Musical adventures

It takes a worried man, to sing a worried song,
It takes a worried man, to sing a worried song.
It takes a worried man, to sing a worried song.
I’m singing now, but I won’t be singing long.

Josh White’s album,( we called them LPs) Empty Bed Blues occupied wet Sunday afternoons as I tried to figure out the chords and growled along on a black, second hand guitar. The chords were as easy as the words, but I never quite managed to synchronize the strumming with the halting, tortured howl. Never mind, it was a step up from ‘Little Brown jug’ on the mandolin.

I was into the blues and even tried to like Jazz, borrowing some Thelonious Monk from Dave Galashan: 'Brilliant Corners' and 'Monk’s Dream,' as I remember. I didn’t enjoy them very much but pretended otherwise. Credibility was more important than truth – important in teaching and politics and for the terminally insecure.



Reasons to be insecure. No 1. (Sounds like an Ian Dury record)
The only autograph I ever acquired or even queued up for during the height of the Liverpool explosion was that of the Applejacks, and they came from Birmingham. If you Google them now they compete with a well known brand of cereal. Even then I knew to keep quiet about it, and talked instead about Thelonious Monk.







Then came John Mayall, the British Blues Boom, and the National Jazz and Blues Festivals at Reading. Credibility restored, though not without some hiccups. The first time, we trudged through grey drizzle onto a grey field about ten o’clock at night. We put up our very small children’s tent and settled into the dampness. Early the following morning we heard the puzzled drawls of those cooler than us.

‘Where did that come from?’

‘What is it?’

‘I think it’s a tent’.

We waited until the voices had gone and cautiously peeked out. Our white children’s tent was lost in a sea of pavilions, like a dinghy bobbing amongst the Spanish Armada.

At one of these festivals, a friend got us entrance to a great Jacobean house that had been commandeered by some very wealthy hippies. We were guided from room to room by someone half stoned who spoke in reverential tones.

‘This is the beer room’ and the door opened to reveal a bunch of Anglo-Saxon look-alikes solemnly quaffing beer.

‘And this is the cannabis room.’ Here the curtains were closed and little could be seem through the thick aromatic haze.

We went from room to room; I vaguely remember an 'acid room,' vaguely hoped there might be a sex room.

Finally we came to a door at the end of a long paneled corridor.
‘And this is the quiet room…for those who just want to be quiet.’ There was nobody in it, but I was impressed by those responsible who seemed to have thought of everything. The rich are different to us, even when stoned.

Minster Minerals and the Little Red Book

My very first job was a paper round which paid me 7 /- 6d a week. Following a gentle hint from my dad I gave it to my mum for housekeeping in continuance of a long working class tradition. Both were pleased by the gesture, but mercifully it was returned.

After that, especially during my student years the part time job became paramount. I’ve worked delivering bread for ‘Mothers Pride’ bakeries and still remember the warm and sweet yeasty smell of the ovens and the diesel fumes of the vans, their engines running on dark winter mornings. I’ve queued for summer jobs at the Corona lemonade factory someway down Hall lane but the queues were always too long and I always got there too late.

The job which paid most money and which nearly destroyed my mind was the night shift in a bottling factory. Minster Minerals. I was put in charge of the capping machine which stood below a very large clock. The shift was 10 pm to 6 am, and my job was to refill the capping container when ever it ran low. This basically involved standing there, gazing from clock to capping machine and back again. The conveyer clinked and a thousand bottles passed; the caps in the transparent capper jiggled and slowly subsided like sand in an hour glass…The second hand ticked…You are feeling sleepy…sleepy…. It was crash course in self hypnosis – only when that happened the capping machine ran empty and hundreds of un-capped bottles passed on a conveyor belt that couldn’t be stopped.

The foreman screamed and you ran backwards and forwards in panic, taking off the uncapped bottles and re-filling the capping machine as fast as you could. Then back to the tick of the clock and a brain slowly dying.

There was one other person there with a worse job. Quality control. He had to sit by the side of the conveyor belt, scrutinizing each bottle as it passed, watching out for foreign bodies or a level of liquid that was more or less than it should be. He went quietly mad, putting in foreign bodies to give his job meaning. Cockroaches, wood-lice, some he even pissed in.

At last the foreman took pity on me. He put me in charge of a small forklift truck but this promotion ended when I ran over my own foot… Or was it me? Maybe Stephen King had once worked in Minster Minerals and shortly afterwards wrote Christine.
But the money was good, for those days, and I met interesting people. I met Tim, a casual teacher who worked when he needed money and spent the rest of the time wine-making and brewing beer, which he stored beneath the stairs. I met a Chinese student called Andy who was enamored of Mao tse Tung, and who handed round these little red books.

It was the height of the Cultural Revolution and about that time a Chinese Ship had berthed in Liverpool docks. It caused a great stir amongst the Dockers. The ship was festooned with banners and flags, its crew on all decks, singing and waving their books like handkerchiefs. The great proletarian revolution had arrived, much to the surprise of the Liverpool docker. ‘Daft twats’ said with amusement, seemed the prevailing view.

Not really Liverpool's style.




Shortly afterwards the little red book began to circulate, discarded by contemptuous Dockers. I have one still as a curiosity. I probably also have a file in British security by virtue of this Chinese student whose name I can't quite believe was Andy. He told me you could get white leather bound copies of the works of Chairman Mao by writing to the Chinese embassy. I looked at the capping machine.

“I’m not spending my money on that!”

“No, they give them away if you’re poor.”

Hmm… A Homer Simpson moment.

The Keyton acquisitive gene took over. And I duly wrote my begging letter stressing my poverty and my undying admiration for the Great Helmsman. They didn’t seem that impressed, sending me another copy of the little red book. No doubt they learnt about my well paid job in Minster Minerals.

Post script
All jobs have their drawbacks. My friend Geoff Fimister had a job cleaning out the sugar tunnels in Tate and Lyles. When he emerged after a shift his hair was four times bigger framing his face in Afro-Candy-floss. Still, better than teaching.

Wet Legs

There was rarely, if ever any crowd trouble at Liverpool or Everton matches, for one simple reason. The police turned a blind eye to the law. In those days licensing hours dictated that pubs shut at three pm in the afternoon and not open again until 5.30. The problem was Saturday football usually ended somewhere in between – so the pubs stayed quietly opened, siphoning off the huge crowds enroute to Lime street station. A law was broken but everyone benefited. Then, it may have been the 1980’s, a new and zealous Chief Constable enforced the law. The pubs were forced to stay shut. Thousands and thousands of thirsty people walked en masse the three or so miles to the rail station, and crowd trouble began. You need to know when to turn a blind eye – in the classroom, marriage, dealing with children – or in this case thirsty adults. When it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

With relaxed licensing laws, the ‘lockup’ has lost most of its magic. When I played with an Irish band in Newport, we regularly played at O Reilly’s on a Sunday lunch hour. The pub ‘closed’ at three pm, and the regulars including us stayed on drinking behind locked doors. The Liverpool ‘Lockup was much the same.

I went for a drink with my cousin, Michael McDonald, somewhere in Kirkdale I think. We didn’t get there until Ten pm, which worried me because pubs shut at Ten Thirty. I was introduced to Mike’s thirteen or so friends – then somebody bought a round – 14 pints. Bloody hell, I thought, we’re going to have to drink fast. Ten twenty somebody else in the group bought a reciprocal round…and then the ‘lockup’ began. I was choking down my fourteenth pint sometime around 1.30 in the morning. I had to go to the toilet.

Walls bounced as I clung for purchase, and an immense cloud of steam filled the latrine as I released the contents of an overstrained bladder. Four of Mike’s friends joined me, two on each side. We peed in companionable silence. Then someone asked me where I came from.

‘Liverpool,’ I said, puzzled.

“Yer wha? They turned, still pissing. “What’s happened to yer accent?” They spoke like concerned doctors confronted with pneumonia in Belize.

I had no answer. Just a pair of very wet legs.

The Milky Bar Kid

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     John Lennon's sacrifice: The Philharmonic pub.

The entrance to the Phil

  Doing it in style Mosaics on the floor. More mosaics

And if you get tired of mosaics No not one of King Ludwig's Bavarian castles. The Vines Public House nr. Lime street station. 

 It’s impossible to dissect the magic of the Liverpool pub. I have drunk everywhere from the Cascades to New Orleans, London, Malta, Newcastle, Glasgow and some of the finest pubs in Wales, even New York. But nothing beats the Liverpool pub. I went back recently after a decade or two of absence. We hit the Globe, opposite Liverpool Central Station. It was the Sunday Liverpool had just lost 1.0 to Manchester, which is a bit like saying God had just lost to the Devil. The pub was crammed with flesh, elbows sticking out of windows, bellies rammed against the bar. When someone moved, there was a domino ripple across what was a very small room; a perpetual phenomenon as people made their way to and from the bar, sometimes risking the toilet – everything made well with immense and cheerful courtesy. Chaos and the Butterfly effect, only with beer. Half the Liverpool Kop were there, or it sounded like, people singing, the rest bellowing to make themselves heard. My son asked my how they celebrated when they won. What can I say? It was a blast-back to the past. Within ten minutes a young girl with long black hair, otherwise dressed in red was talking to us having spotted we were strangers there.

 My first experience of a pub was a solitary pint of Double Diamond in the Black Bull, having told my mum I was off to Sunday Mass. It got better. When I and Mike Adams were at Colquitt St. we drank in the Royal Albert in, I think, Seel St. the tables were of dimpled copper and Percy Sledge was for ever on the Juke Box singing 'When a man loves a woman.' 

 When I became a ‘student’ I moved on to the most magical pub in Liverpool. The Philharmonic. It was like walking into a masterpiece and becoming part of it. Even the toilets were special. Pissing was an event John Lennon lamented the fact that he was never able to drink there again after he’d become famous. I lament the fact that it is now too far away for me to slip in there for pint. The beer was good, so was the talk, the company, but it was everything else, the mosaics and the stained glass windows, the plasterwork, the paneling in the different snugs. The only thing wrong with it was the Cocktail bar. Beautiful, but they would insist on serving you in half pint glasses. Further down the road was O’Connor’s Tavern. It reeked of Restoration England, only seedier, and was presided over by a short, cynical bald-headed man who sometimes smiled when he thought of the money pouring over his bar. 

 Once, jaded by the opulence and fired by working class zeal, I persuaded Geoff Fimister and others in our group to go to a real working class pub. ‘Where?’ they asked, tolerant, amused, but not yet convinced. ‘The Slaughter House, somewhere off Dale St.’ I said. ‘I hear it’s really good.’ ‘It’d have to be good with a name like that,’ said Geoff. So we went. It was obvious something was wrong as soon as the door slammed behind us. Too late to escape. A room full of skin-heads, their heads swiveling, focusing on us, on our long hair, and me with my gold rimmed John Lennon glasses. Someone grabbed me by the collar and accused me of looking at him; someone else called me the Milky Bar Kid. It could have been worse. I think we stayed for a pint, out of pride and then made our escape. Once again my judgment had been brought into question. So I guess not everything in Liverpool is good. Just most of it.

Buses are for talking on

The beautiful Atlantean bus
The old pierhead bus terminus
The magical Ribble bus
Regimented penguins walked on these ferries. We would hang from that chrome rail shooting at outlaws.

The Liverpool bus was a wondrous thing. It came in red or green. So simple. The red buses were run by Ribble and came from faraway places such as Blackpool, Ormskirk, Much Hoole, Little Hoole or Preston. I loved the colour, especially on misty days, but the people on them spoke different, and looked different. The men wore tweed and the women wore strange hats, which to a small boy was off-putting.

The Corporation buses on the other hand were green and the people on them spoke like I did, which was all to the good. These Atlantean buses are still remembered with fondness – especially by my brother in law in Australia; but I preferred their precursor. These were also green. You don’t mess about with colour.

The driver was encased in the front and the entrance/exit was at the back of the bus and guarded by a conductor, who stood there all day, when he was not going up and down the bus collecting fares or talking to old ladies.

The beauty of the entry point was that it had no doors. Just a single chrome pole and you could leap on the bus as it was taking off and hang on with your head sticking out into the traffic. What fun we had.

The real beauty of the Liverpool bus was the people on them, talking to their friends, talking to strangers, talking to themselves, talking. I warned Bernadette the very first time she went on a Liverpool bus. Don’t make eye contact unless you want to tell a stranger your life story. She thought I was mad until she was halfway through giving an account of her schooldays to curious old man.

On more than one occasion I’ve heard how a student or stranger to the city, looking for an unfamiliar address has asked the conductor or driver for the nearest bus stop to it, and have found themselves driven to the very front door, the bus and its passengers having gone on a magical mystery tour to get there. It helped if you were young, female, and attractive.

And finally you reached the Pier Head, a place once exciting and vibrant but which is now little more than an antiseptic theme park. Then the buses piled up in their bays right on the water front, like gigantic green pigeons jostling for space.
If you were early, you’d see the Wallesey ferry come in and be treated to another sight, now sadly gone: a ferry its three decks crammed with office workers in pinstripes, some in bowler hats, all carrying umbrellas, earnestly perambulating in a clockwise direction, and stopping only when the ship hit the landing stage with a judder. Seagulls, giant green pigeons and regimental penguins, Liverpool had them all.

“I’ve lost me ticket. I’ve lost it. I’ve lost me ticket!” the boy, about sixteen years old and wearing a pale green jacket, jumped up from his seat, brushing down his bottom, his face torn in anguish. “I hope I haven’t sat on it – It'll have swallowed up.” It was the first time I’d ever seen or heard somebody overtly gay and gloriously funny. I’d heard about it but only in whispers.

In the early sixties if you wore deodorant you were ‘gay’. Somebody in theatre once came to St. Bonaventures. He wanted ‘volunteers’ for a production of Carmen he was putting on in the Philharmonic Hall. We were dragooned into it and did our stuff as soldiers on the stage in the school hall. Rehearsals didn’t go well. The man wore deodorant and talcum and we cringed when he touched us. I never made my debut on the stage, at least not then.

Whispers: the pub in Liverpool where the Beatles’ ‘Sexy Sadie’ worked; we’d heard about him before ever the song was written. Whispers: lesbians – never heard of them until the word came out that Dusty Springfield was one, and that broke a small boy’s heart. Whispers: Mick Jagger was changing his sex.

There was an obnoxious and prurient undergrowth of homophobia feeding on the insecurities of adolescence and designed to entrench the status quo. It took courage then to accept what you were, courage, too for others to accept that they should. Homosexuals were never shown as attractive; films showed then as in some way ‘creepy’, and the whispers soon came out that Dusty bathed her face in onion juice to preserve her skin. I mean, tell me anything better designed than that to quash a boy’s desire!

And despite all the whispers I never saw it coming.

It took place of course on a Liverpool bus.

I was coming home from an evening drinking. A middle-aged man sat next to me and in the way of things we soon began talking. He worked on a farm, and I was the young Trotsky in full inflammatory mode and skin-full of beer. We talked of workers and peasants, and by the time we reached Walton Church his hand was on my knee. We talked of Krondstadt, the Permanent Revolution, and by Warbreck Moor his hand was on my thigh. I was oblivious, convinced he was hanging on my every word. He would have been hanging on something else pretty soon except for the fact that the next stop was mine. The following morning, in replay mode I winced at what I never saw then. But boys grow up and learn that deodorant is good and that gays are both funny and generous and wise.

In many cases.

Shelagh Williams

Last night I had a dream of Harry and Felicity Dowling. They were sitting on the pavement alongside a small bookstall, both dressed in brightly coloured clothes. Felicity was not the first great love of my life, but I went out with her briefly, largely because I felt it was about time I had a girl friend. It started badly. We agreed to meet outside the Cavern in Matthew Street, but she didn’t turn up. As she said later, she hadn’t thought I’d been particularly serious. The second time was more successful, but coming home on the bus, I noticed her face looked slightly yellow beneath the fluorescent lighting and I lost enthusiasm.

Harry Dowling was a working class Marxist who also enrolled at the Liverpool Institute for Further Education. Within a few months, he’d discovered the delights of romantic poetry, psychedelic shirts, and Felicity Corcoran. And shortly after that they married. I haven’t seen them since - except in that dream. Nor have I seen Shelagh Williams since then.

She taught me what it was to be in love. She could have sat under a ten-gig watt fluorescent strip, a face with the tonal quality of butter, and I would still have loved her. Fortunately she never put me to the test.

Shelagh had a lean, intelligent face with a wry smile and dark shoulder length hair. Her mother was a teacher, her father head librarian in Bootle Library and I realized I was scaling dizzy heights. Even her name, Shelagh, was spelt different to the Sheilas I had known.

Our first date would have to be special. She was educated, more cultured than I, intensely bohemian. I settled on Ballet - The Nutcracker suite, and read a book on what it was about. To my relief she settled on the pub.

It’s hard to recapture now the excitement in first holding her hand. I tingled in ways I’d never tingled before, but we’ve all been there, so enough about emotion and strange sensations. I just enjoyed being with her, even when she cut her hair short and took to wearing a grey pinstripe suit. My last abiding memory of Shelagh was at a party. She wore a black dress. Sergeant Pepper was playing, and we got gloriously drunk.

We split up when I was at University and I was heartbroken. I hope my own children never experience this, though the odds are they will…and then get over it.

Jesse James and King Zog of Albania

The Liverpool Institute of Further Education was a pale blue Victorian building on Duke Street almost opposite the Anglican Cathedral. The building itself seems to have gone, which is a shame because a large part of myself has gone with it. The Anglican Cathedral remains, which is something.

The Institute was an exam factory for anarchists and free spirits. Mrs Clough was one of them, a sixty year old student who’d just given up smoking because she wanted to live longer. Then there were Balbur and Daljeet Kanijar, two Indian brothers who were hopelessly in love with Lily, a diminutive pre Raphaelite blonde. It was a place where the unexpected happened, and sometimes sex. Toni was her name, an intense nervy looking girl in a blue corduroy dress. She had an interesting way of breaking the ice, unbuttoning the front of her dress and taking out a breast. ‘You can feel it if you want.’ Then there were those who were less sexy.

Mark Serralier was less sexy, a porky looking boy with black hair and a high pitched lisp. He claimed to be descended from Jessie James and King Zog of Albania. Worse, he believed it, which made him irresistible. My abiding memory of Mark is of him sidling up to us in Liverpool Central Library. The main reading room is a huge acoustic reservoir, a vast book-lined dome where a dropped pencil reverberated like a World War I cannon.

“Have you seen my new umbrella?” he whispered.
A thousand faces looked up.
We shook our heads, but said nothing.
“It opens out with a touch of a button.” (We’d never heard of such a thing!)
The devil spoke to me then. “Show us,” I said.
He looked round as one who hoped he wouldn’t be seen, then pressed down his thumb.
Metallic spokes exploded. It was like the crack of a hundred bull-hide whips, and he stood there, in the middle of the reading room beneath an open umbrella, waiting for rain or for the ground to swallow him up.

The place was an exam factory, the teachers cynical and dedicated at a time when you could be both. Notes were dictated, a two-year course compressed into one and we valued the teachers who spoke clearly, gave good notes and told it as it was. We’re not here to educate you lot; just learn the damn notes. As a teaching method, it can’t be faulted, except by progressives who find beauty in complexity.
The Institute was also a place of laughter and excitement. One window opened out onto sky and the gothic grandeur of a great cathedral. Below us was the hum of a Liverpool in ferment, and just a little down the hill was small seedy café where you learnt to make tea last an hour.

I learnt’ Sixteenth and Seventeenth century history from Mr. Radcliffe. He may be dead now, but then he resembled a prince of the church, a Cardinal Wolsey in a grey suit. He was fleshy, sardonic, good humored and cynical. Later I learnt English Economic History 1750 to 1920 from Bob Waring a man with the face of a battered cherub. He later became a Labour MP and grew less cherubic, though no doubt rich. For English I had Ms Fahey, a Catholic with a merry smile and a very sharp tongue.

Finally there was a tall thin man in a grey pinstripe suit. He was bald, and I think his name was Basil. He made the workings of the British Constitution even more mysterious, his notes a patchwork of random thoughts, biographical asides and finely tuned boredom. His real passion was Moral Rearmament a Christian cult that spearheaded the importance of the individual. I would have settled for decent notes.
He was more interested in making converts, focusing on those lads he thought had ‘leadership’ qualities. So I was spared. Tony McMullen however was not and went to his Hope St. Flat on a number of occasions to meet Mrs Basil (I wish I could remember his damn surname) for pamphlets and tea.

Portals have become cliché in speculative fiction, and we struggle to find new names to refresh a useful device. The Liverpool Institute of Further Education was no Star-gate but it was a magical portal - and thoroughly human. It whirled me from the kitchen to University and introduced me to the first great love of my life.