Beat in Liverpool (1966)

Photographs by Juergen Seuss, Gerold Dommermuth and Hans Maie

Scarce work in its original dust-wrapper and with the original 7″ (45 rpm) vinyl single as issued. The record includes live recordings from Liverpool clubs: The Clayton Squares (Cavern Club) The Hideaways (Sink Club)

“Another book about the Beatles? Beat in Liverpool is less than that and at the same time more.

When the Beatles—an average group among hundreds who were making music in the port and industrial city on England’s west coast, a city of millions, of slums and the unemployed, of docks and shipyards, of impoverished immigrants from Ireland, Wales, and the West Indies, of gangs and juvenile offenders—were pulled into the spotlight by a clever manager, the world discovered Liverpool.

Television filmed the slums and proclaimed: “This is where it all began.” Tourists photographed the entrance to the famous Cavern Club, on the gloomy Mathew Street, hidden among warehouses and fruit depots.

But did they discover the real Liverpool? Three young people set out to find out what it is really like: How do the 380 beat groups live who today make that music in cellars, suburban pubs, and youth clubs—the music the world knows as “Merseybeat”? What life goals, what values and ideals do the tens of thousands of young people in Liverpool have, for whom beat is more than just leisure entertainment—for whom it is a way of life

has become? Are they poor lunatics, pitiable victims of show-business managers, anarchistic revolutionaries, or even criminals?

The authors lived for four weeks with two beat groups, their friends and fans; they conducted hundreds of conversations, took thousands of photos, and recorded the music and atmosphere of the beat clubs on tape. The result is something like a sociological monograph in image, text, and sound—a book about which Mike Evans, alto saxophonist and vocalist of the Clayton Squares (from whom many of the songs still sung in Liverpool today originate), an engaged socialist and opponent of nuclear weapons like many young beat musicians, writes in the foreword:

“During the time we spent with the authors of this book, it became clear that here, for the first time, an attempt was really being made to focus reportage on discovering the real Liverpool. An understanding of the character of the city as it is, and of the lives of its people, is revealed in text and images. Here is a rare opportunity to look from the inside, instead of from the outside.”

Condition: tape repairs along the top and bottom edges of inner dust-jacket. Light surface wrinkling to rear endpaper. Top edge of one page has a small tear with resultant creasing (see photos).