THE CHRISTIANS, HOLLY JOHNSON, PAUL MCCARTNEY, GERRY MARSDEN, STOCK AITKEN AND WATERMAN – "Ferry Cross The Mersey"

Number 2 Watch: A week of Natalie Cole’s ‘Miss You Like Crazy’. Didn’t care for that one much, I’m afraid.

Here’s how close I came to being involved in the events commemorated by this record.

I moved to Belvedere in summer 1988 and discovered that I had a non-league team if not quite on my doorstep, then close enough that when they had a floodlit game I didn’t need to switch on the bathroom light. I decided to do something I’d fancied doing for years – follow the FA Cup from preliminary round to Final, following a team until they were knocked out, then following the team that beat them, etc etc to Wembley. Erith & Belvedere would play the winners of Corinthian-Casuals v Hanwell Town. Thus was born “From Casuals to Cup Winners”, which began as a series of articles in the Crystal Palace fanzine edited by a good friend of mine, and ended up as a 52-page booklet that sold fairly well.

Hanwell won the first tie, beat Erith then lost to Wembley FC. Wembley lost to Walton and Hersham, who then lost to Sutton United in a replay. Away wins at Dagenham and Aylesbury took Sutton to the third round and their famous victory over Coventry City. Sutton lost 8-0 to Norwich in the 4th round, and the Canaries beat Sheffield United and West Ham in a replay to get to the semi-final, where they played Everton.

I got a semi-final ticket by the simple method of going along to the FA offices at Lancaster Gate and asking if they’d had any tickets returned. That’s how I ended up on the Holte End at Villa Park for the match on 15 April 1989, which Norwich lost 1-0. Pat Nevin’s winner has been almost forgotten, since news from the other semi was already filtering through to those of us with radios. I often think that if the Cup draws had gone slightly differently – and I’d had the same luck with the FA – I could have been in the Liverpool end at Hillsborough that afternoon. Through the FSA I counted Rogan Taylor as a friend, and as FSA Chair and a Liverpool supporter he bore the enormous strain of being a spokesman for supporters in the aftermath.

In the final chapter of “Casuals to Cup-Winners” I talked about the unique atmosphere of the all-Merseyside Cup Final, the Spinners reviving the old tradition of community singing with a medley of “Liverpool Lou”, “The Leaving of Liverpool” and such like, and Merseyside station Radio City broadcasting outside the stadium, playing commentary of Liverpool and Everton goals to the crowd, and following up with the original Gerry and the Pacemakers version of “Ferry Cross The Mersey”, which I described as “always one of my favourite 60s songs, and now a sound to raise the hairs on the back of your neck”. Even as a Manc, you couldn’t be unmoved.

The Christians had produced two fine albums to that point, Garry Christian’s soulful voice complementing Henry Priestman’s lyrics full of anger at the state of the nation and compassion towards those on the wrong end of it. You kind of wish their producer Laurie Latham had handled this one, as the unsubtle beat once again treads all over it. But as you say Tom, possibly Gerry Marsden’s best song – has anyone ever done a compare-and-contrast between this and the later “Waterloo Sunset”?

Interesting fact – the film of the same name, G&tP’s answer to “A Hard Day’s Night”, was written by Tony Warren, the originator of “Coronation Street”.

Light Entertainment Watch (a): Gerry Marsden (sans Pacemakers) has turned up on UK TV quite often (no copy of the DEE TIME survives);

AFTER ALL THAT THIS: with Gerry Marsden, James Carol, Lee Brennan, Peter Poselthwaite, Billy Butler, George Roper (1981)

DEE TIME: with Michael Bentine, Lulu, Gerry Marsden (1967)

THE EAMONN ANDREWS SHOW: with Billie Whitelaw, Gerry Marsden, Harry H. Corbett, Jackie Trent, Peter Maloney, Sir John Barbirolli, Bob Sharples (1966)

THIS IS YOUR LIFE: Gerry Marsden (1985)

WOGAN: with Tom Jones, Gerry Marsden, Diana Ross, Pete Waterman (1989)

Light Entertainment Watch (b): People forget how big The Christians were in the late 1980s. British TV appearances include;

FRIDAY NIGHT LIVE: with Ben Elton, The Pogues, Harry Enfield, The Christians, Moray Hunter & Jack Docherty, Jo Brand, Mark Thomas (1988)

PARAMOUNT CITY: with Arthur Smith, Dennis Leary, Monica Paper, Angie Clark, Curtis & Ishmael, Jeremy Hardy, Helen Lederer, The Christians, The Notting Hillbillies (1990)

THE ROXY: with Jermaine Stewart, 2 Men, A Drum Machine & A Trumpet, The Christians, Tiffany, Terence Trent D’Arby (1988)

WOGAN: with The Christians, Brenda Giles, Mike Harding, Jonathan Porritt (1988)

WOGAN: with The Christians, Don Hewitson, Derek Nimmo, Christopher Reeve (1989)

The original Gerry and the Pacemakers recording of “Ferry ‘Cross The Mersey” drifted into the British charts like a ghost ship in that excitable winter of 1964. It was used as the theme to a film involving the group as well as Cilla Black and various other notable Liverpudlians of the period; the film is rarely, if ever, revived, and this may not be surprising since, watching it, Merseybeat seems as arcane and distant a cult as Chartism. But the song prospered; although the Mersey Sound had by the turn of ’64/5 begun to implode to the point where it really was the Beatles and everyone else, the clouded optimism of Gerry Marsden’s song and George Martin’s string and French horn arrangement in the manner of “Wonderful Land” still pointed to a time when Liverpool was a place of hope and riches, somewhere everyone wanted to be…Liverpool’s “moment.”

That dissipated, as “moments” tend to do, and when Frankie Goes To Hollywood revived the song for inclusion on the B-side of the original 12-inch of “Relax” – thus providing a clear link between the first and second acts to top the British charts with their first three singles – they preceded it with a snatch of dole office dialogue from Boys From The Blackstuff; Liverpool in 1983 was on its knees, defeated by Thatcherism on one side and council leader Derek Hatton’s reckless careerism on the other. Against this backdrop Holly Johnson sings the song with a strong element of defiance and a new kind of hope; Horn’s cavalcade of arpeggios at the end suggest Liverpool not to be beaten, that the North would rise again despite everything.

Then came Saturday 15 April 1989, the afternoon of the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, to be played in the neutral grounds of the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield. Traffic delays on the motorway meant that many Liverpool fans did not arrive in time for the kick-off, and thousands crammed the stadium’s inadequate entrance turnstiles in an effort to get in. Concerned that some of these fans might be attempting entry to the game without tickets, the police and stewards were loath to let them in en masse, but eventually – and far too late – they opened another gate, with the inevitable inward stampede.

In the wake of Heysel and other misdemeanours – not to mention an underlying contempt for the working classes who, in 1989, still constituted the majority of football crowds – Hillsborough, in line with other stadia, had introduced steel fencing at the front of their crowd stands in order to prevent hooligans from invading the pitch. In those days crowds were still obliged to stand for matches; there was no seating for fear that seats might similarly be ripped up and tossed into the pitch.

But this policy proved disastrous. The sudden influx of spectators caused an immediate crush to those already in the stadium, at the front of the stands, and they were likewise crushed from the other side by the steel fencing. In desperation, some attempted to tear down the fencing and escape onto the pitch, but police, under the impression that they were en route to attacking Nottingham Forest fans at the opposite end, herded them back. The crushing continued; dead bodies began to emerge from the walls of desperate flesh. 96 people were killed, including a fourteen-year-old boy and a man who went into a coma before finally dying in 1993, and nearly 800 others sustained injuries.

The disaster, much like Zeebrugge, was the inevitable consequence of a culture of wilful incompetence and mismanagement. But then the lies started to appear; in part generated by frightened police chiefs not wanting to sacrifice their careers two months before their pensions, in other part encouraged by certain Conservative MPs, under the headline “THE TRUTH” in The Sun – the same newspaper for which Pete Waterman had recorded the Ferry Aid fundraiser – there were stories of “drunken” Liverpool fans urinating on, or copulating with, the bodies of the dead, pickpocketing their wallets, picking fights with police. It was a PR disaster from which the newspaper has yet to recover on Merseyside – in particular because it, or the editor of the time responsible for it, has never issued an unconditional apology for running the piece, or the headline – to this day many newsagents there continue to blackball it from their shops, and its circulation figures there have remanied low.

So the 1989 “Ferry ‘Cross The Mersey,” recorded by a quickly convened cross-section of Liverpool artists to raise funds for the families of the dead, has to be considered as a protest record; in many ways it is the angriest record SAW ever made – where “I’d Rather Jack” simply has a jibe at out-of-touch radio programmers, the dignified but barely suppressed fury of Waterman’s “Ferry” is a direct, controlled attack on the powers which would traduce Liverpool to a thug-crammed subhuman wilderness. Marsden and Johnson were both brought back to recreate their original performances, but there is a renewed intensity in their performances; Marsden in particular sounds at times on the verge of tears in his solo features, while Holly retains his original defiance but makes it somehow deeper – in the “People around every corner” middle eight he stares daggers at those who would doubt that Liverpudlians were happy to welcome and embrace anyone, and his furious focus on the line “Hearts torn in every way” needs no further underlining. Henry Priestman, lead singer of the Christians, provides the rich voice of moderation throughout.

But getting Paul McCartney to participate was a genuine coup, and it is he who, at the end of the record, takes it to a further dimension and slowly unleashes the rage which has been simmering beneath the surface for the previous three minutes; as the harmonies modulate, and SAW introduce an adroitly-disguised slow motion/16 rpm House piano line, McCartney suddenly bursts loose: “This land’s the place we love!” he howls in terrible anger. “Ferry! Cross the Mersey!” he virtually sobs – the subtext being: don’t ever fucking try to do us down, our culture, our way of living, our beliefs.

This “Ferry ‘Cross The Mersey” is therefore a profoundly anti-Thatcherite record – anyone lazily categorising Waterman as a nouveau riche Tory missed his fortnightly columns in the teenpop magazine No 1, in which he regularly railed against the poll tax and other manifestations of New Rightism, or his violent decrying of Thatcher and Ian MacGregor apropos the 1984 miners’ strike, which he has done on both radio and TV more than once over the years – and in an era when, as stated in the Times of 5 May 2007, the likes of Matthew Parris (with regard to that week’s local government and Scottish Parliament elections) can still smugly state that Liverpool “doesn’t matter,” it seems to me still the most propitious, and certainly one of the most telling, of all charity records, since its inherent current of political protest is as inescapable as the original Pacemakers record is from the speakers on any Mersey ferry on which you might happen to step.

#10 – Excellent on the music, politics and sociology as always, Marcello, but allow me to correct a couple of things about the football. Of course there were seats at football grounds, and the instances of them being torn up and used as weapons à la Millwall in 1985 were very rare. For supporters terracing was a cheaper alternative to seats, and one that many fans actively preferred, giving a heightened sense of belonging, the option to watch the match with whoever you chose and the chance to get away from anything untoward that did happen. As the Football Supporters Federation continues to argue to this day, terracing is not inherently unsafe as long as proper barriers are in place to prevent surges and crowding does not exceed a certain number per square metre.

The fencing at the front of the Leppings Lane stand wasn’t the main problem either – the issue was the lateral fencing from the back to the front which divided the terrace into pens. Without those fences the crowding on the terrace would still have been mightily uncomfortable but the crowd could have, in the terminology of the time, “found its own level”. The Taylor Report is crystal-clear that the main cause of the disaster was that when fans walked briskly through the open gate (the video shows there was no “stampede” either) there were no police or stewards to tell them that the central pens were full and they should go to the side ones. The tunnel leading to the central pens was directly opposite the gate, so that’s where they headed. There’s a photo taken a few minutes before kick-off showing the central pens dangerously packed while people in the side pens by the corner flag had enough space to sit on the terrace and read the programme.

Mike #5, re the blamelessness of every Liverpool fan – I dare say a few were drunk and/or stroppy, but again the Taylor report is clear that the fans’ behaviour on the day was not the main cause of what happened. But if you were ever a hooligan, and a Liverpool hooligan in particular, you share the blame for Hillsborough: because the fences were there in response to what had happened in previous years, and the police’s attitudes were an unfortunate by-product of years of dealing with that element of the football public with which they’d had to come into closest contact. When Trevor Hicks, seeing what’s developing on the terrace where his daughters are standing, tries to remonstrate with a policeman only to be told “Shut your fucking prattle!”, any hoolie who ever baited the police has to share the guilt with the policeman.

Some wonderfully poignant contributions here, not least from Erithian and Marcello, following on from Tom’s initial excellent write-up. It’s one of those days you will never forget. I was pottering around Cardiff on a daytrip from London with my partner Lizzie, then my girlfriend of barely seven months. On the way back to the car from visiting the castle, I turned on the radio to hear Kenny Dalglish rhubarbing away in that indecipherable brogue of his and my immediate reaction was that it was impossible to determine if Forest had beaten Liverpool because Kenny’s accent was incurably incapable of variation at any time. I remember losing patience and saying out loud something like: “Oh for Christ’s sake just tell us the result, you charmless nerk!” I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that this flippant remark was very soon greatly regretted when it became apparent what had happened in Sheffield.

“THE TRUTH” “editorial” in The Sun, of course, caused great harm, the fall-out from which has still not gone away, as has been mentioned. There was alas a feeling in some quarters of “Oh not the bloody Scousers again! ALWAYS the bloody Scousers!” as well as the current Mayor of London’s later comments, whilst editor of The Spectator following the vile beheading by terrorists of Liverpool resident Ken Bigley:

“the editorial claimed the inhabitants of Liverpool were wallowing in a “vicarious victimhood”; that many Liverpudlians had a “deeply unattractive psyche”; and that they refused to accept responsibility for “drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground” during the Hillsborough disaster, a contention at odds with the findings of the Taylor Report.”

I think Boris’ “lovable buffoon” mask slipped a bit that day.

12/13: Thanks for clearing up the football facts (and yes, Gary Christian, or was it Garry with two Rs? Look it up DJP you lazy sod). To be fair my team at the time was Oxford United who had parted company with their manager Mark Lawrenson rather acrimoniously and performed with typical mediocrity that season to finish 17th in the old Second Division. Top of that league, and up for promotion, were Chelsea. Different times or what?

Waterman loves Wagner and has been pals with Mark E Smith for decades; go figure (or better still, go seek out “Plug Myself In” by DOSE and MES, put out under the PWL aegis in the mid-nineties).

Thanks, Billy. I am grateful.

“… were being presented to him”. By anonymous South Yorkshire policemen apparently. Because yes, the fans were going through dead fans’ wallets – to find their ID, do you think? And yes they possibly were urinating on the bodies of the dead – because part of being crushed to death involves losing control of your bladder, why the hell else would they be doing it?

Wichita #11 – I was in the Everton end at Villa Park, and I’ve no idea how many of those around me knew what was going on, but it can’t have been that many since at the final whistle I couldn’t hear anything on the radio for fans celebrating reaching the fourth Cup Final in six years. I’d heard that at least five people were dead, and as we left the stadium I turned up the radio to let those around me listen in to Sports Report as I’d done a hundred times before after a match – just as they announced that the latest death toll was 74. It was like a hammer blow.

Marcello, is my memory playing tricks on me or did Oxford’s Manor Ground have fencing that ran from the ground right up to the roof? I went there to see them play Leeds in 1984, the year they went up to the First Division as champions, and feeling claustrophobic. It was still essentially a non-league ground only with these grisly ‘modern’ additions that made the terrace feel like a cage.

It didn’t prevent the Leeds fans from ripping up seating and anything else they could trash in the away end. Erithian, I’d like to think these instances were rare but this mini riot didn’t merit a mention on the news. I’d guess Luton v Millwall got more attention because of the home side’s cuddly chairman David Evans and his desire to be in the papers as often as possible.

Wichita #22 – there was something like a three foot gap between the top of the fence and the low roof. Very claustrophobic and very poor views of the pitch, unsurprisingly. My girlfriend and I went there in 1987 and wrote this piece of doggerel afterwards, to the tune of “Mull of Kintyre”:
“The ground at the Manor’s the worst in the land
With ruddy great fences in front of the stand
If you watch a match there then you cannot fail
To get the impression that you’re stuck in jail…”

It was reported before the 1989 Cup Final that Robert Maxwell had telephoned the FA to ask if he could present the cheque from the Mirror’s Hillsborough disaster appeal to Gerry Marsden on the Wembley pitch before kick-off. The response was apparently: “No, you’re not hijacking the Cup Final [sound of dialling tone].” Kudos.

So, is this the longest “artist credit” to hit the top spot?

I was at a game up North that day too (a rare occurence for me in those days) watching a mate play for Dartford against Macclesfield in whatever the non-league version of the FA Cup is called (FA Trophy?). It had been a really enjoyable day — despite Dartford losing — being at that tiny ground with the home fans cheerily waving inflatable blue worms. A bloke near us had a transistor radio to follow the game at Hillsborough but all he said was the game had been delayed because of crowd trouble (“typical” we thought) and it wasn’t until we got back on our coach at the end that we found out what had happened.

There’s more passion in this (or anger as Marcello said) than the wistful original and it’s pretty good as rushed charity records go but I’d be happy never to hear one of those tinny and fussy 80s backing tracks ever again.

Best Popular story ever.

But when you scored, did Galloway come over and salute your indefatigability?

Returning to the matter in hand: what did people make of the Christians as a band? As I think Marcello noted before, they’d been on Opportunity Knocks under the name “Natural High” as far back as 1974.

I’m assuming that when Galloway called for the pass, he wasn’t in a position to score but posing on the by-line in front of the cameras.

@34 – during the twilight of their career in the mid-nineties (although I notice they’ve since reformed) I was sent to review a Christians gig. It wasn’t a prospect I greatly looked forward to, and I couldn’t find anyone who would be willing to accompany me to the concert, even though it wouldn’t have cost my friends anything to become my “plus one” for the night.

When I got there, the venue must only have been a fifth full. However, as unbelievable as it sounds, The Christians were absolutely amazing live. I just remember this powerful Northern Soul rawness, a big rush of energy and some astounding vocal harmonies which really hit you in the gut – it was almost as if they saw hardly anybody was in the audience, and thought “screw it, we’ll be as spontaneous as possible”. Or perhaps they always were like that live. I genuinely wouldn’t know.

Whenever anyone asks me who the most surprising live band I’ve seen are, they get mentioned straight away. I was forced to completely re-evaluate them, and whilst some of their recordings are a bit too slick and studied to really excel, there’s the odd diamond in the pile. “Ideal World” is a beautiful piece of work, for example. Comparing them to the Lighthouse Family is a bit unfair. Mind you, perhaps they’re a strong live act too… who knows?

Flicking through Kenny Dalglishs autobiography alerted me to something I never knew. Besides being present at Heysell and Hillsborough Kenny was playing for Celtic at the time of the Ibrox disaster (1971).
You think of Kenny Dalglish as having had this chequered career but carrying around even one of those dark memories must be hard.

There’s been some fascinating responses on this thread. It’s a sobering subject to even think about.

The Christians, ok. They looked awful (bald front man in shades puts them one image rung below Classix Nouveaux) and had a terrible name. Their first single was reggae-lite with a flat, jazz-funky vocal (possibly pitching for Heatwave, ending up closer to Hue & Cry). Their biggest hit – excluding this – was a note-for-note copy of Harvest For The World (which puts them one creativity rung below UB40). I couldn’t have had less of my chads dimpled.

But Henry Priestman is indeed a lovely man, met him at a pop quiz once. And quite possibly I’d love some Christians records if I heard them. I just don’t think it’ll happen unless I live to be ever so old.

# 42 a bit unfair to have a dig at them for “Harvest For The World” since that was a charity record they were asked to do at short notice (and a terrific vocal from Garry too).

#39 Interesting Jimmy that all the MPs who’d dabbled with reality TV – Galloway, Julia Goldsworthy, Lembit Opik – went down in the last election. I’d be surprised if we see any more try it.

Re 46: Fair point, but ‘charity record’ + ‘short notice’ was also an excuse for the Jagger/Bowie record – treacherous waters.

Re 47: I think you’re right. Politics aside, it made no sense, and I imagine the Lighthouse Family would have got similar coverage if they had been so publicly of the left.

Speaking of whom… has anyone got copies of Let There Be Lighthouse? It was a Lighthouse Family fanzine from the late nineties which was a beautifully subtle pisstake. I can only find one reference to it online (so I know I didn’t dream it). Included features like an interview with the drummer in a motorway service station, noting everything he ate, how he ate it etc. Wish I’d kept it! I think it was from Liverpool.

My last encounter w/the Lighthouse Family was in 2000 at a company team-building conference at the Millennium Dome: not playing live of course, nothing so big-ticket, but “Lifted” was played on loop during every gap between speakers, some of which were uncomfortably long. Setting, subject and music combined perfectly as I’m sure you can imagine.