Football and Music Cultures in Liverpool

Abstract

Using interviews with musicians and football fans from the city of Liverpool and other research materials, this paper examines the shifting synergies and dissonances between football fan and youth music and fashion cultures in the port city of Liverpool in the UK over the past 40 years. The city of Liverpool achieved some global popular cultural status and success in the early 1960s as The Beatles became international pop music stars, but in football circles such recognition in Europe came much later. In a period of rapid economic decline and of considerable political unrest and resistance in the city, Liverpool Football Club actually dominated European football between 1977 and 1984, before being banned from European football competition for five years from 1985 due to some uncharacteristic crowd violence. These regular football excursions abroad for Liverpool fans in the 1970s and 1980s more usually offered very rich sources of inspiration for fashion, music and cultural interpenetrations in the city during that period. Twenty years on, in 2005, Liverpool FC under the club’s new Spanish manager Rafa Benitez, once more won the football European Cup in an astonishing final against the Italians AC Milan in a match played in Turkey. Moreover, in an entirely unique development, bands from the city of Liverpool travelled to the final in Istanbul and played a concert for some of the 40,000 Liverpool fans who travelled to the final. In part this event was to mourn the recent death of a great Liverpool music and football icon, the BBC radio and TV DJ John Peel. This development also reasserted the important connections between music and football cultures in the city. The paper asks how and why these connections emerged in the city and also how they have they been reshaped as football and music cultures have become increasingly commodified in the UK. It also explores some of the recent history and the specific cultural and ecological peculiarities of Liverpool and the people of the city by way of explanation.

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