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It has involved 4½years of planning, £95 million of spending, and a saga of feuding and bloodletting that makes Wagner’s Ring look like a vicar’s tea party.

But at the symbolic hour of 20.08 last night Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture finally burst into life with one of the weirder spectacles in the history of Western civilisation: Ringo Starr, very much the lesser of the two remaining Beatles, performing his new single, Liverpool 8, precariously perched on a platform 100ft in the air at a free open-air concert outside and on top of St George’s Hall, in the heart of the city.

“Destiny was calling, I just couldn’t stick around; Liverpool I left you, but I never let you down,” sang the man who had admitted earlier in the day that he had no idea what sort of city Liverpool now is.

The show, performed to a massive crowd in front of Lime Street Station, was nothing if not all-embracing. Several hundred local singers crooned while fireworks exploded from all available edifices. Cranes and cargo containers danced in the night sky. Rock guitarists and drummers duelled and duetted from the rooftops of buildings half a mile apart. Big screens celebrated Liverpool’s artists and writers by wittily adding them to a pastiche of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album cover.

There was also a gymnastic display by acrobats suspended in mid-air, wearing builders’ hats and waving semaphore flags; and an interminable procession of local schoolchildren carrying what were doubtless deeply meaningful illuminated boxes. Spine-thuddingly noisy, the 45-minute spectacle wasn’t to everybody’s taste. “We want Ken Dodd,” one Scouse wit shouted.

Still, it will get better. Tonight such stalwarts of Liverpool’s “rockocracy” as Echo and the Bunnymen, Pete Wylie of the Mighty Wah, Dave Stewart and the Wombats gather in the new 10,000-seat, swallow-shaped Echo Arena down on the waterfront to enact a theatrical epic called Liverpool: The Musical.

After that, however, the intellectual curve of Liverpool’s year as Capital of Culture gets considerably steeper. The Tate Liverpool is hosting Britain’s first blockbuster retrospective of Gustav Klimt. Monets and Manets will go on show at the Walker Art Gallery. The Metropolitan Cathedral will house an exhibition devoted to the seminal 20th-century architect Le Corbusier.

The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, revitalised under its brilliant young Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko, is giving no fewer than 30 world premieres throughout the year. Pete Postlethwaite will play King Lear in the Everyman, where he cut his theatrical teeth in the 1960s. And a Chekhov play, retitled Three Sisters on Hope Street, will be staged in a postwar Liverpool context.

The Tall Ships race, the Open golf championship and the National Ballet of China have all been enticed to Merseyside. So has Sir Simon Rattle, who has persuaded the renowned virtuosi of his Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra to make their Mersey debuts.

All of which is likely to be eclipsed by the return of Sir Paul McCartney, who will top the bill at a rock concert in Anfield stadium on June 1. Add to that an “upmarket” fashion parade by the WAGs of Liverpool and Everton football clubs and rumoured “surprise” appearances throughout the year by such Merseyside legends as Cilla Black and Jimmy Tarbuck.

Nevertheless, there have been times in the past four years when observers doubted whether the 2008 jamboree would happen at all. The first mistake was probably the city’s decision to hire an Australian cabaret singer, Robyn Archer, to mastermind its artistic plans. She was given a £125,000 payoff in August 2006 when she failed to deliver anything remotely convincing.

More recently, Jason Harborrow, the chief executive of the Liverpool Culture Company (which is organising the jamboree) was also given a reputed £250,000 payoff, after spending seven weeks on sick leave. Confidence in the LCC had plummeted after the city’s popular annual Mather St Festival was cancelled at the last minute because of health and safety fears.

Meanwhile, Will Alsop’s much-vaunted “cloud” design for the Museum of Liverpool Life had to be scrapped when city councillors realised it would cost £100 million more than expected. To add to the gloom, the city council is facing a £20 million shortfall in its budget.

On the other hand, the vast Liverpool One project, a £1 billion wholesale redevelopment of the city’s premier shopping and eating district, is predicted to be the retail wonder of the North West. Britain’s cheeriest and most characterful “faded” city could at last get its long-desired renaissance.

Starr quality

— Liverpool claims to be the world capital of pop, but the conductors Sir Thomas Beecham and Sir Simon Rattle also grew up on Merseyside, as did the jazz singer and art historian George Melly

— In May 1965, the US beat-poet Allen Ginsberg declared Liverpool to be “the centre of consciousness of the human universe”. However, he said similar things about Baltimore and Milwaukee

— The city has the largest concentration of Grade I-listed buildings outside London

— In 2007 the Turner Prize was awarded at Tate Liverpool, the first time it has been outside London

— The city hosts a biennial contemporary international arts festival

— Liverpool’s streets are familiar from thousands of films and television programmes, including Shirley Valentine and Brookside

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