September 11th - Day 146

"Bizzare 40's/rock/Roxy amalgam with bouncy vocals threatening suicide" is how one critic described the single "What a way to end it all" in late 1976. The song, their debut single, was by a band called Deaf School. Live music accounts from mid-seventies Liverpool suggest that they alone were responsible for rescuing the city from musical impotence, a place where "there was nowhere to go and nothing to see". Music writer Paul Du Noyer called them "the band that brought Liverpool music back from the point of extinction". He also theorised that "in the whole history of Liverpool music two bands matter most, one is The Beatles and the other is Deaf School". So why, one might wonder, were they not as big as The Beatles...or Echo and the Bunnymen...or Pete Wylie's Wah!? I guess a big clue lies in the first line of this post. The punk-boom Britain of late 1976 was not a time ripe for a "bizarre 40's/rock/Roxy" amalgam, however exhilarating and formidable the band's two year live experience had been. So like another much vaunted, multi-musician combo of the time, Kilburn and the High Roads, they stayed forever in the mid-seventies and paved the way for others. Listen to their music now, however, with its musical mix of pre-war Berlin cabaret (so more 30's than 40's), pop, glam and damn good tunes, and it's timeless. Now they seem less of their time than the punk and new wave that came after them.
You may have deduced that I was a fan of Deaf School. When I was sixteen (three years after they'd split), a friend bought their first two albums second hand for 50p each. He hadn't heard of them - I think he liked the covers. I hadn't heard of them either. But I listened and loved the music. For a long time, in those pre-internet days, all I knew about them came from the album sleeves themselves - their strange names like Enrico Cadillac Jnr, Eric Shark, Bette Bright, Rev. Max Ripple, Steve "Average" Lindsey and Cliff Langer and the accompanying band photos which were theatrical and a touch bizarre - they were an odd-looking bunch and I found the photos vaguely unsettling for some reason. The years rolled along and with no record player and seemingly no CDs available - the sound of Deaf School became distant.
I have a record player now, and an anthology of their music on CD, so their music is back in my life. Their music is also back in their lives. In 1988 they'd reformed for a one-off gig in Liverpool and in 2006 they did a couple more. In 2007 I got wind of a couple of London shows, but ended up not going and regretted it. But here they are again. Two shows in London - The Dublin Castle and, today's one, The Garage in Highbury and Islington - followed by a couple in Liverpool next weekend. I will endevour to write more about the gig soon - I think it was probably quite an emotional experience for many of tonight's mature audience, either because they were spun back to the last time they saw the band over thirty years ago, perhaps at London's Marquee or perhaps at Eric's in Liverpool, or because, like me, they were listening to music that existed only on vinyl and in the head, recorded long ago by a defunkt and mythical band, performed tonight in the same room, by that same long-lost band.

deafschoolmusic.com

video.aol.co.uk/video-detail/deaf-school-live-hi-jo-hi-2009/1279476292