Liverpool Heroes

By Mark Hooper

Visiting Liverpool again recently made me realise there’s probably no other city in the world (with the possible exception of Memphis) that is so dominated by its association with a single band or artist.

Thanks in no small part to the memorialisation in song of many of the landmarks of their childhood, it’s hard to escape the link between The Beatles and their hometown. Statues, shop and bar names, yellow submarines, Magical Mystery Tour buses doing the rounds from Penny Lane to Strawberry Fields – there are constant reminders and references to the Fab Four everywhere.

Growing up surrounded with so much Beatlemania rammed down one’s throat, it’s little wonder that many of the locals rebel against such over-saturation. It’s exactly for this reason that my friend Andrew, Liverpool born and bred and with an encyclopedic knowledge of music far deeper and wider than mine, hates The Beatles with a passion. He’d far rather there were statues to Liverpool’s legendary Crucial Three – Julian Cope, Ian McCulloch and Pete Wylie – or to OMD’s Paul Humphreys and Andy McCluskey.

While of course he has every right to not like their music – subjectivity is everything – there are certain undeniable facts about The Beatles that I will argue about until I’m blue in the face. Put simply, they frame the very way we think and talk about bands. They laid down the blueprint for all pop careers that came thereafter.