The Cavern – The Most Famous Club In The World

EMI Catalogue Marketing / Universal Music TV

Release date: 20th August 2007

EMI Marketing / Universal Music TV are proud to release a 3 disc anniversary edition cd to celebrate The Cavern’s 50th year this year. Containing 50 tracks from artists who have all appeared at the club over the years, the tracklist reads like a Who’s Who of British popular music over the decades, and amply highlights the pivotal importance and influence the club has extended over the years since it opened on 16th January 1957.

The Cavern – The Most Famous Club In The World features The Beatles and The Rolling Stones together for the first time ever on a commercial album, with Arctic Monkeys bringing the tracklist up to date with a previously unreleased live version of The View From The Afternoon.

The album is released on 20th August, ahead of the internationally acclaimed Mathew Street Festival, which runs over the Bank Holiday weekend every year and is typically visited by in excess of three hundred thousand people.

CD 1

1. Bob Wooler Intro

2. The Beatles - Please Please Me

3. Chuck Berry - No Particular Place To Go

4. The Shadows - Apache

5. The Spencer Davis Group - Keep On Running

6. Johnny Kidd & The Pirates - Shakin' All Over

7. Cilla Black - Anyone Who Had A Heart

8. The Hollies - I'm Alive

9. Gene Vincent - Be Bop A Lula

10. The Easybeats - Friday On My Mind

11. Lonnie Donegan - Cumberland Gap

12. The Fourmost - Hello Little Girl

13. The Searchers - Sweets For My Sweet

14. Manfred Mann - Do Wah Diddy Diddy

15. Chris Farlowe - Out Of Time

16. Wilson Pickett - In The Midnight Hour

17. Ben E. King - Stand By Me

18. Stevie Wonder - I Was Made To Love Her

CD 2

1. Queen - Killer Queen

2. Paul Mccartney - All Shook Up (Live at The Cavern)

3. The Kinks - You Really Got Me

4. The Big Three - Some Other Guy

5. The Animals - The House Of The Rising Sun

6. Hermans Hermits - I'm Into Something Good

7. The Moody Blues - Go Now

8. Gerry & The Pacemakers - Ferry Cross The Mersey

9. The Zombies - She's Not There

10. The Swinging Blue Jeans - Hippy Hippy Shake

11. Little Eva - The Locomotion

12. Cliff Bennett & The Rebel Rousers - Got To Get You Into My Life

13. Billy J Kramer & The Dakotas - Little Children

14. The Merseybeats - I Think Of You

15. The Flowerpot Men - Let's Go To San Francisco

16. Elton John - Border Song

CD 3

1. The Rolling Stones - It's All Over Now

2. The Who - My Generation

3. The Yardbirds - For Your Love

4. Donovan - Sunshine Superman

5. Wishbone Ash - Blowin' Free

6. Georgie Fame - Yeh Yeh

7. Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley

8. Status Quo - Down Down

9. Tom Robinson - 2-4-6-8 Motorway

10. Edwin Starr - War

11. Thin Lizzy - Whiskey In The Jar

12. Rod Stewart - Handbags And Gladrags

13. Embrace - All You Good People

14. Kt Tunstall - Black Horse & The Cherry Tree

15. Travis - Why Does It Always Rain On Me

16. The Coral - In The Morning

17. Arctic Monkeys - The View From The Afternoon
(Live - previously unreleased version)

** Local band and current Cavern favourite 10 Reasons To Live provide the hidden 51st track – highlighting the club’s commitment to promoting new music well into it’s 50th year and beyond. **

‘Fifty years ago a few jazz-loving Liverpudlians had the most exotic notion you could imagine. They dreamt of bringing the Parisian Left Bank to their home town. Into this unfashionable Northern seaport they would import the chic ambience of a smokey “caveau”, the sort of dive where femmes fatales and French philosophers might meet to escape the straight world upstairs. So they found a pokey basement under an old fruit warehouse and they called it the Cavern.

Well, the jazz plan faltered when Britain succumbed to American rock’n’roll; nowhere fell as violently in love with the new sound as Liverpool. Incredibly, in less than a decade the Cavern became a shrine of global youth culture and a magnet for musicians everywhere. The Cavern became, in fact, what it remains to this day – the best-known rock club in the world.

It goes without saying that The Beatles were the biggest noise in all of this. They played at the Cavern nearly 300 times. So the Fabs take pride of place in this collection with a number, “Please Please Me”, first perfected there, amid the sweaty confines of this legendary dungeon at 10 Mathew Street. Here as well as are their peers on the Merseybeat scene that quickly colonised British pop, like Cilla Black and Gerry & The Pacemakers. Here, too, are the great acts who followed The Beatles to America and re-shaped the very meaning of rock music – bands like The Rolling Stones, The Animals and The Who. They all played the Cavern, as did many American legends, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley among them, whose own music had inspired those British groups in the first place.

Somehow the Cavern story never stopped being eventful. In spite of its fame it went bust in 1966. The closure caused such an outcry that the Prime Minister Harold Wilson had to rush up to Liverpool to re-open it. By the early 1970s, even though it attracted hot new bands like Queen, it was back on the skids. They closed it down, the warehouse was demolished and Brian Epstein’s beloved “Cellarful of Noise” was filled with rubble instead. Yet a New Cavern opened across the street, was re-named Eric’s and spawned as many world-famous acts as the original Cavern (Elvis Costello, Echo & The Bunnymen and Frankie Goes To Hollywood were but a few).

But Liverpool without a Cavern Club? It just didn’t seem right. So they re-built it, brick-for-brick, back in 10 Mathew Street. It re-opened in 1984 and, marvellously, it’s there to this day. The Coral, Travis, KT Tunstall and, in 1999, a certain Paul McCartney are the calibre of acts who have taken the Cavern into a new era. It’s more than a club, this place. On one level the Cavern’s story is a microcosm of the city in which it stands – a classic Liverpool tale of drama, disaster, romance and rebirth. And on another, it has a credible claim to be the cradle of British pop. The Beatles believed their Cavern years were their best as live performers. In the fractured final days they tried, poignantly, to rediscover their lost solidarity as a tough young Liverpool combo. The spirit that informed “Get Back” was really the spirit of the Cavern. There is a long-held school of thought which holds that Mathew Street is a place of mystic energy – Bill Drummond of the KLF believed a ley-line ran along it. Outside today’s club, a life-sized bronze John Lennon lounges against the wall. Beneath his hooded gaze the music fans still troop downstairs for an experience they will never forget. Let these songs stand in tribute to a little hole in the ground that really changed our world.’

Paul Du Noyer, author of ‘Liverpool: Wondrous Place’

May 2007

For further information please contact: DEBRA GEDDES, EMI Marketing, 020 7605 5477, Debra.geddes@emimusic.com