The Liverpool Scene
Julian Cope, Pete Wylie and other postpunks on how they created a unique voice in a city overshadowed by The Beatles
Liverpool: the late ’70s. A generation raised in the shadows of The Beatles set out to establish their own creative voices. Here JULIAN COPE, PETE WYLIE, WILL SERGEANT and other post-punk trailblazers tell Rob Hughes about radical agendas forged in the city’s basement clubs, record shops and cafés. “The culture was obliged to change!” insists Cope
Later in the month, its patrons could enjoy a festive production of Puss In
Boots, starring Frankie Vaughan and Jimmy tarbuck. However, visitors to Liverpool’s empire theatre on Sunday, December 5, 1965 had something other than panto to look forward to. Inside the venue, for the princely sum of 15 shillings for a seat in the orchestra stalls, ticketholders were witnessing a rare homecoming gig by the Beatles. although no-one knew it at the time, the two sets they played at the empire that day were the last time the group played their hometown. eight months later, they stopped touring altogether. the Beatles had left the building; what happened in the vacuum that remained?
“everybody hated the Beatles in Liverpool because they’d fucked off,” says Julian Cope, who arrived there in 1976. “after Merseybeat, the city had suffered a musical doldrums of disparate, barely occasional achievement – Liverpool express, Supercharge, Marseilles, the real thing. What the fuck! the culture was obliged to change.”
Plainly, the Beatles’ presence was hard to shake. During the early ’70s, the Liverpool music
scene slowed to a near standstill. any new bands that came along – regardless of individual merit – were hampered simply by not being the Beatles; elsewhere, covers bands clung desperately onto the Mersey sound. In 1973, the Cavern was subject to a compulsory purchase order by British rail – who demolished the old warehouses above it and filled in the cellar club with the rubble. an air of ambivalence existed between the city and its most famous sons that lasted for most of the decade.
But for a generation raised in the shadows of the Beatles, who now sought to establish their own creative voices, there was hope. as the ’70s progressed, a loosely affiliated network of musicians, promoters, scenesters and hustlers took shape that was in some way defined by, and in conflict with, the mighty weight of Beatledom. Pete Wylie remembers receiving a sage piece of advice early on: “‘Don’t ever listen to the Beatles.’ Of course, growing up in Liverpool, all we ever heard about was the Beatles. So we were encouraged to make our own reputation.”
at its nexus was eric’s – a Mathew Street basement club situated just across from where the original Cavern had stood. the venue became
the crucible of the Liverpool new wave, hothousing a community of outliers and aspiring musicians, many of them helping to set the musical agenda for the following decade – echo & the Bunnymen, the teardrop explodes, Dead Or alive, Wah!, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the KLF.
“eric’s was a magical place,” confirms Bunnymen guitarist Will Sergeant. “It exposed you to so much music. It didn’t matter who was playing, it was all about the camaraderie and vibe. For us, it seemed to be the most important place in the world. It felt like we were the centre of the universe.”
Geographically, Sergeant wasn’t far off the mark: by the mid-’80s, the Liverpool music scene had progressed beyond eric’s and its satellite homes at Probe records and the armadillo tea Shop to the stages of Top Of The Pops. “at one point in 1984, 18 of the top 40 singles were by artists who had some sort of connection with eric’s,” says Wylie. “It was ridiculous.”
this was the crest of Liverpool’s most important musical scene since the heydey of Merseybeat – the culmination of nearly 10 years of wild ingenuity. It is an irrepressible story, involving
legendary Clash gigs, unexpected smells and an amiable rivalry with another city, 35 miles to the east. “When Ian McCulloch and I used to hitch to Manchester to see bands, we were always shocked at the sheer Anglo-Viking ‘masculinity’ of its scene,” recalls Cope. “Everybody in Manny held down day jobs to finance their bands. Whereas Liverpudlians followed Ian Hunter: ‘You look like
a star but you’re still on the dole.’ A prescriptive lyric if ever there was one.”
In late 1973, a group of Fine Art students and tutors at the Liverpool College of Art discussed how they might profitably contribute to their annual Christmas Social event. Formed primarily to play this one show, Deaf School were a nebulous ensemble that set about remapping the city’s musical aesthetic. “They weren’t big on technique, but they had massive ideas,” recalls manager Ken Testi, then playing in local prog group Great Day. “Deaf School supported us at o’Connor’s on Hardman Street. There were three girl singers, banjo players, fiddlers, euphonium players – it was the most amazing collective. Liverpool has never been short of fine musicians, but there was nothing new going on. Then along came this audacious bunch of upstarts.”
Deaf School injected the city’s live scene with fresh colour. Shows were chaotic and unpredictable, the various band members – led by singer Enrico Cadillac Jnr – cavorting about in flamboyant stage gear that reflected their anarchic mix of art-pop, glam and cabaret. “Liverpool was dead when we started,” remembers guitarist Clive Langer. “Because we were an art college band and an entertaining co-op, we attracted an audience straight away. Everyone in Liverpool was still wearing flares, whereas we wore tight trousers. It was maybe 18 months before punk and we had this ethos whereby looks were more important than musical ability. We much preferred to have interesting characters.”
As Deaf School’s reputation grew, they decided to enter Melody Maker’s Best new Band contest of 1975. They ended up winning it. “That changed things,” says Langer. “We were on the front page of Melody Maker, which started a buzz around Liverpool as well.”
Ironically, given that Deaf School were lighting the way out of The Beatles’ shadow, it was the group’s former press officer who helped them do it. Derek Taylor, then working as A&R man for Warners, came to watch them rehearse at Aunt Twackies – a vintage clothes shop run by Big In Japan’s Jayne Casey from a converted warehouse in Mathew St. “He wanted to sign us to the label,” Langer says. “The Liverpool connection really helped. It brought back memories for him and he felt there was something special going on. Derek had a tear in his eye.”
“over a cup of tea, Derek Taylor was seeing what I’d seen at o’Connor’s a couple of years before,” adds Testi. “Wonderful ideas being crunched into a musical format. It’s a powerful thing to see an act reaching outside of its capacity to nail something down. And that’s what Deaf School were doing.”
Deaf School released 2nd Honeymoon, their Warners debut, in 1976. The city
Tsuddenly had a new export worth bragging about. Local teenagers Ian McCulloch, Pete Burns, Paul Rutherford, Pete Wylie and Holly Johnson were among those who went to their shows. For Johnson, Deaf School “revived Liverpool music for a generation”. Will Sergeant was another young devotee. “I saw them loads of times,” he recalls. “Deaf School were like our version of Bowie and Roxy Music.” While working as Deaf School’s tour manager, Testi found himself reunited with local promoter Roger Eagle, who he’d first met in Manchester’s Magic Village in the late ’60s. A former DJ at the Twisted Wheel, more recently Eagle had been the booking agent at the Liverpool Stadium, a boxing arena that played host to the likes of David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Mott The Hoople and Dr Feelgood. With the Stadium due for demolition, the pair pondered their next move. “I asked Roger what he was going to do,” remembers Testi, “He said, ‘Well, I’d quite like to open a club again.’ So we decided to start one together.” o Testi and Eagle, the choices of prospective venues in Liverpool were hardly auspicious. “The whole club scene in Liverpool had moved towards disco and they all had feminine, Disney-esque names, like Tiffany’s or Becca’s,” Testi says. Eventually, he and Eagle began putting bands on at Gatsby’s on Mathew Street, which, until only recently, had been the site of a revamped Cavern. Critically, they also had access to its basement club – the Revolution. “Roger and I wanted a club with the most diverse music palette you could get, with a name that poked a finger in the eye of all those aspirational female ones.” Testi duly christened it Eric’s. Deaf School, appropriately, were the first band to play there, in August 1976. But the club’s official opening took place six weeks later, on october 1, with The Stranglers as headliners. “It was pure curiosity that drove me to go to Eric’s,” recalls Wylie, who attended the october 1 opening. “Going down the steps was dismal. Then the music started coming through. Roger Eagle played The Doors and the Velvets, who I loved, Muddy Waters, which was new to me, and lots of reggae. And we’d never seen a band like The Stranglers before. It was the first time any of us had gone to a place full of outsiders. It was the most decisive weekend of my life.”
With local entrepreneur Pete Fulwell on board as third owner, Eric’s quickly became a magnet for young punks and nonconformists. Eagle began pushing local bands as support acts. He also organised Saturday matinee gigs, wherein fledgling groups could use a PA that Deaf School had left behind when they went to tour America.
Testi remembers a very young Ian Broudie taking to the stage, as well as Jayne Casey, Holly Johnson, Ian McCulloch and Will Sergeant. “Roger recognised that a bunch of us were more than just customers or fans,” Wylie says. “There was something creative going on. He created a scene around Jayne, me, McCulloch, Pete Burns, Paul Rutherford, Holly and Julian Cope. It wasn’t a druggy scene, either. It was all pure energy.”
“Eric’s smelled of ciggies, spirits and K-Y Jelly,” recalls Cope, who was then at teacher training college. “To begin with, everybody was caught up in getting their looks together, even those whose images were already great. Coming from Tamworth as a Daryl Hall lookalike, I had furthest to go. It was totally hierarchical in there. The younger and gayer you were, the higher your standing. Holly, Paul Rutherford, Pete Burns and [Burns’ girlfriend] Lynne Corlett were all 17 and daringly gorgeous to me. I was a posh Anglo-Saxon aged 19, so they at best tolerated me, whereas they actually slagged off Wylie and McCulloch. But I clung like a limpet to all of them.”
If Eric’s was the essential nightspot, the like-minded souls who gathered around Mathew Street in the late
’70s hung out at the Armadillo Tea Rooms, The Grapes pub and Probe Records by day. The latter, run by Geoff Davies and just around the corner on Button Street, shared a particular synergy with Eric’s. Probe’s staff, at one time or another, included Wylie, Cope, Rutherford and Burns. “We used to try to avoid getting served by Pete Burns,” laughs Sergeant. “He’d throw things at you: ‘What are you buying that shit for?’” The idiosyncratic character of the place – and its staff – was obvious. Perhaps inevitably, the records sold in Probe provided a physical version of the music heard at Eric’s, where its clientele could see visiting new acts in intimate surroundings – Buzzcocks, The Clash, Joy Division, Ramones, The Slits, Wire, XTC, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads and more. Eagle’s highly eclectic jukebox carried singles by Link Wray and Captain Beefheart to LaVern Baker and Joe Gibbs. “Roger was importing loads of Jamaican records,” Testi explains, “ramming this deep, dark reggae into the unsuspecting minds of the punk fraternity that was starting to adopt us.” Eagle was by then pushing 40, and thanks in no small part to his schoolmasterly demeanour, represented something of a father figure to the regulars at Eric’s. “Roger was educating us all the time,” confirms Wylie. Cope, who’d been switched on to reggae by schoolfriend Selwyn Brown – who later formed Steel Pulse – remembers: “At Eric’s, Roger Eagle was properly impressed by the reggae I knew, and we bonded even more when he played all 20 minutes of Can’s ‘You Doo Right’! Fuck yeah! When I bounded up to praise his choice, Roger had Geoff Davies open Probe Records up at midnight and gave me a guided tour of all the most essential soul, kraut and reggae pre-releases. My status increased dramatically.”
“Deaf School were like our Bowie and Roxy Music” WILL SERGEANT
IF Deaf School were at the frontline of Liverpool’s musical resurgence, Big In Japan represented a further step towards something new and avowedly un-Beatles. They were the most outlandish and experimental art-punk band to emerge from Liverpool in 1977. It wasn’t uncommon for Jayne Casey, the band’s formidable, shavenheaded frontwoman, to sing while wearing a customised lampshade. Their ranks included bassist Holly Johnson, with severely cropped hair and bondage trousers, and former art student and Eric’s handyman Bill Drummond, who often performed in a kilt.
The band’s rolling cast of members also included Ian Broudie, drummer Peter Clarke (aka Budgie), David Balfe and Clive Langer. “They were outrageous,” Langer remembers. “Jayne always had pipe cleaners in her hair and black lipstick.” Adds guitarist Mick Finkler, an Eric’s mainstay who went on to co-found The Teardrop Explodes: “Big In Japan were kind of the elite. I was terrified of Jayne. She was scary, out-there. They were really the first ones.”
Pete Wylie’s great epiphany, meanwhile, arrived in May ’77 – when The Clash played the city. “I’d never seen Eric’s so full,” he recalls. “Someone was standing in front of me, doing this terrible, cantilevered rocking dance, backwards and forwards. He was getting on my nerves, so I tapped him on the shoulder and went, ‘If you don’t stop doing that, I’ll fucking knock you out!’ It was Julian. He said something along the lines of, ‘Don’t do that. Why don’t we form a band instead?’”
According to Cope, however, he merely fixed Wylie with a blank stare, before spinning back round to face the stage. Whatever the details, the two of them got talking later that night, at which point Wylie introduced Cope to McCulloch, out celebrating his 18th birthday.
“Me, Julian and Mac started the idea of the Crucial Three there and then,” Wylie says. “I called it the Crucial Three simply because there were four of us – the other one being Steve Spence, my best mate from school.”
Cope insists that the Crucial Three more or less fizzled after a sloppy afternoon’s rehearsal in Wylie’s living room: “I had no dreams at all of being a lead singer, I just wanted a brilliant band. Ian wouldn’t sing, and Pete insisted on jamming Johnny Thunders-type riffs. I sat on an amp and learned Wylie’s bass riff for their only real song, ‘The Salomine Shuffle’. It was terrible. Another one, ‘I’m Bloody Sure You’re On Dope’, emerged from a recurring accusation that Mac’s mother was always levelling at her son’s sloth-like non-activity.”
For Wylie, “Julian wasn’t like us and I’d never met anyone who was middle class before. He was fascinating and charming, but he was trying
harder than us to be punk. He came in with an industrial punk slogan sprayed on his bass and me and Mac looked at each in an almost sitcom-type way: ‘He’s gotta go.’ And he went. We tried to carry on with another lad, but that didn’t work.” Cope and Wylie went on to form another short-lived outfit, The Nova Mob, with Budgie as drummer. And, along with Pete Burns, The Mystery Girls, who lasted for one gig only, in November ’77. “I’d first seen Pete, dressed head to foot in PVC, at a Pistols gig at Gatsby’s,” Wylie recalls. “With The Mystery Girls, he was amazing. I was wearing my mother’s clothes, red satin kecks and a toilet seat. Pete Fulwell later said that he’d never seen an audience move backwards before. It was the force of the three egos up front – me, Cope and Burns.” Another temporary concern of Cope’s was A Shallow Madness, formed in early 1978. It proved a trial run for The Teardrop Explodes, only with McCulloch as singer. As history has shown us, it didn’t pan out. “Julian was always the one who made things happen,” says Mick Finkler. “He always wanted to be the boss. Mac was this mixture of arrogance and shyness. He was very self-conscious, so the idea of being a frontman was weird. We were rehearsing and Mac wasn’t turning up. He says now he didn’t like what we were doing, but I think it was because it didn’t feel right in that setup, I think Mac needed to be with someone slightly quieter, like Will Sergeant.” Cope had no option but to ask McCulloch to leave. “George Harrison has commented that Macca forever treated him as an underling because he was in the year below at school. Similarly, Ian was 18 months younger than me. I was a confident blond six-footer who’d lost his virginity at 15 and was living in my own flat with a woman nearly three years older. Even in the street, Ian always had a wonderful vocal delivery but was a charmingly gozzy living-with-mam virgin until he was 19, and clearly – to grow at his own pace – needed to get away from my hectoring and Pere Ubu obsessions.” McCulloch eventually found the ideal foil in Sergeant. Along with bassist Les Pattinson, Echo & The Bunnymen were born in October 1978. Their first gig took place a
“Ian needed to get away from my Pere Ubu obsessions” JULIAN COPE
month later, at Eric’s. “We’d never heard Mac sing until that night,” explains Sergeant, “then he came out with all this strange imagery about primates and evolution
[“Monkeys”]. It was like, ‘Wow, this is special’. Jayne Casey came bouncing over afterwards and went, ‘That was amazing!’ To get acceptance from one of the Eric’s hierarchy was a really big deal.”
Headlining that night, and also playing their first proper gig, were Cope’s latest band, The Teardrop Explodes. “In true outsider terms, the Bunnymen were Liverpool’s Ramones, formed by two innocents who’d just been dumped by their former musical partners,” recalls Cope. “When Paul Simpson quit Industrial Domestic [ for the Teardrops], he left Will Sergeant with nothing to do. In their abandonment, Will and Ian formed the Bunnymen as a duo. The addition of the sweet, placid and Adonis-like Les Pattinson gave us something to stare at during Bunnymen shows, lending Ian breathing space to cast off all the subsub-Bowie jibes. When he emerged triumphant as himself I was shocked, jealous and defensive.”
Three months later, Wylie formed Wah! Heat. Each band began to accelerate at its own speed, fuelled by a healthy competitiveness. Within weeks of one another, in early 1979, both the Teardrops and the Bunnymen had issued debut singles on Zoo, a local label set up by Drummond and Balfe. “I have a memory of standing outside Eric’s one night with Roger and Pete,” recalls Testi. “Pete turned to us and said: ‘You do know we’re writing history here, don’t you?’ And it was absolutely true. It was clear that something was going to happen.”
AS if to symbolise the end of this particular era, Eric’s was shut down by the police in March 1980. The authorities had initially refused to renew its drinks licence, then decided to follow up with a bogus drugs raid. The Psychedelic Furs and Wah! Heat were the final acts. “I loved the fact that I went on the first night as a fan and then as the last Liverpool band to ever play there,” Wylie reflects, with some pride. By that time, however, the Liverpool scene had begun to outgrow its surroundings, just as The Beatles had when they moved to London 17 years earlier.
“We had developed an attitude of how to break that Beatles cycle to make our own reputation,” states Wylie.
He uses The La’s to illustrate the kind of band that was able to flourish in the wake of the scene that he helped nurture, but he’s inadvertently selling his legacy short. The artists who emerged from Mathew Street in the late ’70s were far more radical in outlook. “We were all feeding off each other,” offers Will Sergeant, “but no-one sounded like anyone else.”
“It simply wasn’t enough to pick up a guitar,” concludes Wylie. “Roger Eagle had given us an agenda for making a new generation of Liverpool bands. The city is famous for being in love with itself and taking pride in not being like the others. It was about finding a different take on how to make a bigger world, a bigger story. I’m excited to have been a part of such a thing. They were glorious times.” Revolutionary Spirit: The Sound Of Liverpool 1976–1988 is available now from Cherry Red