The Mathew Street Festival: Liverpool's Weekend That Got Too Big For Its Own Good
It started in 1993. The Cavern Club's 40th anniversary. Someone had the idea of shutting the street off for a weekend and putting some bands on. A few thousand people turned up. It worked. So they did it again the next year. And the year after that. And by the late nineties it wasn't a street party anymore — it was a full-blown city takeover.
I went to a few of them. Early ones, mostly. Before it got mad. You'd walk down Mathew Street and there'd be a stage at one end, someone doing Beatles covers, someone doing something else at the other end. It felt like Liverpool. It felt like ours.
The problem was it worked too well. By 2000 they were getting 100,000 people across the weekend. By 2005 it was pushing 300,000. That's not a street festival anymore. That's a major event. And major events need major infrastructure. Major policing. Major everything.
The line-ups were a mixed bag, and that was part of the charm. You'd get proper Scouse acts — the Icicle Works, the Christians, Cast, Space. You'd get tribute bands. You'd get the Zutons before they were famous. You'd get someone's mate from down the pub who'd talked his way onto a side stage. It was chaotic. It was brilliant. It was exactly what a free festival should be.
But here's the thing about free festivals — they cost money. Someone's got to pay for the stages, the security, the barriers, the clean-up. And when you're getting 300,000 people into a square mile of city centre, the clean-up bill alone is eye-watering. The council were subsidising it for years. Local businesses loved it — the pubs on Mathew Street did more trade in that one weekend than they did in some months. But the cost kept going up.
2012 was the beginning of the end. They moved it to the Pier Head. Bigger space. More room. But it lost something. Mathew Street Festival at the Pier Head isn't Mathew Street Festival. It's a different thing. The whole point was the narrow streets and the pubs spilling out and the noise bouncing off the buildings. Put it on the waterfront and you might as well be anywhere.
They cancelled it after 2012. Said it was too expensive. Said the infrastructure costs had doubled. Said they couldn't justify it. And they were probably right. But it still stung.
There was talk of bringing it back in 2014. Didn't happen. There was a smaller version in 2015 called Liverpool Music Week that tried to capture the same spirit. It wasn't the same.
What people forget now is how good it was at its peak. A free weekend of live music in the city centre. No wristbands. No VIP areas. No corporate sponsorship plastered everywhere. Just stages on streets and people standing on cobbles listening to bands. When did we last have anything like that?
The Mathew Street Festival died because it got too successful. That's the irony. It grew so big that it couldn't sustain itself. But for those years — from the mid-nineties to 2012 — it was the best weekend of the year in Liverpool. And I don't think we'll see its like again.