#'sex-crazed Liverpudlian jerk'

[tavolgisvist]

Liverpool groups were like little gangs - a mentality that’s helpful when your audience is full of big gangs... <...> ‘Invasion of the Liverpoplians’ was a typical music paper headline of the day. Thank Your Lucky Stars, the big pop show of 1964, had a Mersey special with Cilia, the Beatles, the Searchers and Billy J. Kramer - so successful was the show that it was the British entry in that year’s international TV competition. A beat group was invented called the Wackers, who were in fact from Manchester. That may not sound like a scandal of Watergate proportions, but to those on the scene it was a sign of the desperation other towns were feeling. Polite young Merseyside men, up at the Oxbridge colleges, were suddenly talking Scouse for the first time in their lives. Liverpool, so often out of step with the national mood, was now its very model: cheeky and young, un-posh, un-stuffy, democratic to the boot-heels. <...> The strangest sight of all was Merseybeat’s impact on the world beyond Britain’s shores. Thanks to the impression it made, big doors were opened to British music. Before the Beatles there was no sense, internationally, that Britain was a natural home of pop, but suddenly you had Chuck Berry coming up with a title, ‘Liverpool Drive’, for an LP called St Louis to Liverpool. Chuck had, of course, been quite the demi-god to Liverpool groups, but it’s unclear whether he had even heard of the place twelve months earlier. Motown’s boss Berry Gordy was even quicker off the mark. The man whose label had been to Merseybeat what gasoline is to a flame, now arranged for Diana Ross and the Supremes to rush-record an album of Beatle covers called A Bit of Liverpool. American recognition of the Liverpool upsurge was occasionally bizarre. In 1967 The Monkees followed up their hits ‘I’m a Believer’ and ‘Last Train to Clarkesville’ with something called ‘Alternate Title (Randy Scouse Git)’. As Mickey Dolenz explained to Mojo: ‘We were over in England and the Beatles threw a party for us. There were limos outside and always screaming girls. I was just sitting in a hotel suite trying to document what was going on in a kind of poetic way. The title I got watching Till Death Us Do Part - I just heard it and said, “That’s a cool term, but what the hell does it mean?” And it was something like “sex-crazed Liverpudlian jerk”. RCA in England told me they’d pull it from the album unless I came up with an alternate title. So I said, “OK, ‘Alternate Title’ it is.” ’ Stranger still, the ‘randy Scouse git’ was actor Tony Booth, playing Alf Garnett’s idle son-in-law and target of his Cockney rage. Booth was the father of Cherie Booth, future wife of Tony Blair.

<...>

Britain took the ultimate American invention, re-arranged its ass and shipped it back. The British were not, on the face of it, the race that anyone would have tipped for this job. The English in particular were not a funky people. Their menfolk danced like Douglas Bader. It was a land where reserve was valued over exhibitionism, where enthusiasm was suspect and quiet irony the favoured means of subversion. English music was sometimes beautiful, often witty, but never sensual. Yet it seems all it needed was a push.

(Liverpool - Wondrous Place by Paul Du Noyer, 2002)

Part (I), (II), (III), (IV), (V), (VI), (VII), (VIII), (IX), (X), (XI), (XII), (XIII), (XIV)