MAYOR Joe shook his head as he glanced down at the front page of the local morning/evening newspaper. ‘Oh Eck’ I think I heard him say with a look of annoyance, if not anger. Mathew Street Festival Axed, screamed the headline.
The Mathew Street Festival needed to be more than axed, it needed to be banished for ever.
During the briefing, hackles were raised, especially those of Bill H, when I dared to mention the ‘B’word: Is Liverpool, half a century after they left, finally turning its back on the Beatles?
When Bill Heckle and his mates started it in 1993 it was intended as a celebration of Liverpool music, from the Beatles and the Merseybeat era to the up and coming bands of the last decade of the last century. It is some years since I even bothered to head to the city during the event. To me it had become Liverpool’s booze and vomit fest.
It was costing the council almost a £1m and generating hardly any feel-good publicity for the city. It was lucky to get a mention on Granada Reports or North West Tonight, let alone Sky News or ITN. Most of the money was spent on security, safety, policing and cleaning up, with little being spent on the actual bands.
tMayor Joe first thought about pulling the plug on funding in 2011 and last year finally announced the civic money tree had been axed.
Beatlers Cover BandsHeckle and his team greeted the news with "great sadness", but rather than taking away their guitars and drum sets, they sat down with Mayor Joe to work out the future. Out of the Mathew Street Festival, rising like a phoenix will be a new international music festival.
The hope – and I believe this will happen – is the new festival will become to Liverpool what the Edinburgh Festival is north of the border.
In the early 1990s Liverpool was dead at weekends. In fact at 6pm on any weekday and during the weekends, you could have locked the city gates until Monday morning and nobody would have been fussed.
Now the city is thriving 24/7, and making large areas a no-go area to accommodate a booze-up is unacceptable.
During the briefing hackles were raised, especially those of Bill H, when I dared to mention the ‘B’word: Is Liverpool, half a century after the Beatles left, finally turning its back on the Beatles?
No, no, no! came screams from every direction.
Those were the daysBut I have the unpopular view that Liverpool, certainly in any civic way, does not recognise or celebrate the Beatles in the way Stratford celebrates Billy Shakey or Memphis Elvis. Yes, there is more to Liverpool than the Beatles and there are new bands, perhaps many of them influenced by the Fab Four. And while I am full of admiration for Cavern City Tours, Bill H, Dave Jones and the rest of them, as well as the Beatles Story, I still feel we are missing a trick.
The new Liverpool International Music Festival will, admitted Mayor Joe, be a suck-it-and-see event this August. It will cost the council 40 per cent less – trimmed further if the Arts Council and other sponsors chip in.
It will give the event the chances of survival and longevity, unlike the Mathew Street Festival which had become too big, and too hot, to handle.
