Macca at 76 back where he once belonged...
In Liverpool’s Cavern club, that is
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 at lunchtime 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 in a fit of Liverpool lunacy 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 spot of legend, if not actually on it. It doesn’t matter. The 270 fans who queued for hours in the sweltering 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 a knight – though he chose to drive himself to the venue for the two-hour lunchtime performance.
Playing the guitar and keyboards, he ran through Beatles songs such as Love Me Do, Ob-La-Di Ob-LaDa, 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.
After playing Magical Mystery Tour, he said: ‘All those years ago we came here and played and we didn’t know if we had any future.
‘Coming back here with all my guys and all my crew and stuff, it’s pretty amazing.’
At one point he paused mid-song to ask the audience – who had been ordered to turn their phones off when they entered the club – to stop taking photos. ‘ It’s, like, putting me off and I don’t want to get put off,’ he told them.
Inevitably, memories were evoked of his late bandmates – ‘Here’s to them. Let’s hear it for John and George’ – and performing with them in the original Cavern.
How many can remember how the Cavern was in those days, nearly 60 years ago?
I don’t mean the Cavern of legend, the fabled spring from which the river of the Sixties spouted, bringing with it that tidal wave of colourful teenage fashion, youthful optimism, mini- skirts, the Pill, drugs and rock and roll.
That wasn’t the Cavern – a place that until then had been a jazz club. All that came later in the Sixties, when it seemed that the world had gone into Technicolor.
The Cavern that Paul McCartney first knew was a monochrome world in a then unfashionable city that owed more to the Fifties than the Sixties – just a doorway in a warehouse in a cobbled alleyway.
NOT far from the Pier Head, the club’s entrance was surrounded for much of the day by trucks and vans disgorging, or picking up, boxes of fresh produce, the essence of which would lace the surrounding 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, in the days before anyone worried too much about ventilators or air conditioning, 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 that 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 working class young people in their first jobs from offices and shops in the surrounding district.
They called themselves Cavernites, and they only got into the club if they adhered to some strict rules. While the Beatles were allowed to wear the black leather stage suits they’d brought back from Hamburg where they’d recently been playing, 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 at the lunchtime sessions would mainly be typists, shopworkers or hairdressers’ assistants and they would have to be appropriately dressed, too, in their sensible, if drab, skirts and back- combed beehive hair. Sometimes a girl