How Liverpool soon outgrew the Beatles

‘If any journalist asks you about the Beatles because you’re from Liverpool, say you hate them and you don’t listen to that old crap.’ Such was the advice that the DJ Roger Eagle, promoter and founder of the legendary (and there really is no other word for it) Merseyside punk club Eric’s, dispensed to a young Ian Broudie in the late 1970s. Little could either have imagined that almost simultaneously John Lennon, over in New York in the Dakota Building, was busy demo-ing ‘Now and Then’. It was a song which would resurface as the final Beatles single and top the charts some 40-odd years later, aided by a form of AI technology that possibly only members of Dalek I, the Wirral’s wackier answer to Kraftwerk, could have dreamt of back then.

Host to gigs by everyone from the Sex Pistols to Talking Heads, Eric’s (christened in an ironic riposte to nightclubs bearing Sloaney girls names like Annabel’s) was located on Mathew Street, near the former site of the Cavern. But as each of these three memoirs by musicians who emerged a decade later and in a fresh wave of Mersey beat bands confirm, the Beatles were childish things that Liverpool punks had to put away, at least publicly, for a year or two anyway. As Paul Simpson, the co-founder with Julian Cope of the Teardrop Explodes, who confesses to hiding most of his pre-punk records under his bed come 1977, notes, the mantra, taken from the Clash, was ‘No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones’.

After the initial smash and gob of punk, however, the Liverpool scene developed its own distinctive and distinctly psychedelic identity, clad in the trademark ‘bleak northern overcoats’ as Echo and the Bunnymen’s Will Sergeant characterised them. Although Sergeant himself was fairly abstemious when it came to narcotics, he suggests that Operation Julie, the notorious late-1970s police raids on LSD labs over the border in Wales, may have resulted in an influx of acid to Liverpool.