Flanagan's Apple, Mathew Street, Liverpool Feb 3 2007

by Mike Chapple, Liverpool Daily Post

IT'S always a bit of a hung jury when it comes to Irish-themed pubs, to be sure, to be sure.

Get it right like Pogue Mahone, on Seel Street, with its thoughtful collection of Gaelic football team shirts proudly displayed along the walls and you're on to a winner.

Get it wrong with an over emphasis on cliché - Guiness overload, ear-shattering tape loops of diddley-diddley music and bar staff dressed as leprechauns - then it's a no-no, especially if you happen to be Irish yourself.

Flanagan's Apple, on Mathew Street, appears to have got it just right - although, talking of pesky leprechauns, it does have a few of the dancing little divvils painted on the windows.

Mind you, they do look very authentic - and as they are painted by legendary city pub painter George "Professor Longhair" Mawdesley, who just happens to be a good mate of the Pub Column's favourite patron Arts Edtor Mr Phil "Wotcha cock" Key, we'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Mr Key and Yours Truly had retired to the Apple after another long day in Castle Greyskull, and were in need of a welcoming ambience bereft of strip lighting and computer screens.

Maybe that's why hostelries such as Flanagan's offer such appealing respite after a day in work dungeon.

There was subdued lighting, cosy corners of wooden comfort, friendly service, reasonable ale and a healthy smattering of nostalgia to tickle the memory, including a welcome reprise from 1987 of the Pogues' If I Should Fall From Grace With God playing in the background.

Also in its favour is the tribute sculpture embedded in its outside wall, devoted to the eminent 19th-century Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, who once referred to Liverpool as "The Pool of Life", an appropriate analogy given the sometimes frenetic social activity that has traditionally gone on inside and outside the building.

Mr Key remembers it when it was called O'Halligans Parlour, renowned as a centre of Bohemia.

The likes of eccentric director Ken Campbell would stage all-day dramatisations of the science-fiction opus Iluminatus, which featured among others former Beatles manager Allan Williams playing, er, a Singing Whale.

Mr Key insists this to be true and not a figment of "double Famous Grouse with lots of ice" induced imagination.

With the scary Pete Burns prowling around in his Aunt Twacky's fashion lair upstairs; Probe, the fabbest record shop in the world, across the way and Eric's club down the road, all eccentric human life was here.

Today, with the area smartened up with the adjacent Cavern Walks development and a welter of new pubs and clubs surrounding it, activity may be less eccentric but no less frenetic in this little quarter with the Apple at its eye.

Landlady Nancy Mooney has kept a hold on the past, hanging all kinds of ancient bric-a-brac from its ornate rafters, including a penny farthing bike.

There is also an old photograph on the wall of a young Paul McCartney on Cavern duty walking past the pub, which used to be among other things a tea room.

Indeed, it's become something of a shrine for former customers.

"You get people coming in and saying me Dad used to love coming here. This used to be his - can you hang it up to remember him by?," said Nancy, who also claims that not only do the Scousers love the place but the match-day Norwegians do, too.

By this time, the pub soundtrack had moved on to Shane McGowan's rabble-rousing The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn and soothed by doubles and Caffreys our eyes were smiling, too.

To be sure.

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