One of the more bizarre but recurring tales about how the music of Liverpool has been shaped over these past 45 years concerns Courtney Love, the American musician famed, music aside, for being married to Kurt Cobain, and for being wildly unpredictable. This story claims the 17-year-old Love, who had travelled across the Atlantic to be near the bands she loved, introduced Liverpudlian musicians to LSD, setting in train a decades-long phenomenon known as ‘Cosmic Scouse’.
The slight problem with this is that Love only came to Liverpool in 1982, by which point the musicians she had come to celebrate – Echo & the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes among them – were well into their careers, plainly already making psychedelic music, and already well acquainted with hallucinogens. But the fact remains that for decades now, Liverpool and its environs have produced scores of bands that believe civilisation peaked in 1966: the Stairs, the Coral, Clinic, the Zutons, the Icicle Works and more.
Michael Head, for more than 40 years, has been among that number, making records with an array of bands – now with the Red Elastic Band – all of whom owed some debt to the great LA psychedelic band Love. During that time, he has repeatedly been fêted by music writers as the greatest songwriter in Britain, but the public were never biting: the nearest he came to a hit single was reaching No. 44 with Shack in 1999. It would be fair to say, though, that his obscurity wasn’t entirely the public’s fault. Head took reading Coleridge, Huxley and Burroughs a bit too literally, and lost years to heroin addiction.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in