Lancaster, capital of the Palatine County of Lancashire, sits on an especially floody bit of the River Lune. For the child version of me, growing up in the east of the county, it was an austere yet mystical place. They hung our witches and serial killers there. It was like Jerusalem to Pendle’s Nazareth. When I was a kid, the only way to it may as well have been on a donkey. The parents would always drag us through The Trough of Bowland. That was where I saw my first Nazgul. My furry little feet got all twitchy.
Generally, we’d be heading to Morecambe. Back in the 70s, Morecambe had glamour – a 1970s-but-without-Bowie-and-Bolan version, but glamour nonetheless. It was just the place for us to be paraded in the knitted tank-tops mum had made from a catalogue pattern. It was the place for eight inch collars and bowl haircuts. We fit in proper fancy there. There’d be car sick down our fronts, to which we added chip fat and stick rock food colouring. At Morecambe we could faff around in the mud and fling ice cream cones at pigeons. We could wander around Happy Mount Park, staring at lost grannies. Morecambe had glamour.
Lancaster was the place where the traffic jams were. We’d sit for hours on the back seat of the Hillman Avenger, staring out of the window as we were passed by local pedestrians. They were our overlords, on their way to the shops. They looked well fed and haughtier than us hill-folk. They’d probably just come from a witch trial up the castle. They had that look about them. For eight year olds, forty miles from home may as well have been forty thousand.
In reality, this place, with its university and its castle and its shopping centre sat as close to the precipice as our Nelson with its derelict mills and its odour of chloroform (from the Victory V factory). These weren’t our overlords. They ate the same lard boiled potatoes as us. Fifteen years later, The Justified Ancients of MuMu would name all our towns in “It’s Grim Up North”. The way to that badge of honour had long roots. The late seventies was pivotal. As we sat in our car, inching towards the delights of Morecambe Bay, the whole of The North had reached a tipping point. A nudge one way and it could have headed up hill. A nudge the other would send it freewheeling to near oblivion. Then came the 1980s. The rest, as they say, is history.
It’s 2018. We’re driving up the seafront of Morecambe, heading towards the Heysham end of town. We’ve got “This is Eggland” on the car stereo. It’s a lovely day. A lovely day for The Lovely Eggs. The mountains of the Lake District stand clear in the sunlight across the expanse of the bay. Couples walk hand in hand up the prom. For a few short minutes we can forget the country we’ve left behind. If we just keep staring to starboard, it’ll all be fine. Eggland can trump Brexitland. For a few short minutes, at least.
Jump back a good while, to the early ‘80s, back to where I’d lost contact with The North. A personal thing, I suppose, but also The North itself had changed. It had drifted away from mothball stinking granddad shirt for a pound shops and into Primark. My journey started when we moved to Wales just as the 80s started. I became an outsider then, and revelled in it. Not belonging coincided with both my teenage years and with Thatcherism. What else could I be? I was a natural. Life made me that way. In the mid-80s, for a brief few years, my outsider attitude coincided with my immediate environs. In the mid-1980s we moved back up north, to Blackburn. I signed up a course in the art college and spent my nights going to pubs, parties and gigs. It was a time for musicians outside the corporate sway to build their fiefdoms. In various clapped out old bangers we journeyed across Lancashire to see The Fall, Bogshed, John Cooper Clarke, Half Man Half Biscuit, various Factory Records affiliates and Frank Sidebottom. There were performance artists doing the rounds and beer was cheap. For a few years I’d found a home, of sorts. The North blossomed in a way. A desert grass, twisted into a giant “F*** You” shaped topiary. For a few years, I belonged.
It’s 2021, and everything has changed. We are on the other side of the curtain. I’d moved away in 1988, before the Berlin Wall came down, before the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia, before Blair and Diana, before the second Gulf war, 9/11, the fizzling of New Labour, Clegg, Cameron, Brexit, Johnson, the pandemic. I’m looking out west. It’s a strange place to find myself in. Back here, but it’s all shifted away from me. This part of the world I thought I knew has lost an important part of its soul. It’s not like ’79 or ’83. It’s lost its spark. It’s lost its fight. Sure, there are angry voices. Every time I click on my phone there are folk moaning on about this or that. The feed is full of them. They all blur into one. It doesn’t seem to matter which “side” they are on, or what particular gripe they have. It’s all much of a muchness now. Maybe it had always been there, but was easier to filter. Yes, it’s changed around here. So, I’m looking back west, hoping for the light to come back.
There’s something daft about the The Lovely Eggs. Like, proper daft. Sausage roll thumb, digital accordion, goofin’ around daft. If that’s all they were, it’d be fine: a knowing comedic smirk from the edge of the garage. It’s very far from all they are though. It’s a daft which sits atop the kind of positive do-it-yourself-for-the-community action the north has let bleed away. It’s a daft which grows from a trope of regional identity as rooted as fish and chips and local football rivalries. It’s socialist in the genuine sense of the word: emphasis on the social. It’s a togetherness which can’t be bought, it can only be made. Oh, and they write killer tunes too. There are other bands around who share the attitude, and even something of their “brown psychedelic” chops (Cabbage, for example). Few, however, retain an honest to goodness belief in their own locality and a willingness to make it better.
So, here I am, sat on the eastern borders, staring west and hoping to see a sunrise. It might never happen, but sod it, it just might. Lancaster always seemed so haughty, at least to us hicks. I’m more than willing to admit my child self got it all wrong. Maybe it’s actually an ace, tops and capital place after all.
Check out The Lovely Eggs website HERE
Check out the Lancaster Music Co-Op website HERE