THE VIEW
FROM THE
STAGE
Tony Waddington was
guitarist with Lee Curtis
And The All-Stars, and
played on the same bill as
The Beatles at various
venues around Liverpool.
Here, he recounts his
own experiences of
The Cavern...REWRITING HISTORY
“I’m constantly amazed when I see TV
programmes about The Cavern, at how they
get it so wrong. Basically, the interesting
thing about The Cavern was, when you look
back on it, it was a mini theatre. There were
rows of fi xed seats in the centre, facing the
stage, and big aisles, and people danced in
the aisles. Dancehalls and everywhere else
we played didn’t have rows of seats.”RINGO
“Ringo was a fabulous drummer and he still
is. He was so slick. I remember walking down
the steps at the Casbah and hearing this bass
and guitar, and then these drums, and
thinking ‘Who is that?’. It’s not a record,
it’s not a jukebox, the guy was fabulous.
What he had was a sort of clarity. If he set up
in your living room, it wouldn’t get on your
nerves, kind of thing. He was just crystal
clear and precise.”THE CAVERN SOUND
“The ceiling was kind of arched, what we call
in recording a parabolic refl ector, so it’s just
like a speaker, and so when you played there
was no sound loss. You hate playing big
places because the sound gets lost, but in
The Cavern you could hear yourself and thesound was compact. And the audience could
hear this compact sound. It was a fabulous
place from that point of view.”THE GEAR
“All the PAs then sounded crap. But the
Cavern one, as run-of-the-mill went, was not
too bad. They had old Reslo microphones
that were for public address systems. When
we went to Hamburg, I was shocked because
the equipment onstage was fab. I still have a
Sennheiser mic of that era and I like it
because it just reminds me of when we stood
on stage in the Star Club. There was reverb
on the system and you could hear it perfectly
well. In The Cavern, you were yelling your
head off .”PERILS OF PLAYING
“You had to be careful at The Cavern
[because] you often got a shock off the
microphone if you touched it with your
mouth. In fact, when I borrowed John’s
Rickenbacker one night I got a shock and
I said later, ‘Hey you might have told me
your guitar wasn’t earthed’. And he said,
‘Oh yeah. Sorry I meant to tell you that’.
It was like being punched in the mouth
while you got this blue fl ash like lightning
in your head.”The Beatles At The Cavern
ninepence get a hot dog or soup and a bread
roll. Even in the depths of winter, the club
was oppressively hot, with condensation
dripping off the brick walls and ceiling. And
then there was the smell.
“Oh, the odorous cocktail,” laughs
Greenberg. “It was condensation that used
to run down the walls, it was perspiration
because people were so hot. It was like a
sauna. The smell of disinfectant, because
the toilets had been topped up every day as
there were no main drains in The Cavern.
And then we had the smell of the soup
and the hot dogs from the little cafe at the
front and the smell of rotting fruit from the
fruit exchange across the street. So it was
a real concoction. When you went home
on the bus you could see people wrinkling
their noses and saying, ‘They’ve been to
The Cavern’.”LIFE OF BRIAN
There are landmark moments in the
gestation of all great bands. For The Beatles,
such a pivotal moment arrived during
the second set of a lunchtime performance
at The Cavern on Thursday 9 November,
1961, when an elegantly dressed 27-year-
old man arrived at the front door and was
whisked by doorman Paddy Delaney past
the queue of fans and down the narrow
stone staircase.
Brian Epstein was director of the music
store NEMS, a branch of his father’s
business in Liverpool’s Great Charlotte
Street, just a few hundred yards from The
Cavern. Epstein’s interest in The Beatles
had been piqued when a customer asked if
the store had a record called My Bonnie,
a single The Beatles had recorded in
Germany with singer Tony Sheridan.
Epstein’s fi nely tailored suit, smart overcoat
and Italian shoes were wholly at odds
among the teenage fashions in The Cavern.
After a brief conversation with Bob
Wooler, Epstein positioned himself towards
the back of the centre tunnel in The Cavern
and watched as The Beatles joked, drank,
ate and worked their way through their
set. It wasn’t their best, but Epstein was
impressed by their charm and charisma,
their look and, above all, their sound.
“I was immediately struck by their music,
their beat, their sense of humour onstage,”
recalled Epstein in an interview in October- “They were fresh and they were
honest and they had what I thought was
a kind of presence, and – this is a vague term
- star quality.”
Epstein returned numerous times over
the next three weeks to watch The Beatles
at The Cavern and travelled further afi eld
to gauge their appeal in other venues. The
more he saw, the more convinced he became
of their potential. “I sensed something big,”
he told Time magazine in 1967, “if it could
be at once harnessed and at the same time
left untamed.”
On 24 January 1962, The Beatles signed
a fi ve-year management contract with BrianEpstein. One of his fi rst priorities was
to transform the band’s image. Out
went the head-to-toe leather look
and on 5 April 1962 at The Cavern,
their new image was unveiled. After
performing the fi rst set in leathers,
The Beatles changed. Before they
returned to the stage, Bob Wooler
announced “And now The Beatles
will be appearing in their new