Counter Culture

The Kop

Brunswick Young Women`s Players (Australia)
C too at St. Columba`s by the Castle

Inspired by the grandfather (a £10 Pom from Liverpool who emigrated to Australia in the post-war period) of Josie Coyle ,who introduced the performance, this was a lively and fitting musical tribute to a great period (1962-1994) in the history of Liverpool Football Club through the eyes of the Kop. The Kop was a terrace holding 28,000 standing supporters at the Anfield Road end of Liverpool`s Anfield Ground. Originally it was a vast mound of earth which acquired its name because it reminded soldiers returning from the Second Boer War (1899-1902) in South Africa of Spion Kop, the Hill on which many soldiers from Lancashire had lost their lives in an unsuccessful attempt to relieve Ladysmith.

Before 1962 Liverpool F.C. had enjoyed an undistinguished history, inferior in every way to that of their great local rivals Everton. This was transformed by the appointment of Bill Shankly as Manager, which co-incided with the advent of the Mersey Beat, of which the Beatles are by far the most important example. Shankly`s rapport with the crowd and the performance of his team on the field transformed the atmosphere at Anfield. Success in Cup and League was accompanied by Shankly`s encouragement of the Kop to sing the hit song from “Carousel”, re-popularised by Gerry and the Pacemakers, “You`ll Never Walk Alone”, which has been the Liverpool Anthem ever since. By the time of Shankly`s retirement in 1974, although he never enjoyed success in the European Cup, he had become a legend. His successor, Bob Paisley, built on this, with his success in League and Cup AND three European Cups. Liverpool`s slow decline began after his retirement, and at the time of writing it is 28 years since Liverpool last won the League title. They have never won the English Premiership.

Unsurprisingly, the production concentrated on the glory years. The production was imaginative and performed enthusiastically. The songs, particularly the adaptation of the “Fields of Athenry”, were both relevant and moving. The inclusion of numbers hostile to Liverpool`s great rivals of the period, Nottingham Forest (who knocked out Liverpool in the First Round of the European Cup in 1978 and went on to win two European Cups themselves), Everton (inevitably) and Manchester United (who have won two fewer European Cups than Liverpool but two more League Championships) were not inappropriate. No-one who has ever attended a football match at Anfield can fail to have been moved by the Kop`s rendering of “You`ll Never Walk Alone” – an experience surely unequaled at any sporting venue in the world – and the audience participation in it proved a fitting end to the performance.

The Hillsborough tragedy of April 1989, when 96 Liverpool supporters lost their lives, took over the last third of the performance. The anger of the population of the city at the way in which the supporters were traduced by the press, blamed unfairly by the police and let down by the criminal justice system, was transmitted to the audience effectively by the whole cast, with Matt Hood`s solo as a climax. I was, however, left with an uneasy feeling. No mention was made of the events of May 1985 in Brussels, when 39 Juventus supporters were killed when charged by a group of Liverpool supporters, compounded by the Club`s attempt to deflect the blame elsewhere – a mirror image of the behaviour of the police at Hillsborough. Don’t the deaths of Italians also matter?

Reviewed by Henry Falconer

Gold star