Musical Mystery Tour Liverpool
Second leg of weekend launch has 10,000 joining in Scouse singsong
Ten thousand people were on their feet singing along with All Together Now by the Farm, the perfect rallying cry for the second leg of the weekend's launch of Liverpool's year as European capital of culture. Even national newspaper cultural elitists who have never knowingly heard the song before were seen to be humming while admiring two blond aerialists in topaz catsuits hanging upside down from stout ropes.
Source:
The Guardian
After the singsong, it was easy for Phil Redmond, the laconic soap man who has taken the culture year by the scruff of its sometimes troublesome neck and put it back on track over the last six months. "Well, we did it," he said. "Tonight's the start. We've got the whole year. It'll be bigger, it'll be better. It'll be deeper, it'll be wider."
The end of the show was nigh, because Ringo was on next with Dave Stewart to sing Liverpool 8, his sentimental tribute to his native city. This song is going to hover over the culture year like the Holy Spirit.
"Ringo for president!" yelled someone. "He doesn't look bad for 67, does he?" muttered an admirer. After that, all they had to do to send the people home proudly wrapped in a metaphorical Scouse comfort blanket was to get everyone on stage at the city's new riverside arena to sing John Lennon's Power to the People. Liverpool really had done it. Or this bit anyway. But it had not looked good at the start. As the audience took their seats, workers in hard hats and reflective jackets were still on stage banging and brushing. A tacky illuminated sign suspended above them gleamed Liverpool 08. The L started flashing, stopped and, with five other letters, went dim, leaving only "poo" alight.
A workman climbed up and attempted to tightrope, then crawl along the sign. Oh God, this is terrible, thought the hack in row AA. He's going to break his neck! Another capital of culture cock-up! A flash, a bang and the workman tumbled, his fall broken by a well-concealed safety harness. Much relief: it's a joke, a self-parodying merry prank. The hack felt stupid.
The show was billed as Liverpool - The Musical. But those who came expecting something on the lines of The Sound of Music may have been disappointed. This was a cultural mystery tour taking in favourite songs and favourite bands (Echo & the Bunnymen, the Wombats, Garry Christian, Shack, Pete Wylie) and screen images of Merseyside blitz times and tough times, Militant times and Thatcher times. Lennon times (a larky day in Central Park) and football times had segments to themselves. Not that the mind didn't wander a little during Saturday night's show to recall the weekend's more orthodox Liverpool cultural offerings: the Joseph Wright exhibition at the Walker art gallery, Beatles pictures at the National Conservation Centre, the new slavery museum, the Turner prize at the Tate (big demand for free tickets), and Richard Wilson's rotating dismemberment of a former Yates's wine lodge.
Liverpool's biggest band - the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic - was not at home because it was here in the arena, stacked in horizontal ranks, now red, now blue. They played a chunk from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and a little piece by Shostakovich. But most of the night they were the ultimate backing group, joining almost every band on every number, with their dynamic young conductor, Vasily Petrenko, riding high on a scissor lift and joining lustily in the Lennon singalong.
The RLPO was in the thick of it at the start, a melange of Rule Britannia, Amazing Grace (with images of slave ships), Jerusalem and Land of Hope and Glory, with mezzo Kathryn Rudge got up as Britannia to belt out the ruling the waves bit before being joined by two more singers, the Liverpool Welsh Choir, a brass band and semaphoring sea cadets. It was a wonderfully surreal moment. Very Liverpool.
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