Day 6: Liverpool
Welcome
Yesterday we played our first ever show in Liverpool.
At the Horwood House Hotel in Milton Keynes we were jolted back into the reality of a breakfast buffet that closed its doors at a rather harsh 9.30am. It was a good spread though, and I put together a plate inspired by colours at the longer-wavelength end of the colour spectrum. A fried egg on toast works as the centrepiece for this meal and I surrounded it with a hashbrown, a vege sausage, and some fried mushrooms, before garnishing with HP Sauce. On the side I enjoyed a bowl of granola with berry compote and Greek yoghurt.
Our drive took us northwest up through the Midlands, the M6 Motorway providing a smooth if un-scenic passage up to this famous port city. As we drove through Liverpool’s outer suburbs, we were lucky enough to witness the pointiness of the Greystone Road Footbridge, an 80m cable-stayed structure that conveys pedestrian traffic across the M62 Motorway. The central A-frame mast supports a three-metre-wide deck that presently carries upwards of 400 users per day, each user safely contained within pedestrian parapets with mild steel supports and internal stainless steel mesh panels.
This impressive piece of local council infrastructure with may be eye-catching and packed with safety features but I’m sure that the local residents were sad to lose the infamous Sausage Bridge, a precast concrete structure that completed this important local connection from 1973-2015. If you were lucky enough to use the Sausage Bridge please send me an email and maybe even describe your experience. You can reach me at breakfastandtravelupdates@breakfastandtravelupdates.com
📸 Knowsley Council
Shortly after 2pm we pulled into the loading area behind Hangar 34, a warehouse-type music venue that resides in Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle neighbourhood, a former industrial area. We unloaded and set the stage, taking a moment to appreciate the generously high ceilings that allowed Bird to enjoy a full vertical inflation. With Owen on the team everything was completed rapidly and we enjoyed a couple of hours off before soundcheck.
Jon took a big step forward in his career as a professional guitarist yesterday when he incorporated a second amp into his rig. This additional Vox AC15 which we were carrying as a backup has now been pressed into service in the pursuit of a stereo effects rig, an outcome which if enacted successfully will allow Jonathan to fully utilise effects like delays and echoes, bouncing them in between the left and right PA speakers.
For dinner we walked into the city centre and found a Mexican restaurant where someone had been given the interior decorator version of a license to kill; even the ceiling had not been spared.
This being my first visit to Liverpool I was especially keen to see some of the city so after eating I walked down to the waterfront. A number of historical docks line the western edge of the city forming a boundary along the Mersey Estuary. The tide was out and some 19th century engineering feats were on full display, the water level inside these ‘wet’ docks standing a full several metres above the river and restrained by a large hydraulic dock gate. Liverpool was the first city in the world to have a commercially operated floating dock or ‘wet dock’, a facility that propelled it to the forefront of world trade in the 18th and 19th centuries. These small harbours remain at a constant water level allowing ships to enter during high tide and then remain in place to offload their cargo while the dock gates prevent the water from escaping when the tide goes out.
I walked along the waterfront for a time and came across The Queen’s Dock, used throughout the 19th century to handle tobacco imports, and now home to the Liverpool Watersports Centre; albeit after an extensive campaign to recuperate the local waterways from pollution sustained throughout the industrial revolution. Quite magnificently reflected in the mirror-calm waters of this basin was a brick structure that I recognised from the research I had done a couple of months ago on the Battersea Power Station. Giles Gilbert Scott’s Liverpool Cathedral took 74 years to construct (not bad by cathedral standards) and at its completion in 1978 the city was rewarded with a grand Anglican monument described by Sir John Betjeman as ‘one of the great buildings of the world’. Vere Cotton, a cathedral historian, wrote that ‘no English cathedral is so well placed to be seen to advantage both from a distance and from its immediate vicinity’ and indeed it does dominate the cityscape, visible from almost all points of my walk.
I returned to the venue in time to catch Lande Hekt who had returned to this UK leg of the tour with her full band. They were in fine form and the room was buzzing by the time we went out to play. It was a Tuesday night and the crowd recognised this by remaining respectfully silent in between songs, leaving room for whoever had the pluck to scream out a heckle, usually delivered in the form of a question to the band. I think I might have received my favourite heckle of all time last night: “how’s your hay fever, Ben?!”, closely followed by “what hay fever medication do you take?!” This was priceless stuff. I loved how a crowd could be so rowdy and respectful at the same time. After this lovely evening we celebrated by letting Gabe make the pack train, and it was one of the finest pack trains of our time together.
