The Creators

It started with Schubert’s music, which I love and know so well. I was experimenting with 21st century arrangements of the works, when I heard that Liverpool was to become European Capital of Culture 2008. The news inspired me to consider a full-length musical, and the emotional range of the music supplied me with all the dramatic effect I needed to get started.

However I soon realized, when talking to people about my project, that the word “Schubert” could be a big turn-off for non-classical music fans, so I rearranged the spelling and started calling it my Take a Butchers at Liverpool project. No one—apart from Schubert fans and anagram lovers—recognized its classical origin.

As I worked on “transmogrifying” the music into 21st century rhythms and styles, the idea for the basic storyline began to emerge: the conversion of a run-down Liverpool nightclub into a top class venue by people from all walks of Liverpool life. The process forces them to come together and re-examine their lives and loves.

By the end of 2005, I had sequenced and recorded over two hours worth of music and given the pieces code names such as Carnival, Remorse, Vivacity, Intrigue, Fear, Crunch, It’s No.1. I was then faced with the daunting task of finding a writer who could not only write the lyrics for all the songs, but who could also convert my basic storyline into a drama.

After a long search, and virtually on the point of giving up, I went to a meeting of The Inklings in Liverpool Central Library in July 2006 where I had the greatest good fortune in the world to meet writer, poet and guitarist extraordinaire John Dixon……..

How did this start? To get to the nub, I’d rather ask where. Photo of Liverpool Central Library

It was at Central Library, the first place where any Scouser could find books. When Victorian Liverpool was still the home of deprivation and injustice, intellectual democracy started right there, and so does our story.

So, right there, at the writers’ group, the Liverpool Inklings, I ran into Geoff Lavelle, pianist, actor and director, who wanted lyrics for a Liverpool musical. The music, ready and complete, had been extracted from Schubert’s works and transmogrified (Geoff’s own term) into twenty-first century rhythm.

Well my interest then was poetry, not lyric. But in student days, I’d got to know stage music as a jobbing guitarist in pit orchestras. It was a good period. Beyond the Fringe was a force in the land, and student reviews had work for any of us menials who could face the feverishly biroed orchestra scores that fed the boom. Now the stunning rock and rumba of Geoff’s transmogrifications were challenging me to make something of the motley interests I’d sustained beside my academic day job.

A few experiments in word setting led us to striking agreement on style. Then Geoff created the real crisis by offering me the job.

The real crisis was that I, a woolly-back from West Herts, would have to write about Liverpool. Liverpool and I hitched up over the rich quarter century I spent at the University. City and precinct were full of clever people, groomed by society for achievement, who went on and achieved. Then some like Ella, our heroine, whom the system had abused, also went on and achieved. I called this sheer creative humanity; these folk followed ideas for their own sake, not for profit or prestige. They’re the intellectual democracy—anarchy if you like—found four generations ago at Central Library. Yes, all cities have them, but in Liverpool they’re everywhere, and it seems to need an outsider to see this. Why do I mind about them? For the same reason that I’m in Liverpool at all. In 1975, an East Anglian research institute sacked me because I spotted something the director had missed. Maybe Scousers, from a race memory of institutional corruption, find that less shocking than I do. But it puts us in the same boat, and we’ve survived.

For me, the Liverpool culture of 2008 is this creative humanity that is permanently beyond the reach of fatcats, manipulators, snides and nutcases. It drives our story’s central characters, the socially incompatible Ella and Matthew, through the Liverpool life celebrated in Geoff’s music, to come to terms with what Liverpool has made them.

Maybe I’ve talked up my adoptive city into some kind of sensation. If the cap fits, you can wear it.