David Gough inspirations-day three: Liverpool

Day three of five things that influenced me as a kid

"No one who has any self-respect stays -but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.”James Joyce

Every artist or writer holds a weary relationship with there hometown. Growing up in Liverpool in the Seventies and early Eighties felt akin to living in a warzone.
The architectural contemporary dream of the sixties had been reduced to the urban squalor of a abandoned tenements, whilst dilapidated Victorian alleyways lay strewn with garbage, soiled mattresses and bursting couches. Burned out cars sat on faceless gray estates, while shipyards heaved with rusted old vessels on banks of shit colored mud-bygones of an industrious era. Everything felt like decay, particularly when you lived by a cemetery.

These were the playgrounds of my youth.



It's all too easy to heighten reality, recast it as some romantic, resilient 'Boys from the Blackstuff' morality play, but the truth is far from ideal. Still looking back at pictures from that era, I can see the influence that those times had on my creative geography.


All photos copyright Dave Sinclair, for more of his incredible images go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/dave_sinclair_liverpool_photos/