Understanding John Lennon. Francis Kenny

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ vibrancy and cut and thrust of a large seaport like Liverpool was to have a profound effect on John, as would his family life, which had its own Celtic roots to add to the influence of the city’s own home-grown Irish culture. This influence on his music, however, has to a large extent been overlooked. John’s rebellious nature has been attributed to the early absence of his parents and the death of his mother, Julia. But if one looks at the history of rebellion in the city, we find that this particular characteristic is rooted in the port and the mix of blue-collar workers, large numbers of Afro-Caribbean people (the largest community in the UK) and a Chinese community, the oldest in Europe. The influx of Irish immigrants, Welsh and Scots seeking work in the port, as well as African and Chinese seamen, led to an eclectic cultural community. The word Scouse, for example, comes from the word lobscouse, a Scandinavian stew. John’s Aunt Mimi was to take particular exception to John’s adoption of a Scouse accent upon forming The Beatles. To many, the garrulous, sharp-natured ‘Scouser’ can on the surface be seen as caustic or delivering a certain truculence, but this is not the full story. It is no coincidence that Liverpool, Naples, New York and Kingston have always had much more in common with each other than their own particular country. They are populated by outsiders fully aware of their sense of otherness.

      The cultural make-up of the city encouraged a particular tendency to puncture pretension and defy authority, while its internationalism and multiplicity created an accent tailored to support the case: dese for these, dat for that, giz forgive us, youse as a plural for you, all of this interchangeable with the accent of Brooklyn or New York. The transatlantic shipping lines between Liverpool and New York conveyed not just people, but cultural and social discourse.The nature of both dock work and seafaring demanded teamwork and good communication skills. In factory jobs, the noise of the shop floor or the gaze of the foreman limited socialising via the spoken word. With seafaring, however, signing on for a trip meant bringing to the job the ability to compromise, and an understanding of the needs of others. This was especially true on a deep sea trip, where there was a more intensive need to communicate, to give and take, gain acceptance and generally get on. This centred on dialogue concerning common values and interests. In order to gain acceptance, maintain a shipmate’s welfare and aim for a ‘good trip’, there needed to be a sense of comradeship. It was this ability to ‘rub along’ that formed a seafarer’s profile. And these traits were transferred over to land jobs, when gangs were formed on the docks. From this casual type of work and the Celtic fondness for the craic emanated the image of the Scouser.

      As a suburban teenager, John’s first ventures into inner-city Liverpool would have been one of intrigue and awe at the unfamiliarity of the terms and the machine-gun delivery of dialogue. To John, this was a different country. This provoked clashes with his Aunt Mimi over, amongst other things, his previous Received Pronunciation sliding into Scouse. But when The Beatles achieved world fame, John declared:

      The first thing we did was to proclaim our ‘Liverpoolness’ to the world, and say, ‘It’s all right to come from Liverpool and talk like this’. Before, anybody from Liverpool who made it … had to lose their accent to get on the BBC … After The Beatles came on the scene, everyone started putting on a Liverpudlian accent.⁶

      John’s father Freddie recalls ringing up from dockside Southampton when John was five years old: ‘He spoke lovely English’, Freddie enthused. ‘When I heard his Scouse accent years later, I was sure it must be a gimmick.’⁷ It wasn’t a gimmick – to John it was much more important than that. It was a matter of survival.

      Having nailed the accent, John was quick to pick up on the ‘Scouse attitude’, seen at times as a split personality of argumentativeness and extreme bonhomie. The Liverpool accent, it must be remembered, was in many ways the product of influxes to a port city, much like its far-flung sister port, New York. Turn-of-the-century Liverpool and New York essentially grew up together, their working-class cultures resembling each other more than they would the English Home Counties or the oil fields of Texas. Playwright Eugene O’Neill’s work dramatically reveals the closeness of his Brooklyn characters with that of the Scouse accent, most notably in his 1911 play, The Iceman Cometh. His character Rocky’s delivery, spoken in a waterfront Brooklyn dive, could easily be found in any bar in Liverpool’s own Scotland Road or Park Lane:

      ‘De old anarchist wise guy dat knows all de answers! Dat’s you, huh?’ ‘Why ain’t he out dere stickin’ by her?’⁸

      This is Scouse set in a Brooklyn bar: an Irish accent and demeanour that ran through both cities’ histories like a thread.

      John’s view of his hometown was that ‘it was less hick than somewhere in the English Midlands, like the American Midwest or whatever you call it’.⁹ In the same interview, John ‘regrets profoundly’ that he wasn’t born in New York. It gave further resonance to the similarities, attractiveness and pulling power of both cities to John’s idea of himself. Due to its seafaring internationalism, Liverpool was open to exotic, non-English ideas, to the extent that the Mersey was paradoxically viewed as an inland extension of the Irish Sea. As a port of world status, it had the confidence to ‘choose’ its own nation state. It wasn’t only England. Although young John was not a Scouse in the true sense of the word, he readily threw himself into a world of poverty, sheebeens and communities of sharp-tongued, hard-faced, generous, quick-witted and quick-tempered people. A world that was sensitive to injustice, a rowdy, rock ’n’ roll world, the world of dockland Liverpool. This was the life he wanted. It was not what his Aunt Mimi wanted for him, which couldn’t have been further from rock ’n’ roll: listening to the sound of the establishment in the shape of the BBC Light Programme, being in bed by 12 o’clock, with a bookcase full of Just William and Mimi’s Encyclopedia Britannica beside him for company.

      It was time to move on, and he had the perfect place on his doorstep. John was confronted with fast-speaking young men his own age ‘talking with their hands’ and fashioning new language patterns around themselves, pounding the ears of the listener with a language of street slang and ruthless Mickey-taking; and this was the world for him. The verbal street corner duals must have amazed him, encouraging him to listen and learn, to add to his own armoury and develop speech as a weapon to beat an opponent. If he was going to lead this group called The Beatles and provide a platform for his musical goals, he needed to have the audacity to step up to another level of wit and guile. This was demanded in inner-city Liverpool: fight not only with fists, but with verbal putdowns, with cunning and, above all, the ability to get one over while out-flanking your opponent.

      Throughout his life, John used Liverpool as an anchor to give stability to the maelstrom of Beatlemania, the persistent mental health and drug problems and the final break-up of the group. What mattered to him was his identification with music and this first came with his own burst of independence, as a teenager on the streets of Liverpool. His creative, artistic flourish was nurtured against the backdrop of the edginess of a bustling multicultural seaport.

      The whole notion of being an outcast in a city full of outcasts – located in a last refuge seaport, no less – nurtured a sense of otherness that appealed to John. In the year of his Aunt Mimi’s birth in 1906, the City Council Health Committee revealed that:

      there was not a city in this country, nay in Europe, which could produce anything like the squalor that … officials found in some of Liverpool’s backstreets.¹⁰

      Like the ‘Famine Irish’, another group of people that faced impossible suffering at that period were Afro-Americans. Like the Irish, Afro-Americans were also inclined to develop an aspect of their culture that was derived from prejudice and derision and to reflect this defensively in their language. Afro-American writer Stanley Crouch argues that:

      Negro Americans are not predisposed to follow people. They aren’t. That’s why there’s always a certain element of chaos in the Negro world, because … from СКАЧАТЬ