'Liverpool Understood It Was Screwed. Its Reaction Was To Dance Harder, Celebrate Wildly And Ignore Tomorrow'

Thatcher piles on pressure in 1985 after the Miners' defeat. Billy is a local star with a covers band. Part 15 of Good Guys Lost contains a song for you to play while dancing on Keith Joseph's grave

Read part 14 of Good Guys Lost here

KNOWING THAT THE miners’ strike was a lost cause, I should have realised that Liverpool would lose its battle, too. Yet the euphoria in town made us delusional. Every night we would see news reports from Northern Ireland showing anarchy in Belfast and Derry. Streetfighting with the authorities was beamed into living rooms at teatime and normalised. It was thrilling to see unarmed youths taking on the army and the police. Most of the nation was disgusted to see the soldiers, their brave boys, coming under attack from those who wanted to destroy the British way of life. My sympathy was with the rioters. The ease with which the majority accepted that troops should be deployed on the streets of cities that were at least nominally part of the United Kingdom was appalling. Older patrons of the Green Man reminded us that, within living memory, the army were killing civilians outside the Rat just 500 yards down Vauxhall Road. I felt guilty not drinking in the Rat but it was a crap pub.

It looked like history might repeat itself. There were suggestions that the government would suspend the city council and install a commissioner backed up by troops to maintain security. We looked forward to the inevitable confrontation. One of my mates stockpiled petrol bombs, siphoning inflammable fluid from cars, adding, of course, a splash of washing-up liquid after decanting it into bottles. He wanted to make sure the burning gasoline stuck to anyone hit by the improvised explosive.

They were happy days, too. In October, there was news that made us believe that there was a chance to win. The IRA planted a bomb in the Grand Hotel at Brighton months before the Conservative Party Conference. When the device finally detonated it killed five people and narrowly missed Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister.

I was in the Honky Tonk on Scotland Road that night, raising a glass to the bombers. There was a party atmosphere. Even though by then we knew that Thatcher and her vulgarist backers were alive, well and more vindictive than ever, people were giddy with excitement. “Close,” a man at the bar said to no one in particular. “Next time they’ll get the bitch. Next time.”

The bitterness was entrenched. Heroin had hit the region and the bonds that held communities together were beginning to erode, which was exactly what the government wanted. Drugs were causing havoc on the edges of the city: in Croxteth to the north and on the Ford Estate, across the river on the Wirral. In L8, the scene of the Toxteth riots, a place held up as a symbol of British decline, the black community resisted hard drugs. The graffiti around Granby Street read: “This is Toxteth not Croxteth, strictly ganga.’ Heroin was not welcome there. There were still relatively few smackheads. Narcotics were coming, though.

Unexpectedly, Billy walked in to the Honky. He was with a couple of mates but he immediately came over and hugged me. “They nearly got her,” I said in his ear, elated with ale and whiskey. He shook his head.

“This is bad,” he said. “Bad for the Six Counties, bad for us. They will come for all their enemies. The worst years are coming.”

It made me shiver. After all he had been through, he was expecting worse. He was right, of course.

* * *

If you don’t want to wait for the next extracts, the paperback is available here

I could pick out a thousand moments and incidents that are symbolic of the seismic shift in British society that was taking place. This one is as good as any. On New Year’s Day 1985 the first mobile phone calls were made in the UK. It was technology that should have brought people together by making communication and contact easier. How could this advance in science lead to people becoming more isolated and undermine personal, one-to-one interaction? It would take another 25 years to find out.

The immediate effects were bad enough. Before the end of that month the newly privatised telecommunications monopoly announced that it was phasing out public phone boxes. They were a lifeline and a safety net when emergencies occurred in impoverished communities. Elsewhere it was different.

The south of England was booming and the foremen and their wives had their own phones, shares in British Telecom, cars on the drive and were looking forward to buying their council houses. They didn’t care about those who needed neighbourhood phones. The only message they wanted to communicate to us was that we were screwed.

Liverpool understood that. Its reaction was to dance harder, celebrate wildly and ignore tomorrow. Billy and his covers band became even more in demand.

There was a rage that drove Billy’s audiences that was more authentic and furious than punk. It did not manifest itself in violence but in crazed excess – all on a very limited budget. The group’s live performances gained legendary status because of the crowd reaction. More and more people flocked to the gigs to experience the madness.

There were no jobs. I was 24. Almost half of the young men below my age were unemployed. People with next to no money appeared to blow their entire bankroll as quickly as possible.

Because of this Billy was doing well financially. The band played six nights a week, culminating in the festival of scalliness at the Bierkeller every Saturday night. He was maudlin, though. On his night off, in the Glass House, he articulated his misery.

“This can’t last,” he said. “The city’s shrinking. Every year of school-leavers have less chance of making a success of their lives. When I was their age the possibilities seemed endless. They weren’t, but at least I went into adulthood with optimism. What chance do these kids have?” He was upset. “My kids are teenagers now. God knows what they’ll do. I don’t.”

I shared Billy’s fears. It wasn’t that young people were ignored, it was worse. There seemed to be a deliberate effort to misunderstand and alienate them. Mary Whitehouse and her ilk based a whole philosophy around the cry “Won’t somebody think about the children” but there was no real consideration for youth. If there had been, then more effort would have been put into creating jobs for school leavers.

In fact, the economy was stretching childhood way beyond where it should have ended. Without employment, young people had to remain living at home and rely on their parents. Instead of going into the world and fending for themselves, their only responsibility was to get up and sign on the dole on time once every two weeks. The economics of the 1980s were extending adolescence into people’s third and fourth decades.

* * *

You can’t live on the dole. You can survive but it’s no life. The giro cheque is enough for you to purchase the requisite calories to get you through two weeks but being barely able to nourish the body while the soul withers is pointless. It’s even worse than starving someone. It’s torture. The fruits of a consumerist society are dangled in front of you every day from every angle and you know you will never have the pleasure of tasting them. So, what do you do?

It is not money, cars, expensive clothes or holidays that people crave. They want expectation and opportunity. Billy had expectation. So did I, though it dwindled on my route to adulthood. It was a brief window. Opportunity and expectation were being slowly withdrawn by the vulgarists so that most of us didn’t notice. By the time it became clear what was happening it was too late. There was no going back. The generation behind me would bear the brunt.

The idiocy and lack of self-awareness of those in power was illustrated by their advice to relocate to a city where there was more potential employment. As if it was that easy. The message to us was ‘get on your bike.’ Billy turned it into a lyric:

“They’re telling us to move around for work but I just got nicked for stealing a bike.”

The line got to the nub of what was going on. The women and men in control had no empathy; they made the inane assumption that if they could make a success of their lives then anyone could. They wanted to believe life was a straight race, with everyone starting from the same point. It isn’t. It’s a handicap. Get the right start and you’re ahead and uncatchable. And as the vulgarists disappeared into the distance they left barriers behind them to make sure the trailing pack never got any closer.

So how do you survive? The robbers took the high-risk route. There were other ways of bringing in extra cash. Working on the side was Merseyside’s staple industry.

It was cheaper for some companies to employ the unemployed at paltry rates as casual workers under false names. I started to earn an extra few quid working in a warehouse in Canning Place, across the road from where the Albert Dock was being turned from a derelict swamp into a showpiece attraction.

This was a legitimate firm that was contracted to do mailshots for the big catalogue companies. These brochures were effectively department stores operating through the Royal Mail. Their advantage for the buyers was that the payments were staggered over up to 36 months. These were the days before credit cards were widespread so it made a huge variety of products available to those with little cash.

The bulky catalogues were backed up with promotional mailouts; anything from a single printed note in an envelope to an extra magazine-style supplement packed into a polybag to emphasise the latest bargains.

The post room of this business was crammed with two hundred or more shabby women stuffing envelopes and polybags for as little as £5 per thousand items. The dextrous and speedy could perhaps earn a fiver in two hours. For most it took much longer. The room was bare, dirty, cold and clogged with cigarette smoke. It buzzed with the murmur of downbeat womanhood. Me and the other warehouse boys delivered pallets of printed materials and envelopes to the working floor and removed the completed correspondence after it was packed into sacks. The heavy bags were hurled into cages, dragged to huge lifts and taken to the loading bay to be flung on to the back of 40-foot articulated lorries.

Of the 400 or so people that worked for this company every day, 95 per cent were illegal. Periodically, social security investigators would raid the building. The women worked on the sixth floor so there was invariably a short warning given but those who were not quick enough to scamper down the fire escape or disappear on to another floors were prosecuted for working while claiming benefits. The inspectors never sanctioned the company, who were profiting from the women. Government unemployment cheques effectively subsidised this commercial operation.

I was brighter and more articulate than the average warehouse lad and the managing director took a shine to me. He was a sharp, ruthless sort from the Wirral and saw exploitation as part of his birthright. He was not a bad man. He tried to give me a leg up and it would have been madness to turn down his offer of a job. Part of it was simple. He was a huge Liverpool fan and took vicarious pleasure in my away-game exploits. There was one problem. The removal of my bi-monthly giro cheque cut my income by a quarter.

One of the facts of British life was the ‘fiddle.’ Everyone had one, it seemed, at least in Liverpool. This was a way of making extra money from your employment. It usually involved some form of robbery. But ‘fiddle’ was a nice, fuzzy, inoffensive term and it was considered a perk of the position.

The company was responsible for maintaining two warehouses. One was a secure area that housed returned consumer goods that mail-order customers sent back. Some were damaged, some had been delivered to the wrong addresses. It was tempting to raid this security warehouse and sell on the stock. Most of it was eventually destroyed anyway. This would be more than a fiddle. It was clearly straightforward theft.

There was a less dangerous route. In the back warehouse sat pallet upon pallet of catalogues linked with promotions that had expired. Even the cheapest, most basic waste paper would earn £15 a ton. There were more than a hundred tons’ worth. There was one problem.

This was the warehouse manager’s fiddle, passed down with the position and almost part of the job description. He was a fat Evertonian who marched in the Orange Lodge. His name was Brian, a cowardly, thirtysomething bully. I watched him closely when I was working illegally. Vans would arrive with the words ‘we buy all grades of used waste paper’ on the side and he would order the lads to load them up, disappearing into the office while the deed was completed. It struck me that the other boys – especially the legal workers – had no idea they were complicit in this fiddle. As soon as the managing director gave me a proper job I was ready to take Brian on.

There was an ideological element to it. One of the mailshots sent out by the company was for the privatisation of British Telecom. While I humped sacks of letters offering the shares to the public on to a lorry, I listened to Brian talk to the Lancastrian driver of the truck. They probably did not realise I was paying attention; and, anyway, why would either have cared about the sweat-drenched scally lugging sacks?

They talked about buying their council houses. They were excited at the new opportunities to buy shares. Both wanted to be part of the Thatcherite revolution. The idea struck me that Fatboy Brian was using his fiddles to finance his foray into property and share ownership.

When he went on holiday I convened a meeting of the lads in the pub. The four boys – they were all younger than me – expressed shock that getting rid of the unused pallets could be anything other than company policy. Fatboy’s demeanour told me different. I took a chance.

I had made a note of the telephone number on the side of the truck. On the second day of the warehouse manager’s break I rang it. “Can you send a van round today, we’ve got stuff building up in the warehouse,” I said. The voice at the other end was sceptical. “Your boss didn’t mention it.”

“He told me on Friday before he shot off on holiday,” I said. The man was not convinced but a wagon arrived to take a load that afternoon.

For the rest of the week I had them come in twice a day, sometimes three times. On Fridays I’d noticed Brian disappeared for an hour just after lunchtime. It was about the length of time it would take to get to the waste paper yard and back.

So I went. The owner was suspicious. “The boss said come and get the cash,” I said.

“We only deal with Brian,” the man said. “He gets the money.”

I was calm and smiled. “He gives the boys a few quid on Friday for a night out. He asked me to make sure they got it when he was away. You wouldn’t want to see the lads go without a pint?”

He counted out the cash. It was £130, more than my weekly wage. As I went to take it he held onto it for a moment. He looked like a hard fella. “You be sure it gets to Brian,” he said. “And I’ll get you to sign a receipt.” Now I knew for certain I was right.

“Are you taking the piss because I’m on the dole?” I asked, staring him down. He let the money go.

“There better not be any funny business. I’ll be talking to your boss as soon as he gets back.”

With that I was off. I went back to the loading bay and gave each of the lads £20. I kept £50 for myself. We were sharing the risk but I was the one who would have to face down Fatboy. That’s how the fiddle worked. Everyone in the building seemed to be on the take from top to bottom. Only the underclass of women envelope stuffers were not getting their fair share.

* * *

Billy’s song about life on the dole, Is That The Way It Is? was recorded at Strawberry Studios in Stockport some time in October 1984. Billy had saved enough money to buy three days of recording time and he did a version of Slamming Doors, which he renamed Pursuit. It was an astute change. It made the song more enigmatic.

He brought me a tape when we met in Streets, a wine bar on Baltimore Street opposite Kirklands. It was quite trendy here but the bouncers were friendly and tolerated me and my mates when we arrived for a late drink on Saturday nights after away games. They always wanted to know whether there’d been any action. On a Tuesday, it was dead.

“I need to do more creative stuff,” Billy said. “Covers are fine and pay the rent.” He underlined that by sliding a tenner across to me. “Go and get the ale in.”

When I came back he returned to the theme. “But I’m 34 now. I still look young enough to get away with it but the clock’s ticking.”

I thought of those wasted years. He was still in his 20s when he had to disappear and while he was never a convincing punk he might have fitted perfectly into the new wave aftermath. Although he still looked youthful he was a man out of time. Since his return he had been playing catch up. That was clear when I listened to the Strawberry sessions. If I had heard this tape four years earlier I might have got excited. It wasn’t bad but things had moved on.

He sent the tape to Wild Momentum records, which was run by a talent spotter called Duncan Stevenson, a man who had developed a reputation for taking a chance on unknown bands and turning their best songs into quick hits. The cassette was returned and it had either been stopped after about 20 seconds or Stevenson had not rewound it properly. Only one out of those two options was plausible.

When Billy told me, I consoled him by saying he needed to play these songs live. A&R men were crawling all over The Farm and The La’s because of the buzz their performances were causing. The irony was that Billy was playing in front of the biggest following in the city every Saturday but only those in the audience cared.

I also suggested he restructure the tape and place Pursuit first rather than one of the more political songs. He had left the best to last. That never works.

The disappointment was too much, though. He had the air of a man who had given up. The instinctive charisma was being beaten out of him. He was stuck in a blind alley and did not know how to escape. Weren’t we all?

*

Is That The Way It Is? Written by Kevin McFarlane, Patrick Berry, Tony Evans. Sung By McFarlane. Dedicated to the memory of Keith ‘Get On Your Bike’ Joseph. Dance on his grave to this tune

• Next: Battling on the streets, the tipping point gets closer