Smash hit

Not surprisingly, the Culture Company’s Jason Harborow offers a robust defence. “We send people out into all areas of Liverpool to make sure they are touched by what we are trying to achieve,” he says. “We funded 150 organisations last year, ranging from £5,000 to £1 million.”

Nevertheless, it isn’t hard to detect an air of imposed “targets” about the Culture Company’s methods — targets that sits awkwardly alongside the traditionally free-wheeling atmosphere of Liverpool’s music scene. Indeed, Harborow admits as much.

“Whereas in the old days public money might have been given out without many objectives attached, now we have defined what we are looking for,” he says. “And we have a team monitoring that.”

Hmm. One wonders how well a stroppy, drug-raddled John Lennon would have prospered in Harborow’s “monitored” Liverpool.

Still, some official interventions have been generally welcomed. The annual Mathew St Festival, for instance — the biggest free city-centre festival in Europe, and usually dominated by cover bands — put up a stage this year specifically to showcase unsigned local bands. Youngsters who usually played to a few hundred in the Zanzibar suddenly found themselves entertaining 10,000 people. By all accounts, it was the liveliest part of the whole weekend.

Jayne Casey, an Eighties punk-rocker (Big in Japan — that was one of her bands) turned avant-garde art impresario, is the force behind an even more significant move.

“After we won the 2008 thing, there was a period when everyone in Liverpool seemed like rabbits stuck in headlights — paralysed, waiting for instructions from city officials,” she says.

“But my attitude was: why are we waiting to be told what to do? Did Ian McCulloch go to the city council and ask permission to set up the Bunneymen? Did James Barton ask permission to set up Cream?”

So Casey devised a plan to safeguard the rude vigour of Liverpool’s music scene from being either bulldozed out of existence by the developers or tidied up and tamed by the bureaucrats.

“I asked myself: why has Liverpool produced so many bands over the years? The answer is that in a shrinking city we were always able to get derelict buildings for rehearsal space, recording studios and clubs. But then the developers moved in, and we had to move out.”

So she found an old warehouse area on the edge of the docks that was still untouched, and began lobbying to keep it like that for the independent music sector.

“My line to the council was: ‘The Duke of Westminster came to town with a big bag of money and you basically gave him the city centre, so we need this area if you want the music scene to be strong in 2008’.”

With financial backing from the Moores family (the philanthropic heirs to the Littlewoods fortune), her tactic worked. The area is now officially called the Independent District. The Picket Club is being resurrected and will move there. So will lots of cutting-edge galleries and studios.

But Casey’s main achievement has been to set up a series of summer-long festivals in this rundown area, starting next year and running until 2008 at least.

“They will be programmed by independent promoters, and provide a great platform for musicians from the city and elsewhere,” she promises.

To say that the future health of Liverpool’s music scene depends on Casey’s initiative would be too pessimistic. But plenty of people share her worries about the dangers of 2008. “People here use the verb ‘coventrise’, meaning to flatten a city centre, as in Coventry,” she says. “It would be a great irony if 2008 — which is what brought all these developers to town — was the very thing that coventrised Liverpool’ s culture after all these years.”

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