COVID-19 has reaped much misery, I don't need to tell you that. Almost three-quarters of a million deaths worldwide and counting, with 41,000 in the UK (or 46,000, depending on your preferred accounting method). The pandemic has cut a huge swathe through business, with high streets and airlines, department stores and restaurant chains, forced into administration, some possibly never to reopen. As of last week, 175,134 people had been made redundant in the UK as a result of the crisis, with 9,373,700 employees at 1.2 million companies placed on furlough. That, you could say coldly, is business. The economy will return, "the green shoots of recovery" will poke up at some point. They always do.
The arts, though, have suffered particularly badly, with theatres dark and music venues shuttered for the foreseeable future. I've lost count of the number of gigs I had tickets for which have been transmuted optimistically to 2021, much like mine and your next foreign holiday. So the argument to keep one individual venue open, as opposed to the thousands of others currently struggling, is a tricky one. However, news this week that the Cavern Club in Liverpool is facing closure is worthy of debate. Opened in January 1957, just as the rock and roll era took off, the warehouse cellar at 10 Mathew Street became, arguably, the most famous music venue in the world thanks to being "the cradle of Merseybeat", granting early exposure to acts like Gerry & The Pacemakers, Billy J Kramer, The Searchers, Cilla Black, and the Merseybeats themselves, plus a quartet that would go on to project Britain across the world - and still do.
The Beatles made their Cavern debut on 9th February 1961, the first of 292 appearances over the following two years. Seven months later local businessman Brian Epstein called in one lunchtime and saw the Fabs for the first time. By the following June he'd become their manager and had secured a recording deal with Parlophone Records. History - and not just musical history - had been made, and the Cavern had been where it had happened.
The importance, then, of this slightly dingy backstreet cellar should not be underestimated: it could be argued, of course, that Liverpool's Cavern plays no more an important part in British music than, say, the former Station Hotel in Richmond (location of the Crawdaddy Club which spawned the Rolling Stones), or the nearby Ealing Blues Club and Twickenham's Eel Pie Island, but the Cavern's nurturing of The Beatles in their early days is worthy of special national interest. I'm not going to wax on here about The Beatles' career and legacy - Lord knows, there's plenty of reference material out there on the subject - but it wouldn't be that preposterous to place them in the same league of historic importance as Shakespeare, Dickens, Wordsworth and Chaucer. I'd go so far as saying that the Cavern is of similar national significance as Stonehenge, and easily the equal to the Royal Albert Hall (especially now they know how many holes it would take to fill).
Liverpool's mayor, Joe Anderson, has warned that the Cavern is in grave danger of closing forever as a result of losing £30,000 a week since the beginning of the pandemic. He is understandably concerned, given that the club anchors the 'Beatles Experience' - the micro tourist industry that brings visitors to the city for its numerous Fab exhibits. Bill Heckle, one of the Cavern's directors, has called for government help to see the venue through the crisis: "We made a decision a few years ago to keep as much money in the bank as possible for a rainy day, not realising it was going to be a thunderstorm," he told the Liverpool Echo, revealing that, like so many businesses, they've been now forced into making redundancies - 20 so far, with another 20 likely in the next few weeks. "If the government grants allow us to open at 30% then we still lose money," Heckle says. "I wouldn’t expect [the government] to pay our profits, but at least make sure we don’t lose money, because it’s costing us £30,000 a week at the moment to be closed. That’s a lot of money."
Heckle stresses that it's not just nostalgia that should keep the Cavern alive: "The history is continuous. It’s not a museum," he told the Liverpool Echo. "It’s a very vibrant part of the Liverpool economy, which is why we’re reaching out at the end of August and reopening the Cavern for a week, virtually and bands from all around the world have sent messages and recorded sets. We know we’re not going to make money, it’s about really reminding people we’re here and the sole aim is to get out the other side. I’m sure we will, but it is about survival." It's a tough call. The arguments against protecting even as hallowed a venue as the Cavern are strong. My argument is that it is a museum, and a critical one at that. But why save this one venue and not, say, the local pub near me where a young Eric Clapton joined The Yardbirds, which has just been flattened to make way for more high-rise housing? The difference is, in fact, a bit bigger than just sepia-tinged emotion. The Cavern begat The Beatles, and there's a much bigger story behind all that.
Even if the timespan between their Cavern debut and their legal dissolution on 31 December 1970 spanned less than nine years, it's still a truly remarkable, unmatched nine years in terms of what The Beatles did in that time. They evolved, progressed and matured, before the world's very ears and eyes, all while remaining in their 20s from start to finish. And, yet, in that time, they went from fresh-faced, mop-topped, zoot-suited youngsters to bearded, absorbed hippies; metamorphosing, creatively, from the chirpy, innocent pop of Love Me Do to the wistful, even cynical soul of Let It Be, if you follow the chronology of releases. Even if you think of those nine years in terms of moving from their childhood homes to Surrey mansions, the role of the Cavern as the seed bed of The Beatles' success can't be ignored.
As a side point, on Monday a German friend of mine reminded me that it was 60 years to the day that The Beatles made their debut in Hamburg, having been recruited to be part of the city's efforts to boost its international appeal. Aged between 17 (Harrison) and 20 (Lennon), the foursome learned their craft, playing seven-days-a-week, for four-and-a-half hours on weekdays and six hours at the weekend, and sleeping in a squalid room at the Bambi Kino cinema on the Reeperbahn. It was their education. No magic route to fame via a TV talent show. And it prepared them, when they returned to Liverpool, for more graft at the Cavern.
Quite how this informed their most creative years and the astonishing progressiveness of Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and beyond, is hard to really gauge. Their final concert, in 1966 at San Francisco's Candlestick Park, was not, as often surmised, a retirement. They simply didn't tour again. Instead, they retreated into their homes and the studio to move the rock'n'roll era into the classic rock era by writing those incredible albums that defined the final four years of their career as a recording unit, and their development into one of the most enduring symbols of the pop era, still to this day. Rather than being seen as a building block in that story, the Cavern should be seen as the foundation stone. To me, that places it in the same category of national cultural importance as a landmark like Stonehenge. And we wouldn't let that disappear, would we?
No comments:
Post a Comment