MAKING A FILM, THUNDERCLAP NEWMAN AND POVERTY
Summer of 1972.
A burden on my parents’ limited incomes, with no job or prospects, I was summoned back to Liverpool for my second spell there in a year. This time I was in the city to help my brother Simon make a film. Though in his fourth year as an architectural student, he became obsessed with films. This he lived out through running the University’s Film Society and each week students were treated to an array of classics and experimental films. And, of course I got let in for free for setting the chairs out or such.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Unchien Andalou, Woman in the Dunes, Metropolis, Shadows, L’Age D’or, Closely Observed Trains, Battleship Potemkin and many, many more. One or two of the silent movies were blessed with a pianist improvising to the action of the movie.
Simon’s own film, which he was making. concerned an elderly man looking back on his life through the buildings and built environment he inhabited. We shot the film at some amazing locations in Liverpool: a warehouse full of thirty foot high sugar mountains in the docks, the amazing Walton Tunnel and St Luke’s Church, to name but three.
St Luke’s is a bombed out church. It’s interior was totally destroyed by the Liverpool Blitz of 1941.Just its outer walls stand. In 1972 it hadn’t been done up. Shrubs sprouted in neat rows where the pews once stood and the main aisle, though overgrown, was matted with grass. All this was set against the black walls of the church.
Simon had employed an actor drawn from the Unity Theatre and a fellow student doubled as camera man and editor. Meticulous doesn’t cover the film direction. In one scene of a few seconds, a handkerchief was folded over twenty times before the director was satisfied! For the tunnel shots Simon put the camera on rail tracks and one of my jobs was to wheel the camera man and camera at a set, steady speed for there were many ‘takes’ as camera shake had to be minimized.
Both Simon and his editor used the film as their portfolio to enter The National Television and Film School, which had just been set up in Beaconsfield in 1971. The film itself went on to feature at the Berlin Film Festival.
I cannot now remember if it was in 1971 or 2 when I saw Thunderclap Newman perform “Something in the air” at a John Peel gig at the Everyman. Change needed to happen. This song had a surprising lyric as the “instigators” were asked to “hand out the arms and ammo.” The wistful melody gave way to the stark barrel piano at the defining bridge of the song – which I found moving indeed. Three weeks at Number One in 1969, it’s a song which takes me back to those times still.
Even in 1972, unemployment was massive in Liverpool, unlike much of the rest of England. Renshaw Hall, Benson Street, was the Labour Exchange, where we signed on. There was a quadrangle in the central hall. Here staff sat behind grilles in front of their counters and each counter had letters, A to Z, hung above them. Here the unemployed queued up to sign on at the counter bearing the first letter of their surnames. Me included.
Leading to the hall was a long corridor. On my first visit a blind man was carefully stretching out his hands along the wall to find his way to the counters. Other men, young and old, leaned together against opposing walls, ready to pounce on fag butts thrown on the floor.
It was a Thursday. With ten pence in my pocket, I wandered the streets to find something filling for tea. At the grocer’s I noticed a huge bag of greens for sale – just 10p. I took my find back to my flat and boiled it up. Of course, it was Wallasey Spinach and it had boiled down from a large pot full to a mouthful! I should have taken my 10 pence to the Second Hand bread shop, in Everton.
One day, I had an interview for a job and borrowed a tie. The sex workers hung about the corner of our street by a small church. Never before had any of them spoken to me but wearing a tie, I was flavour of the month! I hurried on by and did not hear their propositions trailing after me. After the interview I took off the tie before walking home. I didn’t get the job. And the sex workers took no notice of me. Thankfully.
Yet, there is always light: Birkenhead Market, where I bought pikelets and potato cakes, was accessed using the famous Woodside Ferry. No, I won’t break into song! That market was a real treat. There was also a ferry which chugged its way to Liverpool’s New Brighton, though fish ‘n’ chips was the highlight of this Brighton in those days.
Hope Street was my favourite. Look left down the street and there’s the huge Anglican Cathedral; look right and there’s the bright, new Catholic Cathedral. In those days, it had a nick name then with derogatory anti-Irish sentiment and I’ve always referred the Cathedral as an upside down Cornetto.
Hope wasn’t at either end of Hope Street but in the street itself. Across the road from The Liverpool Royal Philharmonic Hall is the Royal Philharmonic pub – probably the finest public house in the universe with its huge circular bar leading to rooms and snug alcoves. On a Sunday evening at 7pm workers would pile in for the last of the weekend’s booze. Pints of Guinness and bitter were lined up around the bar, filled up beforehand for the opening time rush!
On Hope Street there was also the wonderful Everyman Theatre and a few yards away was the always packed Rainbow Records. My brother helped to design and construct its interior. Here were all the “heads,” the scent of Petulia oil and smell of cannabis, and enough hair to make ladders to the moon.
Between 1971-2 some huge clearances of the old back-to-back housing was underway to be replaced with high rise. Many of these terraces were superb houses and their clearance didn’t invoke hope but despair. In the acres and acres of rubble the last building to be toppled was the pub.
One evening I visited such a pub. Queens, I think? Older and younger cloth capped men sat in a corner with their instruments (mostly mandolins rather than banjos I seem to recall). I also remember the seriousness on their faces as they played: proud men never consulted or considered in a world pitched against their conservation.
For myself, I became homesick indeed. There didn’t seem to be a poetry scene I could be part of in Liverpool and I felt incredibly anonymous. Yet, if I was to go home to Suffolk I needed a plan to get my life moving. In Liverpool I forged such a plan.