1 - Episode 1 – Violent Playground

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1 - Episode 1 – Violent Playground

Episode 1 – Violent Playground The title comes from a 1958 film which was shot around the council flats in Gerard Gardens in Liverpool. The cast included a young Freddie Starr. This episode sets up the background to Merseybeat. It opens with Ken Dodd likening the racial mix in Liverpool to a packet of Smarties: how times change as that was intended as a witty, innocuous comment. Hank Walters and John McNally talk about the popularity of country music in Liverpool; Jim Gretty talks of selling instruments at Frank Hessy’s and we hear how Gerry and the Pacemakers, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, Rikki and the Red Streaks and the Four Jays got started. An awkward dance manoeuvre could start a fight. Adrian Henri and Bill Harry talk about Stu Sutcliffe as an artist and Dave May of the Silhouettes reveals that he taught Stu the bass and that, contrary to Beatle books, he was okay. Norman Chapman describes drumming for the Beatles. There is hardly any jazz in the programme: I should have spoken to the Merseysippi Jazz Band, but we hear a test pressing of the Swinging Blue Jeans, then the Bluegenes, as a jazz band with ‘I’m Shy, Mary Ellen, I’m Shy’, recorded for Oriole Records in 1962. The scoop of the programme was in unearthing a whole album by Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes which had been recorded in Cambridge Road, Crosby in 1958. The recording had been made by Bernard Whitty who owned Lambda Records and to get the balance right, he put the drummer Dave Lovelady at the top of the stairs. At the time of the series, no one knew of the Quarrymen’s 1958 recording for Percy Phillips, so this was an extraordinary find: a Merseybeat group a couple of years before anything happened. I play two tracks in full: ‘Shortnin’ Bread’ and Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’. Kingsize Taylor, then an 18-year-old butcher’s boy, sounds like he means business. I was presenting the series without hindsight and hopefully anyone listening to it would get a feeling that something was building up in Liverpool but nobody was quite sure what. There is talk of records coming from the Cunard Yanks. I have demonstrated elsewhere that this effect was exaggerated, but I accepted it at the time. All the cover versions that the Liverpool groups performed had been released in the UK and the NEMS store, managed by Brian Epstein, stocked them all.

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1 - Episode 1 – Violent Playground

AP_780-LEI-1-2-1_s1_f01_v1