‘A Moment Of Clarity’, the title track of Professor Yaffle’s 2020 album, opens with the sound of tide lapping up against the jetty, there are gulls and bell-chimes with rippling strings chasing sitar-drones over shivering keyboards. The rhythms are exotic. The harmonies are a soft time-breeze that blows the decades around, the Byrds into the Stone Roses into Spiritualised, into a cosmic spoken-voice that just might be a Sci-Fi sample.
The original Professor Yaffle – as devotees of Oliver Postgate’s 1970s children’s animation series Bagpuss will know, was part of the cast alongside ‘The Most Important, The Most Beautiful, The Most Magical, Saggy Old Cloth Cat in the Whole, Wide World’, in which Yaffle was a carved, wooden bookend in the shape of a wise woodpecker, a very knowledgeable but pompous academic, on who the six mice from the ‘mouse organ’ loved to play tricks. His appearance might just constitute a hint at the Liver Birds, those mythical creatures who look down from the spires of the Liver Building. ‘Bagpuss was one of the main programmes that fuelled my imagination as a child – and no doubt countless other imaginations’ says Lee Rogers. ‘Ealing comedies and sixties/seventies British thriller/horror movies too, they’re all mixed up in there, and a bit of sixties/early seventies sci-fi, too.’
From his vantage point, standing on the crest of Everton Brow, the solitary policeman photographed on the sleeve of their latest album – Everyone Wants To Dream, can see Liverpool spread out below him like a Google map. He can see the pretty nurse selling poppies from a tray, the Billy Fury statue on the pierhead, Ken Dodd’s Diddymen on their way to yet another day’s work down the Knotty Ash Jam-Butty Mines, Adrian Henri painting enormous pictures of every pavingstone in Canning Street, the La’s chasing an impossible love down a lane that has no end, and he can see Pete Wylie’s Wah with ‘The Story Of The Blues’ stuffed into his back-pocket. From the crest of Everton Brow he can see each and every last detail. Karl Hughes’ monochrome photo is taken from a 1970s archive, an affectionate nudge to our collective memory of the melancholy heartbeat of Tuesday afternoons. ‘From Everton Brow, you see everything that matters. Not just the landmarks – the layers. This album is about finding yourself in the view’ explains Lee.
The huge legacy of Liverpool music must be something that’s all-pervasive, either in a positive inspiring sense, or in an overwhelming intimidating way? ‘I’m a massive Beatles fan,’ Lee admits, ‘but mostly a fan of their tunes from Help onwards, and particularly their more psychedelic, experimental songs. So, while I’m appreciative of the wonderful musical legacy of the city, inspiration-wise, it’s pretty much almost all about the Beatles for me. And it’s completely positive. We didn’t have their music playing in the house when I was growing up, despite my Dad having been a doorman on the ‘Casbah’ when The Beatles played there. Though I was aware of the Beatles, I was only properly introduced to their music by a teacher in my primary school and was hooked from then on. However, while I’m inspired by the (later) Beatles, other artists have been just as inspirational to me as a songwriter… a topic which I’ll be happy to go into in more detail! Of the more well-known artists, it would include the British and West-coast Folk and Folk-Rock acts of the late sixties and early seventies, such as Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, Joni Mitchell, The Byrds, CSNY, The Band etc. I’m also inspired by psychedelic bands of that same period, with the likes of Pink Floyd and The Grateful Dead being among the more mainstream bands. And I’m inspired by sound library jazzy/funky instrumental artists such as David Axelrod, Roy Budd and Dave Pike amongst countless others.’
Everton Brow features as a recurring motif across the eight original songs that make up Everyone Wants To Dream, the first Professor Yaffle album to emerge on the Liverpool (& Paris)-based Violette Records label, ‘this collaboration wasn’t planned, it was inevitable.’ It’s an urban dream. A Liverpool dream. Violette Records also issues material by Beatowls, The Pistachio Kid, Michael Head & The Red Elastic Band (who Professor Yaffle supported at the Liverpool Florrie). Everyone Wants To Dream is a trapped lightning quicksilver shimmer, an alternating storm of light and dark where wind abates and the sun glitters across wet rooftops, summer heat and winter ice in equal measure, cause and effect, the glimmer of the moon in a pool of rainwater, increments of wonder, expanse and reflex, mirrors and gadgets. When the album plays, all the clamouring poseurs with cocktails in their hands, the streetcorner buskers, the roaring drunks, and dogs being walked in Sefton Park, all stop and listen. It’s good enough to eat, if I’d not already dined. It turns the ‘Pool figuratively into Paradise City through its psych-Folk chemistry.
Liverpool has a long history, of not only sound and beat music – from the tourists on Mathew Street and the gates of Strawberry Fields, to downstairs at Erics, but performance poetry and a literary subculture of word-games from Brian Patten and Scaffold through Dave Ward’s Windows project. A native gift for idiom that dances with scant regard for scallywag poetry or ragamuffin poesy, taking in Z-Cars and the Ferry Cross The Mersey, as sharp as Scouse wit, as tender as a drunkard’s hug. ‘Anfield Road’ gets a name-check in the harder up-tempo ‘Every Day Of My Life’ – emphasising that ‘memories will never fade away.’
From earlier album Cosmic Lullabies (2017), the opening track – ‘Sometimes’, is an acoustic power-strum that incorporates Rudyard Kipling spoken quotes about ‘if you can dream, and not make dreams your master.’ On the same album ‘Raining Inside My Mind’ has a Paul Simon complex simplicity… ‘Simon and Garfunkel were one of the acts that we did have playing in the house when we were growing up’ says Lee. ‘The Concert In Central Park double-album (1982). Excellent stuff.’
Then the track ‘You Were Made For Me’ has credits to Leah & Lee Rogers, and is embroidered by Michael Holcroft’s accordion sway. ‘No,’ he protests, ‘Leah was just a small child playing on the swings in our garden when I wrote it. I had a couple of different ideas for the lyrics, and I asked her which ones she preferred, hence the credit. That song is about two totally separate things. Some of the lyrics to the verses were inspired by her, ‘don’t be afraid to be the girl you want to be’ and ‘can’t everybody see there’s something about you,’ whereas some verses and the chorus are more traditional lyrics about lost love/heartache. My younger daughter Lucy sings on a few songs, including ‘Outside Looking In’ and the remix ‘A New Vibration’. She was only about ten or eleven when she sang on them.’ Later – in 2022, Lee’s fragile vocals are mixed low in the more densely textured three parts of ‘Let There Be Light’, feeding over into Prog layering, with horns (‘Let There Be More Light’ is a pre-empt from Pink Floyd on their 1968 A Saucerful Of Secrets).
Orbiting songwriter Lee Rogers on Professor Yaffle’s Everyone Wants To Dream are John Edge (acoustic & electric guitar, vocals, and two songwriter credits), Michael Holcroft (producer), Dan Brownrigg (electric guitar, bass, mandolin, sitar, harp, keyboards), Alan Williams (bass guitar, vocals) and Jon Humphreys (acoustic & electric guitars, bass, keyboards, producer). It’s an album that has been described as an aural pilgrimage to the places and memories that anchor them, where the city reveals itself through rain-slick streets, whispered histories and the quiet epiphanies that arrive when they pause for long enough to look. ‘On Top Of The World’ is a starlit ode to Liverpool sweetened by string quartet, made up of equal parts both gritty and romantic, with the knowing that ‘I’m connected to it all somehow.’ It’s Lee’s ‘stoned love letter’ to the city itself as seen from the elevation of Everton Brow. The title track is a nuanced meditation on life’s vagaries underscored by electric keyboard, where destiny shifts as unpredictably as tidal undertows, and where distractions (‘it’s time to take your medicine, it’s time to take your pill’) become lifelines, ‘the wheels just keep on turning, and we’re running out of road.’
‘Come Fly With Me’ rejects the Frank Sinatra lift in favour of the old ATV logo-theme, it invites ‘sail beyond these skies with me,’ with the interjection of tastefully jazzy horns and oozing organ. ‘Yes, but I do like ‘Come Fly With Me’,’ Lee argues, ‘however I’m more a fan of Frank’s sixties albums/tunes, particularly ‘It Was A Very Good Year’, which is a masterpiece. The opening of ‘Come Fly With Me’ is the old ATV ident, which was on before ‘Pipkins’ at lunchtime when I was a child. Initially, the album had some linking passages between songs, playground sounds etc, the type of thing we have on our other albums. But, this album was about looking at my life now, and reflecting on some of the strong memories I have of growing up in Liverpool. So I then decided to trim it back to eight songs and cut out the bits between the songs, but the ATV ident fitted so well it had to stay. I particularly like the organ on that track, which was played by our drummer/producer ‘Mike’ and the horns are by Mike’s cousin David who has played on all of our albums. For the organ sound, I wanted it to sound like a cross between The Peddlers’ ‘Walk On The Wild Side’ (on their 1967 Live At The Pickwick! album), and experimental Euro-band Brainticket on ‘Places Of Light’ (on their 1971 debut album Cottonwoodhill) – which Mike had never heard of either, but somehow it hit the nail on the head.’
For ‘Lost In A Dream (On Everton Brow)’, Lee disinters lyrics he wrote at eighteen, and weaves them into a new baroque string-bedecked arrangement, setting up a dialogue between his past and present self. Was Everton Brow somewhere he went as a child? A place to escape to and live out childhood adventures? ‘It was more as a teenager’ Lee explains. ‘I often went on my own, and sometimes went up there with friends. Me and Jon (Humphreys) from our band took our guitars up there a few times as teenagers. It was a place to go and spend some time if you felt good and wanted to have a smoke and a daydream, and also the perfect place to chill out when things maybe weren’t so good. I ended up living just along from the Brow for a short while in my late teens. The view had everything for me, you could see right out across the Liverpool Bay to the Irish Sea to your right, a beautifully lit-up Liverpool city-centre at night to your left, and to the occasionally snowcapped Welsh mountains on the horizon in between.’
‘I wrote most of the lyrics to ‘Lost In A Dream (On Everton Brow)’ about it when I was about seventeen-eighteen. It was one of my first ever songs, it was then-called ‘The Hill’ back then. For some reason I painted a T-shirt with a silhouette of me standing on the hill, to go with the song that no-one had ever heard. After reintroducing the lyrics for the new song on the album and writing two more songs about Everton Brow, I stumbled across the picture of PC Bob Barlow stood on the Brow in the sixties, a photo taken by Karl Morris Hughes. It was pretty much the same (but better) as the painting on the T-shirt I’d done thirty-five years earlier, so we had to have it for the album cover! We paid for permission to use it from Liverpool Museums, but it was worth every penny!’
‘It All Came Tumbling Down’ is a panic attack that rides a defiantly catchy melody, embodying resilience in dissonance with wispy fly-away vocals. While John Edge’s writing contributions (‘The City Bells’ – ‘wash away our sins and troubled souls,’ and the acoustic more bucolic ‘A Whispering Amid The River Reeds’, with cello) are woven seamlessly into the album’s tapestry. There are intricate arrangements throughout the album, with what sounds like string quartets, which must make the songs difficult to perform in a live setting? ‘One of the things I initially wanted to do with this album was to simplify it, compared to our previous ones so we could get closer to the album sound when recreating the songs live’ Lee explains.
‘I had a loose idea in my head that we would aim to be like ‘The Band’ when recording at Big Pink, with a more live and simpler sound. Of course, that idea went out the window, but I think we did manage to stop a little short of adding the extra instrumentation we have on our previous two albums. Ultimately, we’ll be able to perform some of the songs very similarly live, some will have a bit of a compromise and one or two will require more of a compromise if we decide to do them live. That said, we’ve played live with a cellist previously, so depending on the environment, we may decide to add a cellist and a violinist to some of our live performances.’ He pauses for thought. Then muses ‘Matthew Phillips (cello) and Lara Simpson (violins) are both wonderful musicians and the main string players on the album, so maybe we’ll ask them to play live with us? You’ve got me thinking now!’
To writer Ian Salmon, the album is ‘about love. Love is in every groove of this record. It’s sad and beautiful and uplifting and dreamy and spacious and delicate and graceful and confident and every single note matters’ (in Science & Magic). And yes, the harmonies are a soft time-breeze that blows the decades around.
‘Back to the Beatles’ adds Lee in closing, ‘and in another connection, my daughter’s first student house was the exact same house that Mal Evans had lived in when he got married!’
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BY ANDREW DARLINGTON
‘EVERYONE WANTS TO DREAM’ by Professor Yaffle
(September 2025, Violette Records VIO-084)
Recorded at Upholland Recording Studio
Cover photo by Karl Hughes (1979)
- ‘On Top Of The World’ (Lee Rogers) 4:57
- ‘Everyone Wants To Dream’ (Lee Rogers) 4:52
- ‘A Whispering (Amid The River Reeds)’ (John Edge) 4:53
- ‘Come Fly With Me’ (Lee Rogers) 5:11
- ‘Lost In A Dream (On Everton Brow)’ (Lee Rogers) 3:30
- ‘The City Bells’ (John Edge) 6:18
- ‘It All Come Tumbling Down’ (Lee Rogers) 4:18
- ‘Every Day Of My Life’ (Lee Rogers) 4:29
Personnel:
Lee Rogers: acoustic guitar, mandolin, banjo, dulcimer, melodica, vocals, producer
John Edge: acoustic & electric guitar, vocals
Michael Holcroft: producer
Dan Brownrigg: electric guitar, bass, mandolin, sitar, harp, keyboards
Alan Williams: bass guitar, vocals
Jon Humphreys: acoustic & electric guitars, bass, keyboards, producer
Previous Professor Yaffle albums:
‘Cosmic Lullabies’ (November 2017, 2CD), includes ‘Raining Inside My Mind’, ‘You Were Made For Me’, ‘Sometimes’. Lee comments ‘actually, I’ve just remembered that Leah did help a little bit with the lyrics on ‘You Were Made For Me’. And our Lucy came up with the ‘dream’ theme for ‘In My Dreams’ on the same album, as well as singing harmonies.’
‘A Brand New Morning’ (June 2019), includes ‘Outside Looking In’, ‘Beyond This Life Pts 1&2’, ‘Inconceivable’.
‘Moments Of Clarity’ (2020), includes ‘Time To Change’, ‘Turning Fear Into Ecstasy’ and ‘Sail Away’.
‘Let There Be Light’ (2022, PY004-15-A00) with the ‘smoking cyberman’ cover-art, three parts of ‘Wandering Star’ and three parts of the title-track. Lee comments that ‘the smoking Cyberman artwork is from a lino-print by my daughter ‘Leah’ who is a brilliant artist. Our friend Ed Rimmer, who has worked on most of our albums, collaborated on the design.’
‘The Outside Looking In: An Introduction To Professor Yaffle’ (August 2024, Shipwrecked Records SHIPW003), a compilation including gathering ‘A Moment Of Clarity’ (8:08), ‘Cosmic Lullaby’ (6:15), ‘Let There Be Light Part 1’ (5:59), ‘Sometimes’ (5:34) and ‘Falling Into You’ (5:15).
https://www.facebook.com/ProfessorYaffleBand/about?locale=en_GB
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