And to celebrate the test event nightclub gigs for 6,000 people in Liverpool the past weekend Rainy Days and Songdays gives you our Mersey mix.
Across the Universe, The Beatles:
And the original and the best sung dreamily by John Lennon.
I’m sure the weekend’s DJs could put some bass and drums beat on this.
But I’m happy enough with George’s tanpura and Ringo’s skins.
I dare say Stefanie Hempel can do Across the Universe on her ukulele.
On der Beatles tour in Hamburg too but this is one she prepared earlier
Of course no trip to Liverpool would be complete without a trip to The Beatles Story on Albert Dock.
And pictures outside the Cavern Club, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields.
Of course there is no shortage of Beatles tours around the city but we’d recommend The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour of course.
People around every corner
Gerry and the Pacemakers, Ferry Across the Mersey:
There are iconic river trips, and ones personal to me, and we’ll deffo return to this.
But a ferry across Liverpool’s River Mersey is certainly right up there.
It became a favourite attraction to show visitors in our time living in Liverpool.
While Gerry’s other anthem You’ll Never Walk Alone is for ever associated with football team Liverpool FC or the great Celtic in that other great British port city Glasgow.
Real Liverpool
You To Me Are Everything, The Real Thing: As important in their own way to Liverpool at their time in the Seventies as The Beatles were in the Sixties.
The Real Thing were the first all British black band to make it and in those days that was a challenge.
Of course good music has no colour and travels across the world and time.
And it is the soundtrack of the Whiskey Muhle in Söll in Austria.
Power of Frankie
The Power of Love, Frankie Goes to Hollywood: And, of course the Eighties in Liverpool and across the UK belonged to Frankie.
I’ll leave the grinding of Relax to the Liverpool gay nightclub scene, great song though it is.
And the political zeitgeist theatricality of Two Tribes to the boxing Reagan and Chernenko (ask your parents).
It’s the Three Wise Men from the East on the video which gets me every time. It’s the camels you see.
That takes the Biscuit
Dickie Davies Eyes, Half Man Half Biscuit: Birkenhead, Liverpool’s wee brother across the Mersey.
And where the Ferry docks is colloquially known as the One-Eyed City.
Because it always has one eye on Liverpool.
But Birky on the Wirral punches above it’s weight (sometimes literally, it can be rough) with its musical output.
It spawned synth gods Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, The Teardrop Explodes and the wonderfully inventive alternative cult band Half Man Half Biscuit.
The Birkenhead quartet have given us some of the most unforgettable song titles in pop…
All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit, Trumpton Riots, and my own fave, Dickie Davies Eyes.
Dickie Davies was an Eighties British TV sportscaster.
With a grey flash in his bouffant black hair and a manicured moustache not unlike my own at the time.
And different coloured eyes, like David Bowie had.
And I was giddy with excitement when I got the opportunity to interview him when I lived in Aberdeen.
HMHB were geniuses in channeling popular cultural reference points.
And celebrated Dickie in a pastiche of the Kim Carnes’ song of the tune, Bette Davis Eyes.
Of course I remember nothing of my interview with Dickie… I was too busy looking at Dickie’s Eyes.
Sit back and enjoy… Rainy Days and Songdays Mersey Mix
