A fifteen-metre artwork featuring one hundred musicians who have shaped Liverpool’s cultural heritage is being unveiled on Mathew Street, honouring the city’s past, present and future influence on global music.
00:00Standing on Matthew Street, you are surrounded by reminders of Liverpool's musical past.
00:06But a brand new mural aims to celebrate not just the legends of yesterday, but the musicians shaping the city's sound today.
00:13The 15-metre artwork features 100 performers arranged as an audience with Matthew Street imagined as the stage itself.
00:22Celebrates their great heritage of music we've got here, but also there's loads of artists from their current day and people who are going to be stars in the future.
00:29But it's not just about the Beatles. When I was 15, 16, a club just to your left there, Eriks, I saw Eriyaka and the Bunnymen there, Teardrop Explodes, Big in Japan, which had Holly Johnson and Jane Casey and Bill Drummond in.
00:44So it's a street that's got a massive music history.
00:49The mural's designed and painted by Wirral-based artist Joe Venning, who says this project is about making musical connections visible.
00:57He explains that the musicians are arranged in roughly chronological order, with contemporary artists at the front and Mersey beat names further back, forming a timeline through the crowd.
01:08I'm hoping this mural being here with all the tourists going past, it'll sort of draw attention to the other artists that are from the area.
01:19And, yeah, people can hopefully see the influence that the Beatles and the other bands from around here have had on subsequent generations.
01:28He says the mural highlights the lineage of Liverpool music from indie bands linked through the Lars, the Farm and the Zootons, to the family tree of dance and electronic music reaching from camel fat back to cream DJs, the KLF, OMD and further into disco with the real thing.
01:44Over here with all the 100 artists, I've kind of thought of that as like the side A of a single, the big kind of showy one that gets the attention.
01:54And then the other side, I'm thinking of the side B, the sort of slightly weirder, artier one.
02:01Phil Addy, CEO of Liverpool Bid, says the artwork puts a legacy and impact on the city's music centre stage, reinforcing why the cabin quarter is such a distinctive place for visitors.
02:11The mural's been funded by SP Energy Networks and the Beatles Story by the Beatles Legacy Group and facilitated by the Liverpool Business Improvement District.
02:21In a street where many of them will have played, many of them will have gigged over the years and the power for those gigs and the electrification of the instruments that played would have come from this substation, going stretching right back to the Beatles in the early 60s.
02:33Peter Hooten, chair of the Beatles Legacy Group and founding member of The Farm, says the mural brings Liverpool's musical heritage to life.
02:43And its position near the cabin in Erics feels fitting because of the history those venues shaped.
02:49Matthew Street has long been a part of the city's musical heritage and the mural's intended to reflect the culture and ambition of Liverpool's creative communities.
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