Going down to Liverpool

A return to the city sets off waves of nostalgia for a place that generated some of my sharpest musical memories.

Nearly 30 years ago I arrived in Liverpool armed with my music collection, the guitar that currently sits behind my desk and a ticket to see Bob Mould’s band Sugar.

Before coming to the city for university I’d started seeing some of the indie bands that appeared in the NME when they came to Reading, the nearest town with actual venues. My musical tastes overlapped plenty with those of my friends, so we’d see the likes of Carter USM, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin and Thousand Yard Stare, bands I liked then but will only idly and briefly listen to now.

Very occasional we’d head further afield, up to London once to see Verve at the long-gone Astoria or down to Brighton for the Daytripper double bill of Ride and The Charlatans, all bands that have held my attention far longer.

But there never seemed a question of seeing alternative rock bands like Sugar. That point’s best explained by my first trip to the Reading Festival in 1992. I certainly wasn’t unhappy to see Ride, nearly see Suede, buy a t-shirt for the Smashing Pumpkins to sign (though we’d actually been queuing for Suede and missed out on that too). There were also youthful performances by Therapy? and Buffalo Tom. It’s just that we could only afford to go for one day and, in hindsight, maybe we should have chosen the Sunday that would host what would prove to be Nirvana’s last UK gig.

So, once I knew my university destination would be Liverpool I bought a ticket for Sugar’s FU:EL tour. Never mind that the gig was actually in Manchester (or that I had no idea how to get there). Fortuitously, Freshers Week introduced me to the (terribly 90s) Indie Society, who turned out to have a coach going to the gig. It’s still the loudest show I’ve ever been to. Most of the time I couldn’t tell which song was being played until the vocals began, all subtlety lost in the trio’s bludgeoning noise. Taking up a place just one row from the crowd barriers, at one point I turned to look around and realised the mosh pit’s roiling sway of activity was behind me.

The spark for these recollections, and the reason for the delay to this week’s newsletter, was a brief work trip up to Liverpool – and never have I looked forward to work travel so much. There’s a certain type of nostalgia that hits me as the train crosses the River Mersey at the Runcorn bridge (see main picture above), its geometric inner structure giving zoetrope animation to the industrial towers in the distance.

Arriving in 1994 I fell in love with the city and its friendly people, buoyed up by moving 200 miles away from my hometown. I even stayed for a year and a half after university trying to form bands and find work. At the time I thought there were no ‘proper’ jobs there – though, in retrospect, maybe not knowing what I wanted to do held me back a little, and possibly not being great at a lot of practical adult stuff could have been an issue.

Nevertheless, I did get some work. A December stint at the Ernest Jones jewellers in the city centre (where they had just the one cassette of Christmas tunes… playing on a loop the entire time) and then a full-time job at a big British Telecom call centre. At the latter I made friends with local lad Ian, and our lunchtime pub chats would invariably take in books, writing and Black Flag.

My periodic returns to Liverpool always revive memories, and not just because I think Carl Jung makes a good point (see above). It was after all the city in which I first saw the beautiful girl (who would become my wife) as she descended the stairs to Rosie O’Grady’s, but the Irish pub is now a generic O'Neill's, just one change to the city since I first saw it.

Its record shops have also seen many changes – though of course Liverpool’s no different to most towns and cities in that regard, particularly with the decimation of the national chains.

The basement-level shop on Bold Street where I bought a second hand vinyl copy of Unknown Pleasures is long gone, as is the shop further down that street whose name I've forgotten and where I picked up singles by Tanya Donelly’s band Belly.

Liverpool institution Probe Records is still around, though no longer on Slater Street, where I visited it in the 90s, intrigued by the artwork on their Black Flag singles. At that time its walls featured a long list of bands, among them Black Flag and Led Zeppelin if I recall correctly, that were not to be requested to be played ‘because you should already own them’.

But my focus then was on looking for Minor Threat and Fugazi singles and I was particularly excited to find a copy of the SST compilation The Blasting Concept - Volume II, bought solely on the basis that it had the unreleased Hüsker Dü track ‘Erase Today’. They also had a sun-damaged Metal Circus t-shirt in the window that I had to have, however long it had been on display.

Nowadays Probe seems to offer more psyche, Krautrock (though they term it kosmische) and reggae albums than punk - despite the Minor Threat, Dag Nasty and Circle Jerks t-shirts on the walls for sale (though no danger of the sun getting to them in their hole-in-the-wall grotto location).

This time I also made a point of revisiting the newer Dig Vinyl shop on Bold Street, which also features a kosmische section, as well as a small punk selection. I’d earmarked it for a return visit after going there on a pre-Covid family break to Liverpool and I wasn’t disappointed this time, buying cheap albums by Cornershop, Brave Captain (Boo Radley Martin Carr) and Mastodon. Added to the CD reissue of Big Black’s Atomizer and a Tangerine Dream boxset from Probe, plus a deluxe edition of The Cure’s The Head on the Door from HMV that I’d been looking for and it proved to be one of my more successful city record shop hunts.

As well as providing a wealth of record shops, 90s Liverpool also generated some of my sharpest live musical memories. Before university my friends and I would occasionally go to Reading’s chrome-lined monstrosity Washington Heights, the sort of provincial 90s club you’d go to because there seemed no alternative when you were 16. Obviously somewhat happy-go-lucky even then, I’d often hum ‘barren lands and barren minds’ to myself as we walked in. Clearly the joy of going to clubs in Liverpool that played music I actually liked cannot be overstated.

There was also top-tier Britpop from Suede, Pulp and the Boo Radley’s at the art deco Royal Court theatre, and more varied fare at the grungey Lomax from Stereolab (easily the second loudest gig I’ve been to) and Kim Deal's second post-Pixies band The Amps with Brainiac supporting. (My university band would also play The Lomax once but that, combined with a rejection letter from Radio One, would be our high watermark).

Bob Mould booked ended my time in Liverpool. The last Northern gig before heading down south would see me travel once again to Manchester, this time for his Last Dog and Pony Show tour with Mercury Rev supporting, though I caught the tour a second time in London with my girlfriend – who today still puts up with the wild differences in our musical tastes.

Writing this my head’s been filled with far more memories and reminiscences than I have time to share. I’ve also had at the back of my mind something Norman Brannon wrote recently on his excellent anti-matter Substack about access, and how it depends on what you can afford, who you know and, perhaps crucially, where you live. He was talking about hardcore but, considering it more widely, it wasn’t until I went down to Liverpool that I felt like I really had access on my terms.