~ Liverpool Jazz Club Scene ~
The Beatles Take Stage: Part I

Introduction

Before I speak, I really should give you my credentials just so you know that it's all authentic. I was born in 1924 and I spent 40 years In Liverpool. By and large I war very involved in the "Beat Scene" when it materialized. In fact, I opened the first club In Liverpool which we will come to in a minute. But I want you to understand that I'm talking from experience. Not like people who rave about the Beatles and have never met them.

Initiation to Liverpool

To be able to put it over properly, I'll have to initiate you to this place called Liverpool. I don't know whether any of you have been to England, but in order to put it in its correct category, Liverpool is a very big sprawling city. In comparison to Saint John, Liverpool has a population of maybe one million people. And, because it happens to be on the river Mersey, Liverpool on this side and Birkenhead on the other side, it becomes known as either Merseyside or Liverpool. Here you have Provinces, but in Liverpool we have outlylng districts. It's a very sprawling city and the fact that it is a big port with shipping means that it is very cosmopolitan. So In Liverpool you meet all sorts of nationalities. And in Liverpool itself there are big areas which are purely Chinese and in Upper Parliament Street is a dense Black population. You get all different people that are living in Liverpool.

Early Liverpool Clubs

But we're going to talk about Beatles really. We're going to talk centralized Liverpool. While a lot of names I come up with are beautiful to you, to me they were just streets like Lime Street and Upper parliament Street and various places like that. Well, the whole area of the "Beat Scene" was centralized Liverpool. Now I want to tell you how the whole thing started. I've seen one of your questionnaires from this club and I can't answer one of those questions. I don't remember dates and things like that but I was there at the time. So, I'm really going back to the War in Liverpool to start with. As you may know, Liverpool was very badly bombed. That meant a lot of open areas or bomb sites as we called them.

I'm going to start in the 1940's. I was a student at the Liverpool School of Art for five years. Then I went to Paris on another scholarship for painting. When I returned to Liverpool, things were changing. Instead of practicing fine art in those days I had to make some money. So I took a job and I became a display artist in a very big shop in Liverpool-- Lewis's Limited. Now I'm 10, 12 maybe 14 years older than the Beatles. But when I was 27 years old, I met two fellows aged 20 in the shop that I was working in. And I think that you all know that I'm deaf. This is rather strange. I haven't heard music since I was fifteen years old. These two guys were very interested in something that was beginning to go on in Liverpool. They approached me and asked if I would he willing to come to a place with them and have a look around. They told me that it was only a hotel in Liverpool where there are some people getting together and playing.

These were the Jazz days, not the Beat, in Liverpool. We went to the Exchange Hotel on Lime Street. I think you all know about the Lime Street Station. From Lime Street Station you go to Hamburg if you want to. This is a long time before your time, but Lime Street was a hell of a place. Most of the girls around Lime Street were prostitutes and you couldn't walk five yards without being asked If you wanted to have a good time.

Bill Harry comments 'Lime Street wasn't full of prostitutes at all. It may have been the case at the turn of the century when Liverpool was still a major seaport, as depicted in sea shanties like 'Maggie May', but of the period Bob talked about, this was no longer the case. Lime Street had the main station, a few pubs, cinemas like the Forum, Futurist, Palais de Luxe and Scala (where Bob Percival actually painted the designs on the outside of the cinema) and was a main thoroughfare for respectable people, families with kids, courting couples going to the cinemas and so on.'

So we went down Lime Street and we went to the Exchange Hotel. You went upstairs in an elevator and there was a dreadfully depressing room. It had old-fashioned wallpaper and it had a photograph on the wall of the Queen. It had a little stage with a few people knocking around. A sort of group got up but they weren't playing guitars. They were playing saxophones, clarinets, piano and drums. I couldn't hear this but I was looking at the atmosphere. The atmosphere was dreadful. I had just come back from Paris and I had seen a lot of music clubs and jazz clubs. I had even been in the Existentialist Club of Jean-Paul Sartre. Clubs where there was a lot of atmosphere. I told these fellows that we'll try to do something better than that.

In Liverpool as in all England, the main entertainment was in pubs. There were thousands of pubs in England. But the pubs had entertainment with a piano and someone singing or someone doing something. Clubs were sophisticated, drinking clubs or gaming clubs. There was nothing for the young people. Now I have to divert from that for a minute and explain England.

Social Class In England

To a Canadian it's very different. In England, they are very class conscious. Even now they have upper class, middle class and lower class. They also have different dialects like you do in Canada and different ways of speaking depending upon where you come from. Now there are some genuine high class people and that is what you call the "fruity talk" of England-- the "lah dee dah." Sixty-five percent of what you call the high class are middle class pretending to be high class. In the Liverpool area you have Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham. Liverpool is unique because it has a speech of its own. Liverpool tended to be low class because It was such a big city and you have very many square miles of poverty and slums. And the normal Llverpool guy was from a slum. And I hate to say this, but Ringo Starr came from the slums. It was the way you spoke and the way you were brought up, depending on how your parents spoke. We have to admit that at least two of the Beatles were very well educated, Lennon and Paul McCartney.

The reader is reminded by Bill Harry that ' None of those major cities is in Liverpool; they are all separate entities with Birmingham over 100 miles away. Liverpool was not the only city that had 'a speech of its own', Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle are among other numerous cities that had their own dialects and local phrases unique to themselves. Liverpool is not an area of slums. Certain areas of Liverpool contained poor housing, but it also had large green areas, parks such as Sefton Park, Princes Park, middle class areas such as Childwall, Woolton, West Derby etc. Too much media attention was always given to the run-down areas of Liverpool because film and TV makers always found that more colourful.'

Liverpool Dialect, "Wack Talk" and the Beatles

John Lennon went.to the same school as I, and the educational system in Liverpool was rather different than that in Canada. You had high school and public school. Now in England a public school was the opposite to a public school here, very high class. All snob value. People with a lot of money sent their children to a public school. But a high school was a good education and was comprised of middle class people. Secondary school was for the lower class. If you were born in Liverpool and you pick up the dialect of Liverpool you can be a Liverpudlian but if you are a low class, you're a "wacker." If someone is a friend of yours, he is a wack. But then they had a corruption of the work lad. A young boy, a lad, became a "lah." So you would say "hello lah", and lah means a friend of yours. Hello wack or hello lah. Now, the Beatles were wacks. The Beatles would speak to one another, "Hey wack what are you talking about." Now in Liverpool if you didn't understand something you wouldn't say I beg your pardon. You would say "Wa." Very low class people were difficult to understand unless you knew how to speak the dialect. Just as bad as you get in Newfoundland here. And when the Beatles became the Beatles, they would use the Liverpool wack talk as a gimmick. They purposely used it if they went on radio or television. They would smack Liverpool speech because they were a Liverpool group. Lennon and McCartney didn't really speak authentic wack as they were rather well educated.

The Kinkajou Club

But, I've got a little bit ahead. These two fellows were asking me about the club. So I told them that we could do better than that. We took some premises on Duke Street. Now I know when I talk about streets it leaves you in the dark. I'm talking about this area, Lime Street, North John Street and Bold Street--the whole centre of Liverpool. So we took a room and as an ex-art student, I decided I would paint this room and do murals. Something connected with jazz. So I painted murals, more or less a New York Jazz scene. The only other entertainment was pubs having music and a few other high class clubs. So we thought of a name for this club and I found it in a children's book called "Barbara Lou the Kinkajou." So I thought that's quite a nice name. So we called the club the "Kinkajou." And this was on Duke Street. So we advertised for about three weeks "What Is a Kinkajou?" And after two weeks everybody in Liverpool was talking about what was a Kinkajou. So two nights before we opened we put an ad in the paper. This was the Liverpool Echo. We said that the Kinkajou was a new jazz club up on Duke Street. Now the room we had was small and could hold only 25-30 people. So we went around Liverpool to look for people to book to play and there was this one guy, Ralph Whitmore and his band. So I asked Ralph Whitmore if he would play and he said that he would for a certain amount of money. So we opened up but when I got to this club there was a line-up from the front door right down Duke Street. Quite honestly about a thousand people. We could take only 30 in the room. So we were charging a half a crown for entrance and I stood in the door collecting these half crowns. We let in 30, then 35 and then 40. It was jammed packed and then Ralph Whitmore and his band started to play jazz. Now there was no drinking in the club. So In those days all we kept was soft drinks and coffee. But there were pubs just down the street and when we had an interval the band would knock off and they would go to a pub. They were all beer drinkers and they would drink three, four or five beers In 15 minutes. They would also pop what we called "purple hearts." And when the band got hack to the room, they'd take their jackets and shirts and almost everything else off and whoop It up and all hell would break loose.

Bill Harry recalls 'I used to go to the Kinkajou coffee bar in Duke Street, where I'd sit on a bench in the tiny club and listen to 'Little Darlin'' by the Diamonds. They seemed to play that number all the time. Often I was the only person in the place and used to chat with the owner Neil English.

There happened to be a church a few houses down from this club. The vicar of the church came one night and wanted to know what was going on. We told him it was just a jazz club. So the vicar came up and said that he thought it was a good idea as it was keeping the young people off the street. But he didn't.know they were all wacked out on purple hearts.

The Majorca Coffee Bar

The Kinkajou flourished quite well as word got around Liverpool. Two friends of mine, Jim Ireland and Stan Roberts, came to visit me. They had formed a company called Ireland and Robert's Company Limited. They said that they were opening a coffee bar in Liverpool up the main street. It was going to be called the "Majorca Coffee Bar. They wanted me to do murals, so I did. So the Majorca Coffee Bar opened. That was the first time in Liverpool that a club opened where a lot of people could congregate. It only served coffee, soft drinks and snacks but it went very well.

The Jacaranda Coffee Bar and Allan

Another young fellow approached me and his name was Allan Williams. Allan Williams wrote a book entitled "The Man Who Gave The Beatles Away." Allan Williams said that he was opening up four doors down from the Kinkajou Club and the club would be called the "Jacaranda Coffee Bar." So he opened the Jacaranda Coffee Bar on Slater Street and it became known as the "Jac." The Jack had a small room for coffee and snacks but it also had a basement, and Allan Williams asked me if I thought that anything could be done downstairs. The law in Liverpool stated that If you were letting the public in, you had to have a male and female toilet. You had to have that or you couldn't open as a club. There was a pub next door with a male and female toilet. So we opened up the basement and just put a sign on the door that said "Toilets," which were really down the street. The Jac was open from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. the next morning, depending on the people that were there. It could only take 20 to 25 people in the coffee bar and it still had the Kinkajou club upstairs three doors away.

Mr. Bill Harry describes the location of the Jacaranda and writes 'The Jacaranda was not 'four doors down' from the Kinkajou. The Kinkajou was at the bottom end of Duke Street, near Paradise Street and the Jacaranda was in Slater Street, near the Bold Street end. They were hundreds of yards away from each other. The Jacaranda did have its own toilets. The gents was to the rear of the kitchen, in a tiny yard (I remember going out and finding cavern DJ Bob Wooler knocking back whiskey from a flask there, because only coffee and soft drinks were available) and the ladies toilets were on the floor above the club.'

The Early Beatles and the Jac

One evening I went into the Jack and Allan Williams wanted to introduce me to someone. So he took me over and introduced me to John Lennon and his friend, Paul McCartney. Now they were two distinct characters. John Lennon looked very studious. He had a very long face and he sat there quite quietly. But Paul McCartney would clap his hands and say hello to you, He'd throw himself around. Allan Williams said that they wanted to play downstairs. He said Lennon plays a mouth-organ and Paul McCartney sings, but he's going to try the piano and see what happens. We went downstairs to the little cramped cellar containing about 30 people standing shoulder to shoulder. John and Paul introduced me to George Harrison. The three of them had got together and they were trying to form a group. But they weren't getting anywhere. Allan Willlams mentioned that he was contemplating opening a bigger club.

As a point of historical note Bill Harry mentions 'He mentions that Allan Williams introduced him to John and Paul, who then introduced him to George Harrison and says, "the three of them had got together and were trying to form a group" and were playing in the Jacaranda cellar. That was in 1960 - the three of them had already been playing in a group together for over two years.'

Article Submitted on May 30, 1999
Revised August 21, 2000