Anfield Road: In Conversation with Chris Shepherd

A multi-award-winning writer, artist and filmmaker, Chris Shepherd’s list of credits ranges from animation on cult BBC sketch show Big Train to directing the music video for Holly Johnson’s ‘In and Out of Love’.

Anfield Road is the Liverpudlian’s debut graphic novel and depicts a beautiful coming-of-age story centred around growing up on Merseyside during the late ‘80s

Words | Jack Poland

When Chris Shepherd tells me how the students he teaches inspire him with their “energy and life”, I can’t help but think of Conor, the 17-year-old hero of his debut graphic novel Anfield Road. It is this simmering adolescent fervency, and all of the possibilities that reside in it, which is at stake in this striking coming-of-age tale set in late-1980’s Liverpool.

Conor lives with his overbearing nan on one of Liverpool’s most famous roads, yet the only road he’s interested in is the one out, away to the bright lights of London. Paul Carty, the hero of Kevin Sampson’s novel Awaydays, set a decade before Anfield Road, said: “I am the product of a blank generation, I live for kicks, I live for me.” It is the snarling lament of a maltreated, abandoned and wasted youth, in a city going through the  same treatment, and it is everything Conor is trying to avoid.

This is a story of sunrises over urban wastelands; a symbol of what is possible and what isn’t. The ’80s was the decade in which Pete Wylie sang ‘I don’t want charity, just half a chance’. Conor sees his chance when the prospect of attending the London College of Painting is dangled in front of him by his art teacher. To get there, Conor must contend with family, community and love, all during a time when roads were barely visible, never mind clear.

During a painful decade for the city, the salve for many was found at Anfield or Goodison Park. For some, it was in music and art. It is the latter to which Conor’s heart belongs. It just happens to be the case that the many thousands of acolytes of the former traipse past his house every week – a constant reminder of his otherness.

“When I grew up in the city, I wasn’t like the footy scouser,” Chris tells me. “I didn’t like falling over and hurting myself. I was a bit sensitive I suppose. I always wanted to express myself and I’d do that by any means.”  Though art and music thrived in the city in the ‘80s, animation wasn’t exactly at the epicentre. “Animation didn’t exist. I thought Daffy Duck was real! I never thought about how it was made. When I used to tell people that I did animation they’d go ‘what’s that!?’”

Though Anfield Road isn’t an autobiography, it’s difficult not to see Conor as a young Chris. Chris, like Conor, was born in the shadow of Anfield and he has lived and worked in Conor’s Shangri La, London, for the past 20 years. As anyone who has ever moved away from Liverpool will attest, the city stays with you. Alexei Sayle, another Anfield native, provides the book’s epigraph with the following paean: “By the time I was 12, I’d experienced the wonders of Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Paris and Rome but we always returned to Anfield and that was the finest place.” Chris expands further: “I’ve lived in London now for longer than I lived in Liverpool but I still go back to those formative years. It never goes. I’m very proud to come from Liverpool.”

Liverpool in the ’80s hardly needs any more column inches. Thatcherism and ‘managed decline’ cultivated a world of paradoxes: despair and community, polarisation and unity. “I always remember as a kid being on the bus and somebody would suddenly just jump up and scream ‘Margaret Thatcher, you ruined my f-ing life’. I saw that happen two or three times, not just once,” says Chris.

“I think in a way there’s more polarisation now in society. The gap is much bigger. I feel like in the ’80s we were all pretty much in the same boat. There were obviously rich people then but we were all pretty skint.”

The first thing you notice when you open Anfield Road is how aesthetically pleasing it is. Your eye is drawn to, and lingers on, panel after panel as if rifling through old family photographs. And this is the next thing you notice, just how much you recognise. Of course you then realise that the two aren’t exclusive, that this is the craft. As only true artists can do, Chris has extracted a beauty from this period and then laid it down in front of us as if to say ‘see, it’s always been there, you just weren’t looking hard enough’. It is not just the famous local landmarks that readers will recognise – the Grapes, TJ Hughes, St George’s Hall – it’s the side streets, the graffiti, the people. These depictions are universal and you don’t have to be from Liverpool to appreciate them.

On Chris’s part, this was no accident. “I really got into the detail and tried to make it accurate. I tried to pick places that had gone. I loved drawing the landscapes. It was like making a film in ultra slow-motion. I made all of these decisions over months and months and months. I grew up with that dereliction, streets with no buildings, all demolished. Only the pubs left.

“When I started doing animation, I realised quite early on that a lot of the other people were quite middle class and everything was about it being beautiful and poetic but I always felt ‘well, why can’t my world be poetic? Why can’t council estates, places where real people live, why can’t they be beautiful?’” Well they can and are, certainly under Chris’s pen.

Anfield Road is about hope and aspiration but it is also a reminder of why it is so difficult to leave behind the world that made you. It’s about finding your people by leaving, well, your people. What is youth but the awkward, sorrowful, guilty, embarrassing outgrowing of those around you?

There is a poignant moment towards the end of the book where Conor is awakened to the unifying power of the ‘ballet’ that is performed each week in that famous stadium across the road from his house. He is spellbound by the splendour and visual artistry playing out in front of him. Anyone who picks up a copy of Anfield Road will know the feeling.

Anfield Road is on sale now at bookstores, comic shops and online

Main image © Louise Haywood-Schieger

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