Beer – FOOD, FILMS 'N' TINGS

Köln, Kölsch and Cola

Köln (aka ‘Cologne’) is the fourth largest city in Germany. Devastated by the extensive bombing campaigns of Allied aircraft during WW2, the city is essentially one of concrete, steel and glass and some what ‘thrown up’ in nature. So great was the bombing devastation that is some way past the interchange at Barbarossa Platz (where the southbound U Bahn to nearby Bonn rises to the surface), before you are amongst the older suburbs of turn of the century housing. Köln is, not a pretty city and there is, a fair amount of homelessness (even in the airport) and urban grime. Like Berlin or Hamburg, there is nothing neat or ‘twee’ about the place. Nevertheless, the city is friendly, cultural and full of character and it reminds us in a way of Manchester in the North of England.

Three key city landmarks spring to mind. Most important amongst them is the Cathedral, the Kölner Dom, it’s outline of blackened sandstone visible from miles around. It is the largest Gothic church in Northern Europe and is Germany’s most visited landmark.

Second in importance in our opinion is the Hohenzollern bridge with its three distinctive arches. It runs east of the main train station and crosses the Rhine. It is used by both pedestrians and trains and with the exception of the walls of hideous ‘love padlocks’ which line the railway fences along the bridge, it is an otherwise pleasant way to walk across the Rhine to the other side.

Clearly visible from the bridge are another city landmark, the three Kranhaus buildings of the Rhineauhafen urban regeneration area. The area was once a commercial harbour for loading and unloading goods from Rhine barges. Now the area’s most eye catching buildings, the three ‘Kranhaus’ loom over the river as if they were modern day harbour cranes of glass and steel.

Rhineauhafen is a commercial and aesthetic success in our opinion as is the revitalised MedienHafen district of nearby Düsseldorf, another former harbour area now a media industry district distinguished and enlightened by impressive architecture including Frank Gehry’s Neuer Zollhof buildings

Düsseldorf is forever associated with the artist Joseph Beuys who was the professor of monumental sculpture at the city’s art college, the Kunstakademie. The artist Paul Klee had also taught at the Academy.

Joseph Beuys outside the Kunstakademie. ‘Wer nicht denken will, fliegt raus’.

Kõln and Düsseldorf between them produced two of Germany‘s most innovative and influential music groups, Can from Köln and Kraftwerk from Düsseldorf. You cannot underestimate the influence the music of these two groups had on popular Western musical culture from Rock to Techno, from Hip Hop to Electronica. If you add Donna Summer (who was identified with the Munich scene) to the work of Can and Kraftwerk you more or less have the blueprint for the electronic dance music of the UK and USA which was to evolve in the 80s and 90s

Kraftwerk even extended their influence to London’s ‘Ebony Steel Band’. They who covered Kraftwerk songs in their 2021 album ‘Pan Machine’. The album’s name is a pun on Kraftwerk’s 1978 album ‘Man Machine’, a ‘Pan’ being the nickname of the oil drums played in a Steel Band.

As for classical music, the nearby city of Bonn (easily reached from Köln by U- Bahn) is the birthplace of Beethoven. His family home, the Beethoven House, is the most popular attraction in the city for visitors.

Köln is especially well known for two popular drinks, the first is a soda (‘afri cola’) and the second is the local style of beer known as ‘Kölsch’.

Afri cola is a very high caffeine (250m/L to Coca Cola’s 32 m/L), ‘old fashioned’ tasting local soda, first manufactured in Köln in 1931. The birthplace of the drink can be found in the grounds of the Courtyard by Marriot hotel on Dagobertstraße, north of the main train station. The original stoneware tanks used in the production process of the drink‘s syrups are housed in the hotel’s reception area, afri cola graphics adorn the walls.

The drink’s popularity peaked in the 60’s when the brand was advertised on German TV via a ‘risqué’ TV commercial by Ad Director Charles Wilp whose 1968 creation for the brand featured super stars of the day Donna Summer, Marianne Faithfull, Amanda Lear, and Marsha Hunt as well as a leather clad biker and a moustachioed Vietnam era US soldier with the commercial set to a discordant sound track.

https://youtu.be/RW-_8okYW5I – follow the link to the 1968 advert, well worth watching.

Although it had been hugely successful, the drink was more or less discontinued by the 1990’s. Foreign competition from the likes of Coca-Cola, a change in the recipe and a reduction in the caffeine content all contributed to the brands’s demise. However, the drink was revived thereafter with its original, taste, high caffeine content and logo resurrected. The drink is readily available all over the city including at an atmospheric bar/restaurant, the Gaststätte Max Stark on Unter Kahlenhausen, near the cola’s original source on Dagobertstraße.

The Max Stark is also a great place to drink a glass of the city’s unique beer, Kölsch. a light, fine tasting drink. The term Kölsch is a protected designation of origin in the EU and it can only be used for a specific type of beer made within 50km of Köln and which has been brewed to a defined standard.

Kölsch is served in a tall, thin glass known as a ‘stange’ in small 200mm measures. The glasses keep the beer cold and help it to retain a frothy head.

Kölsch is traditionally served by rather ‘stern’ waiter known as a ‘kobe’ who circles the bar handing patrons glasses of Kölsch from a circular tray known as a ‘kranz’ . Each time a customer takes a beer the waiter marks a piece of card with the tally. As is the custom with the Brazilian currasqueria, the kobe will continue serving until the customer places a beer mat over the glass indicating that they have had enough.

Inside, the bar is cool and dark. Older regulars line the tables to the left as you walk inside. To the right is the main restaurant area with it’s fulsome plates of German food and, of course, Kölsch.

Nevertheless, in our opinion it is Turkish food that reigns supreme in the city.

Prost!

Munich, Art and Beer

The Haus der Kunst (‘House of Art’) is a contemporary art museum located on the corner of an intersection where Von-der-Tan Straße becomes Prinzregentenstraße in the city of Munich. Whilst the museum exhibits art of the present, the museum building itself dates from 1937 being originally built under the Nazi’s to house work that regime considered true ‘German Art’. Hubert Wim, a pro-Nazi artist explained at the time that the latter exhibition was about the “representation of the perfect beauty of a race steeled in battle and sport, inspired not by antiquity or classicism but by the pulsing life of our present-day events”.

In reality the Exhibition staged the kind of pompous, sterile rubbish beloved of fascists everywhere. Meanwhile across town at the Institute of Archeology in the nearby Hofgarden, the Nazi’s staged a counter presentation of work the regime hated, work which they felt evinced the ‘moral decay’ of the Weimar era. That exhibition was of ‘Entartete Kunst’ (‘Degenerate Art’) and it featured work drawn from the modernist spheres of Dada and Surrealism. The Exhibition’s raison d’être was the mockery and denigration of the avant-garde by linking it’s concepts with an alleged Jewish-Bolshevik plot to undermine the ‘wholesome family values’ of the Nazi state.

The exhibits at that exhibition were a small portion of the 16,000 art works seized at the time which the State deemed ‘degenerate’. Many of these works were then sold by the State overseas for “hard“ cash“ whilst some 5000 were burned in Berlin, mirroring the ritual destruction of thousands of literary works in book burnings across Germany a few years previously.

Paintings by artists of the calibre of Otto Dix, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, George Grosz went on show at the exhibition. The works were deliberately hung askew on the walls with adjacent graffiti mocking the artists and the subject matter of the paintings. The idea was to rubbish the art by presenting the paintings as morally and artistically worthless.

Portrait of the journalist Sylvia von Harden, 1926 by Otto Dix

Unsurprisingly, given the quality of the artists whose work was on involuntary display, the Exhibition of Degenerate Art attracted significant crowds of visitors whilst across town the dismal counter event of the Nazi approved Great German Art Exhibition drew a far smaller crowd

Today, the Haus der Kunst looms somewhat forlorn and sullen on the Prinzregentenstraße in the centre of the city where it stands as a space for contemporary modern art, the exact opposite of it’s original function. In its interior it’s cool, spectral rooms and corridors eventually end up at the surprisingly elegant and atmospheric Golden Bar. The murals in the Golden Bar date from 1937 and it’s centrepiece chandelier came from the Hotel Savoy in Zurich.

Beautifully renovated in 2010, the Golden Bar opens out on to a terrace whose columns are crowned with a lengthy banner of Yiddish slang, Meshugener, Alter Kocker, Pisher, Plosher….The banner is an art work named ‘The Joys of Yiddish’ by the American artist, Mel Bochner and it is now a permanent fixture, having originally been exhibited in 2013 and then reinstalled in 2021. The banner’s text is rendered in yellow letters on a black background, the same colours used for the ‘Star of David’ patches and armbands worn to identify and denigrate Jewish citizens.

Modern Art survives in splendour in Munich and of the city’s many galleries a special mention should be made of the Pinakothek der Moderne, one of Europe’s largest collections of contemporary design, architectural and artistic installations.

Classic designs at the Pinakothek der Moderne

The museum exhibits include a favourite of ours ‘Sledge’ by the artist Joseph Beuys as well as a reproduction of the iconic image of that artist titled ‘La rivoluzione siamo Noi’ (The Revolution is Us) produced for an exhibition in Naples 1971 featuring Beuys striding towards the camera in his trade mark fedora and fishing vest.

According to Beuys, his art was shaped by his experience as a Luftwaffe pilot during WW2 when the plane he was flying was attacked and shot down and he crashed into a Crimean landscape peopled by nomadic Tartars who saved him from freezing by wrapping his body in a heat retaining mix of felt and fat before taking him to safety on a sledge pulled by dogs. A wonderful story indeed and one upon which Beuys built his mythology. Nevertheless, as influential on Beuys though it may well have been, the story is probably little more than fiction.

‘Patti Smith 1’, a large scale painting by the Swiss born artist Franz Gertsch also hangs at the Pinakothek der Moderne. The work is the first in a series of five paintings of the American poet/musician by Gertsch dating from 1977. Four of the five paintings in the series were created by Gertsch from a poetry reading Smith gave at Galerie Veith Turske in Cologne in 1977 on the anniversary of the death of Arthur Rimbaud. An illicit recording was made of the performance and later released on a cassette tape. An article Smith wrote for ‘Hit Parader’ magazine about her visit to the city at the time can be found here http://www.up-to-date.com/bowie/heroes/smith.html.

Around the corner from the Pinakothek der Moderne is another modern art gallery, Museum Brandhorst with it’s distinctive ceramic exterior.

The museum has a permanent exhibition of the work of the late American artist, Cy Twombly, one of the largest collections of work by the artist in the world. In fact, the entire first floor of the museum is dedicated to his work. This is not so surprising as Twombly had a special relationship with Munich, a city where he exhibited frequently and of which he was exceptionally fond.

Behind the Brandhorst and back to the grounds of the Pinakothek der Moderne we found a welcome collection of food trucks and a hopeful dog at a cheese stall.

The dog should have made it’s way to the Viktualienmarkt a daily food market in the center of Munich near the St Peter’s church! Dating from the early 1800’s the market has over a 100 food and craft stalls as well as the city’s most central beer garden.

There is also a smaller beer garden at the ever popular Kleine Ochs’nbrater with its organic sausages, pretzels, fried potatoes, cabbage and, of course, wheat beer from the local Landshut brewery. Much as we loved the food, beer and busy ambience at this café, we felt that overall, the curry wurst in Berlin is generally better than the same dish in Munich.

….but if beer is your drink of choice, you have come to the right place. Munich is indeed a beer drinkers paradise with some of the best breweries in the world within its environs. Our favourite ‘staple’ is the Paulaner Münchner Hell, a classic light beer dating from a brewery first established in 1684.

Modern craft breweries are also making their mark on the Munich beer scene with the Schiller brewery particularly noteworthy. The brewery is housed on their premises on the Scillerstraße which is near city’s main railway station. Their copper mash and brewing tuns are housed at the front of their premises whilst their beer is served with very traditional local food in the restaurant behind. Their beers range from light and dark brews to a classic wheat beer. Food includes sour vinegar dumplings, schnitzels, pork and potatoes.

Finally, we will let another poet , T.S.Eliot, an influence on both Patti Smith and whose poem ‘The Waste Land’ was of particular interest to Cy Twombly. Elliot mentions two Munich locations in the extract from the poem below.

“April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. “

T. S. Elliot, “The Waste Land,” 1922

Court Green, Plath, Patti and Beer

Court Green is a house in the county of Devon in the far south west of England. It was the home of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Plath wrote most of her celebrated Ariel collection of poems whilst living with Hughes at Court Green. When the couple separated, Plath moved to London with her two small children to the house where WB Yeats had once lived. It was here that she committed suicide in 1963.

Hughes continued to live in the house until his death in 1998. A ‘secret’ stone memorial lays on a remote hillside on nearby Dartmoor. The memorial, especially requested by Hughes, lay undiscovered in its moorland location for years until it was uncovered by walkers. Although the memorial stone and its whereabouts were known to friends of Hughes, it’s exact location was kept secret to prevent it becoming a shrine to the poet.

By way of a contrast, the grave of the poet’s former wife, Sylvia Plath is very much a shrine to the late author, attracting visitors from across the world.

Sylvia Plath is buried in St. Thomas’ Churchyard in the village of Heptonstall in West Yorkshire. The village lies above the historic town of Hebden Bridge. It is surrounded by rugged moorland. Although she had separated from Hughes at the time of her death, they were not divorced. Hughes was from the village of Mytholmroyd near to Heptonstall, and he chose the latter as the site of her burial.

Heptonstall is, a small, cobblestoned settlement of a couple of pubs, a post office , a gift shop and a great café for coffee and cakes. It is a mixed community made up of those from the locale and incomers to the area attracted by the village’s picturesque beauty.

Sylvia Plath’s grave can be found in the New Cemetery which is to the left of the church. As you approach the headstones looking for her plot, an elderly gentleman called Stuart may well be waiting close by to guide you to the site. He is a charming, helpful individual who has lived in the village his whole life. He knew the Hughes family and although he did not know Sylvia Plath, his care in maintaining her grave and his assistance to the many admirers of her work who come from far and wide to visit the site, has earned him the gratitude of her surviving daughter Frieda (Plath’s son Nicolas committed suicide in Alaska in 2009). Stuart keeps a record of the number of visitors to the site and where they are from. As well as visitors from the UK, well wishers from all over the world (especially the US) make their way to the grave, many leaving a pen in a container under the headstone which has been left there for that purpose.

The jar full of pens is just about visible

When we visited, the full name Sylvia Plath Hughes was clearly visible on the headstone although the name Hughes appeared to be somewhat faded. Stuart explained that some admirers of the poet blamed Ted Hughes for her suicide and tried to deface the name Hughes on the headstone. Stuart had cleaned up their attempts and had been personally thanked by Frieda for his efforts apparently.

One American visitor is poet and musician Patti Smith who has made the journey to the grave several times. Her memoirs ‘M Train’ from 2015 recounts her three visits to Plath’s grave including one she made with her sister who was keen to visit nearby Brontë country, a location especially popular with Japanese visitors who are especially enamoured of the sisters.

Smith is reverential towards other great artists and her M Train memoir describes her visits to the Japanese gravestones of poet and ultra nationalist Yukio Mishima, Ryūnosuke Akutugawa, father of the Japanese short story, and the revered author Osamu Dazai. All three had committed suicide.

Schrader’s outstanding ‘Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters’

The grave of another American poet, Asa Benveniste also lies in the churchyard. His gravestone reads “Foolish Enough to Have Been a Poet”. Benveniste was not only a poet but a publisher as well. As the founder of the Trigram Press in London in 1965 he specialised in publishing the work of Beat Generation writers including William Burroughs and Gregory Corso.

Patti Smith is a clear fan of the Beat writers. She told the Beatdom literary journal in 2012

‘I was very attached to William [Burroughs]. I knew Gregory, Gregory Corso, very well…

I was very privileged to know these people and I had different relationships with them all. Gregory was very, very important to me in my learning process of how to deliver poems live…and in my reading list.

But William was the one I was most attached to. I just adored him. I had sort of a crush on him when I was younger and he was very good to me.’

Asa Benveniste once ran a bookshop in the nearby town of Hebden Bridge, a cultural place in its own right. The town has an excellent venue in The Trades Club where many great performers (including Patti Smith) have played over the years.

We do not know whether Patti Smith visited the grave of Asa Benveniste when she visited Heptonstall as she does not mention the poet’s grave in her writing to the best of our knowledge.

What we do know is that Patti Smith is, like us, a cat lover having kept the animals since childhood.

Patti Smith in 1974. Photo by Robert Mapplethorpe

Sylvia Plath was certainly a feline admirer. As well as writing the poem ‘Ella Mason And Her Eleven Cats’ she created the following drawing in 1956.

The churchyard at St. Thomas’ is no stranger to cats. Whilst we stood before Plath’s headstone, a large black beastie who Stuart named as Otto was roaming through the graves a few feet away. When we approached him he slunk further into the brambles, his tail swishing behind him.

Sylvia Plath was both influenced by the wild Yorkshire moors and by the Brontë sisters and Wuthering Heights in particular. The Brontë family home was at Haworth, a few miles from Heptonstall.

Plath wrote the following in a letter to her mother in the US in 1956 after a visit to the moors and the Brontë home in Haworth in 1956.

‘I never thought I could like any country as well as the ocean, but these moors are really even better, with the great luminous emerald lights changing always, and the animals and wildness. Read Wuthering Heights again here and really felt it this time more than ever. ‘

After visiting the grave on an especially bleak winter’s day, Smith made the following comment in her excellent book M Train:

It was such a desolate place in winter, so lonely. Why had her husband buried her here? I wondered. Why not New England by the sea, where she was born, where salt winds could spiral over the name PLATH etched in her native stone?

In an extract from her Journals, Plath describes the moors in a way that only someone who loves them can:

‘…..across the slow heave, hill on hill from any other direction across bog down to the middle of the world, green-slimed, boots squelchy – brown peat – earth untouched except by grouse foot – bluewhite spines of gorse, the burnt-sugar bracken – all eternity, wildness, loneliness – peat-colored water – the house – small, lasting, pebbles on roof, name scrawls on rock – inhospitable two trees on the lee side of the hill where the long winds come, piece the light in a stillness. The furious ghosts nowhere but in the heads of the visitors & the yellow-eyed shag sheep.’

In 1961 Plath wrote her own poem entitled ‘Wuthering Heights’ an extract from which reads

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright

Among all horizontals.

The grass is beating its head distractedly.

It is too delicate

For a life in such company;

In 2013 Patti Smith played a small acoustic set at the Brontë schoolroom in Haworth in aid of the Brontë society. She is an enthusiastic admirer of the sisters as is her own sister, Linda who also visited at the time. She gave a ‘shout out’ to Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff and Cathy at the gig apparently.

Emily Brontë is buried in the family vault at St. Michael and All Angels’ Church, Haworth.

The village of Heptonstall and the adjacent town of Hebden Bridge are a part of the Upper Calder Valley which includes Cragg Vale which is situated high on the Pennine moorland.

Cragg Vale has two breweries, Vocation (www.vocationbrewery.com) and the Little Valley brewery (www.littlevalleybrewery.co.uk).

Our favourite brews locally are the Little Valley beers. The brewery has been around since 2005 when it was formed after a Dutch farmers son met a Geordie lady (i.e someone from Newcastle in the North East of England) whilst cycling in Kathmandu.

Their beers are 100% organic and better tasting for it in our opinion.

With all these words about poets, Japan, beer and cats, we thought we would ‘attempt’ a Haiku for you.

A Haiku

Wintry eventide

A tiny tabby cat purrs

Enjoying the beer

Manchester, Refuge and Nico

The Kimpton Hotel & Restaurant Group is a San Francisco based chain specialising in unique boutique accommodation. Their ‘Clocktower’ hotel in Manchester in the North West of England is no exception. Housed in the Victorian era gothic architecture of the offices of the former Refuge Assurance Company, the distinctive terracotta facade of this imposing building together with the clocktower which gives the hotel its name, dominates this corner of the city.

The hotel lobby is especially impressive with its elegant glass dome and marbled walls and floors.

The Kimpton Clocktower often puts on small photographic exhibitions. As a part of the celebration of International Women’s Day on the 8th March, the hotel is currently hosting an exhibition of the works of photographers Anne Worthington (locally born) and the late Tish Murta who was from South Shields in the blighted North East of England. Both photographers captured the lives of ordinary people in poor communities. Worthington and Murta between them produced some of the best photographs nationally, photographs that are a long way from the society portraits of Cecil Beaton and Earl Snowdon and better for it in our opinion.

The hotel houses one of the most amenable spaces in the city, ‘The Refuge’ with its restaurant specialising in an ever changing small plate menu, games room (the ‘Den’ with its football machines), an indoor Winter Garden (under glass – this is Manchester after all!), and a beautiful Public Bar.

The Refuge was created when local DJ’s Justin Crawford and Luke Cowdrey, aka ‘The Unabombers’, joined forces with a business group and brought their own personality and expertise into the design and overall ‘feel of the recreational area of the hotel. They are also the force behind the popular Elektrik bar and Volta eatery, both situated in the south of the city

However, it was as ‘The Unabombers’ DJ duo that Luke and Justin made a name for themselves internationally. Their influential nights named ‘The Electric Chair’ were based just a few minutes walk away from where The Refuge is now situated, at a small below stairs venue known as the ‘Music Box’. The Electric Chair cemented the duo’s reputation for hosting a truly underground night which attracted with only the very best national and international DJ’s. We are not talking about any of the many dreadful ‘hands in the air, piano breakdown’ type DJ’s who were legion at the time but innovators such as François K, Danny Krivit and of course Joe Claussel. Claussel from New York’s legendary Body & Soul was asked about The Electric Chair and commented: ‘I rarely play in the UK, but I can’t explain in words how great that party was. To me it’s all about energy and that place had one of the greatest energies I’ve experienced as a DJ anywhere.’

A short walk from the former Music Box venue will find you in the centrepiece of St Peter’s Square with its statue of suffragette and political activist Emmeline Pankhurst, named by TIME magazine in 1999 as one of the top 100 most important persons of the 20th Century. She was born in the nearby district of Moss Side and she is best remembered for organising the UK suffragette movement and helping women win the right to vote for parliamentary representation.

Across from Pankhurst’s statue is the city’s refurbished central library and theatre where another unique woman, Christa Päffgen aka Nico recorded her live album ‘Heroine’ in 1980 when she was living in the city. The album was released some 15 years after the concert was held to great acclaim.

Nico had been, of course, the muse of the film director Fellini, a model for Vogue and Chanel, an associate of Andy Warhol and a former girlfriend of French actor Alain Delon and singer Bob Dylan. Although an early member of the Velvet Underground in New York, in our opinion it is her remarkable (some would say ‘difficult’) solo work that is her greatest legacy with two albums in particular, The Marble Index in 1968 and Desertshore in 1970 being exemplary works, quite unlike anything heard before or since. Strange and disquieting.

Frozen Warnings

At the time Nico lived in Manchester the city was not in good state. It was grubby with high unemployment and pretty dilapidated. It was not an attractive place at the time.

Hulme district of Manchester – early 80’s

Local guitarist Martin Bramah who played with Nico commented however that “she didn’t see the grubby, industrial city I grew up in. She’d gaze at the Victorian architecture and say this is so romantic.” Her pianist at the time, James Young echoed her apparent affection for the city noting ‘Nico liked Manchester. It was a dark gothic city and was in a state of semi-dereliction at the time; empty Victorian warehouses, factories closing down. She said it reminded her of Berlin, the ruined city of her youth.”

Nico enjoyed a beer and a game of pool with the locals pubs in Hulme and The Foresters in Salford being some of her haunts.

Across from the Central Library is a monument to the Peterloo massacre of 1819 when 15 protesters were murdered by cavalry as they charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people in St Peter’s Square who had gathered there to demand votes for all and the reform of parliamentary representation.

A few doors down is the site of the old Free Trade Hall now a Radisson hotel with its highly rated contemporary Japanese restaurant. The old Free Trade Hall is best remembered locally as a concert venue for everything from classical to popular music. The Hall was famously the venue for the cry of ‘Judas’ which greeted the formerly strictly acoustic Bob Dylan when he introduced his new electric band to the audience in 1966. The concert and the taunt of ‘Judas’ are immortalised on the bootleg recording The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4 released some 32 years after the event.

The ‘Judas’ heckle at the Free Trade Hall:-

Judas!

We’ll leave the last word to Nico. Apparently when asked how she would like to be remembered, she remarked: “By a tombstone.”

Liverpool. Art, Poets and Pubs

Yoko Ono at the Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool in 1967

The Bluecoat gallery in Liverpool in the North West of England is a beautiful contemporary arts centre set in a 300 years old building. The gallery is centrally based and although it is surrounded by dull retail stores, it is an oasis of calm and a great place to while away some time. As well as the gallery, there is a cafe, a book store and the contemporary houseplant shop ‘Root’.

At the reception you are greeted by a commissioned work by the artist Babak Ganjei.

Another commissioned work on display in the foyer is the frieze ‘Summer’ by local artist Sumuyya Khader.

Sumuyya Khader (exhibiting under the programme title ‘Always Black Never Blue’) was one of three artists featured in the gallery on the day we visited along with London based Rosa-Johan Uddoh (‘Practice Makes Perfect’) and Deborah Roberts (‘A Look Inside’).

As noted above, the exhibition introduced us to the work of Sumuyya Khader. This was her first UK solo show in a public gallery. Khader has a studio in Liverpool 8 (of which more later) and runs Granby Press (named after the area’s most important and iconic thoroughfare, Granby Street), a community based printing project .

Her LinkedIn entry notes

‘Currently in conversations to develop a Black culture & history centre in the L8 area of Liverpool. A space for past, present and future with a focus on education and support‘.

We managed to buy a print of one of Sumuyya Khader’s works from her online shop at https://www.sumuyyakhader.com. The print we ordered, ‘The Revolutionaries’ is inspired by the film director Steve McQueen’s film, ‘Lovers Rock’, part of a series of five films he made under the title ‘Small Axe’ (‘if you are the big three, we are the small axe’ sang Bob Marley) charting the lives of Black Britains from the 60s to the 80s. The films were recently shown by the BBC.

‘Lovers Rock’ is a film of a London house party in the 1970’s. Reggae is the party’s soundtrack. The most memorable moment in the film is the that where the guests are seen dancing to Janet Kay’s lovers rock hit ‘Silly Games’ and then singing the song as an acapella. The thundering reggae instrumental ‘Kunte Kinte Dub’ (credited to The Revolutionaries, the house band at the Channel 1 recording studio in Jamaica) follows not long afterwards. The Dub provokes joy and excitement in the partygoers with its trade mark synth line and bellowing foghorn introduction, the scene ultimately influencing the content and title of Khader’s work above.

The Bluecoat has a venerable reputation for staging innovative artists. Looking at a list of past exhibitors at the gallery we came across an entry for Don Van Vliet, better known as R&B legend Captain Beefheart. The Captain was a ‘total artist’, a painter, singer, writer and performer. His exhibition at the Bluecoat, way back in 1972, was the first time the Captain’s painting had been publicly exhibited anywhere in the world.

Captain Beefheart at the Bluecoat in 1972

Another ‘total artist’ who embraced music, art, writing and performance, was local innovator Adrian Henri. Henri is probably best known as one of the Liverpool poets who came to prominence in the 1960’s and the founder of the poetry-rock group Liverpool Scene. Henri and his compatriots, Roger McGough and Brian Patten brought the influential ‘Mersey Beat’ poetry to the UK and beyond by using the same language, the same people and their lives as the Beatles were using in their songs. As well as poetry and performance, Henri was an established artist who exhibited several times at the Bluecoat.

An aubergine, presumably from Granby Street

Henri lived for much of his life in Liverpool 8, amidst the crumbling Georgian streets near the Art College and Anglican cathedral. As he noted ‘I cannot imagine what it would have been like to be a poet and not live here; or, indeed, whether I would have become a poet at all’.

His work ‘Autobiography’ lists the names of streets in the in and around Liverpool 8.

Rodney St pavement stretching to infinity

Italian garden by the priest’s house

seen through the barred doorway on Catherine St

pavingstones worn smooth for summer feet

St James Rd my first home in Alan’s flat

shaken intolerable by Cathedral bells on Sundays

Falkner Sq. Gardens heaped with red leaves to kick in autumn

Gambier Terrace loud Beatle guitars from the first floor

Sam painting beckoning phantoms hiding behind painted words bright colours in the flooded catfilled basement

Granby Street bright bazaars for aubergines and coriander

Blackburne House girls laughing at bus-stops in the afternoon

Blackburne Place redbrick Chirico tower rushing back after love at dinnertime.

Another poet, another ‘total artist’ of Liverpool 8 is the writer and performer Levi Tafari.

Born in Liverpool 8 to Jamaican parents Levi Tafari’s Wikipedia entry notes:-

‘Tafari self-identifies as an Urban Griot (the griot being the traditional consciousness raiser, storyteller, newscaster and political agitator)’.

As Tafari himself says ‘Liverpudlians are affectionately known as scousers, and scouse is a stew made of many ingredients’. He is a formally trained French chef and an alumni of the Liverpool 8 Writers Workshop. He is an established poet and performer who has taken his work all over the world.

Another Liverpool 8 poet and artist is Malik Al Nasir. After a tough early start in life he met the legendary writer, poet, musician, activist and ‘total artist’ Gil Scott Heron, the legendary influence behind rap (and much else) on a visit to the city. Gil took Malik under his wing and encouraged and mentored him through a masters degree and into a life of poetry and creativity.

Malik Al Nasir’s powerful memoir ‘Letters to Gil’ explores his ‘story of surviving physical and racial abuse and discovering a new sense of self-worth under the wing of the great artist, poet and civil rights activist Gil Scott-Heron’. The forward to the book is by another noted poet, Manchester born Lemn Sissay.

Liverpool is still a great city for characterful pubs. Pubs have been closing en masse throughout the UK during the past few years. Many have been successfully turned into ‘gastro pubs’ combining quality food, drink and hopefully ambiance. Nevertheless, there are still ‘traditional’ boozers left, especially in Liverpool and we’ll mention a few here (even if they serve decent food along with the drinks!).

Adrian Henri is there to help us. His ‘Poem for Liverpool 8’ mentions some of the pubs he frequented in the city although all of the following are on their way to Liverpool 8 from the city centre rather than in the district itself.

drunk jammed in the tiny bar in The Cracke

drunk in the crowded cutglass Philharmonic

drunk in noisy Jukebox O’Connor’s

As you leave the Bluecoat, immediately to your right is the venerable ‘Old Post Office’ public house. The Old Post Office is an old fashioned ‘does what it says on the tin’ Victorian pub and it is a delightful place to while away an hour or two.

Other great pubs follow as you move away from the city centre itself. Around a 10 minutes walk from the Bluecoat as you walk up Hardman Street towards the Philharmonic Hall and Georgian terraces, is the Fly in the Loaf bar (although we always refer to it by its old name of ‘Kirklands’). With its long interior bar, tiled floor and mosaicked entrance, it was a formerly called Kirklands Bakery as the external signage notes saying ‘Vienna Bakery – Bakers to the Queen – Kirkland Bros – Scotch Confectioners’ and ‘By Royal Appointment’ (to Queen Victoria no less!). Although the bar may not be as consequential as it was in the 70s and 80s when it was a preferred haunt of local footballers and celebrities, it is still a great place for a drink and ambiance!

Tiled entrance to the Fly in the Loaf and the old name of the bakery

On the other side of the road to the Fly in the Loaf was an old bar called O’Connor’s Tavern which had been both a synagogue and then a morgue in a previous existence. The Tavern had a legendary jukebox and was popular with the Mersey Poets including of course, Adrian Henri. Henri once met Yoko Ono at the Bluecoat where she was exhibiting (in 1967, she returned to the gallery in 2008) and took her for a drink at O’Connors. Regulars of the Tavern, including the landlord are featured on the cover of The Liverpool Scene album ‘Amazing Adventures of’.

O’Connors is long gone and the site has changed hands several times since those days. Showing our age, we remember it when it was a wood lined bar called ‘Chaucers’.

A short walk further up the hill will bring you to The Philharmonic pub (‘the Phil’) surely one of the UK’s most spectacular ‘boozers’. The Phil is a Grade 1 listed building and if you ever get the chance to visit Liverpool, do stop for a drink here.

Across the road from The Phil is the Philharmonic Hall. Although a concert venue (and in particular, we remember seeing jazz poet Gil Scott Heron perform there), the Hall’s upstairs bar is an Art Deco masterpiece and worth a visit in its own right.

Another short walk away from the Hall takes you to ‘Ye Cracke’, a legendary pub not only frequented by Adrian Henri and John Lennon but by generations of students from the nearby Art College.

Away from Ye Cracke and into the outskirts of Liverpool 8 proper is Peter Kavanghs pub. Our personal favourite in the UK, we’ve never seen such a great mix of people drinking in one bar before. Ambiance galore!

We’ll leave Gil Scott Heron to have the last word.

‘A good poet feels what his community feels.

Like if you stub your toe, the rest of your body hurts’.

‘

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