It has involved four and a half years of planning, £95m and a saga of feuding, but at the symbolic hour of 20.08 on the evening of Friday 11 January, Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture finally burst into life, reports the Times.

This involved one of the stranger spectacles in recent history: Ringo Starr performing his new single, Liverpool 8, precariously perched on a platform 100ft in the air at a free open-air concert outside and on top of St George’s Hall, in the heart of the city.

The show, performed to a massive crowd in front of Lime Street Station, was nothing if not all-embracing. Several hundred local singers performed while fireworks exploded from all available edifices. Cranes and cargo containers danced in the night sky. Rock guitarists and drummers duelled from the rooftops of buildings half a mile apart. Big screens celebrated Liverpool’s artists and writers by wittily adding them to a pastiche of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album cover.

Starr quality:

- Liverpool claims to be the world capital of pop, but the conductors Sir Thomas Beecham and Sir Simon Rattle also grew up on Merseyside, as did the jazz singer and art historian George Melly - In May 1965 the US beat-poet Allen Ginsberg declared Liverpool to be “the centre of consciousness of the human universe”

- The city has the largest concentration of Grade 1 listed buildings outside London - In 2007 the Turner Prize was awarded at Tate Liverpool, the first time it has been outside London

- The city hosts a biennial contemporary international arts festival