ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a brief account of Liverpool's changing economic circumstances that will set the scene. It focuses on the appropriation of music as a local sound in order to examine how music is interpreted as local culture and connected to tales and mythologies of the city, and the influence upon that process of music genre and local social and economic factors. The chapter highlights contrasting descriptions of and debates about the Liverpool Sound, but it focuses in more detail on Roger Hill's description of the song 'Christian' by China Crisis as the definitive Liverpool Sound. Themes of urban discontent are by no means peculiar to rock music in Liverpool. Riverine music was about 'being here' and perhaps dreaming of being somewhere else, but also about being away yet wanting to return. Music and media corporations have thus promoted not only the notion of distinctive local rock sounds, but also selective constructions of a local rock lineage.
