Livercool, pyjamas and babies called Tranquility – what is it about Liverpool?
Two things made me think about Liverpool and its cultural place within the country today. The first was seeing several women walking their kids to school, or off down to the shops, wearing their pyjamas. The second was reading about the Echo’s Baby of the Year competition and seeing some of the quite extraordinary names of some of the young babbies.
It reminded me of a long-running puzzle I’ve had over Liverpool and its unique style and attitude. Defining this peculiar style, this parochial je ne sais qois, has long eluded strangers to the city like me.
Despite coming from Hartlepool which, to my mind, is quite a lot like Liverpool, I had never seen anyone wearing their pyjamas outside of their house before coming to the city.
Nor have I seen fake tans as widespread or as bold as those in Liverpool, or such OTT outfits. When I interviewed Moby years ago he voiced his total disbelief at the costumery of young Liverpool ladies, and this was a man who has probably slept with groupies in every major city of the world.
Trackies tucked into socks don’t seem quite as popular as they used to be, but I’ve never seen them anywhere else. We need scarcely mention the ‘taches. And Ugg boots?
Paul du Noyer, in his book Wondrous Place, invokes Liverpool’s historic role as a jumping-off point for immigrants from all over the world, along with their own cultures, music and accents – as well as being a port-of-call for bored sailors determined to have a good time.
Perhaps this is behind the city’s determination to look and behave differently to the rest of the country, not in terms of ghettoisation but a definite desire to do things a little more differently, a little more flamboyantly.
It’s tough not to come to the conclusion that city’s role as a whipping boy for various governments and stand-up comedians over the years has led to a kind of insularity. A version of the everyone-hates-us-we-don’t-care attitude that sustained Wimbledon FC, and is Ryanair’s modus operandi.
Liverpool’s a city of contrasts and contradictions. Living here it’s easy to discern a vaguely puritanical Catholic, working-class and socialist vibe, especially in certain pockets around the north end.
But in the more cosmopolitan south it’s a real culture clash. There’s still aspects of the immigrant West Indian community, but there’s a much more ‘bling’ black culture in south Liverpool that’s different in itself.
Pockets of students and bohemians dotted around the city add to melting-pot feel, something that has been pushed out of the homogenised city centre a little, to my mind.
I lived in the Dingle for a year and during some of that time I signed on, also in the Dingle. I don’t think you’ve ever really experienced what it is to live in Liverpool until you’ve spent a lot of time in one of Liverpool’s inner-city boroughs. It was pretty rough, but apart from the lack of amenities I loved it.
Toxteth is at the centre of this whole phenomenon in Liverpool, bordering several very different areas in the city with their own communities and feel. And it’s in Toxteth that the most famous representations of ’scouseness’ can be found.
Over the years I’ve asked at least three different people to write articles on this matter, and I don’t feel we ever got any closer to pinning down what is so different about Liverpool.
In his rumination on ‘Livercool’ and writing in Black+White, Damo Jones pondered the duality between Liverpool as a cultural port, winning national praise from Isabella Blow for its grooviness, and its working-class roots and less salubrious side:
Would she have been swept away by the movers and shakers clad in shiny shoes and neatly-pressed shirts pole-axing each other on Slater Street over an orange woman on an energetic Friday night?Would she have been bowled over by the architectural delights of Granby and Toxteth? Would she have been woman enough to tackle shopping in the city centre on a Saturday – wearing that hat?Liverpool has lived long with a certain Scouse stigma; that is, if wasn’t tied down someone would nick it. An endemic caricature embodied by the likes of Harry Enfield and turned in a pseudo-Greek tragedy with elements of Ealing farce by everyone at Brookside.
The article had a grisly footnote. Blow committed suicide a few years later by drinking weedkiller.
Matthew Whitfield – also writing in Black+White – went further, alluding to Liverpool’s heritage, politics and racial mix.
For the article we pondered commissioning someone to draw the Lacoste crocodile crawling out of the Mersey, the Three Graces – Liverpool’s celebration and reminder of its glorious, and inglorious past, as a huge shipping port – in the background.
The city has its critics but has always possessed an amazing ability, inherent in its people and its sense of place, to defy them all with sheer creativity and a not-inconsiderable degree of bloody mindedness.This is still a city of immigration, with both asylum seekers and students bringing new influences, cultures and ideas to bear on a city that is more than used to welcoming strangers.This is a place with a heart and soul of its own – when it comes to style, Liverpool can’t be fooled and knows exactly what it wants.
So, are we any closer to an understanding of the city? Nope – I can rationalise it, but I don’t ‘get’ it. It’s something that has always eluded me and got me into trouble on occasion.
But while I can’t explain it, I don’t feel excluded by it. The city and its people do have their own ways but, as du Noyer notes, it’s a city used to welcoming people of all creeds and classes. I wouldn’t have stuck around if I didn’t like it.
It’s conceivable that I’ll raise children in this city, it’s not a prospect that concerns me. I’ll long defend Liverpool against shit jokes and sneering criticism. In most important respects this is my home now. But no child of mine will ever go down the offie in their pyjamas.
Image by Welovepandas via Creative Commons
8 Comments
Super post. You’ve put your finger on a lot of what I used to think when we lived there. The split personality – fierce pride coupled with a kind of couldn’t care less attitude – used to puzzle me.
Coincidentally, we lived in the Dingle for a year too, having moved there from Kensington.
Great post. But, really, great picture. Doesn’t the lovely Stuart Maconie call Liverpool the US’s easternmost state? That pic, to me, could easily have been taken in the West Village or something (and I don’t mean Crosby). Mind you, what do I know, I live in Birkenhead.
St Helens has its fair share of pyjama-clad young mums, and I’m routinely told I should get back to where I come from (eight miles down the round, to be accurate), so insular is the worldview round there. So maybe it’s something that has either spread out from town or is endemic in that area of Lancashire as a whole?
In any case, Liverpool fascinates me. I’m inordinately proud of the place and yet can overwhelmingly despise elements of it at times. What outsiders like you and Sandy must make of it, I’ve no idea. But I’m happy to call it home.
As a proud scouser myself, I agree with the your sentiments but I think the pyjama thing maybe more widespread and is simply people who are too fucking lazy to get dressed in the morning – or even the afternoon!
An awful lot of self-mythologising bollocks gets written about stuff like this, especially lazy twaddle which seeks to read the present backwards into the past. Get real. The girls aren’t making some ‘fuck-the-lot-of-youse’ neo-Barthian statement about pernicious performativity in late capitalism. They aren’t rooting their ‘cultural display’ in some radical alternative representation of style. They’re just slack & tasteless slappers, essentially harmless but without judgement or wit. Why else the ‘jouissance’ of walking round in curlers? Why else the tan, the bottle blonde, the ‘plaisir’ of six shots of vodka before they go out? The Liverpool ‘Judys’ haven’t changed in a century of sea songs and pop – chirpy, brassy & coarse; the screech of a parakeet and quickly run to seed.
OK, further to my earlier post, I have now consulted the ‘non plus ultra’ authority on this matter. No, not Paul du Noyer – my daughter (19)!
She says it’s unique to Liverpool, and it’s entirely WAG-led. She claims the pyjamas business took off a couple of years back when Alex Curran was snapped in her pjs getting into a limo, and heading off somewhere. Not knowing the full story (whatever that was), local girls thought it was the latest fashion, and copied it. Ditto for fake tan & black eyeliner. Ditto for curlers. Kicked off by Alex Curran, taken up by Abby Clancy, and slammed into the net by Coleen McLoughlin. I know you won’t believe me, so scroll through this
http://bit.ly/3u5dYM
Is it all tongue-in-cheek, in-yer-face irony? My daughter says emphatically not. There are grades of self-awareness, from ‘utter scally’ (lecky orange tan, red lippy, bleached hair, and pjs/curlers during the day) through to ‘restrained wannabe WAG’. But on the whole, the girls think it’s where the scene is – hard for them to know otherwise because they never leave the city.
I don’t see how that can be true. Girls were wearing pyjamas to go down the shops when I arrived in Liverpool back in the late 90s.
Alex Curran probably couldn’t even dress herself then. Assuming she can these days.
Don’t hold me to “a couple of years back”. It could be longer. My daughter seemed pretty definite about Alex Curran, although I could be mixing up pjs and curlers. She also confirms it’s unknown to girls from elsewhere (Notts Uni ‘focus group’) who regard the idea as bonkers. My lad (18) has now weighed in to argue pretty firmly that the pj thing is all about girls nipping down the shops, and it took off from there.
ps Alex Curran is no spring chicken