The Beatles would go on
to make an estimated 292
appearances at The Cavern
The Beatles At The Cavern
lunchtimes have they got? We must have
them regularly’.”
The Beatles would go on to make
an estimated 292 appearances at The
Cavern. While their Hamburg residencies
were pivotal in forging their musical
development, it was The Cavern that
inspired their aff ection and became the
focus of landmark moments in their
mercurial ascent.
The Cavern looms large in the backstory
of The Beatles. Sixty years on from that fi rst
performance, the venue’s legacy
shows no sign of diminishing.SOUNDS OF THE CITY
The city that spawned The Beatles
was a desolate place at the dawn
of the 60s. Buildings were blackened by
soot and much of Liverpool was little
more than a bombsite, the result of the
hammering it received from the Luftwaff e.
Unemployment was high, too, resulting in
limited options for teenagers.
“There’d been an explosion in the birth
rate in Liverpool and now there were twice
as many kids and not enough work,” says
Tony Waddington, guitarist with Lee CurtisAnd The All-Stars. “The older generation
didn’t understand that. And our hair was
longer, so we were considered louts. I’d be
walking with my guitar down the street
in jeans and everywhere you went you
were just called layabouts. ‘Get a job you
layabout’. We were absolutely penniless.
Everybody was. We had to walk everywhere.
I made my own guitar out of bits of wood
that I found in the bin, literally, stuck a
pickup on it. That’s how it was.”
But one Liverpudlian saw an opportunityin the run-down inner city. Alan Sytner was
a 21-year-old jazz fanatic and a frequent
visitor to Le Caveau jazz club in Paris.
When an unprepossessing three-tunnel
vaulted storage cellar at 10 Mathew Street
in Liverpool came up for sale in 1956, he
glimpsed its potential immediately.
“I was seeing a replica of Le Caveau,” he
told broadcaster and writer Spencer Leigh
in the book The Cavern. “As Mathew Streetlooked like a little narrow street in the Latin
Quarter in Paris, I felt I was bringing the
Left Bank to Liverpool.”
The basement measured 58ft by 39ft and
Sytner set about transforming it into a music
venue, using sledgehammers to dislodge
hundreds of bricks that had been installed
to reinforce the basement when it was used
as an air raid shelter. “We did it by hand and
were left with a lot of rubble,” Sytner told
Leigh. “That was the ideal foundation for
the stage, which was made of wood and just
went over the bricks.”
The Cavern Club opened its
doors on 16 January 1957 and from
the outset, Sytner adopted a no
alcohol policy. On the opening
night, 652 jazz fans crammed
themselves into the venue to watch a line-up
that included the Merseysippi Jazz Band.THE SKIFFLE SCENE
Despite being a fervent devotee of jazz,
Sytner extended his booking policy to
include bands that were emerging from the
city’s burgeoning skiffl e scene. One such
outfi t were The Quarrymen, a band formed
in 1956 by Woolton resident John Lennon.
MICHAEL^ OCHS^ ARCHIVES/GE
TTY
IMAGES