The ghosts of the Cavern Club, Liverpool
Back to Liverpool, and today we’re in the Cavern Club – for international readers who don’t know it, it’s a legendary nightclub known as being the place The Beatles did their early shows as they were making their name in their hometown. These days, the club is more of a tourist attraction, containing a miniature museum and a gift shop inside what is also a functioning and very lively nightclub (albeit mostly full of tourists!). It seems that most of the artists playing there are doing covers or homages to great acts from the past, rather than playing their own material, enhancing the sense that this is a museum and a slice of history more than anything. When you’re in the club, the sense of history is thick in the air, almost seeping out of the brick walls.
For the remix, therefore, I wanted to try to walk through decades of Cavern Club history and try to give expression to some of those ghosts of musical history you sense in there. I’ve created a bed of washes and drones entirely from the original sample of a local artists covering Bon Jovi, and threaded it through with old archive radio and TV interviews from the 1960s with The Beatles as they were just starting out, and with early owners of the club talking about its history and its present.
City version:
Memory version:
