Report: Paul Du Noyer celebrates the popular music of Liverpool and London

Paul Du Noyer (left) and me in 'convo'. Picture: Afsheen Shaikh, view her work here

I INTERVIEWED Paul Du Noyer about his last two books for the Cornerstone Festival today and it was  a hugely enjoyably hour and a bit because he posited a tonne of hugely entertaining theories about why London and Liverpool musics sound as they do.
His belief about London music is that the story telling elements of classic capital musicians like The Kinks, The Small Faces, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Madness, Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen and Dizzee Rascal form part of an unbroken link between the singing broadside news sellers of the pre-17th Century, pre-newspaper era and the cockney market traders who became the template of music hall.
Furthermore, this thesis is deepened by evidence of the historic pool of talent who sought London as their Whittington-esque showbiz El Dorado over the years.
Musicians headed to London to make their name through the ages and so in the era of music hall they assumed the popular Cockney stereotype that the people loved. The showbiz and 'media' industries of the day were there, and as a result, in later years they went to London because that's where the work was. From music hall to big band, to jazz to folk and rock - even the feckin' Beatles did it - London continued to be a centre for the popular arts.
And although the Beatles didn't, to a large extent, become proto-Lahndaners, London, for most performers is a place where they go to reinvent themselves and to make money in the process. London is pragmatic and showy in equal measures - that's just what people do when they get there. It's the reason why outsiders like Damon Albarn, Jimmy Pursey, Paul Weller et al, suburban boys unsure of themselves, become more Cockernee than the the 'cor blimey, love a dove' natives.
As GM follower Tom McGeehan tweeted after the event today, the key point about Paul's talk was: "London is a city, Liverpool is a state of mind."
Paul's belief that Liverpool has a melodic, stoned and anarcho-surrealist pop sensibility is more in keeping with a debunking of the notion that there is a North South divide fashionable in deconstructions of British culture.
Rather, Paul said, we should think of Liverpool's position in Britain's musical canon more in terms of an East/ West divide that it fits in with a line that runs from the Western Isles of Scotland and takes in Glasgow, the Lake District, Wales and Cornwall.
In these terms, he said, Liverpool's melodic, slightly melancholic dispositions fit in with notions of a residual Celtic Twilight - of a place people may have gone to escape their previous malaises but are marooned because they haven't got to their desired final destinations of the USA or the new world - just like those who came to Liverpool in the first wave of Irish immigration in the mid 1840s.

Liverpool was not a place of ultimate emigration historically. People, either Irish, West Indian or Italian or Scandinavian stayed here not because they intended to, but because they hadn't enough money to go anywhere else. Through this necessity was born a virtue of new 'Scouseness'.
But the seagoing tradition of Liverpool in the time of its prosperity in the 19th and early 20th centuries, drove a collective imagination: dads and uncles came back from foreign lands with exotic stories and the sight of big ships and the eternal Mersey skyline (even to this day) inspire Scouse musicians to produce, not pragmatic storytelling, but dreamy eyes-to-the-sky reverie.



It was a great event, enjoyed by one and all and you can listen to third year journalism student Dave Jenkins interview Paul on Radio Hope in the clip above.

Well sound: Paul Du Noyer speaks to GM about his home cities

GM grabbed 10 minutes with Merseyside author Paul Du Noyer,  visiting fellow of journalism at Liverpool Hope, prior to his talk about the music of Liverpool and London at the university's upcoming Cornerstone Festival.
We previewed the event, at 1pm on Thursday, November 26, here  previously.
Paul's two brilliant books Wondrous Place and In the City are required reading for any lovers of modern popular music, great journalism and especially for those of us who love both.
Deep in the middle of research for a long piece on Ian Dury for The Word magazine (it's hard to believe it is nearly 10 years since the great man died), Paul took time out to reflect on the city of his birth and the city he has spent his adult life in.
Paul Du Noyer - Food for Thought, Venue: Cor 114.

The Parish Pump: It wasn't the vandals that stole the handles - let's take them back

IN a quaint turn of co-incidence for a neo-Habermasian community journalism advocate like myself, to be in agreement with internet impressario Jeff Jarvis is remarkable.
With the advent of Google Wave, the new all-singing-all-dancing browser/ interface from the internet collosus, the focus is again towards a hyper-local model for newsgathering and presentation.
A browser which unites and aggregates every aspect of our online lives is the ultimate goal for Google and a more fulfilling life under the cloud seems to be only a matter of months away. We can create and upload content, blog and flag content with simple keystrokes.
But, it still does not solve the problem of paying for newsgathering - it is still parisitic. But news still has to be gathered in a meaningful and accountable way for any number of ethical and democratic reasons.
And this is where hyperlocal has to come in.
Local is important to us in Britain and Ireland or we wouldn't have the vast numbers of local news outlets that we have sustained for more than a century since the development of affordable press and broadcast technologies.
But, at the local and regional level of news in Britain, the depth of content and engagement in local communities is being corroded by successive rounds of damaging cuts in personnel at news organisations.
In Februrary, and at one fell swoop, a couple of hundred years worth of accumulated local knowledge and talent left the Liverpool ECHO and wasn't replaced - even with cheap recent graduates or the even cheaper work experience/ interns.
We have to understand the uncertain business climates of the big news organisations making staff cuts face. The inherently fractured nature of the internet is not the friend of the centralised conglomerate news organisation - there are too many options for the consumer and these companies have always worked best moving towards monopolies where they could.
But Liverpool, like any similar sized city with a vast history and a highly defined identity needs news organisations rooted in its communities. News organisations, in this way, need social and intellectual capital - people who have knowledge and empathy with their communities in a micro and macro sense.
So how about this: let's summon the power of the community or third sector and devise and implement wide ranging education programmes and outreach initiatives aimed at media education which allows everyone to be part of newsgathering.
Let's have paid-for community workers and teachers embedded in their area telling us what is going on in their communities rather than newspapers and radio stations just reprinting missives from PR organisations paid to portray the activies of regeneration quangos in best possible light. (Among other travesties)
My example of how this could work is in the twin communities of Kirkdale and Kensington in Liverpool. I cycle through Kirkdale and am struck by how there is a huge degeneration of the area but that story hasn't been told - parts of it look like the Baltimore of The Wire.
Likewise the wholesale closures of shops and pubs throughout North Liverpool, thanks in no small way to the huge investments in city centre retail area, are stories which have not made any local media.
There are community groups in nearby Bootle who were working to highlight the injustices of regeneration programmes filtering money to big business 15 years ago - I know because I went to the Strand community centre to interview them. These people have not gone away - let's give them cameras and blogs and let them do their adversarial work. And let's train them to do so in an accurate and engaging way to maximise engagement with readers.
In Kensington, the Kensington Vision group have been highlighting the inadequacies of multi-million pound regeneration agency, Kensington Regeneration, via social and public journalism activism which points the way for the future of media at a macro level in the city.
Crucially, they also train 'ordinary' people to make their own radio, video and print products and get them up on the net. Now, that's a great social history project laden with that most corny of values - empowerment. (As Lewis Black says: 'I learned that word from Oprah'.)
The parish pump was the big buzz word for those of us involved in local and regional journalism until quite recently - it's just that there is no-one left to document those operating the handles.
In recent times, and in keeping with Dylan's lysergic visions of 1965, if the vandals had stolen the handles no-one would have been there to report it. That is, apart from the community activists who had no cash or means of accessing the regional media without first going to PR companies with the contacts to get published.
Let's train people to both operate and document the use of the parish pump. You'll see it will work, it is a no brainer.
And you know what? Free global social networking with the need of vast bandwidth and no visible means of raising the cash for it via advertising is not the answer. At least it is not the ultimate answer and is, at best, only a part of the overall solution for news' revenue quests.
Those of us involved in the media are too much in thrall to blogging, twittering and facebook poking and the fact that we can tell someone in Spokane, Washington that we think Peter Andre is standing strong.
This blinds us to the vast numbers of people who hate the blowhard, egotistical world of social networking's telling to one and all what you (mostly irrelevently) are thinking or doing at any one time.
The future does not lie in 140 character synopses of 'wa gwan' with you and your 'bredren' - no-one, to any meaningful extent, gives a Rat's A.
You may need a lie down and you also may be able to tell everyone from Starbucks in Tianamen Square to the Copper Kettle in Waterloo about it via your @dickhead Twitter account, but ultimately it's never going to be the future of journalism some contend it could be.
With this in mind, look to the blogs and pictures from Iran over the last two days and marvel at the true glory of community and activist journalism. Its glory is in the ability not to tell millions of people that Ronaldo may have shagged Paris Hilton but that a popular revolution is taking place in a nation which has huge ramifications for the rest of the world.
But also remember that journalism when done properly can make a difference to a pensioner whose bins haven't been collected by the council or 40 people opposing the closure of a community centre or thousands opposing the closure of a hospital or primary school.
Regional journalism's power is felt most keenly at the local level.
As Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh said in Epic, the 1938 poem recently voted Ireland's favourite,

"That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was most important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance."
(Emphases blogger's own.)

The Writing Merseyside Project

SINCE viewing the addictive silver bullet mainline hotshot of Merseyside and alcohol in the rare oul times that was Awaydays the movie, GM has been in Scouse pride overload.
GM wants to collect the best pieces of recent journalism about Merseyside and publish them on GM. Please, send any great pieces of writing about the People's Republic to us.
So, here are some great pieces of writing about Liverpool and surrounding districts.
We heartily recommend GM's new Liverpool 1 Bureau chief, Paul Du Noyer's New Statesman piece after we snorted coffee through our nose reading it.
Paul Du Noyer on why Liverpool is the capital of the North, and,
The Guardian's Alexis Petridis on why Liverpool music scenes are unlike any of those in other cities
Kevin Sampson, author and screenwriter of Awaydays on new pictures of Eric's
Mike Chapple on why Merseyside pubs are great

What are the new busking classics?

IN LIVERPOOL, on Saturday, in the heart of the Cavern Quarter (where it all began, folks!) I saw a brilliant, insanely good looking lad busking Kings of Leon's Sex on Fire, note perfectly.
I didn't have camera capable of high quality video footage, but it was a great scene. He was surrounded by a load of Geordie stag trip drunks all tunelessly and enthusiastically joining in.
Allied to the fact that Liverpool now has its own version of kora genius Toumani Diabate (above film) and the blind lad who does Shadows-style instrumentals of YNWA (among others), maybe one of our Capital of Culture dividends is an increase in quality in the busking community.
But it has got me thinking, what are the new busking classics?
An old Q magazine (probably in the Du Noyer editorship era, 1990ish) did a round-up of old busking classics, Cavatina, Streets of London et al.
But what are the songs that have become the new busking classics and what are the songs that could never become busking songs, within reason obviously.