Once a figure of fun, we have now taken the Superlambanana to our hearts. Laura Davis reports

"IT SOUNDS revolting, silly and rude. What the hell has it got to do with Liverpool?" asked Bread star Jean Boht in 1998, some 10 years after some TV viewers had been asking the same question about her sitcom.

She wasn’t the only one quick to criticise the city’s newest piece of public art. Half lamb, half banana, many thought it would clash with its backdrop – too abstract for Liverpool’s fine Victorian architecture, and too vibrant and quirky for the drab 60s office blocks.

"What particular spirit does it represent?" asked then City Council leader Frank Prendergast, when told it was designed to reflect the Scouse zeitgeist.

Meanwhile, Alan Bleasdale’s first thought was for the late Liverpool sculptor Arthur Dooley, who created many works of public art, including the "Four Lads Who Shook the World" piece on Mathew Street.

"If Arthur was still here, he would be leading the march across the Pennines!" he declared.

Only the actress Margi Clarke seemed to guess the sculpture would tickle that famous Scouse sense of humour. "Well, at least it’s a vegetarian lamb," she quipped.

As we reported last week, from this month, smaller versions of the Superlambanana will be appearing across the city – in hotels, shopping centres and offices – proving that the initial reservations about introducing such an unusual creation to a place just beginning to come out of its depression years were unfounded.

Politicians often describe Liverpool as rising like a phoenix out of the ashes, a reference perhaps to the Liver Bird, but it is the Lambanana that has become the unofficial emblem of the city’s new found self-esteem.

Originally sited at the Pier Head for three months, during the Artrans- pennine 98 festival and Tate Liverpool’s 10th birthday celebrations, the 17ft sculpture was moved to a number of different locations around the city before settling outside JP Lamb & Sons, the ships chandlers at Wapping Dock. The owners of the suitably named JP Lamb, Sir Trevor Jones and his wife, Lady Doreen, soon found themselves taking care of their strange new neighbour.

"It became part of our family and our grandchildren had their photographs taken with it," says Lady Doreen, who was a committee member of the Liverpool Architecture & Design Trust, the organisation responsible for bringing the sculpture to the city.

"We kept it clean, and fed it and watered it, and any time there was a dirty mark on it we would touch it up. Our staff knew it was part of their job to look after it.

"At first I didn’t particularly like it, but it’s become part of Liverpool now and everybody loves it. When it was outside JP Lamb, people were always coming along to have their pictures taken with it."

Having provided the paint when the Superlambanana was first built, they kept a spare tin of it to cover any graffiti.

"When it came to us it had been in Williamson Square and it was in a mess. It had to be stripped down to the bare material and repainted," recalls Lady Doreen.

"The colour it is now is not the original colour. The artist specified that it had to be that horrible bright yellow and that’s what it should be, but it’s been painted a much paler yellow now.

"Our doctor’s is near John Moores University, where it is now, and whenever we go there we stop and say hello to Superlambanana and say ‘sorry you’re not the right colour’."

It hasn’t just been vandals who have seen the potential in redecorating the Superlambanana. It has been painted pink to mark Breast Cancer Awareness Month, purple for the Smoke Free Liverpool campaign, and green for reasons nobody seems to remember.

For the Millennium, Sir Trevor added a bright red hat and bow tie so the sculpture could join in the celebrations and, one morning, commuters driving along The Strand were astonished to see it done up like a Friesian cow.

A secret group of pranksters had transformed the artwork in the middle of the night – one member calling the Daily Post later that day to warn that the Liver Birds could be next. Fortunately, however, they have so far managed to escape twilight redecoration.

This year, artists, school children and organisations are getting in on the act. One hundred smaller Superlambananas have been distributed as plain canvasses and there will be a parade of the finishing products in May.