LIVERPOOL, UK (Top40 Charts) In the 1970s and '80s, the vibrant Liverpool Punk and New Wave music scene, centered around Eric's club, featured the likes of Elvis Costello, the Teardrop Explodes and Echo & the Bunnymen, bands formed on the back of the recent punk movement which had taken the music world by storm. The new cultural buzz generated by Punk would shape the music industry forever.
All over the United Kingdom and across the world, kids were finding a new way to express their frustrations, buying guitars and forming punk bands.
Peter Alan
Lloyd was one of them. His new book, Bombed Out! (www.bombedoutpunk.com), vividly recalls those heady days in a northern English city, experiencing the first
Sex Pistols riffs of the punk period.
Peter had just turned 17 when he quit school, rejected his family's working-class aspirations, joined a band in Liverpool and starting working in Eric's club in the city centre.
"The early 1980s was an exciting, but also a very troubled time," recalled Peter, who played bass for Pink Military Stand Alone and Pete Burns' Nightmares in Wax (later known as Dead or Alive). "The UK was decimated by a severe recession which saw many people thrown on the unemployment scrap heap, with no prospect of finding work in their lifetimes."
Against a backdrop of massive job losses and financial hardship in the UK,
Peter dramatically walked away from the Liverpool music business, and Bombed Out! chronicles the unorthodox way he set about trying to avoid a lifetime of unemployment, as the recession bit deep.
"If this was just a book about being in a band, having fumbled teenage sex in nightclub toilets and signing on the dole in 1980s Liverpool, Bombed Out! would still be better than anything else on the bookshelves," said Mick Finkler, guitarist for the Teardrop Explodes. "But it becomes much more than that."
"It's a story of hope in adversity, of stubborn refusal to be beaten and, ultimately, of personal triumph. The themes are universal but the story is all his."
Compiled from diaries and journals scrawled out thirty-five years ago, Peter's brutally honest account recreates the energy of the Punk and New Wave period in a remarkable coming-of-age story.
"The name Bombed Out! reflects the destruction wreaked on Liverpool by German bombs during World War II, but it also encompasses the economic devastation caused to the city and the UK in the 1980s, under the policies of the Conservative government led by
Margaret Thatcher," he said.
"Back then it all felt very personal."
Now available in paperback, signed copies of Bombed Out! can be ordered from Peter's website (www.bombedoutpunk.com) or downloaded as an e-book on Amazon and Smashwords. They are also on sale at News From Nowhere, on Bold Street in Liverpool.
