Forget the Cavern Club: The Grapes is the Liverpool pub that truly led to Beatlemania
The Grapes, Liverpool: it’s not the best pint of Guinness you’ll ever have here, but it’s also not the worst. The staff are friendly, the company is good, and this is the pub that truly kicked off The Beatles‘ career.
The majority of my time here has been spent making idle chat with a pissed-up local who’s convinced I look like a comedian he likes; this isn’t an uncommon occurrence for me. I’ve never had this particular comic before, but when you’re a big bloke who sports a bushy beard, hat and glasses, you’d be surprised at how often you’re mistaken for other people.
One of the best I get mixed up with is a bigwig in Sheffield, a man who owns a local brewery which is stocked in half the pubs around the Steel City. The number of times I’ve been offered top-tier service and a free pint at local pubs because bar staff have thought I was someone who keeps their shelves stocked is a beautiful thing. It seems that that bloke doesn’t have much pull in Liverpool, though, as the pint that sits in front of me was charged at full price with zero hesitation.
However, you can’t let the price of a pint get in the way of history. In between impromptu speeches from this drunk stranger who simply can’t believe that I’m not his favourite comic, the sound of 1960s and ‘70s classics bleeds through, while the drunken sing-alongs of tourists and locals flood the pub, and the history of this unassuming building on Mathew Street is both ignored and admired.
A photo sits above me where I drink, one of the Fab Four (excluding Ringo Starr, as it was before his time), having a drink and looking as young and naive as ever. Those boys had no idea what kind of an impact they were going to have on music and the world at large, as they wouldn’t just become influences for this brand new sound that everyone would obsess over, but they would fundamentally make this big blue and green rock a better place to live.
Ozzy Osbourne put it best. “My son says to me, ‘Dad, I like The Beatles, but why do you go so crazy?’” Recalled the ‘Prince of Darkness’, “The only way I can describe it, is like this, ‘Imagine you go to bed today and the world is black and white and then you wake up, and everything’s in colour. That’s what it was like!’ That’s the profound effect it had on me.”
We often look at The Cavern Club as being the place where The Beatles formed what, for a few years, became a unique and unbreakable connection that would change music for good, and while this is true in the musical sense, it doesn’t apply on a personal level. You couldn’t drink at the Cavern, and so the band didn’t spend much time there unless they were playing a show. Granted, this was still crucial, as the group wouldn’t have originally taken off had it not been for their live show, given it was a performance on The Ed Sullivan Show that propelled them to fame.
“There was no real future for a British band before The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. That was the turning point, after which there was an avalanche,” said Andrew Loog Oldham, The Rolling Stones’ manager, adding, “It totally transformed the possibilities, and as usual, The Beatles were the frontrunners. In music, there is The Beatles, and then there is everybody else.” However, while this live performance was important, so too was the connection that the band made with one another.
If not for this, then they wouldn’t have been able to write the songs that would eventually propel them to stardom. As any musician can tell you, these kinds of bonds aren’t just made on a stage, and in a studio, they happen in the pub, when your life isn’t centred around music, and instead you’re just becoming friends over a pint or two.
They make you comfortable working with each other, agreeing and disagreeing, and essentially setting the foundation that the entire Beatles discography would eventually be built upon, wherein, without this bench, these drinks and this building, simply put, the band wouldn’t exist.
Graham Nash said he believes that the universe brought The Beatles together, but the universe had nothing to do with it; these musical pioneers became joined at the hip because of a city called Liverpool, and a wholesome pub called The Grapes.
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