Issue 53 / March 2015

Bido Lito! March 2015
13
POOL DREAM
, Dream and Pun ue, Mic
Street Brass Band, Deaf School and Yachts then took to an outdoor “It was all so postmodern it was untrue; it was Monty Python,
stage set up on the street. This was the first of three annual it was the League of Gentlemen,” remarks Chris Bernard. “Peter
Jung Festivals that brought the idiosyncratic shenanigans of the O’Halligan is the funniest fuck that’s ever walked the streets of
Liverpool School out onto Mathew Street. At the final festival in Liverpool when it comes to surreal, avant-garde comedy.” It was
1978, the Bridewell Studio’s Charlie Alexander jumped from a fifthfloor
loading bay into a giant can (painted skip) of Bird’s custard. in Liverpool and set up the Science Fiction Theatre, making
towards the end of the summer of ‘76 that Ken Campbell arrived
Chris
stage manager. They would go on to create “the most remarkable
play staged on Planet Earth”, but that’s another story for another
day.
Even though there was an incredible will to push art to
its limits, there still needed to be some money coming in and
a certain bank manager – now on the board at the Everyman –
proved key. “Everybody who was sensible enough banked at the
same NatWest at the time. You’d never on the whole planet find
a bank manager like Mike Carney, he’d back virtually anything,”
explains David Knopov, recollecting the time he paid off his
overdraft with a piece of artwork.
Now, Jung would have been the first to tell you that as all this
was happening, the idea had entered the collective unconscious,
so it is highly imaginable that similar creative pockets were
springing up across the world. However, you need only take a look
at the school alumni to see that there was something particularly
special about this place. From Bill Drummond to Ian Broudie, Holly
Johnson to Jayne Casey, everyone who frequented the warehouse
seems to have found some kind of divine inspiration and it wasn’t
just in the arts either: one resident, Andrew Chamberlain, went
on to become a renowned palaeontologist/archaeologist at
Sheffield University.
Even more profound however, was the influence the Liverpool
School had on the city. “There’s always a spin-off. Each one
spawns the next,” Urban Strawberry Lunch’s Ambrose Reynolds
explains. “I would have never dared to do the Bombed Out Church
thing, but when I saw O’Halligan saying ‘We wanna do this – if
the council don’t like it they can fuck off’, it sparked something
in my mind.”
Taken over by Martin Cooper (now head chef at Delifonseca),
O’Halligan’s parlour became the Armadillo Tea Rooms and took
on a new life. “The Armadillo, Probe and Eric’s were like the
Golden Triangle of Liverpool punk,” notes Bernie Connor, whose
early years were shaped by his time in Aunt Twacky’s. “At an age of
discovery it was just incredible; I learned more there in a fucking
afternoon than I did in five years at secondary school.”
Move forward to the early eighties and Kif Higgin’s Urban
Stress and Earthbeat carried the baton for the Liverpool School
but in a much more politicised way; healing many of the scars
of the Toxteth riots with music, community work and fervent
activism. Comparisons between the Liverpool School and
MelloMello would be more than superficial, too. When Ken
Campbell’s carpenter, Greg Scott Gurner, dreamed up the idea of
a multi-hub café, he was instructed to come to Liverpool by the
late great playwright. When MelloMello closed in 2014, it was only
a matter of months before a new creative space in Water Street
was revealed. And that’s the thing: no matter how hard it gets
squeezed, the Liverpool dream never relents. The city continues
to attract those with an insatiable desire to create something,
and the punk, DIY ethos born in O’Halligan’s warehouse still
permeates almost every corner of the city’s creative underbelly
today.
Go to bidlito.co.uk now to see a gallery of Larry Sidorczuk’s
photos from the Liverpool School Of Language, Music, Dream And
Pun.
bidolito.co.uk