There is quite a lot of competition to be the worst statue in Britain, but the bronze effigy of Cilla Black just unveiled outside the Cavern Club in Liverpool must be a contender. The club’s former cloakroom attendant has been given the crazed grin of a bunny boiler and arms that seem more like distressed eels than human limbs.
“This being Liverpool, the Cilla statue has already attracted a lorra lorra ridicule
Naturally, Liverpool being Liverpool, the statue has already attracted a lorra lorra ridicule — especially as Black lived most of her life in leafy Buckinghamshire. Yet it’s there to stay, joining the three statues of John Lennon scattered around the city, the Ken Dodd at Lime Street station, the Billy Fury at the Pier Head, the Bill Shankly at Anfield, the Dixie Dean at Everton and the effigy of the Beatles erected last year. Indeed, so many Scousers are now fixed in stone that the city centre is starting to look like a reunion party of terracotta warriors. And those are just the real people. Let’s not forget Tommy Steele’s sculpture of Eleanor Rigby, perched on a bench in Stanley Street with a dedication “to all the lonely people”.
I gather that experts in Italy fear that one more strong earthquake will topple Michelangelo’s statue of David, which already has microfractures in its ankles. To which I can only say, paraphrasing John Betjeman, “Come, friendly earthquakes and shake Liverpool” — that apparently being the only way to clear the city of ancient pop stars caricatured in crudely carved stone.
Of course, Liverpool isn’t the only place where the honouring of local celebs is used as an excuse to inflict mediocre sculpture on the public. Last year, albeit for a limited time, majestic Caernarfon Castle was defiled — the verb is not too strong — by a 20ft gold statue of Shirley Bassey dressed as Boudicca. I know not why.
At least Amy Winehouse’s statue in Camden Town, north London, has a certain poignancy, possibly because of the dealers in the area flogging the very substances that contributed to her early demise — but what excuse did Mohamed Al Fayed have for foisting that grotesque 7ft Michael Jackson on Fulham Football Club? Mercifully, when Al Fayed sold the club this tacky effigy was removed, only to end up in the National Football Museum in Manchester.
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Kitsch representations of celebs aren’t confined to sculpture, of course. This week Londoners have been gawping in horror at Peter Blake’s massive new mural covering the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park while the hotel is renovated. Done in self-homage to his Sgt Pepper album cover, it’s a sycophantic collage of famous people who have stayed there. At least it’s only a temporary blot on Knightsbridge, but what a humiliating cash-grab by an artist I once respected.
It’s statues, however, that chiefly seem to bring out an enervating blandness in modern artists. Think of what London has acquired in recent years: the monumentally crass depiction of two embracing lovers at St Pancras station; the Liffe trader near Cannon Street station, perpetually frozen with a 1990s mobile phone to his ear; or Maggi Hambling’s excruciatingly whimsical Conversation with Oscar Wilde on the Strand, which looks as if it has melted in the sun. Indeed, I don’t think a truly inspiring statue has gone up in the capital since Rodin’s magnificently sombre The Burghers of Calais was placed in Victoria Embankment Gardens, and that was a century ago.
No wonder that so many statues are targets of defacement or protest — and not just because, like “Bomber” Harris in the Strand or Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford, they arouse strong passions. Sometimes, I feel, people just want to rebel against having so many dead people on the pavement. Mind you, even the protests are becoming clichés now. The joy of seeing a traffic cone plonked on a statue of Queen Victoria or the Duke of Wellington (or his horse) wears off quickly when you realise that every Victoria and Wellington in every city has a traffic cone on it.
Can’t we stop this onslaught of crappy effigies? In New York, where a terrifying statue of the comedian Lucille Ball — teeth bared, eyes like a psychotic killer — was replaced last year after an outcry, the city council is introducing legislation to give the public more say. In Britain, however, it’s local authorities that are the chief perpetrators of bad statues, usually to show off their stock of deceased luminaries. Charles Dickens actually stipulated in his will that he didn’t want to be made “the subject of any monument”, but that didn’t stop Portsmouth council from erecting a statue to mark his bicentenary. To add incompetence to disobedience, it went up two years late.
Still, at least posterity will be spared a statue of me. As the great composer Sibelius famously quipped: “No one ever erected a statue to a critic.” He meant it as a sneer. Now it seems more like a promise.
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Second-class males
How hilarious to note the two gorgeous Georges — Clooney and Osborne — popping up at Tina Brown’s Women of Impact dinner in Davos the other night. Reminds me of when, bizarrely, I was invited to be a judge at the Asian Women of Achievement awards. I asked the organiser, an old friend, why. “Because you’ll be totally unbiased,” she replied. “You’re not Asian, you’re not a woman and you have no significant achievements.”
I had to admit she was on to something.
Doing it his way
The list of showbiz stars refusing to perform at Trump’s inauguration even appears to include dead people. According to Nancy Sinatra, her father would have been among them. Frank, she says, “would never support a bigot”.
Really? He sang for rich whites in apartheid South Africa. He sang for mafia godfathers. I don’t castigate him for that. He was a pragmatic entertainer, not a Guardian columnist — but please let’s not pretend he would have rushed to join the sanctimonious Hollywood celebrities ostentatiously queueing up to denounce The Donald.