Tag: Beatles

Liverpool Venues 25 to 27

Firstly, this week I will look at the latest hostelry visited within the cornucopia of establishments within the Matthew Street enclave. The lineage of the very traditional Liverpool White Star can be traced back to the 1880’s and this is proved by a reference to the White Star Carvery and Bar within an 1887 Empire Theatre programme. It is named after the Titanic shipping owners White Star Line.  

Apparently, the pub in those days remains relevantly unchanged from today, apart from the fact there used to be a back yard and there was living accommodation upstairs. Astoundingly there were no ladies lavatories in the building until 1987, the wafer thin justification for this was due to the premise of endeavouring to discourage visits from the large number of prostitutes working in the city post Second World War up to the late 1980’s.    

After the war, a punter called Mr Quinn purchased five pubs in the city, including this one and on all that quintet he inscribed the word Quinns on the front windows. To a degree that name stuck to the level that the good beer guide named the pub as the White Star (Quinns 2).

The Beatles ‘back wall’. Image Credit pinterest.com

In the 1960’s, two promoters named Bob Wooler (the original DJ in the Cavern Club) and Alan Williams arranged for bands to play in the back room, and that is where the Beatles played their first ever gig. That room is also where the bands were paid after they had performed at the Cavern and naturally contains Beatles memorabilia, known locally as the ‘Beatles back wall’.

Apparently, Brian Epstein also discussed with Mr Wooler there in 1963 about their upcoming appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show which provided their first exposure to American audiences. On my one foray there I saw a local singer called Siobhan performing.   

Across town on Renshaw Street within the Grand Central building, you will find the Liverpool Liffey Bar, and as I am sure you can glean from its moniker it is yet another Irish themed hostelry, this time named after the river which permeates straight through Dublin city centre.  The plethora of such bars is no surprise when you factor in that 75% of Liverpudlians have Irish descent, the highest heritage of any British city apart from Glasgow.

The pub was subject to a long running rental dispute with a former tenant which resulted in the pub suddenly closing in March 2022, the disagreement also impacting on the Smokie Mo’s and Nelly Foley bars, which were reviewed in a previous blog. The Liffey was closed for around a year and grabbed that fallow period as an opportunity to undergo a £200,000 refurbishment.

The Liffey Bar. Image Credit liverpoolecho.co.uk

From a business profit viewpoint, they ensured that they managed to reopen in time for St Patricks Day on Friday 17 March 2023 and must have expected a busy one by stocking fifteen barrels of Guinness which equates to 1500 pints, you would be a tad merry after that! They have live music every night and on my visit, there was a singer called Paddy performing.

The Liverpool Sound City festival is an annual multi venue music shindig similar in structure to the Dot to Dot events. It was founded in 2008 and acts such as White Lies, White Denim, Gil Scott Heron, Swans and Hold Steady played in some of those earlier years.

It also runs in conjunction with the John Peel World Cup which is a British Heart Foundation led event where teams derived from band members and music industry bods play in a five a side tournament. It is a gala that I have always yearned to attend and in May 2025 that came to fruition.

Now, my football team Preston North End had proceeded to make an absolute dogs’ dinner of the end of the season, and this allied with some unfeasibly spectacular results from their rivals meant that the spectre of relegation had gone to the last game. Thus, I was nervously checking the scores on the train commute over but results thankfully went in our favour and we achieved safety. I could now relax, and as a result the first cold one did not touch the sides!

The hub points for picking up our wristbands and then our first venue was Liverpool Spanish Caravan. The bar and tapas restaurant is located on Slater Street, and the side wall of the building contains a large mural of ex Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp. There was a spacious indoor bar and beer garden and a decent choice of beverages.   

Spanish Caravan complete with mural. Image Credit liverpoolecho.co.uk

At our visiting time the singer on the small stage at the end of the bar was a chap called Oscar Blue who maintained our Irish theme by hailing from County Clare. He had a busker vibe about him and has apparently been a hit on social media where his initial debut singles have been streamed over 10 million times globally.  

Liverpool Venues 5 to 7

Before I outline the remaining events I have thus far attended in Liverpool, I wanted to provide some detail of all the missed gig opportunities on the other side of the River Mersey from the city centre. The first occurred when I attended my auntie’s wedding somewhere deep in Wallasey territory and there was a pub opposite the wedding reception building, but the name of the establishment evades me now. We visited briefly during the day but only Uncle George grasped the mantle to attend at one point in the evening where there was a band playing.

Following on from that quarter information tale, in July 21, Gill and I were scheduled to attend the Lets Rock 80’s festival at Wavertree Playing Fields (aka the Mystery). The derivation of the mystery moniker is down to the fact that the 104-acre park was donated to the Liverpool corporation by an anonymous well-wisher who subsequently transpired to be a shipping magnet. We were planning to commute in from the local nattily named Wavertree Technology Park train station but in the end, circumstances dictated we could not attend resulting in missing out of the dubious privilege of watching Sister Sledge, Odyssey, Wet Wet Wet and Adam Ant!  

Adam Ant. Image Credit thecurrent.org

I have previously attended gigs at library venues in Lancaster and Wigan and was hoping to tick Birkenhead off this list when we obtained tickets to see the French band Juniore for a chilled Sunday afternoon set, but it was subsequently cancelled and not rearranged due to issues with post-Brexit visa issues and Covid.

Another interesting sounding venue in that area is the Future Yard in Birkenhead. One of my favourite ever bands Sennen were undertaking a very rare tour and had added a date at that very venue. Unfortunately, I had a fixture clash and could not attend, and despite my exhortations to the band they didn’t add a Manchester date, so I have not yet added to my sole sighting of them at Manchester Night and Day in 2010.

Thus, I shall now move away from the hard luck stories onto actual gigs attended. One day in December 2019 I was working out of the Liverpool office and gravitating back down Liverpool Church Street to Lime Street station for my train home. I heard the unmistakable sound of a full band playing a street gig, the combo in question was Keywest.

Keywest band. Image Credit wordpress.com

Keywest are a four-piece folk band from Ireland and their route to success is an unusual one as they learnt and honed their craft by years of busking in the hot bed area of Grafton Street in Dublin. They had obviously decided to take a trip down memory lane by performing on a busy shopping street, I don’t whether that proceeded a gig in a more standard venue that evening.

On Matthew Street, you will find Liverpool Sgt Pepper’s Bar, like many in the area a Beatles themed establishment and the website informs that improbably and in fact impossibly they have music on ‘8 days a week’! In 2017 I caught a chap called John McDonna playing a set there.

In December 2021, I was over in Liverpool for an overnight work event and therefore naturally had to have a gander at the Ents 24 website to see if there were any musical events of note that coincided with my stay, thus discovering there was an interesting act on that very night at Liverpool EBGBS.

After work, we grabbed some tea in the Silk Road tapas and after a couple of drinks persuaded my colleague David Taylor to also attend the gig. David had previously pleasantly surprised me when he stated unexpectedly that he had not only heard of Mogwai but had actually seen them live which was good enough for me!

Heebies Jeebies (known locally as Heebies) has been a popular venue on Seel Street since it first incarnation as a jazz bar in the mid 90’s. In 2016 they opened the 250-year-old basement room as a live and club night venue and named it EBGBS.  Upon entering the establishment, I noted they had nailed the intended vibe as a dingy downstairs biker bar, in a good way! It reminded me of the Merchants pub near Lancaster train station.

EBGB’s dungeon setting! Image Credit architectural-emporium.co.uk

The venue has a capacity of 300 but there cannot have been more than fifty people in attendance that night, I can imagine when the place is full the view of the stage may be impaired due to the numerous pillars in place.

The support band was a post punk band from Oslo in Norway called Mayflower Madame, the main act was New Candys from Venice in Italy. Since their formation in 2008, their singer Fernando Nuti remains their ever-present member. In their early days they had support slots with the likes of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Crystal Stilts.

Their second album was recorded by John Willis, producer, and drummer of legendary psych rock band Loop, who coincidentally I am off to see today (21/05/23) on their comeback tour, 33.33 years since I last saw them at Manchester International 1 in January 1990. New Candys provided an enjoyable slab of gentle shoegaze before we headed back down the vibrant Seel Street, which looked worthy of further investigation at some future stage.