Woof 45 - It’s not the leaving of Liverpool
I was somewhat puzzled by the mighty Toad’s decrying* of the Liverpool scene in a recent post about Elle S’Apelle:
“For some reason, the Liverpool scene seems to me to be utterly moribund at the moment. No matter how feted a band from those parts seems to be I can never develop much more than a sort of positive indifference. The same sort of positive indifference that the world feels towards Coldplay, which leads to the fuckers being all over national radio. The Coral threatened to break that mould, before turning into the new Gomez, and for all the excitement about The Wombats I just can’t seem to get all that worked up about them. If there are better things happening in and around the Mersey I’d love to know about them, because surely it can’t be as bad as it seems.”
Puzzled and perhaps a little piqued. Not because I consider myself a Scouser. I don’t. My parents were both born there but my Dad was in the RAF and I was born in West Germany. I spent a lot of my childhood in Liverpool when we came back and I support Liverpool FC, but I’ve lived all over the country and have settled in Stockport.
So I think of myself as something of a gypsy, without a home town and subscribe to the premise that ‘it’s not where you’re from it’s where you’re at’.
BUT...if my heart lies anywhere it is Liverpool because of my Mum and Dad, because all four grandparents are buried in Allerton cemetery, because supporting a football team gets under your skin and because I worked in Liverpool in the summer of 1981 and that laid the foundations of my musical taste.
There was a very pivotal day when I bought a copy of The
End, the seminal music/football fanzine and ‘Totales Turns Live’ by The Fall. (Yes, I know, a band from Manchester - not ironic but a faintly interesting juxtaposition of detail).
Soooo, I was going to make this a huge rebuttal of Toad’s comment that the Liverpool scene is moribund BUT (2)..during my fact-checking session I came across two posts that sum it all up very nicely:
Check em out for info for all the great bands currently on the Liverpool scene, including:
goFASTER>>, Puzzle, Voo, Sparkwood & 21, Married to the Sea, and Bexy Sitch & The Creepy Crawlies among others.
Here are two tracks from Liverpool bands not mentioned in the above blogs:
It’s also a good time to point that the best band in the world Hot Club de Paris (from Liverpool as it goes) have decided on the name for their new album, it’s to be called ‘Live at Dead Lake’ but there are no release dates announced yet. Which only adds to my excitement.
Phew...arf.
* = don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing agin the Toadster, his is still, by some distance the best music blog out there.
la
Wednesday, 13 February 2008
