Paul du Noyer has written many excellent books and articles on music, musicians and the City of Liverpool. Paul has very kindly agreed to us reproducing an extract from his definitive book “Liverpool: Wondrous Place”, a history of the city’s music.

A Deaf School fan since the early days, Paul told the DS website "Deaf School were a thrill to watch in those days, and they still are…"

After all the success that Liverpool bands enjoyed in the 1960s, the next decade began as a terrible anti-climax. Only two new acts now stood between Liverpool and extinction. One was the Real Thing, a soul-harmony group from Toxteth, and the other was Deaf School.

Deaf School were formed at Liverpool Art College, John Lennon’s alma mater and thrived on the pub circuit developing in the early 1970s. They were in the Bowie and Roxy traditions, which had been very big in Liverpool, but there seemed to be dozens of them on stage, like a low budget cabaret revue. The focal points were a suave young crooner with a moustache, one Enrico Cadillac, and a sexy, upbeat girl in 60s styles called Bette Bright. A guitarist, Clive Langer, looked serious and bespectacled, so you assumed he was the musical genius. There was a comedy vicar called The Reverend Max Ripple, and another lounge lizard named Eric Shark. In fact there was a pile-up of competing looks to accommodate, and a corresponding jumble of musical elements, from Tin Pan Alley to Brecht/Weill cabaret to rock’n’roll satire.

Bette Bright (who was actually Anne Martin, from Whitstable in Kent) remembers: ‘We started a band that was supposed to be interesting, just kind of different. Originally there were a lot more people in the band – early on it was a bit ridiculous – but it gradually got more serious. Eventually the numbers kind of whittled down to about eight.’

They won the Melody Maker’s Folk/Rock contest in 1975, which led to a record deal with Warners and their 1976 debut LP 2nd Honeymoon. They were massively backed by the company at first, and launched in America with high hopes all round. But this was also the year of punk rock, and Deaf School seemed suddenly wrong. I know I divided my time that year between Sex Pistols gigs at the 100 Club in London, and trips to Liverpool, and despite my affection for Deaf School I recognised the problem. Theirs was a sort of provincial take on Kings Road camp, whereas the mood of punk was something harsher. They made a few more albums in the 70s, before dissolving.

Yet Deaf School had been a great thing for Liverpool in two ways. Firstly they were a compelling if chaotic live event, a hundred times more interesting than anything else available in the mid-1970s. And secondly they were the first young group to provide the scene with a post-Beatle focus. A new generation of music fans and would-be musicians found their earliest role models in Deaf School. Its personnel would be the germ of Mathew Street’s revival. (Their tour manager, Ken Testi, was in fact a co-founder of Eric’s club, from where Liverpool’s next wave of bands emerged.)

Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ former pressman, who signed the band to Warners, told me: ‘I had one or two failures. I had Deaf School. I worked very enthusiastically for Deaf School, because I thought they were fabulous, and I used bore the pants off people about them. They were a great group, we knew that, you knew that, Liverpool knew that. So I’d be going “Deaf School! Deaf School! Listen to Deaf School! Like The Byrds, these are not people who will ever be forgotten. They may not become rich and they may not become famous. But remember, you heard it here first!”

‘Long after it was all over, one of them told me, “We were always too big, there was always too many of us, we were all over the place.” I said, Well there was always that risk, you were too expensive to transport, every fare counted, and Warners spent a lot of money. But that didn’t mean that they weren’t worth pushing, because they had real merit.’

© Paul Du Noyer 2009

Adapted from “Liverpool: Wondrous Place”, published by Virgin Books

Reproduced with permission