Offaly Big Adventure
This month’s blindfolded 180 on rock’s dart board of fate: poetic surrealism, with extra Aintree iron.
AS MERSEYBEAT raged around them, Scaffold first performed their poetry, songs and comic sketches with The Liverpool One Fat Lady All Electric Show revue in 1962. Renamed after Miles Davis’s soundtrack to Louis Malle’s 1958 crime movie Ascenseur Pour L’Échafaud, John Gorman, Roger McGough and Mike McGear – né McCartney – would have big hits later in the decade with 1967 Number 4 Thank U Very Much, and Lily The Pink, a maddeningly catchy all-ages chart topper the following year.
“After those wonderfully silly sing-along songs, we went away from the sketches and the poetry,” says McCartney today. “They were the only thing the mass public knew. But when we did Fresh Liver they could hear all the different facets, the true Scaffold if you like.”
The way to Fresh Liver was circuitous. As well as two Scaffold LPs and numerous singles, there would be the Gorman-less McGough & McGear LP in 1968, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band/Liverpool Scene/Scaffold superband Grimms from 1971, and McGear’s solo debut Woman in 1972, plus themes for Scouse sitcom The Liver Birds and currency decimalisation. A wider comedic acceptance, akin to Monty Python’s Flying Circus or The Goodies, seemed likely. Yet, as McGough notes, the package was erratic, and an inability to get on with the BBC higher-ups was also a factor. “We certainly weren’t Footlights,” he says. “We seemed ill-disciplined, but we weren’t,
though John was a bit naughty. We weren’t, I think, quite in the mould.”
This was in evidence on Fresh Liver, a bracingly schizoid album with a large, bloody organ on the sleeve (open the gatefold to find that the gore has seeped through onto a shot of Liverpool’s North Western Hotel from 1906). Co-producer Tim Rice’s sleevenote explains how he and the group were all “unladen-down commitment-wise” in summer 1972, adding “it was mainly my idea that the world was ready for a new Scaffold album.” They and friendly musicians including Neil Innes, Ollie Halsall and the Average White Band horns arrived at The Manor, Oxfordshire. “Sessions were spread over two weeks or so,” says guitarist Andy Roberts. “Everything at the Manor was done at once, songs and poems, with the orchestral stuff dubbed at Air later on. [Pianist/arranger] John Megginson was key to it all – Mike would sing the songs to Meggo, and he would sketch out the charts.”
“We all had our individual ideas of what the Scaffold should be,” says Gorman, the Tommy Cooper of the group. “Which was understandable. We were three different personalities. Mike wanted to do good musical numbers, Roger wanted to stick with the poetry. I was more interested in the thumpy-thump singalong songs, the ones that got success. We disagreed rather than argued – not in a bad way.”
The disagreements led to an album of piquancy and contrasts. Side one – dubbed the Song Side – is the heavier, with macabre horror rock (Devon’s Dead concerns the death of a New York groupie), Elvis-style anti-war satire (Nuclear Band) and Gorman’s Ob-La-Di-esque novelty WPC Hodges, bookended by Knickers’ ridiculing of the class system. Scaffold’s origins as poets and spinners of curious vignettes take over on the more McGoughled Words And Music side. There is surrealist wordplay and inversions galore on the fearful Twist and Psychiatrist – psychotic public school pastiche Fishfriars even includes the sound of a skull being cracked with a cricket bat, achieved by smacking plastic cups filled with water – though balance arrived via McGough’s more tender reflections. Aren’t We All? – which first appeared in 1967 poetry anthology The Mersey Sound – Fish and I Remember are melancholic reveries with occasional sharp elbows of bathos and unease. S.S. declares “England is the world’s genitalia” as it imagines a government department of obscenity coercing a hapless freak to get swearing.
“It’s of an age,” says McGough of “his” side. “A young man and love lost, trying to make sense of what’s around. It was wistful, yeah, and hopefully moving. There’s also that mix of surrealism, with the poems and the sketches, which are Beckett and Ionesco as much as anything… was it a good idea, separating the record like that? It probably wasn’t. But we were disparate characters – pulling the idea apart… together.”
Though Fresh Liver would not win any gold discs, Scaffold would go on, and had a Top 10 hit with a cover of Dominic Behan’s Liverpool Lou in June ’74, produced by Mike’s brother Paul. 1975’s all-music Sold Out would be their final LP, while they took their last bow alongside the Pythons and Vivian Stanshall at a Nobody’s Fools/Rock With Laughter mental health charity event at the Albert Hall in ’77.
There were occasional sightings over the years, and the trio represented Liverpool at Shanghai’s 2010 World Expo. The recent find of a 1969 live gig from the Talk Of The Town led them to reunite on-stage at the BFI in April. Now there’s talk of a DVD release, a full box set and documentary film. Could Scaffold ride again?
“Are we just going to sit there like three prats and answer questions about it?” wonders Gorman. “Boring! Or are we going to perform something?”
“You never know,” says McCartney. “The years mellow you. And we’re still here – a great attribute – and we’re all still insane.”
If there is a box set, Fresh Liver will be an essential part. McGough says that discussing the record has made him want to listen to it again. “I’ll either squirm or jump up and down with delight,” he says. “Or probably a bit of both.”
“We were disparate characters – pulling the idea apart… together.” ROGER McGOUGH