Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (36 page)

Our visit was the necessary second stage of the Will Alsop challenge: road-test the M62, the spinal boulevard of the SuperCity. Having driven it with Chris Petit, mile after mile, I understood that we had adopted the idiot’s approach. We rode through a geography that was never there.
Nor meant to be.
Any attempt to use a proposal as a working model is madness. We must respect the primacy of the imagination. Here, on the overspill of the M62, is the future we are burning up, the non-spaces we must learn to inhabit.

On Berry Street I spotted what I took to be a notebook in a shop window. Mickey and Minnie Mouse, in relief, against a scarlet-varnish background. Chinese calligraphy. Minnie, in pink pyjamas, is riding on the moon. At £1.30 this was an item requiring a metal grille, security screens, and a hatch through which I had to gesticulate and mouse mime, by making funny-ear shapes. The counter clerk was a Scouse lad of about fifteen. He treated this senior citizen with the rodent fetish with the same wary courtesy he offered to a patron whose head did not quite reach the lip of the counter; a boy of ten or so who had dropped in to pick up his vodka ration. The shop specialized in booze, the Disney stationery was a sideline, a come-on for the juvenile trade. It looked like one of those shotgun-behind-the-counter bunkers in the Bronx, but was otherwise clean and full of surprises. Bottle pocketed, the child asked for a light, then a ciggy to go with it. My notebook turned out to be a bizarre collection of Chinese New Year envelopes: Snow White, Pooh Bear and a pair of horrible furless albino cats I didn’t recognize. The whole pack felt like sachets for very small bribes, birthday cake contracts.

We were close to the decorative arch of another phantom Chinatown, to restaurants and warehouses recalling trade connections, a city within the city. We drifted on towards the Anglican cathedral and the bistro-bars of Hope Street. My idea was to trade on decrepitude, turning the stiff-backed, liver-spotted wasteland of a 65-year-old self to advantage, by riding across England, Mersey to Humber, on my Hackney Freedom Pass. It had been announced that crumblies with their orange plastic wallets could travel anywhere in the country on local buses: gratis. The hope being that numbers of newly privileged geriatrics would forget to come back, or take themselves off to edgeland asylums (if they hadn’t been converted into gated communities). Like inner-city drinking schools, the elderly are expected to relocate to the seaside. And disappear.

Anna joined me on this freedom ride through the back roads of Alsop’s SuperCity; she had her own agenda, memories to set against whatever we would find. As, for example, the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, where we spent our first night. To Anna it represented the good place, that never-forgotten exeat in a time of austerity; afternoon tea served by white-cuffed waitresses in a high-ceilinged room as big as an opera house. The Adelphi, at the hub of the seatown’s civic centre, close to the railway station and the grand public buildings, was a comfortable watering hole for stopover celebs and expense-account industrialists. Or so the channelled schoolgirl, her prior self, remembered: ‘A magnificent lounge with its acres of armchairs and potted palms, the elegant double-staircase curving away at the far end under the vast chandeliers and the mirrored glass.’ A Palm Court orchestra. Sonar echoes of Gracie Fields, the Marx Brothers, Noël Coward, and a thousand cocktail-shakers servicing platinum blondes and local politicians returning favours.

My own experience of the Adelphi was more recent. A very different movie: digital, collision-cut, sponsored. The hip advert disguised as yesterday’s underground road meditation. Chris Petit, by keeping his head down and not releasing any of his substantial archive of television essays, had achieved guru status as the man of the road.
Radio On
, newly reissued in a crisply mastered print, was well received, and accepted as a cultural landmark announcing the coming of Thatcher’s children and the slow death of art cinema. Chris was welcomed in Santiago and Buenos Aires and given the occasional off-peak afternoon in Richmond.

The Audi Channel, who had squatters’ rights on the outer reaches of the Sky satellite network, hired myself and Petit to sit, for one day, in a top-of-the-range motor bristling with cameras. And to drive from Crosby Beach, through Liverpool docks and the Mersey Tunnel, into the enveloping gloom of North Wales. We contemplated the threatened Gormley duplicates, admiring their stoicism, as wind whipped up a minor sandstorm and curs pissed against the slender rusted legs. Liverpool, seen through the frame of our solid, purring car, was a sequence of disconnected quotations. Our present collaboration, and all the earlier films we had made, were not much more than an excuse to talk about cinema and sometimes football. It was my contention that Petit’s German trilogy –
Flight to Berlin
,
Chinese Boxes
and
Radio On
(an autobahn in disguise) – formed a significant detour for anyone interested in film history. I took the opportunity of this sponsored ride, from nowhere to nowhere, to interrogate him about those days.

As we motored on, rivers and tunnels, Liverpool became Dublin, became Rotterdam, became Hamburg. That was another of Petit’s preoccupations, how cities are swallowing each other, pastiching, making copies of copies. What is the future for the redundant shopping mall? Do we follow Las Vegas and settle for cycles of perpetual reinvention? Novelty sets designed to vanish. Demolition as the money shot. Pop-up cities at the whim of fashion.

‘Kit Carson, who was brought in to beef up the dialogue of
Chinese Boxes
, came up with the lines about leakage across the Berlin Wall, the gangsters from east and west getting together. The plot, with its structure of drug smuggling, political connotations, the involvement of the Americans, was impenetrable. But the shoot was quite abstemious. Whole sub-plots were junked. The money was coming from Paris. By the time they realized what they were getting, it was too late to do anything about it.’

Chris had been back to Germany, for a coda to the series, a co-production he called
Content.
‘My latest film,’ he said, ‘is entirely posthumous. I started to think about structure. How you look at landscape, how to get from A to B. The obvious thing is not to meet anyone, not to be linear. I wanted to go back to the windscreen and the road. I wasn’t shooting anything. I wanted to go back to Berlin and on to Poland. And then, later, Dallas. The desert. California.’

Dissolution informs this Audi project too: shapes in the dark, disguised research institutes in farmers’ fields. The sun was setting over a deserted quarry; across the valley, a Land Rover churned up dust as it slalomed down the track towards us. Petit recalled the climactic sequence of
Radio On
, another quarry, another car, doors open, nowhere to go. We were never, at this stage of the game, going to travel far beyond quotation. Films were now shot in an afternoon.

The new Adelphi, Britannia Adelphi (Liverpool), is the state-of-Britain film that Lindsay Anderson never quite got around to making; after rugby league in Wakefield,
Britannia Hospital
and
The White Bus.
Our breakfast bunker is packed with Arthur Lowe and Leonard Rossiter substitutes waiting for their coaches: Lakeland tours, Blackpool Illuminations. Ranked taxis offer to run three people (£45) or five people (£65), for three hours, on a Beatles circuit with ‘lots of photo opportunities along the way’. Mathew Street, Penny Lane, Newcastle Road, Menlove Avenue, Forthlin Road, Arnold Grove, Madryn Street. The idolatry of exterminated Beatles is a major industry: bad boys, slick movers, sanctified by global capitalism and the Celtic passion for wakes and displays of public mourning.

Before we get that bus, we are obliged to sample the Mersey end of the Alsop SuperCity: art, food, spectacle. The Reich Chancellery weight and neoclassical gravitas of that block of halls and museums around William Brown Street is intimidating. Anna’s cataleptic episode on the dock road started with a high-speed trek, the way we insult a City of Culture by cherry-picking its highlights in a couple of hours.

I like the room of classical busts, old gods drained of blood, injected with formaldehyde, chilled into marble. Titular spirits who have seen it all. Shafts of pale afternoon light falling across city fathers, emblematic lovers. The Walker Art Gallery manages its heritage cargo of accidental plunder: trophy Pre-Raphaelite madonnas, competitive topography, and up-to-the-moment, top-dollar commissions.

The picture of the month is a Liverpool cityscape by Ben Johnson. An anamorphic spread: steely blues and aircraft greys so hyperreal that you know it’s another CGI fiction, another visiting card from a future that will never arrive. Johnson, after working on a reconstruction of the Urbino panel, an ideal city attributed to Piero della Francesca, accepted a gig from Hong Kong Telecom to paint a panorama to mark the transfer of sovereignty to China. This Liverpool cityscape, from high above the Mersey, stares unblinking at a planner’s dream of a regenerated, maritime city-state: with empty docks and the human element reduced to dots on the edge of the cultural quarter. ‘Some of the buildings,’ the brochure admits, ‘don’t yet exist or are currently being built.’ But the accuracy of their dimensions is unimpeachable: eleven studio assistants, consultations with historians, architects and planners, ensure it.

What need then of the old Liverpool, its crooked lanes and loud cellars, its failed speculations and faded department stores? What place is there for the golf-tee spike of the Post Office Tower growing out of a Holiday Inn? Or the shop windows filled with
OK!
magazines duplicating the approved marriage portrait of Wayne Rooney and his bronzed and airbrushed bride? A major ‘coming soon’ development –
GRAND CENTRAL
– has ambitions to make Liverpool anywhere but where it is. A destination without a hinterland.

Beside the revamped docks, necrophile sentiment underwrites the heritage makeover: a glistening black Billy Fury, legs spread, gestures at the cranes hovering over new white blocks. An immigrant group signals the pathos of their conversion into a compensatory symbol. Anna remembers, coming back to herself as we settle in an underground bar in Hope Street, being brought here by coach to take part in an anniversary service, to sing in Giles Gilbert Scott’s Anglican cathedral with the school choir. The dark interior of the Gothic revival church is forgotten, sound does not fade.

The point of our bus trip was spontaneity. Anna had to restrain me from jumping on the first vehicle with free seats that was pointing in approximately the right direction: kamikaze pensioners, rucksacked and black-bagged, half-smart (top half), we voyaged in expectation of the rising sun. A day of low cloud, dishcloth skies, mercury roads. Steady movement and, once aboard, no decisions to make: where you go, we go. End of the line. End of the story.

Liverpool buses, I do appreciate them. I stayed once, a terrace in the near-suburbs, with the poet Robert Sheppard. The highlight was the ride, next morning, into town: the friendliness, the breathing space, the way people carriers arrive as soon as you raise a hand. Back home in Hackney, aggrieved clients step further and further into the traffic, scanning the horizon, willing the missing bus, any bus,
challenging it
, to make an appearance. In Liverpool, travellers nod and chat, take in the scenery, discuss the reasons for their journey, cross themselves, and generally acknowledge the privilege of being chauffeured around town, in comfort, for a few coins.

Robert Sheppard, who had experienced it, full on, as rate-payer and citizen, composed a few words around Liverpool’s status as City of Culture. ‘Their shit’s verdure but that’s OK / This isn’t a nature poem.’ Sheppard’s near-twenty-year epic,
Complete Twentieth Century Blues
, outweighed the Ringo Starr returns, the showbiz art: he cooked slow and long, with tangy sauces and bits that break your teeth. The city averted its eyes. Alsopian relativity spurns language that stops our headlong gallop, calling it a ‘difficulty’. As if it were the poet’s fault that we want our meat pre-chewed.

We have a pack of timetables, but none of them make much sense. I’m impressed by the PR material put out by St Helens (previously known to me as a Rugby League team, the Saints). A triumphalist player is featured on the cover of the Visitor Guide, showing off his Pilkington Activtm sponsorship. That’s the other thing in St Helens, glass. We have to get to this Eden on the borders of Liverpool and Manchester. A very Alsop-sympathetic attractor. ‘One-time cradle of the industrial revolution … a growing regional destination of choice … with status as the most car-friendly place in Northwest England.’ The promotional pitch is constructed around ‘a landmark new internationally significant artwork’. Which has yet to be identified. It will be unveiled later in the year (subject to planning permission). It doesn’t matter what this artwork is, or does, or who made it: until you have your Angel of St Helens you are just another car park off the A580. (A road number which looks to my soft-focus gaze very much like ASBO.)

If St Helens is the event horizon of our first ride, the immediate prospect, according to Merseytravel, is Huyton. There is so much room on the bus; the bus
is
a room, a waiting room in transit. Silver-grey tarmac speckled with mica. A high street running on like an infinitely extendable ladder. This ride is a transformative experience, molecules shaken, memories invoked: the cold, greasy metal, the coarseness of tobacco-infested cloth. Generous window panels break down the division between street and interior. We’re clients of a single-decker with bright green poles and red request buttons. Old ladies are the only ones heading for Huyton; old ladies and their mild-mannered grandchildren. The ones who remind me of Welsh excursions in the company of women: mother, grandmother, great-aunts. I don’t think, outside London, I was ever on a bus with my father.

As we pull away from the city centre, the threat of regeneration imposes a uniformity on cancelled terraces; the same blue shutters, old trade-names painted out. The long, uphill road is as unreal as the back projections outside the coach, as it escapes East Germany, in Hitchcock’s
Torn Curtain.
Passengers accept their role as actors in this fiction, they acknowledge our presence, but leave it at that. The local bus service is the last democracy. Accents shift with the miles travelled, allegiances are a real thing: Will Alsop’s elastic uniformity doesn’t play. Liverpool suburbs stretch but do not sprawl. A bus is not a coach (Freedom Pass holders have to pay for a coach ride). When Alsop was being processed through the north with the Urban Renaissance Panel and other lottery-fund commissars, a coach was laid on, never a bus. Luxuriously appointed coaches, with reclining seats and personal monitors, carry Premier League millionaires from ground to ground: Wigan, Blackburn, Bolton. In the flat-cap, Woodbine-and-pint-at-half-time days, footballers took the bus. Coaches don’t stop. They have tinted windows to ameliorate blight: to prevent the curious from looking in. Nobody looks out. Multinational superstars are electronically anaesthetized. Texting. Tweeting. Enduring.