My life as a reviewer came pleasingly full circle when my son was married in Liverpool at the weekend and the celebrations spilled through the city from the registry office to the Hope Street Hotel, the Racquet Club, the Albert Dock and Mathew Street.

Mathew Street was the home of the Cavern Club, where the Beatles played nearly three hundred dates between 1961 and 1964. And next door, at Number 18, Ken Campbell launched the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool with Illuminatus, one of his two great epic cycles, in November 1976.

The theatre site is not marked, and I couldn’t work out whether I spent that historic first day of performances in what is now a souvenir shop or Vivienne Westwood. But the atmosphere still hangs about the place, and many people I spoke to testified that Peter O’Halligan, the poet who found the old warehouse for Ken, is still around and thriving.

The Cavern has been rebuilt exactly as it was — a wonderful below gound warren of bricks, arches and cubicles focussed on the tiniest of imaginable  stages — just across the alley from the original site.

We  had our Friday night dinner at 60 Hope Street, and the honeymoon couple spent their first night in the Hope Street Hotel. Hope Street has the Anglican cathedral at one end and the Catholic cathedral at the other, with the Everyman Theatre and the Philharmonic concert hall nearer the Catholic end, I’m glad to say.

The Everyman was the first regional theatre I visited on a regular basis, partly because I had a girlfrind who worked there, but mainly because even in 1974 we knew the company of actors were a little bit special: Julie Walters, Pete Postlethwaite, Jonathan Pryce, Bernard Hill, Kate Fahy, Alison Steadman, Antony Sher, Bill Nighy, Trevor Eve — I wonder what happend to that lot?

The Everyman playwrights were John McGrath, Bill Morrison and a new young fellow who’d been working as a teacher and a hairdresser called Willy Russell. The Beatles heritage and the new theatre energy came rousingly together at the first night of Russell’s John, Paul, George, Ringo…and Bert, with a bespectacled Barbara Dickson playing keyboards, on 21 May 1974.

So, thirty-five years later, I get to play the host on Hope Street, where I have so many happy memories. Next day, the bride’s brother, Kit Malthouse, emcees another ceremony in the family garden in the Aigburth district, attended by 140 guests: instead of the bridal march, a wonderful cool jazz version of “Come Rain or Come Shine” by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer.

And, amazingly, we have all shine and no rain. There is Pimms, prosecco and canapes, a splendid “wed fest” with three-legged races, hoopla, a badge making stall and a jazz band, and then we repair to the Racquet Club for dinner and dancing.

The occasion is wonderful not just because of the gathering of relatives and family friends, but also because Tom and Ros’s university contemporaries — his at Birmingham, hers at Newcastle — are such a great crowd, and they’re all impressivley close even ten years after graduating.

They work in the medical and legal professions, in the city, in newspapers and television, and they are all, without exception, well-dressed, well-mannered and (reasonably) well-behaved. Some are just starting families, some have small children, one or two have same sex partners, several are single, or in recovery from former relationships.

And one has been top of the pops! Olivia Nervo, the girlfriend of one of Tom’s four best men, Tom Lawrence, is an Australian songwriter with her identical twin sister Miriam.

They were just on the point of jacking it all in when they hit pay dirt with “When Love Takes Over” for ex-Destiny’s Child singer Kelly Rowland; the song was Number One two months ago and is still in the top ten. On YouTube, it’s taken three million hits.

Now, Liv’s dealing with accountants and lawyers for the first time in her professional life and lining up new songs for Sophie Ellis-Bextor and the recent X-Factor winner, Alexandra Burke.  

Maybe she and Mim will one day get round to writing a new musical for the Everyman, so we all have a good reason — not that we really need one — to return to Merseyside and carry on partying.  

This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 8:24 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.