IF the 2008 organisers and their arty-farty hangers on are not careful they will have exhausted potential global interest in Liverpool’s Capital of Culture year well before the first Mongolian throat warbler has taken to the stage.
We are still more than a year away from the event but already Liverpool’s culture clique have launched a “taster” event of very dubious taste, complete with video projected onto balloons (impractical as well as passé), children dressed as angels (a whopping cliché), a gospel choir (so very predictable) and a mock up of a baroque boudoir (a desperate attempt to be sexy).
What the culture company, city council wallies and the local arts establishment are doing by holding such an event way too soon is demonstrating to the world just how very excitable and provincial they are being about the whole project.

There has already been so much hype, so much flaunting of logos and corporate sponsorship deals, that a disinterested observer might be forgiven for wondering whether Liverpool, while it can talk the talk, will actually walk the walk as 2008 dawns.
Genuine culture, after all, rises from the street, not from committee rooms and PR offices.
Real art is to be found in creaking garrets, in sweaty music clubs and backstreet pubs.
Real art, genuine culture, has little to do with public sector money.
Once you get government – European, national, local or the quango variety – involved in culture you kiss the authentic artistic impulse goodbye.
That’s not to say some notable artistic events can’t result from a huge spend-fest such as Liverpool 08, it is just that the motivation for them will be wrong and their appeal is unlikely to be intimate, which very best of art really ought to be.
I hope, for instance, that culture year’s kick-off event – a huge nativity play (possibly the biggest ever staged in Britain) – will be a hit.
Worryingly, however, this event will use a similar format to the Manchester Passion televised live last Good Friday. I watched that and was not impressed.
The very idea of using music from local bands and singers, replete with banal lyrics about all-too-human dilemmas, to tell the story of something as profound as the birth of Christ is surely misconceived.
And why should Liverpool’s special year kick-off with something inspired by the city’s great rival, Manchester?
At the very least, I hope the Liverpool nativity will use better singers than the Manchester Passion managed. The guy playing Jesus sounded like a goat with catarrh.
As for the big music concert promised for the Albert Dock, well I hope it doesn’t try to book the biggest names in rock, because those dinosaurs pump out the blandest music, aimed at the lowest common denominator (usually thick American teenagers hooked on stadium rock bores).
So, may I end with a personal request to the 08 culture vultures?
Please don’t bother to invite Sting, Elton John, Mick Hucknall, Bon Jovi, Phil Collins or bloody Bono to strut their stuff. Frankly, I am sick of seeing and hearing that lot.

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