Liverpool

A lunchtime discovery

On 9 November 1961, Brian Epstein left his family’s record shop and visited the Cavern Club, a cellar on Mathew Street. At a lunchtime session he saw the Beatles. Epstein later became their manager; by June 1962 he had secured the group a recording contract with Parlophone.

The Beatles were already regulars at the Cavern. They had first played there in February 1961, and their lunchtime appearances brought them close to an audience that could return from one session to the next. The same stage also hosted Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Searchers and other groups associated with the local beat scene.

In August 1962, Granada Television filmed the Beatles at a lunchtime performance in the club. The cameras recorded the group playing “Some Other Guy”, a song first released by American singer Richard Barrett. Granada judged the film unsuitable for broadcast at the time; it was finally shown the following year.

A song for the crossing

The Cavern’s regulars did not all tell the same story about the city. Gerry Marsden, singer of Gerry and the Pacemakers, wrote “Ferry Cross the Mersey” about the river crossing and his attachment to home. In the song, the narrator asks the ferry to carry him back to the place and people he loves.

Marsden later recalled that he sang an early version down a public telephone to his mother, who recorded it on his tape machine. In 2022 the ferry terminal at Liverpool’s Pier Head was renamed in his honour. The river crossing in his song is a real journey between Liverpool and the Wirral; it also carries the singer home.

Across Mathew Street

The original Cavern closed in 1973. The club now operating under that name was rebuilt and reopened in 1984, using some bricks recovered from the earlier building. It is a working music venue, but visitors should not mistake the rebuilt room for the untouched cellar of the Beatles’ lunchtime shows.

Later in the 1970s, another cellar on Mathew Street became associated with a different generation. Eric’s, which operated from 1976 to 1980, hosted touring punk and new-wave acts as well as local musicians. Across the street from the former Cavern site, audiences saw groups take early steps of their own.

Among the acts connected with Eric’s were Echo & the Bunnymen. The band’s later song “The Killing Moon”, released in 1984, gives the narrator an encounter charged with desire and a struggle between fate and choice. It belongs to a later chapter than the club’s original run.

Eric’s and the Cavern have both returned as live-music venues, although neither has remained unchanged since those early years. The Cavern’s television footage and Marsden’s ferry song preserve two quite different places in the city: a room below Mathew Street and the journey across the Mersey.