I’ve really enjoyed the promo for The Boys of Dungeon Lane, especially some of the quirkier choices like Chicken Shop Date and this history podcast. Partly because they get away from familiar questions, but it’s also giving Paul a different kind of space for reflection. Having now heard the album, it very much feeds into the sense that Paul has been reexamining his early life, and seeing or acknowledging different things about it. A couple of highlights:
8,50, on Paul’s mother’s job, where they lived, and her aspirations for the family:
Tom Holland: That was very important, wasn’t it, in terms of where you would live - because as a midwife, she would get houses, and you would kind of move around, upgrading with each house.
Paul: It’s true, we moved around quite a lot, and didn’t realise, til we were much older, that “Ah, that’s why we moved!” But yeah, she would - It was often on the edge of the city, you know. But they were nice houses. It was always an upgrade, to us.
TH: Forthlin Road had an indoor toilet, didn’t it?
Paul [laughs]: Wow! An indoor toilet! Yeah, no, it’s true. So we thought we were going somewhere.
And my mum was very aspirational. Like a lot of good mothers, she just wanted her kids to succeed, do well. My wife, Nancy, she will say to me, “You don’t talk Liverpool! People love it when you talk Liverpool.” I say, “Yeah, but my mum tried to get us not to talk Liverpool. She tried to get us to talk posh.” She thought, she was hoping we’d be doctors or something, you know.”
Given how long Paul held on to the guilt of teasing his mother for “talking posh”, it’s such a change to see him speaking so fondly of it here. (@crepesuzette2023 mentioned his mother’s ambitions in the comments to this post, reminding me of this interview - thank you!)
Paul: I think at one point it was the second city to London, because it was a big port.
Tom Holland: Fabulously rich!
Paul: Yes, so we had a great sense of importance. Which waned through the years, you know. But when I was growing up, you definitely thought Liverpool was a very great, grand historic place. You used to go down and see all the liners off, they’ll be going off to Canada, you know, places like that.
It was only later that you learn that this was slave trade. There was a lot of that. The only thing we would see would be the local Caribbean people. So we would know people that would be descended - we didn’t talk about it then.
I love how emphatic he is about Liverpool’s wealth coming from slavery. Particularly in the context of an album that is often nostalgic, idealising some aspects of his childhood. “Good old days” reminiscences can be horribly popular with the far right, which gets sentimentally racist about an invented all-white past, and wants to go on “not talking about” the violence that goes into that. So it’s good to see all that so explicitly and actively rejected.
More generally, The Boys of Dungeon Lane has such an interesting relationship with memory and the past. Because some of it is seen through rose-tinted spectacles, but there’s also this emphatic awareness of hard times and pain, along with a sense of opening it up and being able to process it differently. And I think you can see threads of that in this conversation, too.
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