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Rock the Casbah
By Des Burkinshaw
Just before we started recording the first podcasts, Mark and I made a trip to Liverpool to visit the true birthplace of The Beatles, The Casbah Club.
I’ve been to many venues associated with The Beatles – from Abbey Road to the Indra in Hamburg. The Casbah is unique, the only one truly preserved in aspic. You can still see and touch the low ceilings painted by John, Paul and George as they prepared the basement of Mona Best’s house for its opening (that’s Mark in the picture, standing beneath John’s Aztec ceiling). John also carved his name into the wall and ceiling, both marks as clear as the days he carved them in 1961/62.
The only thing even close to the Casbah’s authenticity, are the walls of Abbey Road Studio 2, which look identical to the many shots taken there in the 60s. The famous sound-diffusing curtains which hang from ceiling-to-floor have never been cleaned for fear of changing the sound of the room. Truly, molecules of that 60s magic still permeate the fabric. The curtains are nicotine-stained and, if you give them a whiff, stink of almost a century of being left alone. I imagine the average micro-biologist could make a lifetime’s study from them.
As soon as Pete Best was kicked out of The Beatles, Mona closed the Casbah, and the family continued living upstairs.
