Following Esoteric’s successful remastering of the McGough & McGear album, as well as both of McGear’s solo albums, this is their tour de force: a six-disc boxed set containing everything that the Scaffold ever recorded (released and unreleased) from their Parlophone, Island, Warner and Bronze Records eras. With five CDs and one DVD, remastered and rounded off by a superb booklet with fantastic sleeve notes by Mike Barnes, this is the first time that all their recordings across the decades have been available in one place.
The trio of Roger McGough, Mike McGear (the younger brother of Paul McCartney, Mike chose the name McGear to avoid the association with Paul’s fame and because it had a Liverpool feel), and John Gorman sprang from the fertile early sixties Liverpool art school culture that also spawned Adrian Henri’s Liverpool Scene —which itself grew from the CBS album The Incredible New Liverpool Scene, with McGough and Henri reciting poetry accompanied by Andy Roberts— as well as the best-selling The Mersey Sound poetry anthology featuring Henri, McGough, and Brian Patten (1967).
Their mixture of comedy, poetry, satire, and music was what initially bound the group together but also ultimately led to their disintegration, as McGough states in the sleeve notes: “Our talents pulled us all into different directions, had we all been musicians or all poets, we’d probably still be working together, but you sort of drift away...we just went the way life took us.” One of the things that comes through in this collection, however, is the fact that the band are firmly rooted in the town of their birth. As a port city, Liverpool was a crucible of diverse cultures, influences, and sounds when they were growing up. There were Irish folk traditions in some families (like the McCartneys), sea-shanties, the sounds of rock 'n' roll, and other influences that Liverpool bands brought back with them from their rite-of-passage seasons in Hamburg. If you mix this all together with traditional Northern songs and the local sardonic wit, you get a trio with so many strings to their bow that their albums can veer from the wild irreverence of John Gorman's sketches to the Irish-style waltz Liverpool Lou. In fact, it is impossible to pigeonhole the Scaffold, which could pose challenges for their audiences —as Mike McCartney comments in the sleeve notes, “You’d have parents in the front row of Scaffold gigs with their kids, having to sit through an hour of satire and poetry before we got to Lily the Pink.”
Across the five CDs we get the Parlophone albums —1968’s Live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and 1969’s L The P (a rather fantastic piece of Scaffold word-play)— the 1973 Island album Fresh Liver with its distinctive cover, and 1975’s Sold Out from Warner. Included as well are numerous BBC sessions, a disc containing unreleased Abbey Road sessions, and the singles that they released on Bronze Records in 1976 and 1977, plus something else rather special, which I’ll mention later.
The first two albums are focused very much on the music/spoken-word divide. This is obvious on Disc One, which contains the Scaffold’s first big hit, the rousing Thank U Very Much. It sparked a now nearly sixty-year-long debate as to what “the Aintree Iron” means (there was a very lengthy discussion in TheGuardian’s Notes & Queries fourteen years ago). The album is rounded out with singles like Goodbat Nightman, the wonderful music-hall of Do You Remember, and their debut single, the lugubrious 2 Day’s Monday. However, it also contains superb sketches such as Ten Whiskey Bottles (which was surely the inspiration for a skit on the Inside No. 9 episode Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room), as well as some of McGough's poetry, including The Act of Love and Let Me Die a Young Man’s Death. This live recording captures the group’s energy, spirit, and sharpness: releasing their stage act as their debut was a bold move that paid off.
Disc Two, dedicated to L the P, features the title track and huge single Lily the Pink (which we all sang at Junior School in Assembly alongside Yellow Submarine), the nursery rhyme-like 1-2-3, and the psychedelic Jelly Covered Cloud, while the band’s more melancholic side is represented by I Can’t Make You Mine. On L the P the musical styles are more sophisticated. Andy Roberts provides some sublime guitar work, whilst Lily the Pink features Graham Nash and a certain Reginald Dwight. The spoken-word pieces include Father John, the parody of radical politics Bucks, and Tim, with its brilliant exposition and punchline. However, the most poignant and affecting piece on here is 10:15 Thursday Morning: McGough, accompanied by Andy Roberts on acoustic guitar, holds us in the palm of his hand as he recites a poem about the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Another McGough protest poem, The Russian Bear, draws attention to the Soviets’ imprisonment of Russian poets. It is this combination of satire, comedy, and protest that makes the Scaffold so fascinating. The disc is rounded out with BBC John Peel sessions including Lily the Pink, the raucous Stop Blowing Those Charity Bubbles, and an early live version of Little Song and Dance Man (known as Gagster), a track about an unsuccessful end-of-pier showman which draws on all three of the band’s strengths. McGear sings the verses, McGough provides the poetry chorus (with the superb line “He’s got no family, got no folks, just the pitter patter of tiny jokes”), and then Gorman comes in with an over-exaggerated comedy routine. The way that it all fits together is a thing of beauty. This is one of their finest works, and should have been a single (the studio version appears on the third disc).
Disc Three mops up their recordings for Parlophone, including the final run of singles. There is 1969’s lively rendition of the old Scouting song Gin Gan Goolie, and Liver Birds - Liverpool Girls —the memorable theme from the successful BBC TV series. The lyrics praise the qualities of girls in various English cities, but (unsurprisingly) ultimately conclude that Liverpool girls are the best. (The tune was later covered by Matt Berry on his Television Themes album.) 1970 saw them release All the Way Up/Please Sorry, Bus Dreams, and If I Could Start All Over Again, while in 1971 they recorded their novelty dance number Do the Albert/Commercial Break.
It is clear that by this point Parlophone/EMI no longer knew what to do with the Scaffold. Of the fourteen additional songs on this disc, all recorded at Abbey Road, five of them have never been previously released, and the remainder were only put out in 1998 on the Scaffold at Abbey Road compilation. This is a shame, as there are some real gems on here: Knees Down Mother Brown, In My Liverpool Home, the cod reggae of Promiscuity, the studio version of Little Song and Dance Man and Burke and Hare. Together they would have made a strong third album, as this disc shows.
Disc Four is the Island album Fresh Liver, recorded at Manor Studios and produced by Tim Rice, with Tom Newman (fresh from engineering Tubular Bells) on studio duty. It saw the Scaffold joined by the legendary Gerry Conway, Ollie Halsall on guitar, Zoot Money on keys, and Andy Roberts and Neil Innes guesting on guitar. As you might imagine of an album recorded at The Manor with musicians of this calibre, it has a much bigger sound, with Halsall's distinctive guitar audible throughout the album. Side One opens and finishes with Knickers (no, not what you’d expect but I’m not going to spoil it!) and also contains the rowdy Fagorf (an homage to Country Joe & the Fish’s I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die-Rag), the almost-psych-rock Devon’s Dead, and the wonderfully satirical Nuclear Band, which showcases the band’s continuing lyrical word-play. The one single from the album was John Gorman’s W.P.C. Hodges, sung in a broad Lancastrian accent, in which he loses himself in the character of a lovestruck old-school bobby –demonstrating that his observational comedy was second to none.
The final music disc is the Warner album Sold Out from 1975, opening with the band’s last hit single Liverpool Lou (Paul McCartney had suggested that the Dominic Behan-arranged traditional song would be a great Scaffold track, and it was!) The album is far more musical than its predecessor and features interpretations of other nostalgic old songs that the group would have heard in the dockland pubs, like the Mingulay Boating Song and The Leaving of Liverpool, as well as a majestic version of Lord of the Dance. There is also the frankly brilliant Potato Clock, which sets a story about someone who can’t get to work on time to a jaunty tune: the punchline alone is worth the price of admission. With a rerecorded and rocked-up version of Liver Birds, now just called Liverpool Girls, they also kick in The Cokey Cokey (a Hokey Cokey rewrite), whilst the McGough original Beilins Boneyard is also a great track. However, my favourite on here is Pack of Cards, in which they play soldiers explaining to a padre what a pack of cards means to them, with a great gospel-style backing and another cracking punchline. They reach the pinnacle of sophisticated humour on this track.
Rounding off this last disc of music is a collection of the B-sides from the Warner and Bronze Records singles, including Mr Noselighter (the reverse of Wouldn't It Be Funny If You Didn't Have A Nose from 1976) and How D’You Do – a raucous and hilarious reinterpretation of the traditional song One Misty Moisty Morning, originally made famous by Steeleye Span. This version has its tongue firmly in cheek, with some Wurzels-esque West Country accents. There is one final treat on this box, 3 Shirts On A Line, recorded specially for a 2008 EMI compilation Liverpool: The Number Ones Album. It’s a humorous reworking (by McGough) of the Lightening Seeds’ Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home), and it nods in the band’s unique way to Liverpudlian culture and its global impact.
The Scaffold continued to perform until 1977. However, in 2023 they reunited to play both the Bristol Slapstick Festival and the Liverpool Everyman Theatre. For those with a hankering to see their live shows, the final disc is a DVD which contains some promo performances of the hit singles, but more importantly showcases recovered and now remastered footage of them playing on the flagship BBC programme Talk of the Town. Long thought lost, this performance is the essence of the Scaffold’s eclectic live act. They really were a unique group, and this film demonstrates the reasons why.
This is a superb example of the art of the boxed set: bringing all the band’s diverse work together in one chronological collection highlights their strengths and development. There is so much to love and to discover (and rediscover) in this box that you certainly won’t regret grabbing a copy. --James R. Turner
