Liverpool Punk Peter Alan Lloyd Spills Punk Memories in New Memoir Bombed Out!; Liverpool Was Just As Punk As London

'Bombed Out!' the new punk and new wave memoirs of Peter Alan Lloyd, bass player of Nightmares In Wax and Dead or Alive, goes behind the leather, piercings and spiked hair of the punk scene to talk about the music.

Most British punk and new age memories come from the London scene of the Sex Pistols and The Clasy, but in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a huge scene in Liverpool, the land of the Beatles, that included such artists as Elvis Costello, the Teardrop Explodes and Echo & the Bunnymen.

One of those British kids to get a guitar and form a punk band was Peter Alan Lloyd. He quit school when he was seventeen when he heard the Sex Pistols, joined a band in Liverpool and starting working in the famous Eric's club in the city center.

"The early 1980s was an exciting, but also a very troubled time," recalled Peter, who played bass for Pink Military Stand Alone and Pete Burns' Nightmares in Wax (later known as Dead or Alive). "The UK was decimated by a severe recession which saw many people thrown on the unemployment scrap heap, with no prospect of finding work in their lifetimes."

"If this was just a book about being in a band, having fumbled teenage sex in nightclub toilets and signing on the dole in 1980s Liverpool, Bombed Out! would still be better than anything else on the bookshelves," said Mick Finkler, guitarist for the Teardrop Explodes. "But it becomes much more than that. It's a story of hope in adversity, of stubborn refusal to be beaten and, ultimately, of personal triumph. The themes are universal but the story is all his."

Bombed Out! Is culled from Peter Burns' 35-year old diaries and journals.

"The name Bombed Out! reflects the destruction wreaked on Liverpool by German bombs during World War II, but it also encompasses the economic devastation caused to the city and the UK in the 1980s, under the policies of the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher," said Lloyd. "Back then it all felt very personal."