BANDS IN THE BOROUGHS: BRINGING IT HOME IN KIRKBY

Out from Kirkby station, across the bridge and up the high street, you’ll eventually stumble across the Carter’s Arms. Unassuming, local and, by the time I arrive, with a car park already filling up.

In the beer garden, bands, family and fans are congregating over pints. It could be any other Friday night at the local, except tonight some of the people usually drinking here are taking to the stage. This is Bands in the Boroughs, part of Liverpool’s Summer of Music, taking live music out of the city centre and into communities across the Liverpool City Region. Tonight, that means Kirkby.

First up is Croxteth’s Lily Almond. Armed with an acoustic guitar, she takes her place on a makeshift stage beneath a television showing the horse racing. The pub is still very much a pub. Conversations carry on, glasses clink and getting a room full of locals to quiet down isn’t an easy task. Then she starts singing. Slowly, the chatter falls away. Heads turn towards the front. Feet start tapping underneath tables and bodies sway along. By the end of her set, she’s won the room over.

Before performing, Lily admits that this kind of gig makes her nervous. Her previous show was a headline at the Arts Club, where the stage and lighting put a little distance between artist and audience. Here, there’s nowhere to hide. But that’s also part of what makes nights like this important to her.

“I think there’s such a rush when you’re making music, it’s like, ‘Right, I need to get out of Liverpool,’” she tells me. “And it’s like, actually no, you need to speak to the people who you grew up around.”

For Lily, who grew up just down the road in Croxteth, playing the Carter’s Arms is an opportunity to put live music in front of people who might never think to buy a ticket for a city-centre gig.

“You’re so busy trying to get to London or whatever, or Manchester, and you’re not actually speaking to the people who grew up around you.”

Next up are Merseyside band The Days, bringing a distinctly 60s feel into 2026. With a Paul McCartney-style violin bass, swooping fringes and melodies that wouldn’t feel entirely out of place several decades earlier, you don’t have to look particularly hard for the influences. There’s something familiar about it, but importantly, it’s being picked up and played with by another generation of Merseyside musicians.

Then come The Lags.

What can I say about The Lags? It’s all about the energy. Drawing on the peak of 90s and early-2000s northern rock and roll, with Oasis, The Stone Roses and Arctic Monkeys among the band’s influences, their particular brand of lads’ rock and roll feels completely at home in the Carter’s Arms. And there’s a reason for that.

The band are from Kirkby. They drank here as teenagers. More importantly, this is where they played their first gig. Years ago, the Carter’s Arms used to host a regular band night. It was here that The Lags first started playing and, in Dan’s words, “putting our own little things together”. Eventually, the band nights disappeared. Apparently, things might have got a little too loud.

So when Bands in the Boroughs came along and gave The Lags the opportunity to choose somewhere in their local area to perform, there wasn’t much of a debate. “There was only really one place that we really wanted to play in,” Dan tells me.

Tonight, they’re back, and the room comes alive almost immediately. People are dancing on chairs, arms in the air, singing along at the tops of their lungs. Whatever nervousness there might have been about the noise level has well and truly gone out the window. It feels less like watching a band perform to an audience and more like watching a room celebrate its own.

Dan tells me that people he hasn’t seen for years have turned up after hearing the gig was happening. Others they’ve picked up as fans along the way have travelled back into Kirkby to see them. The band might now be selling out rooms like District in Liverpool city centre, but there’s something different about bringing those people back to where it began. “It’s nice to rekindle with people who we haven’t seen in a while,” he says.

Standing in the middle of the Carter’s Arms as people climb onto chairs and shout lyrics back towards the band, Lily’s words from earlier in the night start to make even more sense. Sometimes moving forward means remembering to look around you.

And speaking to people in the pub, there seems to be an appetite for more. Two of the people I meet live within walking distance of the Carter’s Arms. They regularly travel into Liverpool for gigs, but tonight getting home is considerably easier. More importantly, they talk about wanting to see local bands given opportunities closer to home.

The conversation quickly moves beyond this one pub. Green spaces, St Chad’s Church and other potential venues around Knowsley come up. So does the question of why more live music doesn’t already happen here. “I think people would go,” one audience member tells me. “I just think that the money isn’t maybe there.”

You only need to look around the Carter’s Arms tonight to see their point. The car park is full. The pub is rammed. A local band who started out in this very room is playing to family, old friends, new fans and people who have followed them back home.

Liverpool’s relationship with music is well documented. But Liverpool’s music doesn’t begin and end in the city centre. It is made in bedrooms, garages, rehearsal rooms and pubs across the city region, by people shaped by places like Kirkby, Croxteth and everywhere in between.

Perhaps supporting a music city isn’t only about helping its artists get out into the world. Sometimes it’s about giving them a reason to come home.

Words by Kieran Irvine