The four lads who shook the world

Jul 2 2007 by Gary Bainbridge, Liverpool Daily Post

For a time in the 1960s, Liverpool was the centre of the popular cultural world. Gary Bainbridge reports

TO BE young in Liverpool in the early 1960s was to win the lottery of life. The docks were booming, jobs were plentiful, and, if you had a spare lunch hour, you could pop down to Mathew Street and watch the most important and influential group of 20th-century musicians play a short set at the Cavern Club.

For a while, Liverpool was the centre of the popular cultural world, thanks to The Beatles.

The group had been running in one form or another since Paul McCartney met John Lennon at St Peter’s Church Fete, in Woolton, in 1957. In 1960, the band - at that time John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and drummer Pete Best - was booked to play several dates in Hamburg.

It was the making of one of the most successful and influential popular music groups in history.

The Beatles returned to their home city without Sutcliffe, taking up residence in the Cavern Club, on Mathew Street. Brian Epstein, manager of the North End Music Stores, on Great Charlotte Street and Whitechapel, watched them on November 21, 1961, and offered to manage the group.

Epstein got the band a deal with Parlophone Records, sacked Best and replaced him with Ringo Starr.

Born Richard Starkey, Starr was drummer with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, and had occasionally filled in for Best in Hamburg.

The band’s first single, Love Me Do, was a minor British hit, reaching number 17, but their second single, Please Please Me, hit number one. Beatlemania took hold of Britain, and in 1964 it crossed the Atlantic, after the group made an appearance on Ed Sullivan’s hugely-popular TV show.

Other acts associated with the Cavern, including Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas, and Cilla Black, as well as groups from the wider Merseybeat scene, including The Searchers, had great success around the world. In 1965, the populist Harold Wilson, Prime Minister and MP for Huyton, gave all four Beatles MBEs in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List.

In the same year, the Beatles played Shea Stadium in New York. It was the first stadium concert in the history of rock. Then Lennon infamously claimed The Beatles were "bigger than Jesus", sparking rage in the American Bible Belt and mass record burning. Creatively, Lennon and McCartney, and - to a lesser extent - Harrison, soared.

The group moved away from the doo-wop harmonies and simple lyrics of Merseybeat to be influenced by Bob Dylan and the psychedelic movement.

Albums like Revolver and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band used experimental techniques including early sampling and instruments rarely used in rock music, such as string and brass ensembles and Indian sitars. But the cracks began to appear after Epstein’s death from an accidental drug overdose in 1967.