Jose McLaughlin was a key part of famous Liverpool group Gerry and the Pacemakers when the group re-formed in 1972. These days he calls Brisbane home, and works as a session guitarist and teacher. Jose also has formed his own bands, including jazz bands McJazz and Ambrosia and has played on more than 150 Australian albums. Here, the musician displays the famous Liverpudlian humour in his memories of growing up in a time and place that is part of musical royalty. He speaks of his mothers legacy and on arriving in Australia on his first tour with Gerry and The Pacemakers. The Last Post: Hello Jose and welcome to The Last Post. Jose McLaughlin: Good morning Greg, nice to be here. TLP: You have a fantastic musical history. You’re living here in Australia now, of course. What are you doing up there in Queensland, you’re with the conservatorium? JM: I am, these days. I’m in my 70’s so I’m just doing enough to keep my hand in and keep myself occupied. I lecture in music at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music and I still do the odd gig. TLP: That’s a good thing for us all. I think you were involved in the Sydney, 2000 Olympics? JM: I was, yes. I co-wrote the theme song for the Sydney Games, yeah. TLP: For anyone that is not aware, your history includes a stint with the famous Liverpool group, Gerry and the Pacemakers. Tell us how that came about. JM: Well, I’d been playing…I started playing in groups in Liverpool from the time I was 13, starting out in a small way, feeling your way, playing in the suburbs and local clubs and stuff and graduated through the ranks of the bands and the muso’s so when it got to the stage where Gerry was looking for a new piano player after the original one had gone and I was kinda…I got myself to the stage where I was an obvious pick. There were lots of recommendations and stuff like that. So I went to see Gerry and he said, “Yeah, okay, you’re in the band”, he said “You’re coming to Australia next week”. TLP: What a nice introduction, Jose. When you say it was obvious. Had you known Gerry? Had you been playing with some of the people associated with them? I guess, in Liverpool, everyone knows everyone? JM: More or less. Back then it was a very big scene. There were lots of bands. The umbrella name that was given to it was Merseybeat. But, there were lots of bands and you’d run across each other all the time. If you weren’t playing one night, you’d go and play in somebody else’s band. It was a big scene and it took a while to rise-up through it because there were so many musicians. Eventually I was playing with the cream of the guys from Liverpool. TLP: What did it feel like? There must’ve been a constant buzz going around Liverpool after that initial launch of Merseybeat, of course. I guess Gerry himself had some connection with all of that and with Epstein when he was alive., being Gerry’s manager and George Martin did some work the group too. JM: Yeah, that was all part of it. Not just The Beatles and Gerry and The Pacemakers, there were some other groups in Liverpool who were under the same wing, like Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas, Fourmost, The Big Three. Quite a few groups got their start in that way. TLP: Did that have the feel of being a family within a family, with all those people under that umbrella? JM: Prior to that, everything musical in England was based in London. Liverpool was this provincial kind of outpost, up in the north that nobody ever really gave any bother to. “Oh Liverpool? That’s just a port, up north, you know”. So the scene in Liverpool managed to develop and form its own
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identity all on it’s own. Because it was cut off from the rest of the music industry in England, it just went on and developed its own thing and we got on with it and there was then a big scene in Liverpool. Once that broke out and The Beatles and Gerry and The Pacemakers started making records, newspapers started coming to Liverpool to see what else was coming out of there. Because of that, a lot of the other Liverpool groups were able to jump on the coat-tails of what was already going on and to get some success out of it too. The Liverpool sound really took off. TLP: It must’ve been good for you knowing and seeing people from London coming up to Liverpool on hearsay and from what they’d heard themselves from what was an amazing pool of talent. How did that all happen? JM: How did what all happen? TLP: The emergence of talent in Liverpool. I know John Lennon had spoken about the music that would come across from overseas, mainly America, on the ships. How do you look at that evolution of talent from within Liverpool? JM: It was a pretty rough place, Liverpool. When I think back to my childhood in Liverpool I invariably see it in black and white and not in colour. The weather was terrible, it was cold, it was dank, dark. It was miserable. People were broke and poor and I think, in a lot of respects, for a lot of the kids in Liverpool at the time, they had two choices. They were either going to get in trouble with the law or they were going to find some other outlet for their energies. It was a situation in Liverpool that grew out of trad-jazz and then skiffle music, like Lonnie Donegan. Pretty soon the kids in Liverpool worked out they could buy cheap guitars, get an old tub and a broom handle with some string and that’s be a bass and get their Mum’s washboard and that’d be like the drums and for virtually no money at all they could get together”
