Yesterday is Today’s History

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Probe, Mathew Street, c1980
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Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun, c1980
It is frightening how quickly time goes by. I remember both Probe and the School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun so well. I was running Open Eye in Whitechapel at the time and we had a close involvement in Ken Campbell’s Illuminatus, that radical theatrical event that lit up Liverpool in 1976. Science fiction writer Brian Aldiss, amongst many others, hailed it a work of genius. Its setting, in Peter O’Halligan’s shrine to Carl Jung, only added to the atmosphere and mystique. How Liverpool could do with more people of such artistic vision. The photograph has an incidental interest – the white Rolls Royce parked on the side is the one famously burnt out in the Toxteth Riots in 1981. Its owner, Michael Showers, can be seen just getting out of the car. Showers, the self-avowed community spokesman, has since spent most of his life behind bars.
Probe also has a connection. The doors advertise a record by The Cherry Boys, released on the Open Eye record label. The short-lived label and sound studio had a memorable history, recording the first tracks of Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark, Echo and the Bunnymen and Teardrop Explodes amongst many other local bands that made waves in the 1980s.
I was offered the whole Probe building for £9,000 in the mid-1970s. I was looking for a base and a number of buildings were looked at. I rejected Probe because it had been used for cold storage and the whole place would have cost a fortune to convert. Besides, £9,000 was a lot of money in those days.
The reason for this blog is to give publicity to a crowdfunding venture which is trying to raise money to publish a book of photographs by Francesco Mellina, who was Dead and Alive’s manager as well as being a talented photographer. If you would like to see more of his photographs, click on the link http://kck.st/1otKScv

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