Liverpool in the 60s

I'm fascinated by old photographs of Liverpool in the sixties. Partly because these guys were around in those days, but also because those little details - the old tramlines, the cobblestones for example - are things I can remember. Just about.

Now it's so long ago it looks like a different world. But Dylan and Lennon and so many others, unbeknownst even to themselves, were beginning to transform it. Appropriate perhaps that it was the decade colour began to predominate over black and white. But in these shots you see the old world of the war, of industry, which still felt so solid and heavy and permanent.

It was peaceful and ordered and claustrophobically static in those times. Dylan and Lennon were looking for a way out and showing a way out. Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, but for those of us beginning to grow up then, his words were only just beginning to resonate:

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

It's a freer world, but a colder one in some ways.