|
Digger
heads to Liverpool on a weekend when the city bustles with Beatles-related activity. The
site of some of The Beatles' first performances - The Casbah Coffee Club, home of original
drummer Pete Best and his family, re-opens after forty years with accompanying
razzamatazz. The Mathew Street Festival, with bands from over 20 countries and The Adelphi
Hotel Beatles convention complete the Beatlemania.
See our interview with Pete Best here
This article is the intellectual property of www.retrosellers.com and cannot be reproduced without express
permission.
Photograph © Casbah Coffee Club and Pete Best
"I was around in the sixties but I was a bit late for the Casbah. I saw them (The
Beatles) at The Cavern, though, and Gerry and all the others," explains my taxi
driver as we try to locate the venue for my planned evening's festivities. "Just your
frigging luck to get the only cabbie in Liverpool who doesn't know where it is," he
says regretfully. As we pass an indiscreetly elegant mansion he tells me, "That place
is owned by a renowned drug baron. They call it The House That Stash Built." He
shouts across to a rival black cab who obligingly provides authoritative-sounding
directions. "That makes a change," says my cabbie. "Those guys normally
have had a personality by-pass." We discuss The Beatles and football - Liverpool F.C.
having predictably won earlier that day. The driver is passionate and knowledgeable about
both topics, me arguably about one. I diplomatically point out that the other driver he
spoke to had an even stronger accent than his. "Calm down, calm down,"
says my driver in a self-mocking imitation of Harry Enfield's Scousers. Such is my
introduction to the humour, good nature and enthusiasm of Liverpudlians. Having been
thoroughly entertained on my journey, I offer him a good tip when we arrive. "No,
you're alright," he says, handing me back the bulk of the tip. "You must be a
VIP," he says and I shrug with fake modesty. "The club doesn't re-open
officially for a while. I hear that even Macca has been seen outside the place recently
looking nostalgically at it." I don't have the heart to explain that I'm just very
ordinary like him while secretly rather enjoying the small and temporary celebrity that he
offers me!
The Casbah Coffee Club is situated in an old Victorian house in a quiet and picturesque
residential district of Liverpool called West Derby. It is clear how the village has been
absorbed by its big city 'neighbour' but it still retains a 'villagey' feel. The large
house has been the family home of the Best family since just after the second world war.
John and Mona Best raised sons Pete and Rory there, and it was at this unlikely venue that
The Quarrymen often rehearsed and played in their formative period and where Pete was to
become the first drummer of The Beatles. Without the Best family The Beatles probably
wouldn't have evolved. Much has been said about Pete's early involvement with, and
departure from, The Beatles. Many theories as to why he was 'asked to leave the group'
have been suggested, but even Pete himself doesn't really know. 'He was too good looking
and popular with the girls so the others were jealous' is the most common proposition that
has been put forward, and certainly when he 'left' The Beatles there was a great deal of
outrage from the fans, including the famous bloody nose for Ringo. Pete has received
recognition for his early work and influence and some decent recompense in recent years
following the release of The Beatles Anthology. It is muted that a reconciliation may be
in the pipeline between the two surviving original members of The Beatles, Paul McCartney
and Pete Best.
The entrance to the Casbah Coffee Club is at the rear of the house via
narrow steps and a low doorway which has probably claimed thousands of victims in its time
- it certainly claimed me a few times that evening. "Mind your head" or "We
call that a Casbah Kiss" are the customary witty responses when someone cracks their
head against the doorway's lintel, and the ones I was to receive on several drink-induced
amnesiac occasions during the course of the evening. The Club consists of several
low-ceilinged small basement rooms, festooned with amateur artwork which evidently goes
back to the early days of the club. Black walls with silver stars (I was to see a lot of
stars that evening), shadow murals, spider's webs and other embellishments dating from a
time before pop art and psychedelia had taken hold.
Fellow invitees include many original members of the contemporary
Liverpool bands of The Beatles. I chat with Lee Curtis, who sports wonderful sideburns and
a D.A. hairstyle exactly as he did in those distant days as front man to Lee Curtis And
The All Stars, except that now the hair is chalk white rather than jet black. As the club
fills to bursting point and spills people into the dampness of the garden and the volume
of the disco seems to defy conversation, the narrow corridors and tiny rooms force people
to engage in a continuous slow-moving body jam and 'body parking' manouvres. Feisty Scouse
women and men with character-filled faces brush past me in both directions and we exchange
brief jocularities at the tops of our voices and I wonder who they are and who they were
forty years ago. I make a concerted effort to try to take in the atmosphere and the
significance of this place - the likely true birthplace of the biggest and greatest
cultural phenomenon the world has ever seen. And I count myself lucky to have seen it and
to have been a part of it, albeit forty years late.
The culmination of the evening's events is the Pete Best band playing
early rock and roll numbers, as The Beatles would have done when he was a member of that
band, in one of the Casbah's biggest, though still tiny rooms. This has got to be as close
to how it felt in The Cavern as you can now get. I share the room with maybe fifty others
as well as the band - there is no room for a stage. We can barely move without jostling
each other. The ceiling is just above my head and the atmosphere is electric in terms of
the buzz between the audience and the band and non-existent in terms of breathable oxygen.
It is so humid that Roag Best apologises for the strange distortions to the sounds of the
instruments but then jokes that actually it's just "because the band are crap."
I leave the club feeling as though I have witnessed something very special.
Mathew Street is an unremarkable looking street with a mixture of
rambling pubs and basement shops and home to the 'new' Cavern club, the original being
famously demolished in a classic example of a heritage blindness by the powers that be.
One wall in the street is comprised of bricks denoting the names of every band to have
played at the location. This year's festival was the best ever, with Beatles and other
tribute bands from all around the world entertaining fans in the pubs and open spaces in
and around the street, and in my view the success and continuance of this, the UK's
largest free annual outdoor event, is a better monument to The Beatles than any statue or
plaque can ever be.
See our interview with Pete Best here
A souvenir book of The Casbah Coffee Club - The Beatles, The True Beginnings, is published
by Spine Books and Faber and Faber and is available at £25. It is packed with great
photos and reminiscences from those early days and is a must for Beatles fans and
collectors.
This article is the intellectual property of www.retrosellers.com
and cannot be
reproduced without express permission.
|
|
