Sixties City - Merseybeat and The Cavern

Merseybeat and The Cavern - Sixties City

End Of An Era

On a typical opening over 750 people would be served with Coca-Cola and soup. The hot, sweaty atmosphere would make them drink more and, in turn, visits to the inadequate toilets would increase - as many as 2,000 flushes would take place in a single session. Multiply that by a week's activity in the club and it's plain to see that something had to give, and give it did. Liverpool has an underground railway and part of its tunnel system, a connecting tunnel that was used by the drivers to change carriages, passed almost directly under The Cavern. The drivers noticed that water was seeping down on them and they complained about the smell. An analysis was made of the water and it was discovered that it was human sewage, the source of which was traced back to The Cavern. The drainage system was simply unable to cope with the amount of sewage coming from The Cavern's overloaded toilets and a huge cesspit had built up which was seeping through the brickwork on to the railway workers.

The Cavern was told that it would have to close until the cesspit was cleared and a new drainage system built with new toilets. The cost of this work was estimated at £3,500, a fantastic amount of money at the time. Closure was temporarily delayed when a company on the ground floor allowed The Cavern's customers to use their toilets. However, it was doomed from the start - the company became increasingly horrified by the mess being made and the Cavern staff grew tired of having to clean the toilets at midnight after the evening session - and so arrived the end of an era.

It wasn't just the toilet facilities that led to the closure of The Cavern - the failure of its recording studio and records was also a contributing factor. Another was that the club was still unlicensed and, with other clubs around the area providing licensed premises, The Cavern's profitability suffered. It could also be said that The Cavern's main attraction had gone.
With The Beatles no longer there, most of the other bands that played at the club could also be seen elsewhere. Times were a-changing and the music listened to by the youngsters was going through a radical transformation as 1966 turned into 1967, a definitive year for music.

The inevitable came on a cold Sunday night in February 1966. Rory Storm and The Hurricanes performed on that night, together with local band The Hideaways, who became the last band to perform on the famous Cavern stage. The Cavern's legendary DJ, Bob Wooler, announced to the crowd of crying teenagers that the club was to close that night as the bailiffs were coming in the morning. The club remained open all night and people were let in for free. At six in the morning chairs were placed at the bottom of the stone steps into The Cavern and the front door was shut, with the remaining people barricading themselves in as a last desperate attempt at delaying the inevitable. When the police arrived shortly afterwards it was decided that enough was enough. They were let in to escort the remaining people from the building and that was that - the home of The Beatles was officially closed and the official receivers, following bankruptcy proceedings, sold The Cavern.

Hippy Daze

While closed, The Cavern had attracted considerable interest from potential buyers including businessmen and even a consortium of fans called New Cavern Ltd. Eventually, The Cavern was purchased by Joe Davey, a local bar owner, and was re-opened on 23rd July 1966. The club was officially opened by the then Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, who was presented with a pipe made out of wood from the original Cavern stage. The club desperately tried to recapture the original atmosphere which made it so popular and famous, but sadly The Cavern had changed forever.

The 'new' Cavern was a licensed venue and, hence, had a much older clientele. The old days of kids bunking off school to attend lunchtime shows had gone forever - The Cavern was now for grown-ups. As the kids left so did the soft drinks and crisps, the replacement coming in the form of drugs. By the end of the 60's and the beginning of the 70's a 'drug culture' had swept the nation and the developed world as we know it. Under the guise of 'love and peace' the hippie was born and so, too, was LSD. The emergence of this new sub-culture spread to the shores of Liverpool and thence to the smoke-filled dance floors of The Cavern club.

For some, the early 70's was a great period for The Cavern with the likes of Wishbone Ash, Thin Lizzy, Supertramp and Judas Priest playing there and the club continued to be popular. During the early Seventies the club acquired a new owner, Roy Adams, but the same old problems came back. The underground railway was to be extended and The Cavern's site was needed for an extraction duct. The local council served the club with a compulsory purchase order which was impossible to fight and the decision was made to close The Cavern for the final time.

On 27th May 1973 the bulldozers moved in and Liverpool's most famous venue was buried under demolition rubble. After the extraction duct was completed, the remainder of the site was levelled and the now waste land became a temporary car park.
Roy Adams decided to open another club, across the road from The Cavern's original site, in a group of warehouses called The Fruit Exchange. The new club was called first 'The New Cavern', later 'Cavern Mecca', and held over 2,000 people.

Local sculptor Arthur Dooley put a representation of The Beatles on the outside wall with the inscription 'Four lads who shook the world' - a work of art which is still in place to this day. Following the tragedy of John Lennon's death the statue has been used as a focal point for fans to leave their flowers and poems of remembrance.

By 1976 times had really changed - the club continued on with a number of new owners until it was bought by Roger Eagle, who changed the name of the club to Eric's, and it became a leading venue for the new type of music sweeping not only Liverpool but Britain - New Wave and Punk.Groups like The Clash and a number of new local bands again started to spring up around Merseyside leading to a second explosion of Liverpool talent - Elvis Costello, China Crisis, Echo and The Bunnymen, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, O.M.D, Wah! to name but a few. Following the change of musical preference from Punk and New Wave into the 80s and the emergence of bands like Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, the club scene again changed into more disco-oriented music and Eric's suffered the same fate as The Cavern club before it and it, too, closed its doors under bankruptcy proceedings.

The Rebirth

In the early Eighties, eleven years after its last closure, the unimaginable happened - The Cavern was to rise again like a phoenix from the ashes - well almost! The interest shown in Liverpool by fans around the world had finally come to the attention of the local council. Liverpool had not really been thought of as a tourist centre and its links to British pop music's greatest export had not been capitalised on at all. For years Liverpool had been receiving large numbers of tourists, fans and sightseers from all over the world, although no official Beatles tours had yet been organised. The local tourist board was receiving increasing numbers of requests for information concerning Beatles-related sites and the council responded by producing a number of sightseeing maps showing various places of interest, but it soon became clear that this was not enough. Following the tragic death of John Lennon on 9th December 1980 the city of Liverpool was again in the centre spotlight as hundreds of thousands of fans from all over the world flooded to the city to pay their respects. The local council finally decided to invest in the area and provide a lasting memorial to the legacy of The Beatles. Around the same time a local company called 'Backhouse' (owned by Liverpool architect David Backhouse), motivated by the death of John Lennon, approached the local council with the idea of redeveloping the Mathew Street area.

His idea was to build a shopping centre with a special theme in remembrance of The Beatles and, more importantly, he wanted to build a 'new' Cavern club. Royal Life, (part of the Royal Insurance group who merged with SunAlliance in 1996 to become Royal & SunAlliance) who had very strong historical links with the city since 1845, were approached as potential backers for the ambitious project. These are not to be confused with Royal Liver Assurance whose main company headquarters is the distinctive Liver Building, an imposing edifice that is a feature of Liverpool's Mersey waterfront skyline.

Meetings were followed by more meetings and eventually permission was finally given for the go ahead. The original plan was to rebuild the old Cavern as it was thought that the underground club would still be intact below the hastily-built car park above it. Unfortunately, on careful examination by structural engineers, it was discovered that the club's ceilings and general fabric had collapsed so the original Cavern could never be resurrected.

The area above the club was also important as this was required for the building of the shopping centre. As portions of the land were owned by Mersey Railways, having been acquired during the original demolition of The Cavern in 1973, it was decided to scrap plans to rebuild the original Cavern and build a replica Cavern underneath the new shopping centre to be sited further down Mathew Street. For this task it was decided to re-use bricks from the now-excavated original Cavern.

Over 15,000 bricks from the old Cavern were used in the reconstruction and, over the weeks of building, quite a few disappeared as many local people took away their own little piece of rock history but 5000 of the original bricks were saved and sold off by the Royal Life company in 1983 for £7.00 each. A plaque certifying their authenticity (see left) was glued to each brick with the proceeds being donated to a local charity. All of the bricks were sold out within the first year and in the late 1980s one was re-sold at auction for over £500 by Sotheby's.

The New Cavern

The new Cavern is a mock-up of the old, smaller than the original, although it does fill 50% of the original site and retains its original postal address. Other differences are that it is deeper set than the original and the stage is placed to the left as you enter down the stairs (it was facing you in the original) and the original band room is placed at the back of the stage as opposed to the side in the original.

The new Cavern also contains a bar area with a new room to one side that contains a large purpose-built stage where many local and international acts have performed, most notable being Paul McCartney's triumphant return to the site of The Cavern in 1999. The large warehouses that once stood on Mathew Street now contain a vast shopping centre that contains several floors of offices, a Beatles theme pub, a restaurant called Abbey Road and over thirty shops selling everything from designer clothes to confectionery and Beatles souvenirs. The whole of the redeveloped Mathew Street was renamed Cavern Walks and the surrounding area is now known as the Cavern Quarter.

The Other Cavern

Even though the original no longer exists there are, in fact, still two 'Caverns' in Liverpool. To see the other one, take a journey to Liverpool's seafront and visit The Albert Dock complex which is the home of 'The Beatles Story', a fascinating multimedia exhibition devoted to the Fab Four. Although not a museum in the strictest sense, visitors are taken on a journey back into the past to relive the great days of The Beatles in visual and audio displays that recreate the sights and sounds of The Beatles rise to world wide fame. There, holding pride of place, is a recreation of the centre arch of the first Cavern club containing the stage and band room.

The original site may have no lasting formal recognition with the echoes of its past finally having been laid to rest, but in the hearts and minds of local people and Cavern dwellers everywhere, the sounds that echoed from its older brother's walls will live on forever in the memories and imagination of all who visit this tiny cellar in Mathew Street each year.

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