This looks like a book, WRITING LIVERPOOL Essays and Interviews Edited by MICHAEL MURPHY and DERYN REES-JONES.
https://epdf.tips/writing-liverpool-ess ... views.html P 248, seems to be by Paul du Noyer, Subversive Dreamers: Liverpool Songwriting from the Beatles to the Zutons
Paul du Noyer Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart – none of which, like the drug itself, commanded much support the first time around in Liverpool’s working-class communities – became the characteristic influence. Blues and primitive rock’n’roll were likewise rediscovered. An atavistic preference for the jangling guitars of Merseybeat opposed the high production sheen of the era. Tunes were at a premium. So, too, was a strangely torpid mysticism. Later pundits came to call this amalgam ‘Cosmic Scally’, but in 1989 it was personified by one group, the La’s. The La’s chief writer, Lee Mavers, helped devise at least two neo Merseybeat classics in ‘Timeless Melody’ and ‘There She Goes’; his bassist John Power carried the approach forward with his next group, Cast. The La’s, and Mavers in particular, were ill at ease in London’s music industry and the group fell apart, only to enjoy a posthumous reputation as prophets of Britpop, secured by the endorsement of Noel Gallagher from Oasis. Like their Liverpool contemporaries Rain and the Real People, The La’s return to pre-psychedelic song values, albeit subdued with a smoky quiescence of mind (‘I am the voyager of the ocean grey,’ goes ‘Liberty Ship’; ‘I wayfarer see fairway’), would become widely influential. Mavers resides, in rock legend, as a mysterious Lost Boy: the pop craftsman whose melodies sparkle in the gloom of a depressed city. Arguably, though, his achievements are surpassed by Michael Head of Shack (formerly of the Pale Fountains). Head’s songs, which have never won the widespread favour so regularly predicted for them, are immaculate examples of Liverpool’s tuneful yearning, even when set in the drug plagued estates of its grimmest districts. ‘Streets of Kenny’ (referring to Kensington, north-east of the city centre) documents an addict in search of his contacts, yet with a graceful swooping tune that pitches it as near to McCartney as to Lou Reed’s ‘Waiting for the Man’. Shack, too, reintroduced a sea-shanty feel that subsequent local acts fell upon with relish. Shack also championed West Coast psychedelic figurehead Arthur Lee of Love, backing him in Liverpool on a memorable live album. The marked affinity of so many local musicians with US acts has been a recurrent phenomenon; from the fast adoption of rock and R&B in the 1950s (in a city already steeped in country, with a significant jazz following, too) to the Eric’s generation’s taste for the cult imports, such as Television and Patti Smith, to the ‘retro-scally’ hunters of vinyl bargain bins. There is something strikingly omnivorous in this appetite for American music, entirely transcending that country’s internal divisions of race, region and cultural category. 248