Liverpool tide

Songs about the Merseyside city by Manic Street Preachers, The Bangles, PJ Harvey, Shane MacGowan and more.

From PJ Harvey to the Manic Street Preachers to The Bangles and beyond, Liverpool’s provided plenty of lyrical inspiration.

I’ve been thinking about such songs after recently going down to Liverpool to do nothing a work thing and being inspired by Penny Kiley’s post about Liverpool places in song.

But where Penny took a local approach of songs by Liverpool bands, I’ve been thinking about those who – like me – are outsiders to the city. So, here are nine songs that are somewhat about Liverpool by a range of performers, some more geographically distant from their subject than others.

The Bangles – Going Down to Liverpool

First up, The Bangles and ‘Going Down to Liverpool’, the second single from their 1984 major label debut All Over the Place. The LA pop rockers may be the furthest removed from Liverpool, but the song was written by Bristol brought up Kimberley Rew, whose group The Waves would become Katrina and the Waves (he also wrote ‘Walking on Sunshine’).

For their part The Bangles give the song a pleasing Paisley Underground feel, though they do better with their versions of Prince’s ‘Manic Monday’ and ‘A Hazy Shade of Winter’ by Simon & Garfunkel.

“I'm going down to Liverpool to do nothing / All the days of my life”

Manic Street Preachers – Liverpool Revisited

The Manics are often lyrically direct and ‘Liverpool Revisited’ is no exception, channelling some of the anthemic qualities of ‘Everything Must Go’. It’s a tribute to both Liverpool and the victims of the 1989 Hillsborough football disaster, highlighting their fight for justice.

“That campaign fought the entire British establishment to get to the truth, and they finally got there with their ruling,” singer and guitarist James Dean Bradfield told the NME. It appears on their 13th album Resistance is Futile, which came out in 2018.

“There is dignity and pride / There is poetry and life”

Billy Bragg – Never Buy the Sun

I don’t buy tabloid newspapers, being more of a tofu-wokerati, but living in Liverpool I seemed to absorb as if by osmosis the clear rule that you don’t buy The Sun. Like the Manics, Billy Bragg also had Hillsborough in mind, specifically The Sun’s disgraceful, mendacious writing about Liverpool fans on that day in 1989, on this plaintive direction.

“The politicians wring their hands and cry: "What's to be done?" / But the Scousers never buy the Sun”

Shane MacGowan – Leaving of Liverpool

Shane MacGowan and sea shanties is an obvious choice, but none the worse for it with a song taken from Son of Rogues Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanteys. The compilation also featured covers by Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Michael Stipe, Courtney Love, Nick Cave and others.

For his part Shane gave the album a backbeat-driven version of ‘Leaving of Liverpool’, a song his band The Pogues had recorded in a markedly different version, produced by Elvis Costello, as a b-side to their fourth single ‘Sally Maclennane’.

“It’s not the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me / But my darling, when I think of thee”

PJ Harvey – Liverpool Tide

A b-side to ‘The Devil’, the third single from Harvey’s 2007 album White Chalk, ‘Liverpool Tide’ was an unreleased track from 1998 that harked back to her more direct, bluesy Rid of Me era. Carried by just a guitar and her voice, ‘Liverpool Tide’ shifts from attack to lament and puts me in mind of her cover of Willie Dixon’s ‘Wang Dang Doodle’ blues (coincidentally Dixon played bass on part of Chuck Berry’s St. Louis to Liverpool – see below).

“This Liverpool tide comforts my eyes / Stings like salty tears I've cried”

The Limiñanas – Liverpool

Judging by the Kosmische sections in the local record shops, you’d guess the ‘cosmic Scouser’ scene - applied to sections of 00s indie and their spiritual forebears like the 90s Nuggets-influenced Stairs - is probably in rude health.

To that scene can be added visitors like The Limiñanas. The French band’s ‘Liverpool’ is a tale of traveling – electric guitar in hand – to the Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia, where they appeared in 2013. The song’s Motown motorik beat serves menacing spaghetti western guitars that play under a ‘sprechgesang’ vocal that sounds so much cooler in French than the numerous post-punks doing the speak-singing thing these days.

“J'avais à la main ma guitare électrique / je me rendais avec mes camarades au festival psychédélique de Liverpool”

Chuck Berry – Liverpool Drive

Released in May 1964, this up-tempo instrumental was the b-side to the far better known ‘No Particular Place To Go’. Both songs feature on Berry’s St. Louis to Liverpool album, which he and Chess Records crafted in response to his new appeal generated by the British Invasion.

Beyond seemingly having a whole Liverpool-themed album, there’s the very obvious Beatles connection, with the Fab Four covering Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ on their second album With the Beatles. His appeal spread far and wide at that time, with the Rolling Stones - whose first single in 1963 was a cover of Berry’s ‘Carol’ - also indebted.

Suzanne Vega – In Liverpool

Coming on like a proto-Portishead, Suzanne Vega’s ‘In Liverpool’ has a video shot in Princeton, New Jersey that’s meant to evoke Notre Dame in Paris. The lightbulb you can 2.29 minutes into the video – the one that goes out? That’s meant to represent the industrialism of Liverpool.

“In Liverpool on Sunday / No reason to even remember you now”

The Stone Roses – Mersey Paradise

To me this is a song about Liverpool, so it’s on the list. More analytical minds than mine might point to the Mersey starting life in Stockport, before skirting round Altrincham, where the Roses’ singer Ian Brown and guitarist John Squire went to school, long before ferries can cross it. Those same analytical minds might even go online to find discussions of ‘Mersey Paradise’s dark lyrics about a drowning.

But to me it’s still a song about Liverpool, whose chiming Beatlesy guitars refine the work put in on ‘Sally Cinnamon’.

“River pool’s where I belong”

Main image - of one of the Liver Birds atop the Liver Building by the River Mersey in Liverpool by Atanas Paskalev