Bard of Liverpool?: No, 'but I’ve been barred from loads of places in Liverpool’

Good morning. PJ Smith could have been a footballer — he got signed to play for Everton as a child. But for a long while he chose partying instead — drinking, dancing, drugs — which was fun and good, right up until it wasn’t. If you’ve encountered Smith before, you’ve probably done so in his guise as ‘Roy’, an alter ego which allows him to tell the stories of everyone he grew up with. Today, we find out how Smith went from rock bottom to being one of this city’s most celebrated storytellers. 

But before that: the publicly-controlled bus fleet’s first bump in the road and 70,000 nicked pints in our news round-up.

Your Post briefing

New bus setback for city: In Monday’s edition, we covered the 560-strong fleet of cutting-edge buses soon to be hitting the roads as part of the region’s bus network being brought back into public control. Well, they’ve already hit a snag: 400 employees of the buses’ manufacturers, Alexander Dennis, have been striking since June over pay. Earlier this week, workers rejected a two-year pay offer from the company over fears year two would leave them facing a real terms pay cut, and Unite say further strike action is set to impact the delivery of 200 new buses for Liverpool. So while the state-of-the-art buses aren’t stuck in a yard outside Sheffield this time, they may soon be stuck in a yard in Scarborough…

Stout stealers leave Skem lead? You may have heard that 70,000 pints of Guinness — roughly a years’ supply for Laurence — were stolen from Whitehouse Industrial Estate on Aston Lane in Runcorn last Monday. Well, the HGVs involved in the daring heist have turned up in Skelmersdale, 30 miles from where they were nicked. Sadly, Lancashire police say the beer barrels — worth about £115,000 — have not been recovered. But detectives have now released footage of two men they want to speak to. Det Sgt Gary McClatchey said police “will not settle for anything less than the full recovery of the near 900 stolen Guinness kegs and the locating of the offenders behind this brazen heist.” 

Children still living in illegal care homes: In July, we broke the story that the city council had placed children in homes unregulated by Ofsted. This week, the BBC found that 14 young people are still living in these unregistered homes, across 12 different providers in areas including Croxteth, Norris Green, Old Swan, Kensington and Fazakerley. Ofsted, who last month carried out its first successful prosecution against this type of provider in Croydon, said that authorities placing young people in illegal dwellings could have their children's services performance ratings downgraded. 

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In 2021, at Moseley Folk Festival, PJ Smith was about to take to the stage as his literary alter ego, Roy, to a tent that could hold around 300 people. Stepping out, he discovered a more meagre turn out: just one woman and her child sitting in the front. “As I walked out, she said, ‘Are you suitable for children?’” recalls Smith with a laugh as we chat over Zoom. “I said, ‘How liberal a parent are you?’. She picked the kid up and walked off.”

Smith performed regardless. He read stories passionately to nobody from his debut short story collection, Algorithm Party, which is made up of fictional stories from his native Liverpool, featuring characters that range from struggling parents to small-time criminals, pent-up white-collar workers and drinkers long lost to the ale.  

Fast forward four years and Smith is performing at Goodison Park to 40,000 people on the day Everton play their final match there, as the club waves goodbye to the stadium it has called home since 1892.

It was a particularly significant moment for Smith, a lifelong Everton fan who played for the club as a child. It’s also just a five-minute walk from where he grew up on Newby Street. As a staunch Evertonian, and with a reputation for turning heads over the years in various venues in Liverpool, Smith landed on the club's radar. They asked him to write something about Everton's history for a short video and then wondered if he would perform it, along with a new piece, on the side of the pitch before the final game.   

Initially he was unsure about doing the gig, thinking that spoken word might not work in that setting. But he didn’t have tickets for the game so he accepted the gig. “I'm glad I did it,” he reflects when I ask him about it. “Because it's a historical moment and I'm always part of that day now. And loads of people got in touch with me after it who I haven't seen for ages, as they didn’t know that I've been writing and performing.”

For some people who hadn’t seen Smith in a very long time, it may well have been a major shock to see him being celebrated as a local writer on that kind of stage. While Smith – who is adamant he’s not a poet and prefers the title of storyteller – has published two collections of short stories, including this year’s excellent Boomerang Process, on top of his aforementioned debut which has been turned into a feature length film, this life was not always on the cards. When I raise the name I’ve heard he’s been called — “the Bard of Liverpool"— he shakes it off with a modesty and self-deprecating humour that is present throughout much of our chat. “I don’t know about that…” he says. “But I have been barred from loads of places in Liverpool.”

Smith, now 46, was a prodigious football talent as a child, signing for his beloved Everton, but he couldn’t commit. “At around 15 I started smoking weed and I didn't like training,” he recalls. “I had the ability and the talent but not the work ethic.” Then came a love of music, going out, drinking, and taking party drugs like ecstasy. Friday nights would be techno at Voodoo followed by indie Saturdays at Liquidation. “It was great for a while,” he says. “For a good few years, it added to my life.”

However, Smith could sense his drinking was different to others’. It was harder and more relentless. “I knew in my late teens that there was something not right with the way I drank,” he says. “I hadn't admitted it to anyone else, but I'd started to notice that drinking was becoming a problem in my life. Therefore, so was holding a job down or having money.”

He used reading as something of a salvation from his troubles. He’d had his mind opened by Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting as a teen, having never read anything written in strong local dialect before (“I didn't know there were books like that”) and would later fall under the spell of writers like Raymond Carver. “To save money, or to make sure I wouldn’t borrow money from anyone, I'd just read,” he recalls. “Sometimes I'd get a travel pass and just sit on trains all day and read. But the minute I got money, I wasn't interested in books again.” Instead, he returned to booze.

This cycle went on for a while until it reached unsustainable levels. “I got evicted from where I lived,” he reflects. “Every relationship failed. Friendships broke down. I'd started to detach from the world. I was hiding, skulking down alleyways and going out when it was dark. I wasn't even up to anything shady; it was just the way I was living. I was full of shame and frightened of seeing people.”

Bumping into people he knew, who may have once remembered him as a promising football talent, was torture. “I was so fucking embarrassed,” he says. “I'd have a rucksack on with cans in it, pretending I was going to the gym or something. It was ridiculous.” However, even in his lowest moments, there was something he felt deep down inside himself that was worth fighting for. “That light or whatever it was just kept diminishing but it never fully went out,” he says. “Even towards the end when I was thinking I can't see much point in living any longer, there was something that just kept me going.”

So at 26, he started going to meetings and he got clean. “Meetings helped because it was a group of people,” he says. “I needed people. I’d isolated myself and that wasn’t good for me.” So instead, he threw himself into all the groups, meetings and activities that he could. “I'd look at notice boards and just think, ‘is there anywhere for me to go?’,” he says. “Is there a group I can go to? Anything. I went to yoga, drama groups, and I started playing football again for the first time in over 10 years. But the one that really stuck was writing.”

Being in an environment around other people pursuing creative outlets was hugely encouraging and empowering. “I used to think, ‘wow, imagine writing a book’,” he says. “Or ‘imagine sending an article into a magazine’. It was like, oh yeah, those people do that. Those aliens who aren't like me. But mixing with people who made music and films or wrote books, I just thought, they are no different from me, really, so I'll have a go.”

Looking back, it was a period in which he was materially poor but spiritually rich. “I had absolutely nothing,” he says. “I had a bike, a camera, and a pair of footy boots. But I tell you what, looking back on my first couple of years in recovery, I was like a big kid. I had no money, I was living in a shared house, but what a fucking great time that was. Because I wasn't harming anyone. I wasn't causing anyone any grief. I was getting my youth back.”

As part of his addiction recovery, he was asked to write out his life story in a group and he was quickly praised for his writing style – one that is raw yet fluid, economic yet detailed, and delivered with an observational eye that suggests Smith has absorbed a lifetime’s worth of incidents and conversations he’s witnessed from every nook and cranny of Liverpool, as he glides between psychodrama and tragicomedy.

His work was entered into a competition and he made the final, which involved reading his stuff out in front of a panel and audience. “I always thought I was shy or didn't want to be the centre of attention,” he says. “But I really loved performing my work and seeing people's reactions to it. I thought, well, I'll just keep doing it. I didn't have a plan. And that's where this whole Roy thing took off.”

Smith initially was unsure about using his own name to write under, so he spontaneously created a pseudonym character called Roy to operate via. While initially it was just a throwaway name that stuck, he has said that it’s become an amalgamation of everyone he’s grown up with – a kind of composite character of all he’s seen and heard in his life. “No one's ever directly confronted me about that,” he says. “Although it has its roots in real life stuff, by the time it hits the page or the stage, it's changed that much that no-one would ever know.”

Or sometimes, the truth is so wild that many people would never believe the fictional end result could be based on reality. Such as his story, ‘Please Mind Your Head’, which is based on a real event in which a family wants one brother (a drug addict) to take the rap and go to prison for the other (who is more of a golden boy) because they look alike. For the most part though, Smith says his fascination for subject matter comes from "mostly insecure men: their relationships, the cultures they grow up in, and stay loyal to, and making the same mistakes. I like writing about people who don't learn. There's lots you can do with those people."

Smith fuses the hyper real with the surreal. It’s a world where dead fathers communicate via smart speakers or mothers of gangsters kick off on the bus. The city is also essential to Smith’s work, running through every page. One story, ‘End Credits’, takes place via a series of letters sent from HMP Altcourse. Others, such as ‘Dry the Rain’, are littered with local references, from street names to pubs to Greek restaurants.

Take, for example, the opening paragraph from ‘Please Mind Your Head’:

The flat is empty. It isn’t. It just feels that way. Maybe it’s me that’s empty? Dark as well, even though it just turned midday. Suppose it’s all about perception, isn’t it? We see the world as we are, not as it is. I usually like this flat. Good job really, as I live here. I experience relief when I close the door. I could be anywhere—but I’m in Kirkdale. The land of florid faces and thin brains. A truly hateful place where almost everyone’s wellbeing, if there is such a thing, is based on what other people think of them. Joy is found in material gain and at the expense of others misfortune. That, and ciggies… they love ciggies around here. Saw a dog smoking once. A Patterdale Terrier with a Lambert & Butler.

Smith is a writer who intrinsically understands his city and people within it – and they feature a lot in his work – but he’s conscious of how he approaches it, choosing instead to depict what takes place in between the cracks rather than the spotlight. “I never ever want to come across as like a professional scouser,” he says. “I am very proud of the city I live in. I'm made up. I live here, my mates are here, but there's more to it than the cliches.”

Instead, Smith says he likes to shatter preconceptions and provide an alternative to stereotypes. “I've been booked to do gigs by people who've not read my stuff,” he says. “They've just gone, oh, he's a poet – which is wrong in the first place – and he's from Liverpool, so he'll just do some nice poetry about the Liver Buildings. But then the first story might be about some kid killing his old fella because there's so much tension in the living room. And you can just see the shock, you see people panicking, looking around like, ‘who's booked him?’”

Smith is currently working on his next book, has just been commissioned to co-write something for TV, and continues to perform live and tour the film of Algorithm Party. But despite the obvious upward trajectory of his writing life, he’s also in love with his day job. He works full-time at Damien John Kelly house, which is an abstinence-based recovery living centre for men, which he co-runs with his own mother since it opened in 2017. “The recovery community in Liverpool is unbelievable,” he enthuses. “I'm happy with how it is now. I've got a balance at the moment; my life is busy in a way that is manageable and meaningful. But who knows? I'm not closed to the idea of change in the future.”

For now, he’s happy to keep returning to the page and seeing what comes out. “I like writing and I like that people enjoy it,” he says. “I'm grateful for my life. I’ll just keep writing and see what the fuck happens.”

Boomerang Process is out now via TNC and Roy is performing in Liverpool at Commune on Sept 10.

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