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**
Local band and current Cavern
favourite 10 Reasons To Live provide the hidden 51st track
– highlighting the club’s commitment to promoting new
music well into it’s 50th year and beyond. ** ‘Fifty years ago a few jazz-loving Liverpudlians had the most exotic notion you could imagine. They dreamt of bringing the Parisian Left Bank to their home town. Into this unfashionable Northern seaport they would import the chic ambience of a smokey “caveau”, the sort of dive where femmes fatales and French philosophers might meet to escape the straight world upstairs. So they found a pokey basement under an old fruit warehouse and they called it the Cavern. Well, the jazz plan faltered when Britain succumbed to American rock’n’roll; nowhere fell as violently in love with the new sound as Liverpool. Incredibly, in less than a decade the Cavern became a shrine of global youth culture and a magnet for musicians everywhere. The Cavern became, in fact, what it remains to this day – the best-known rock club in the world. It goes without saying that The Beatles were the biggest noise in all of this. They played at the Cavern nearly 300 times. So the Fabs take pride of place in this collection with a number, “Please Please Me”, first perfected there, amid the sweaty confines of this legendary dungeon at 10 Mathew Street. Here as well are their peers on the Merseybeat scene that quickly colonised British pop, like Cilla Black and Gerry & The Pacemakers. Here, too, are the great acts who followed The Beatles to America and re-shaped the very meaning of rock music – bands like The Rolling Stones, The Animals and The Who. They all played the Cavern, as did many American legends, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley among them, whose own music had inspired those British groups in the first place. Somehow the Cavern story never stopped being eventful. In spite of its fame it went bust in 1966. The closure caused such an outcry that the Prime Minister Harold Wilson had to rush up to Liverpool to re-open it. By the early 1970s, even though it attracted hot new bands like Queen, it was back on the skids. They closed it down, the warehouse was demolished and Brian Epstein’s beloved “Cellarful of Noise” was filled with rubble instead. Yet a New Cavern opened across the street, was re-named Eric’s and spawned as many world-famous acts as the original Cavern (Elvis Costello, Echo & The Bunnymen and Frankie Goes To Hollywood were but a few). But Liverpool without a Cavern Club? It just didn’t seem right. So they re-built it, brick-for-brick, back in 10 Mathew Street. It re-opened in 1984 and, marvellously, it’s there to this day. Arctic Monkeys, The Coral, Travis, Embrace and KT Tunstall and, in 1999, a certain Paul McCartney are the calibre of acts who have taken the Cavern into a new era. It’s more than a club, this place. On one level the Cavern’s story is a microcosm of the city in which it stands – a classic Liverpool tale of drama, disaster, romance and rebirth. And on another, it has a credible claim to be the cradle of British pop. The Beatles believed their Cavern years were their best as live performers. In the fractured final days they tried, poignantly, to rediscover their lost solidarity as a tough young Liverpool combo. The spirit that informed “Get Back” was really the spirit of the Cavern. There is a long-held school of thought which holds that Mathew Street is a place of mystic energy – Bill Drummond of the KLF believed a ley-line ran along it. Opposite today’s club, a life-sized bronze John Lennon lounges against the wall. Beneath his hooded gaze the music fans still troop downstairs for an experience they will never forget. Let these songs stand in tribute to a little hole in the ground that really changed our world.’ Paul
Du Noyer, author of ‘Liverpool: Wondrous Place’ May 2007 |
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