The Beatles, aka The Fab Four, were probably my favorite band when they came upon the scene and are definitely at the top of my charts even today. The author shares details about the lives of the members of the Beatles and how they got together to form and name the band. 'But it's also a tour of hope - to say, look, this can happen from nothing.'Įurovision and Liverpool's wider musical pedigree will now be used to brand it as a music city, not just as Beatles city.Who Were the Beatles? by Geoff Edgers is a short but fact-filled book in the award-winning 'Who Was.' series targeted specifically for the youth market. 'OK, this is a nostalgia tour,' adds Hooton. 'If you were standing here in 1984, you'd have gone, 'No chance'. Nash says residents of the 80s would 'never have predicted' how far the city would come since then. At the time, riots, unemployment and poverty led Chancellor Sir Geoffrey Howe to urge Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to consider abandoning the city to a fate of 'managed decline'. 'What we want to talk about is our time, and the changes that have happened in the city since then.' 'There's so much more to Liverpool than that,' Nash says. Instead of making music, they are leading guided tours of the city's post-punk and alternative music scene, as well as some Beatles-related heritage. Nash has recently formed a supergroup of sorts with Peter Hooton and Keith Mullin of 1990s band The Farm. Left-right: Keith Mullin and Peter Hooton of The Farm and Brian Nash of Frankie Goes To Hollywood are running the Liverpool Music Icons walking tours 'Eric's for me is way more important than the Cavern because of what came after it,' says Frankie Goes To Hollywood guitarist Brian Nash.

In the late 1970s and 80s, venues like Eric's - opposite the Cavern - produced bands like Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Echo and the Bunnymen, Julian Cope's The Teardrop Explodes and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. While The Beatles are the main attraction, Liverpool is trying to draw attention to other strands of its musical identity. This is another challenge for Liverpool - we need to make sure we don't turn Liverpool into a Disney version of the Beatles.' 'There are many Beatle-themed, rightly or wrongly. This new Beatlemania is centred on Mathew Street, where the Cavern (resurrected in 1984 a few doors down from the original) has been joined by more themed bars, pubs and a museum.

'Then it just kept on getting busier and busier, to the point where we now have live music from 11:00 every day and it doesn't stop,' he says. Tourists flock to have their photos taken with the Beatles statue on the Liverpool waterfrontīack in 2009, there weren't enough customers to open the Cavern all week.