The Pool of Life

“My town used to fill my head with wonder

Now it fills me with disgust…”

For my money, the most underappreciated Liverpool track is “My Town” on The Coldest Winter for a Hundred Years, by the Wild Swans. On the record’s 2011 release, the counter-commercial line “at Liverpool One, I start to gag” hit me like a hot slap, a delicious impiety amidst the post-2008 hubris. Back then, we were all meant to genuflect at the arrival of Debenhams and charmless elevated walkways between Zara and the Apple store, as if they constituted a third cathedral. Ever since, I’ve harboured a healthy suspicion of the phrase “good for the city”.

A declinist lament “My Town” may be, but it was also band leader Paul Simpson’s wry elegy for a neglected past. Unfortunately, most of the other references were lost on me at the time: “Deaf School gigs”, “Aunt Twacky’s Ogden’s cigarettes”, and — most mysteriously — “Ken Campbell’s School of Pun and Dream”.

If you also find these allusions obscure, never fear: film director Grant McPhee has a documentary for you. Pool of Life tells the story of Liverpool’s bohemian underground in the 1970s. Several books that touch upon this scene have emerged in recent years, suggesting a renewed interest: Revolutionary Spirit, by Simpson; Bunnyman, by Echo & the Bunnymen’s Will Sergeant; The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band that Burned a Million Pounds, by John Higgs; at least one chapter of Jeff Young’s Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay. But if you’ve seen McPhee’s Big Gold Dream, about Scotland’s post-punk scene, and its follow-up Teenage Superstars, you’ll know that a better cinematic curator of this material could scarcely be imagined. McPhee kindly shows me a “95% done” rough cut of Pool of Life, and it already lives up to his previous works — and then some.

“It started as a standalone documentary about Zoo Records,” McPhee tells me over the phone. (More on Zoo later.) “Then it grew into two films. Then I had the idea for six one-hour documentaries.” The current plan is that Pool of Life will be the first part of a trilogy, with its sequels covering the Liverpool Arts College scene and the city’s post-punk lineage, respectively. But the first deals with that same fertile milieu Simpson pays homage to in “My Town”, a primordial soup of protean creativity out of which he and others emerged. 

Symbolically, this era began in 1973 with the most heavy-handed allegory for city council philistinism that also literally happened: the world-famous Cavern Club on Mathew Street being filled in with concrete and turned into a parking lot. Such iconoclasm, worthy of a 16^th-century Calvinist mob, seems hard to believe now, but there wasn’t a Fab Four tourist industry then – no kitsch statues glowering down from the Hard Day’s Night Hotel like distant Olympian gods, freezing the city’s artistic horizons in permanent amber.  

“People just didn’t give a fuck about the Beatles”, Jeff Young, Ghost Town’s author, tells me. Young, who features prominently in McPhee’s documentary, remembers a “post-Beatles, pre-punk limbo” in the early 70s.

An exception was the band Deaf School, who came together in 1972 at the same Art College on Hope Street that John Lennon had attended. “Musically, they were really a sprawling collective who practised music, poetry and painting in a way that was characteristic of the local scene,” music journalist and Mojo magazine founder Paul Du Noyer, who literally wrote the book on Deaf School, tells me, mentioning Mersey poets Adrian Henri and Roger McGough as part of that transitional period. But Deaf School’s world “was the pubs around Hope Street, clubs in Upper Parliament and the house parties of Liverpool 8” — what Young in his book calls "Liverpool's Greenwich Village" — not the ramshackle Mathew Street.

Cometh the hour, cometh Peter O’Halligan — very much the hero of McPhee’s documentary, but largely unsung anywhere else. O’Halligan was a Bootle poet, artist and businessman inspired by Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist who in 1927 had had a dream about Liverpool, recounting it in his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections. In that “dirty, sooty city”, the sleeping Jung found “a broad square dimly illuminated by streetlights, into which many streets converged.”

Knowing full well that Jung had never visited Liverpool – at least, not physically – in 1974 O’Halligan set out to discover a “little island” that Jung described, which amidst the “rain, fog, smoke, and dimly lit darkness” nevertheless “blazed with sunlight”.

He found it on Mathew Street. A few doors down from the filled-in Cavern, O’Halligan acquired a disused fruit warehouse on the corner of Rainford Square and renamed it “The Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream & Pun”. Eventually, during a ceremony arranged by O’Halligan, a statue of Jung was installed into the wall outside, his gilded words emblazoned on a piece of stone taken from Jung's house in Switzerland: “Liverpool is the pool of life.”

If it opened tomorrow, the Liverpool School might be termed a “creative hub”, but to avoid associations with overly enthusiastic entrepreneurial divs, let’s call it an “arts lab” – a three-storey workshop where poets, writers, directors, set designers and musicians could hang out, nursing a cup of tea all afternoon if the Muses demanded. In McPhee’s documentary, archive footage shows future poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy sitting alone with a hot beverage. From the age of 16, she was in a relationship with Henri, 23 years her senior — and something of a one-man arts lab himself around this time — for about ten years.

The Liverpool School also became home to Aunt Twacky’s Bazaar, one of the first alternative markets outside of London — a prototype of Quiggins. Some of the characters who set up stalls at Aunt Twacky’s were not inconsiderable cultural forces both in the city and beyond: Jayne Casey, who would later form the bands Big in Japan and Pink Military; Paul Rutherford of Frankie Goes to Hollywood fame; and the irascible Pete Burns, now best known as founder and frontman of new wave chart toppers Dead or Alive.

The Jung quote is still there today, albeit underneath a different bust of the Swiss psychoanalyst. But the building is now Flanagan’s Apple, one of the few Mathew Street establishments not part of the perennial Beatlemania tourist heist. To find out more about its 70s past, I arrange to meet Jeff Young there. He describes himself as an observer, not a participant, of the Liverpool School scene — more at home in the Grapes pub opposite (“when it was still a good boozer”) than hanging around the tea rooms – but he knew many of the key figures, including O’Halligan himself.

Arriving a little early, I buy a pint and pay the best part of £7. (You can get a Liverpool Post subscription for that.) Although the staff are lovely, not much of the bohemian sensibility has endured.

“This is about where Aunt Twacky’s was,” Young points out, not far from where we sit. I try to imagine the second-hand clothes, health food stall, and vinyl-laden tables he describes. “Upstairs–” Young nods at the dark wooden beams above us, “was where Ken Campbell staged Illuminatus!”.

This was an anarchic nine-hour Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool production of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s trilogy of countercultural novels. O’Halligan had recruited Campbell during one of his many tours down south, visiting arts schools and theatres and telling artists of every medium to bring their dreamy wares to the Liverpool School. Campbell was an unconventional and volcanic theatre impresario, described in Young’s Ghost Town as looking like “a medieval peasant in a Brueghel painting, pop-eyed like Marty Feldman and wild-haired like Ken Dodd, a commedia vagrant alive as fireworks, Max Wall crossbred with Lear on the heath.” He in turn brought in Jim Broadbent, Bill Nighy, David Rappaport, and Prunella Gee, who in Pool of Life makes her entrance bollock naked. “And if you go downstairs,” Young says to me, “near to where the gents toilets are now, that was Bill Drummond’s workshop.”

Drummond was an equally mercurial — and irrepressibly contrarian – 23-year-old arts school drop-out, tall and handsome. (In McPhee’s film, flamboyant Letter to Brezhnev director Chris Barnard flirts outrageously with him.) After spending a day down by the docks with Campbell, he’d been appointed carpenter and set designer for Illuminatus! One day, with the production approaching, Drummond announced he was popping out for some glue and never returned. According to John Higgs’ book on the KLF, the band Drummond would later found, by then “Campbell had shown Drummond that the impossible was only impossible if you did not stand up and do it.”

With Jayne Casey, Holly Johnson, Budgie, and Ian Broudie, Drummond founded Big in Japan — a “reverse supergroup” in that Johnson, Budgie, Broudie, and Drummond would go on to have greater success with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Siouxsie & the Banshees, the Lightning Seeds, and the KLF, respectively —– but that DIY spirit is perhaps what unites many of the figures of this period. “I admired Bill Drummond a great deal”, writes Julian Cope, who would go on to form seminal post-punk band the Teardrop Explodes, in his memoir Head On. 

Young vividly remembers Casey, Rutherford and Burns in their still pre-punk but outrageous and provocative modes of dress, and O’Halligan in the odd naval uniform he would wear around town. He also tells me his play 23 Enigma was in many ways a homage to O’Halligan, who once served time in Walton nick for failing to pay business rates on the warehouse: putting the art in martyr. “But he was always shy about his own work,” Young says. “He wanted to create a scene for others.” With the Liverpool School, he achieved that “crucible of activity”, as Young calls it.

In 1976, Eric’s Club opened a few doors down, and Probe Records moved to Button Street round the corner. Casey, Rutherford and Burns would become regulars at Eric’s, with Johnson and Casey the venue’s “King and Queen” according to Will Sergeant’s Bunnyman. Burns, their “Witchfinder General”, worked at Probe, infamously offering, ahem, constructive criticism on customer’s vinyl selections. (A sample: “Put that back and get something decent.”) Record-enthusiast Julian Cope was another Probe employee, and his Teardrop Explodes co-founder Paul Simpson would spend lunch hours from his office job hanging around there. Meanwhile, Eric’s played host to the likes of the Sex Pistols and Joy Division. “The Clash had played a month before my first visit and the place was still buzzing”, Sergeant writes. 

With the Liverpool School, Eric’s and Probe formed a triangle of artistic potency. In ’78 this triangle became a square — the square Carl Jung had prophesied? — when Drummond founded Zoo Records with David Balfe a minute’s walk away on Whitechapel, above where Holland & Barrett is now. Zoo would record, produce, print and distribute albums by the Teardrop Explodes and Echo & the Bunnymen, with Drummond even acting as their manager. Seventeen-year-old American punkette and later Hole frontwoman Courtney Love would also fall into Teardrop, Echo and Drummond’s circle, dating both Cope and Bunnyman leader Ian McCulloch. “Before Liverpool, my life doesn’t count,” Love would later say.

“Crucially, most of the aspiring musicians at Eric’s seem to have loved [Deaf School], from the Bunnymen to Frankie Goes to Hollywood,” Paul Du Noyer tells me. However, in his book Liverpool: Wondrous Place, Du Noyer notes that the artists of this late 70s period had left the previous decade long behind them, with an “ambivalence” towards the “hippies” of Henri’s generation, who had known the Beatles. When founding Eric’s, the owners had deliberately resisted calling it the New Cavern: “It would have repelled the people they hoped to attract,” Du Noyer writes. (“As a kid, I adored the Beatles,” Paul Simpson writes in his memoir, Revolutionary Spirit, “But this is 1978, and I’m hardly going to admit that to anyone now, am I?”)

That hippie generation would’ve included self-described beatnik Peter O’Halligan. Having accomplished his mission to establish a scene that could operate without him, O’Halligan moved away from Liverpool – remarkably, to Silicon Valley, where he would become Apple Computer’s poet-in-residence. Drummond also left, taking a mainstream music job working for the Warner record label. Illuminatus! went to the National, and while Campbell did return as artistic director of the Everyman in 1980, his attempts to stage Philip K Dick’s mind-bending novel VALIS came to nothing. That same year, Eric’s was raided by police and shut down not long after. 

It's not all bad. Probe Records still exists, but it’s now at the Bluecoat on School Lane, no longer at the bleeding edge of (anti)sociality. Venues like Planet X picked up where Eric’s left off, and maybe North Docks spaces like Meraki, Quarry and the Invisible Wind Factory continue in that antimatter tradition. In 2014, Campbell and McGee’s daughter, Daisy Eris Campbell, staged a follow-up to Illuminatus! — a stage adaptation of Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger. Drummond blows through every now and then, trying to arrange the odd Toxteth Day of the Dead or construct a “People’s Pyramid”. Jayne Casey runs a cafe in New Brighton and a club, District, on Jordan Street. But like 20s Paris, 30s Berlin, 60s Haight-Ashbury and the 70s Chelsea Hotel, 70s Mathew Street is dead and gone.

“This was all derelict once,” Young tells me as we step down from Flanagan’s Apple. We joke that maybe it was better off like that. Now, a resurrected zombie “Eric’s” has been enveloped into the same hideous kitsch Heritage Liverpool that claimed the Cavern and the Beatles. I say it should all be concreted over again; Jeff laughs but doesn’t disagree.

“My Town” ends with a funereal stave:

“A grimmer time, I can’t recall
Like ancient Rome, we start to fall
Like John and Ringo, George and Paul,
It’s breathed its last, it’s dead, it’s over now…”

What Simpson articulates is hiraeth, the untranslatable Welsh word meaning a mixture of yearning, wistfulness, grief, and desire for a lost land. What I feel is more like anemoia: a nostalgia for a time I never actually experienced. Watching Pool of Life is both an enzyme and an inoculation: although I admire the anarchic, freewheeling spirit, I can imagine drinking a pint a little too quickly during one of Adrian Henri’s “happenings” and grinding my teeth into nubs well before the ninth hour of Ken Campbell’s Illuminatus! I’m nevertheless left with a sense of astonishment that such a vibrant scene was dreamed into existence and happy that O’Halligan’s place in it has begun to be told. (For that recognition, McPhee credits, among others, journalist Angie Sammons, a friend of O’Halligan’s.)

Sadly, if you want to see Pool of Life, you may have to wait. “Funding has collapsed in the last two years,” McPhee tells me, describing this as an industry-wide phenomenon. If, say, the Liverpool Film Office are looking for something non-crime-related to invest in, great — if not, much of this unique and fascinating material will remain untold, despite the increasing surfeit of excellent memoirs like Simpson’s. And that really wouldn’t be good for the city.