Macca at 76 – back where he once belonged...
THE place won’t have looked the same, that’s for sure. Not the way it did when Paul McCartney made his debut at The Cavern with The Beatles on February 9, 1961.
It can’t, because it isn’t the same. It isn’t even in the same place – the original Cavern having been demolished back in the Seventies.
The club where McCartney played a free one-off gig yesterday, though it’s in the same Mathew Street and has been a tourist focal point for 30 years, is a heritage rebuild close to the sacred site.
It doesn’t matter. The 270 fans who queued for hours in the heat, or who will view the film when it’s shown, won’t mind. Paul isn’t the same as that 18-year-old who first went there, and nor are the fans who saw him there then. He is 76 now – and he chose to drive himself to the venue for the two-hour lunchtime performance.
He ran through songs such as Love Me Do, Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da, I Saw Her Standing There and Get Back, as well as tracks from his album Egypt Station, which will be released later this year.
Opening the show, he said: ‘Liverpool. Cavern. Those are words that go together well.’ Few would have missed his play on the lyrics of the song Michelle.
Memories were, inevitably, evoked of his late bandmates. ‘Here’s to them. Let’s hear it for John and George,’ he said.
Before The Beatles transformed The Cavern, it was just a doorway in a warehouse in a cobbled alleyway in an unfashionable city. The club’s entrance was surrounded for much of the day by trucks and vans disgorging, or picking up, boxes of fresh produce, lacing the atmosphere with the cloying aroma of ripening fruit.
Inside, 17 steps led to three airless, barrel-shaped cellars, with a couple of smaller ones to the sides, where the walls would quickly become damp with teenage perspiration. Paul’s father used to think the place was a health hazard with all that sweat and electricity locked in there together.
Although, over the couple of years when The Beatles played in The Cavern and their local fame grew, students would start to attend, most of their first audiences were made up of workingclass young people who called themselves Cavernites. They only got into the club if they adhered to some strict rules. While The Beatles were allowed to wear black leather stage suits, the fans had to be much more circumspect in their dress.
For instance, jeans weren’t allowed. Boys in denim, it was believed by the management, were the ‘rougher types’, and therefore not welcome.
The girls who might attend the lunchtime sessions would have to be appropriately dressed, too, in sensible skirts. Sometimes a girl would have a scarf to hide the curlers in her hair, if she was going on a date that night. At other times, the scarf might be removed just as The Beatles came on the little stage.
Somehow, The Beatles had developed the gift of turning the audience into friends. They would joke and tease, eating while they goofed about between songs, all the time keeping a conversation going with the fans.
When something went wrong with an amp or a microphone, they didn’t panic and wonder what to say next. Instead, they would simply amuse the fans and maybe have a communal singsong.
For this, The Beatles, who would often play two other gigs in other Liverpool venues on the same day, earned a total of £5 for a two-hour session, with their fans paying a mere shilling to get in.
There was no alcohol on sale, but a cup of tea cost five pence. As for drugs, they hadn’t yet reached Liverpool.
That it would be from this modest, cheap chrysalis of a former wine cellar that The Beatles would emerge, fully formed, less than two years later, seems ever more unlikely the further away in time we get from it.
Yet it happened. As Paul put it yesterday: ‘We did OK.’