Observations on bananas

In the centre of Liverpool stands a piece of public art called the SuperLambBanana. Angel of the North it ain't. It is a bright yellow sculpture, 18 feet high, of a lamb mutating into a banana. The meaning of this work, by the Japanese artist Taro Chiezo, is not obvious, but I have heard that it symbolises Liverpool's sea trading past, exporting wool and importing bananas.

The sculpture's key element is clearly the banana. This fruit, with its familiarity and sameness, has inspired art from Andy Warhol's album cover for the Velvet Underground to the mounds of bananas placed in city squares by Douglas Fishbone. But the banana's uniformity is also its downfall. The bananas we eat are sterile clones that can reproduce only from their cuttings - and now the standard global banana, the Cavendish, is threatened by fungal disease. In future, this may lead to more expensive Cavendishes, or some alternative genetic mutant not yet devised.

Despite being frowned upon in today's low-carb diets, the banana is still the bestselling food item in supermarkets, and yet it is more than that. Ever since the words "have a banana" were inserted into the music-hall song "Let's All Go Down the Strand", it has had a status no other fruit shares. In the interwar period, London's Tin Pan Alley tossed out songs such as "Yes, We Have No Bananas" and "I've Never Seen a Straight Banana", and dance halls held banana nights. When a ship loaded with bananas arrived at Avonmouth in December 1945, to be greeted by hundreds of children who had never seen a banana, it was a national event.

During the cold war the banana divided east and west. Khrushchev boasted that bananas were the only thing the Soviet Union could not produce, and they were rarely available behind the Iron Curtain. As the Berlin Wall came down, West Germans threw bunches of them at the incoming easterners, and they became so identified with western triumphalism that graffiti appeared on walls in East Berlin: "The Revolution is not a Banana".

When Fishbone filled Trafalgar Square with 30,000 bananas he spoke of allusions to Incas and the Nazis, indicating that the banana is what literary theorists call a floating signifier: not meaning anything specific, it seems to absorb all sorts of surplus meaning in our culture.

Liverpool's SuperLambBanana is certainly open to endless variation. It has been painted different colours for publicity campaigns and in 2004 it briefly acquired a miniature version, the Babylambbanana, put there by a sculptor called Billy who thought the original "needed a friend". Pottery models of it are the second most purchased souvenirs of Liverpool after Beatles badges, and for some reason every MP who voted for the smoking ban last February received one as a present. According to the Liverpool Echo one Labour member responded angrily: "What on earth am I meant to do with this?" In the face of such philistinism, I fear the SuperLambBanana's appeal will remain parochial.

Joe Moran lectures at Liverpool John Moores University

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website