Liverpool and Psychedelia: A Brief History

Ever heard the one about how Courtney Love turned a generation of Liverpool musicians on to LSD? Back in the early 80s, way before Babes in Toyland, Hole or meeting Kurt Cobain, Love was a teenager obsessed with Julian Cope and Echo and the Bunnymen, ready to hit Merseyside with little more than the clothes on her back and a parcel full of acid. Love’s dad Hank had been a roadie with The Grateful Dead and was happy to supply his daughter with the means to pay rent the only way she could. Within months the city’s existing penchant for psychedelia had its pharmaceutical wherewithal and Love had moved on.

It’s a neat story and goes some small way to explaining Liverpool’s strange and surreal relationship with all things psychedelic. That relationship has since manifested in the city’s own International Festival of Psychedelia, which this year will see a new generation of heads groove to the likes of Super Furry Animals, The Horrors, Silver Apples and The Stairs.

While the city will always be able to lay claim to producing the ultimate psychedelic band, Liverpool’s close affinity with mind-expansion goes back much further than The Beatles’ decision to turn off their minds, relax and float downstream. In the early 60s, Liverpool became a centre of the emerging beat counter culture with a new art-school crowd hungry for jazz, poetry and performance. When US beat poet and counter-cultural icon Allen Ginsberg visited in May 1965, he declared the city to be “at the present moment, the centre of consciousness of the human universe”, echoing philosopher Carl Jung’s previous assertion that “Liverpool is the pool of life”.

Ginsberg would go on to describe Liverpool as “like San Francisco except the weather is greyer” after visiting such locally famous venues as Ye Cracke, the Philharmonic and Hope Hall (later to become the Everyman Theatre), and he had a point. Here was a west coast city with its own fully formed bohemian quarter where artists, musicians and poets mixed freely and where, this being a busy port, drugs were plentiful.

After the Fab Four

But despite this fecund environment for psychedelic behaviour to blossom, the Beatles' decision to move to Swinging London left Liverpool trailing behind the world’s new counter-cultural centres. While the zenith of the band’s drug-influenced songwriting hit its peak with the immortal Strawberry Fields Forever / Penny Lane single in 1967, their choice to revisit their childhood haunts only emphasised that something was missing from late 60s Liverpool. The beautiful people had moved on.

By the 70s, Liverpool needed to shake its post-Beatles torpor – although it was to the Fab Four’s old haunt of Mathew Street where the attention turned next. A former merchant seaman called Peter O’Halligan was so influenced by Jung’s vision that he opened the Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun. Spurred on by future KLF prankster Bill Drummond's theory that the nearby manhole at the junction of Mathew and Button Streets was the intersection of a ley line, the venue became an inspirational space for the next set of Merseyside dreamers.

How the city seemed to react to punk is key to understanding why it remains a cradle of psychedelia. After the Sex Pistols and The Clash had led the London-centric battle cry, each large urban centre in the UK followed suit in different ways that often seemed to echo their environments. The inland factory-dominated cities of Sheffield and Leeds adopted industrial synth-noise, while just down the road Manchester’s rain-grey skies seeped into Joy Division’s brutalism.

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But Liverpool, with its big skies, green spaces and wide Victorian terraces, took a different road – one with none of the scorched-earth policy that defined so many of the back-to-basics three-chord wonders who turned their noses up at anything pre-New York Dolls. Not for nothing were Echo and the Bunnymen tagged ‘the new psychedelia’: vocalist Ian McCulloch’s voice could not hide his admiration for Jim Morrison, while their fluid guitar lines owed much to Television and their acid rock-influenced transcendentalism. Likewise The Teardrop Explodes, whose name seemed to come straight from the Warhol factory and whose organ-driven songs recalled the likes of The Seeds and Question Mark and the Mysterians.

Both bands embodied a kind of glorious escapism and joyous abandon that took them far away from the dour sounds of so many of their near neighbours down the East Lancs Road; and with their rejection of phony protest or politics, Liverpool’s music adopted an arty, kaleidoscopic feel, conveying those dreamy visions of landscape and hallucinogenics that became so popular with each group’s musicians as their respective stars rose. As cultural historian Andrew Lees wrote of the Teardrops' shamanic leader Julian Cope, here was a “new spirit with the uncontrollable energy of the jungle, a soul with a thousand masks, dark and devious, light and seductive, an artist charmed by birds of paradise and poisoned by serpents, a soul born, fornicating and dying all at the same time.”

Drugs, The La's and the new millennium

From that moment on, Liverpool’s musical landscape became increasingly dominated by the psychedelic trappings of the 60s and early 70s. Cannabis became a given, acid popular and heroin would soon follow as the city adopted a strange escapism that has defined it ever since. Progressive rock forged a northwestern bulkhead with Pink Floyd adopted as the soundtrack, as the ‘retro-scally’ look took hold. Emerging from this smoke-filled room were The La’s, whose obsession with Captain Beefheart and motto of “skin up yer bastards” chimed as beautifully with the times as their magical, Byrdsian riffs. From the same era, The Stairs make a welcome re-appearance at this year’s Psych Fest, complete with the scene’s unofficial anthem in the immortal Weed Bus.

Into the new millennium, it was The La’s shadow that cast its influence over the next generation of cosmic scallies as the likes of The Coral and The Zutons adopted their outlook, influences, intake and style into the charts and beyond. Today many more Liverpool acts continue to hold a candle for psychedelia, whether it’s in the vintage keyboards of Clinic, the stark minimalism of Ex-Easter Island Head or the garage rock of Strange Collective. By its very nature, psychedelia is hard to define, which is where Psych Fest comes in – a broad meeting of the tribes and a chance for the scene to take a step back and revel in the city’s innate strangeness.

For festival organiser and Bido Lito! magazine editor Chris Torpey, it’s this feeling that remains at the heart of the event’s ethos and perhaps explains why it continues to go from strength to strength.

“There’s just something trippy about Liverpool, something weird and open-minded that makes it a perfect seat for psychedelia,” he says. “It’s easy to look at eras where LSD has been prevalent – and Liverpool has had periods of acid indulgence in the 60s, 80s and 90s – but I think the connection runs deeper. For me it’s to do with a sense of adventurism, thinking big and dreaming of the possibilities of ‘what if?’

“The city’s focal point is the river, and being a portal to new worlds and cultures: this has instilled a deep-rooted feeling of discovery in all who are brought up here. It’s empowering and exciting, and a little bit unhinged. There’s also a certain magnetism about that open-minded outlook that attracts waifs and strays, wanderers looking for a journey of discovery. Something just resonates here with the oddball thread that’s woven into the fabric of Liverpool’s collective psyche: that’s psychedelia.”

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Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia 2016, Camp & Furnace, 23 & 24 Sep, weekend tickets £80 / day tickets £40