Liverpool Stadium

Liverpool Stadium: Investigating a Hidden Chapter of Liverpool’s Popular Music Past.

‘Big, dark, noisy and full of Scousers’, Jimmy Hibbert, Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias

Liverpool Boxing Stadium opened on October 20th 1932 and was the most advanced boxing arena in Britain. However, between the thirties and the eighties (it was demolished in 1987) many musical events were also staged there. Throughout the 1950s, the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra presented a popular series of concerts there. American Jazz musician Louis Armstrong appeared there in 1956 and Gene Vincent headlined there in 1960; possibly the biggest rock show that had ever taken place in Liverpool up to that time. In 1968, the venue hosted the Kaleidoscope Festival, with Pink Floyd headlining. It then continued to specialise as a rock music venue into the seventies thanks to pioneering music promoter Roger Eagle. The first of Roger’s concerts featuring Free and Mott the Hoople, took place at the Stadium in autumn, 1970.

The Stadium was not a mainstream music venue in the seventies. In fact, much of the music performed there could be described as underground, or even avant-garde rock. Arguably more challenging, certainly less fashionable than contemporary commercial rock, but which nevertheless attracted large audiences in the early to mid-seventies. Liverpool Stadium was the nucleus of a community of regular concertgoers with a strong sense of their own identity based around specific genres of music. More formal venues such as the Liverpool Empire and the Royal Court did not inspire the same loyalty or the same sense of belonging. Roger Eagle’s mission was to provide excellent music for a discerning audience, and to make sure that the musician did not get ripped off in the process. He was a maverick in a music industry more concerned with ticket and record sales. Although unburdened by any business acumen, his passion for music had a profound effect on those he chose to mentor and his ideology impacted on the Stadium, creating a unique communal space. Since its demolition in 1987, the Stadium’s significance as a popular music venue, and a cultural hub has been largely overlooked.

Liverpool Stadium’s regular entourage of music fans would queue from late morning onwards on the day of a concert. The traffic free location of the building and the relative informality of its regime, allowed the assembled fans to watch bands arrive, socialise with each other and share youthful rites of passage. So strong was the camaraderie and the feeling of affection for the place itself, that when a former Stadium habitué, Craig Mackintosh, created a website celebrating its memory, the site attracted thousands of hits, and contributions from hundreds of former audience members, and from musicians who used to play there. Engaging with the online community presents a unique opportunity for an ethnographic, socio-cultural and historical thesis. With the support of Craig and the website initially, I propose to interview former concertgoers, musicians and management, to compile an oral record. I will analyse local archival records, and other media sources, in order to corroborate witness statements. The evidence collected will accurately document the musical events that took place at Liverpool Stadium, and will also reveal its cultural significance.

Although much has been published about the Liverpool music scene of the 1960s and later 1970s, the omission of this important venue renders previous works incomplete. Punk’s high media profile and its hostility to earlier rock music has contributed to an historical bias. The punk movement, with the complicity of much of the popular musical press, declared a desire to erase what had gone before describing 1976 as year zero. The now hackneyed opinion was that rock music, typically the virtuoso big bands of the early seventies, represented overblown self indulgence and alienated their audiences, whereas punk made music accessible. But prior to punk’s elevation of the amateur, other genres of rock music with a greater emphasis on skills and stagecraft had, apparently, been a thriving concern and, away from the media spotlight, may have remained so. Although no official record of all performances exists, an academically orchestrated oral history presents an opportunity to utilise a primary research resource; the eye witness, and by using an ethnographical methodology to analyse research data, produce an accurate account of period, place and performances. As Liverpool is European Capital of Culture in 2008, the time is right to challenge accepted mythologies about the city’s soundscape and to reveal the cultural significance of happenings at Liverpool Stadium by investigating its history and musical legacy. A thesis based upon oral history and archival research, presents a unique opportunity for a partially hidden history of Liverpool’s performance past to be brought to light through primary and secondary source material.