The Beatles At The Cavern
It’s the most famous small venue in the world and was pivotal in
the development of the biggest band of all time. Now, 60 yearson from The Beatles’ debut performance at The Cavern,
we trace its role in the band’s incredible rise...WORDS BY NEIL CROSSLEY
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t midday on 9 February 1961, fi ve musicians
dressed in leather jackets, dark jumpers,
drainpipe jeans and winklepicker boots
stepped out on to a small wooden stage in a former
fruit storage cellar in the heart of Liverpool’s bustling
business district. The band, known collectively as
The Beatles, were playing their debut performance at
The Cavern Club, a dark, dank, subterranean venue 11 feet
beneath the warehouses and cobblestones of the city’s
Mathew Street.
As events go, it was relatively inauspicious. Their
appearance had not been advertised. The venue, which
had once served as a Second World War air raid shelter,
was barely half full. But for the small group of gathered
teenagers avidly awaiting the performance, it was little
short of a revelation.
“Oh my goodness, they just exploded onto the stage,”
recalls Debbie Greenberg, who had bunked off school
to catch the gig. “We’d heard through the grapevine
that they were going to be on, because they’d playedat the Litherland Town Hall on 27 December 1960
and everybody was raving about them, so we went to
the lunchtime session, which was their debut. They
were everything that the people who had seen them at
Litherland had said they were. Absolutely electrifying.
They grabbed the whole audience from the second they
jumped onto the stage.”
Blistering covers of Chuck Berry numbers such as Roll
Over Beethoven were highlights of the set that lunchtime,
and Greenberg says it was the band’s professionalism and
dynamism that set them apart. “The Beatles were just
complete energy the minute they hit the stage,” she says.
Ray McFall, the new owner of The Cavern, was equally
smitten. “I stood at the side between the pillars, about
halfway up the hall, and as soon as they started playing
I was captivated by them. My God, what a group. John
started, then Paul, then George and they alternated...
I couldn’t get over the quality of the music. From that very
fi rst day, there was no stopping them. I said to Bob Wooler
[the club’s full-time compere and DJ] ‘What other