Barrabackslarrabang

Barrabackslarrabang was shot in two Liverpool pubs (The Vines and The Lion Tavern) – locations strongly associated with informal chat and the birth of the railway, respectively – with speakers of a local underground slang, Backslang.

The film interweaves tropes of class and race, trade and desire in the hidden backwaters and idealised forms of the voice. One of these is the birth of the railway (with Stephenson’s Rocket at Liverpool’ s Edge Hill Station) which also arguably launched consumer capitalism, and with it, Standard Pronunciation, which was established to oil the wheels of trade as millions of businessmen travelling around Britain were confronted for the first time with accents they could not understand.

The characters in the film speak different forms of Backslang (Liverpool and Birmingham versions), a subversion of standard English associated primarily with working class culture and also with illegal trade, being designed to protect risky speech from being overheard, particularly from the ears of the law. It grew out of poverty and powerlessness – oiling the wheels of illegal trade – and like all languages, is also a space of social bonding and pride. Speech is sewn with rogue sounds to confuse the ear, and slips easily in everyday banter into a linguistic game of skill and excess. Liverpool Backslang involves replacing the first or all vowels in key words of a phrase with ‘ab’, ‘ag’ or ‘arrab’, while Birmingham Backslang works with variations of ‘iligili’.

In Barrabackslarrabang the voice criss-crosses social boundaries to mirror structures and desires in ostensibly opposing spaces of language, legality and culture. It can be seen as a symptom of poor economic and social conditions, but also as a form of resistance, and a possibility for different social paradigms.

With Donna Berry, Cliff Higgins, George “Buster” Swaby and Christine Quarless.