How Liverpool fell for a giant creepy-crawly

Liverpudlians were left open-mouthed last week when a huge spider invaded their city. Our critic watched the creation of the mechanical monster and followed its journey from France to Merseyside
Liverpool's Giant Spider

Should Liverpool's year as European Capital of Culture be judged by the ripples it causes beyond the Wirral? The odd burst of Merseyside gaiety has registered on the national radar. I remember Ringo doing his bit, though perhaps only because he said something unflattering on TV afterwards. McCartney came and went, and then there was Klimt at the Tate, and of course Simon Rattle. No doubt there have been hundreds of excellent under-reported smaller events, vibrant and eye-catching in their way, and, yes, visitors have been flocking in to enjoy the docks and museums and parks and dancing in the street, helping to celebrate the city's proud achievements and history and enduring distinctive character. But where, you wonder, is the one big unmissable thing - the thing to boggle the collective mind? Where is the 'blimey' factor of Liverpool 08?

Perhaps this is it. It's Wednesday morning and commuters are staring up at something dangling from a derelict 15-storey office block next to Lime Street Station. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Not with those legs. No, having tried a couple of Beatles, the moment has come for Liverpool to - ahem - roll out its spider. But this is no wee, cowering, timorous beastie. It weighs 37 tonnes and stands 50ft tall. It will remain here for the rest of the day. At night they'll have the searchlights on it, and on Thursday 'scientists' will crane it off and haul it across town. On Friday the spider will awake, beginning what promises to be 'the biggest, most spectacular piece of street theatre ever seen in the UK'...

The idea is that the spider has emerged from the cobwebby recesses of this partly demolished building, providing a notional thread, as it were, between the ongoing celebrations and Liverpool's renaissance. But if it could talk, it wouldn't be in a Scouse accent. Rewind several weeks, to Nantes in northern France. It's a warm day and I'm wandering the site of the city's former shipyards on a sliver of an island in the Loire, a place, like Britain's own post-industrial centres, assuming a new shape and purpose with its ambient rumble of earthmovers and gentle breeze of civic awakening. Things are afoot on this grid of dusty streets lined with abandoned factory units, planted with saplings. There's a Banksy-style bit of graffiti art depicting a woman holding a chainsaw; up ahead a modish slab of office space; further, a little of the brutalist block housing much loved by the French, greenery hanging from the balconies. It has the air of a neighbourhood waiting for cool people to move in, followed by galleries, studios, hip bars, cake shops, estate agents.

Central to all this - the magnet that has set everything twitching, and home to Liverpool's spider - are the workshops of Les Machines de l'Ile. They are busy with visitors - in the sunny café, exploring the high reaches of a huge fabricated tree-branch that sprouts out of the primary-coloured warehouses, or below, on the riverside concourse, admiring the merry-go-round with its winged horses and chameleons. Les Machines is the company charged with constructing a public spectacle here among the ghosts of the city's port heritage, a monumental long-term project funded out of the municipal purse, beefed up with regional and EU money. The designer and creative force is François Delarozière, the man who also dreamed up the awesome mechanical elephant that came lumbering through the centre of London two summers ago. That project - The Sultan's Elephant - was produced by Royal de Luxe, a long-established Nantes-based theatrical company. Nantes itself seethes with impresarios of one sort or another (30-odd performing organisations in a place the size of Southampton), nurtured by an arts-loving administration that has put culture at the heart of the city's revival. If Liverpool wants something special, it has come to the right place. Inside the high workshops, the spider (dubbed La Princesse) is still being knocked into shape - a huge thing, its arrangement of hydraulics and cables and chrome levers exposed, a half-dozen mechanics clambering about up there with their spanners and chisels, others perched amid the wooden and metal armour of its great pod and folded legs, and not a hard hat in sight. Health and Safety? Pah!

It seems unfeasibly complicated. You'd think they'd have robots to do this kind of thing, but no, it's like walking into a Stella ad - small-town 1950s Peugeot factory, sunlight raking the inner darkness, air scented with WD40 and glue and rubber and coffee and Gitanes, the hiss of pneumatic equipment, beautiful grubby women with welding torches and ill-cut hair, grease guns. It's all here bar the Tour de France whizzing by outside.

Delarozière arrives and shows me round. He's a bit grubby himself, with chic pointy sideburns and the kind of wild eyes and aura of having been up half the night inventing that geniuses have. He enthuses about the Nantes development, still embryonic but open since last year to the public (for a few euros you can ride on his amazing elephant - a modified build of the London one - or inspect the new machines as they emerge from the workshop into the viewing gallery). 'There is no project like this in the world,' he says, showing me a model for an unimaginably immense tree topped by a pair of herons carrying baskets of passengers. Each heron alone will weigh 15 tonnes!

And how about Liverpool? 'To have a piece like the spider in a city makes people see the place differently. It makes you pay attention to the space. When the big machine moves, you look at the architecture too. A building with the spider on it becomes a new object. It's like a theatre set.'

We make our way around. There's a thrum of motors. A girl, dreadlocked and wearing goggles, is hammering a piece of metal. Another comes by, trailing a palette truck containing unidentifiable limbs. A man is marking wood with one of those big square pencils. In a few weeks' time, he says, these craftspeople - engineers, metalworkers, carpenters - will be doubling as performance artists and manipulateurs, attending and working the spider as it weaves through Liverpool.

The work here seems more like a way of life, I say - like joining a circus. 'Yes, sure,' he says. 'We think, 70 per cent of our life is work, so it is better to make this time pleasant and constructive. People come here, I hope, to make some adventure!'

We look round the gallery. The next big project will be a 25-metre high 'deep sea' carousel. Here's a squid and a crab and one of those big terror fish with all the teeth and bulging eyes. All feature Delarozière's trademark materials - unpainted wood and metal - with all the workings exposed, the levers and pulleys, the gears, chains and shafts, the myriad articulated muscles and joints. Everything looks like the work of a single mad inventor. It's quite fantastic.

All the pieces start with a drawing, says Delarozière, indicating the detailed hand-drawn blueprints (think Jules Verne via Leonardo and Heath Robinson) on the wall. 'We work in the same way a painter does - if he wants to paint a body, he thinks about the bones under the skin to make it real. So we also think first about what is inside. We add layers. Then it is technical too. The object we are building becomes a kind of sculpture, with everything visible - the engine, the people who are controlling it.'

We step outside, where the elephant is returning from its peregrinations around local streets, its trunk swaying and probing, its great leather ears flapping gently, its knee pistons flagrantly on display. It's the size of a building, but the really startling power of Delarozière's creations lies in their movement, which is intricate and nuanced in a way that makes them seem alive against the evidence of our own eyes that it's all just hardware and people pulling strings. 'This is the theatre of the machine,' he says. 'It is spectacular because of the movement. The movement is a show in itself. It creates the emotions.'

The group that brought Delarozière's elephant to London two years ago - and has been commissioned by Liverpool to stage the spider event - is Artichoke, a creative production company run by Helen Marriage and Nicky Webb. When we meet, the two women are full of war stories about staging the elephant show - not least resistance from the authorities.

'When we wanted to close central London, the prevailing opinion was: "Why would we do that?"' says Marriage. 'And yet they close central London all the time - for royal occasions, marathons, sporting triumphs, George Bush. None of these things are to do with art or culture. Someone had to step up and say: "We have a place here, too." In the end it was the drip of persuasion that did it - 25 authorities, one by one. They asked why we didn't do it in Battersea Park, but the point about this work is that it is disruptive - that the city changes and comes to a standstill. There's no point doing it in a park!'

'It's the same with Liverpool,' says Webb. 'We're putting it into the absolute centre of the city. For the authorities it's a huge pain in the arse, but that's the point.'

The difference with Liverpool, of course, is that they have asked for it, having seen millions amazed by the London elephant. 'They wanted something with the same impact,' says Marriage. 'Something that was free, something to bring their communities together and something that wasn't about football or the Beatles - something that was cultural and powerful and on a scale that nobody could imagine. But the negotiations were still incredibly difficult. The structures themselves are huge, the disruption is enormous, you have to stop the traffic, close stations, reroute buses. It's a big ask.'

Six weeks after Nantes, secret rehearsals for the spider are under way at the old Cammell Laird shipyard in Birkenhead, with its acres of wasteland. It was the biggest site they could find, Webb says - and the owners let them have it for nothing! Plus it's a home from home for the French, who are here creaking about on bicycles - well, those of them not already in the French-run canteen (a converted boiler room), tucking into steak frites. To the clatter of knives and forks, Webb tells me about the 16 whopping cranes, eight cherrypickers, six forklifts, 250 crew, 26 musicians needed to get the spider on the road. And the red tape! She has a file as thick as a docker's neck full of risk assessments, planning authorisations, details of road closures and removal of traffic lights - every nitpicking contingency for every centimetre of the route. 'You have to document it all. There's no agreed procedure for an event like this. You have to invent it.'

Outside the ship-shed - rumbling with generators, sparks flying from angle grinders - the spider is shaking a leg (and, in turn, its others), watched by techies. It looks a bit stiff but eventually they have it walking, its progress tentative. It's not the scampering sort - more like one of those horrors you find stalking across your bath towel on a cold morning. Delarozière is here, standing with a stopwatch as they try to get it under a 'low' obstacle that, on the day, will be the Mersey Tunnel. I ask if he's nervous. 'Of course. This is the time now when one year of work is in one single moment. If you miss it... But I have a good feeling.' He smiles.

I go and watch the spider from a distance, the better to marvel at its finely graded movements - the product of Delarozière's forensic study of the way spiders express themselves, translated into God knows how many permutations of hand-worked hydraulics. Through half-closed eyes the spider seems besieged by little people. If this were a movie, they'd be trying to subdue it with pitchforks.

Behind me, under cover of a small marquee, the musicians are being conducted through the score, moving at a jaunty clip with busy bassoons, parping horns, plinking strings. It's a bit jazzy. One imagines Jacques Tati falling on his face to it. The maestro looks slightly under the cosh. For the past week he has been sleeping in a camp bed alone on site, for inspiration. You can't imagine Simon Rattle doing that.

It's Friday morning and I'm outside the Echo Arena in Liverpool city centre opposite Albert Dock. It has been pouring with rain since dawn but the crowds are out in force, massing in the bowl between the buildings, up against the barrier, waiting for the spider to wake up. The musicians, high on forklifts and cherrypickers around the square, are beginning to drone. Fire bursts from rusty mortars, the manipulateurs climb into position, the band begins its sombre overture, and at last the spider stirs, its eyes flittering, its great legs probing the sea of umbrellas and cameraphones. But what now... why, it seems to be rising and coming forwards, but - ha, ha, surely not - because how can it, surrounded by the crowd in this confined space with old people and baby buggies to trip over? But stewards are asking us to move back and it's not until now that we really get it - the beast is actually coming up the steps, and it isn't going to stop! I don't know if this is stage management or crowd control, but it's a truly brilliant stroke.

Now the special effects people are trying to hold it back with high pressure hoses and someone high above treats us to a sudden, massive deluge. A young man in a dripping business suit (he seems to have closed his umbrella at just the wrong moment) can't believe it: 'I only popped down here for a minute - I've got a meeting to go to. But this is just fantastic.' He looks like he's just swum the Mersey.

At the top of the steps the spider is brought to a halt by a barrage of the most deafening firecrackers I have ever heard, leaving the scene in fog. 'Oh my God, that's amazing,' says one woman to me, her eyes like saucers, and then suddenly... 'But where's my mother?'

The spider reverses and slowly retraces its steps. Snow is drifting now, and the spider, quieted, moves the crowd to silence, until the music - brilliantly responsive throughout - dies at last, triggering long applause.

The rain is still pouring. This is Liverpool's 'blimey' moment, for sure. I don't think I've ever seen so many smiling faces on so many wet people. La Princesse will be off again this evening, ahead of the big procession through the city and grand finale this weekend. I can't imagine the size of the following crowd by then, but one thing's certain - and I'm afraid someone has to say it - she'll never walk alone.

Capital of culture: Still to come

The Liverpool Philharmonic, 2 Oct
Sir Simon Rattle returns to conduct at the concert hall where his career began.

King Lear, 30 Oct-29 Nov
Rupert Goold directs Pete Postlethwaite in the title role at the Everyman Theatre.

Ai Weiwei, 20 Sep-30 Nov
New work from the Chinese artist and architect as part of the Liverpool Biennial's Made Up exhibition.

Guy Barker's Jazz Orchestra, 25 Sep
Guy Barker presents dZf, a 'jazz noir' reworking of Mozart's Magic Flute.

Hope Street Festival, 8-14 Sep
Street theatre, market stalls and 'happenings'.

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