The Beatles

This evening we paid homage to The Beatles, the four Liverpool lads who changed popular culture forever. What a buzz this was for me. This is a memory that will stay with me for a very long time. Rachel walked us from our hotel to Mathew Street nearby. This is the home of the Cavern Club, the downstairs music venue where the young Beatles played over 200 shows.

The street itself is very cool. There is the Hard Day’s Night Hotel on the corner, with statues of the local lads looking out across the street from first floor level. There’s John Lennon’s bronze statue, leaning against the wall, just as he does on the album cover of Rock ‘n Roll. There’s a wall of discs commemorating the record amount of Number 1 charting artists. Lovely Cilla Black is there too. Her statue is outstanding, a great representation of one of Britain’s finest post-war entertainers.

But it’s the Cavern Club we came to see. We walked down the stairs into the band room and bar. It was just as I imagined it would be. The walls dripping with music memorabilia and covered with the scrawled names of patrons (including ours now). A guy with a guitar, whose name I never did find out, sang one Beatles song after another, and of course we all joined in at the top of our voices. It was fantastic. I only wish there was time to stay longer than the half hour or so we spent there. How I would have loved to be in that room when young John, Paul, George and Ringo were playing to a small number of fans.

We finished our drinks and left the Cavern Club, heading to the waterfront. There we had some photos taken with the amazing Beatles statue and reflected on how much we were changed by what the Beatles had achieved when we were buying their 45s back in the sixties. Yeah, yeah, yeah!