love me do

The Beatles, The Lightyears & the legendary Cavern

Fifty years ago today, The Beatles released “Love Me Do”… and changed the world.

They changed Liverpool, they changed the music industry, they changed what it meant to be young – they changed everything. Somehow, fifty years doesn’t quite seem long enough ago for an event of that kind of cultural magnitude. The release of “Love Me Do” feels like it should be centuries in the past, an ancient relic, a barely lit memory, but it isn’t. It’s post-war. Post the NHS. My mum could probably tell you exactly where she was when she first heard it.

There’s a terrific documentary on BBC iPlayer at the moment which covers this whole event much better than I could: 1962 – Love Me Do. Well worth a look, if only because it features a minute or two of fantastic footage of The Beatles onstage at The Cavern – the only existing film of its kind. It’s spell-binding to watch. Paul wobbling his head, George lurking like a little boy at the back of the stage, at one point braving an awkward smile at a friend in the crowd, all four members of the band completely unaware that they are teetering on the brink of re-defining modern music. Absolutely amazing stuff.

We’ve been lucky enough to play at The Cavern a couple of times, and the first one in particular was memorable for a number of reasons. I remember arriving at the venue and suddenly feeling very… ahem… posh. We weren’t in Berkshire any more, and I quickly decided that this would be a gig where I would try and keep my increasingly unpredictable mouth shut. More singy singy, less talky talky. As long as I didn’t say anything that exposed us as southern pansies, I reasoned, we’d be OK.

But it didn’t occur to me that I also had to keep a fairly beady eye on Tony. He’s not a floppy-haired fop like me, of course (Tony’s from Croydon, guv’nor), but he does really really love trivia, and is occasionally known to bust out one of his many useless facts live onstage, in-between songs.

Normally this is fine. Normally this is just part of the act, casual banter for the crowd. But on this occasion things would be different. We’d finished our set and, to our surprise, had gone down really well. So well in fact that the crowd wouldn’t stop cheering after we left the stage. The compere reappeared and the audience were shouting for an encore, but we hadn’t prepared one because a) the festival organisers had made it pretty clear that time was too tight for encores, b) we didn’t expect to get one anyway and c) we literally didn’t have any more songs in our repertoire. Behind the curtain, we huddled for a quick conference and Tony pointed out that there was one song we could do. A song we had learned recently for a friend’s wedding.

A Beatles song.

But no. You can’t do that, not in the birthplace of The Beatles. In fact, it’s not just that you shouldn’t cover The Beatles at The Cavern – it’s that you DON’T cover The Beatles at The Cavern, for precisely the same reason that you don’t wear a cardboard Queen Elizabeth mask to Buckingham Palace. Because MI5 will kick your lily ass out of England, and rightly so. But this would be okay, Tony insisted, because the Beatles song we happened to know was ‘You Can’t Do That’ (originally the B-side to ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’), and the in-built irony of this would cover us in the event of a revolt.

Yeah right it would, I thought.

But before I knew it, there we were back onstage, standing in front of an expectant Beatle-mad crowd, about to do the one thing that you must NEVER EVER do at The Cavern Club… particularly if you’re a bunch of posh softies from the Home Counties.

‘I’ve got a fact about The Beatles,’ said Tony suddenly, into the microphone, before I could begin the piano introduction. What was he doing? I looked out at the shadowy sea of faces. You could hear a pin drop. Tony continued…

‘The Beatles’ first gig wasn’t in Liverpool at all.’

Please don’t kill us, northerners. Please don’t smash us in and mail our body parts to Tunbridge Wells.

‘Lennon and McCartney’s first ever gig wasn’t in Liverpool, it was in Reading. Where we live.’

This is it, I thought. This is, without a single shadow of a doubt, how I’m going to die. And while there are worse places to meet your demise than onstage at the Cavern Club, this wasn’t my time – I still had so much to give. ‘Why,’ resonated a voice inside my head, ‘I’d always hoped that one day I might release a charity single with a Midlands-based football team, or sell a truckload of mobile phones through the canny use of a pop song that sounds a bit like a ringtone, or at the very least see my face on the side of a bin in Wandsworth shopping centre – and how will I achieve any of those things if I die now?!’

However, far from finding myself swiftly decapitated by a flying re-mastered vinyl of The White Album, I opened my tightly scrunched eyes to a room full of people sagely nodding their heads in agreement – because it would appear that not only was Tony’s fact watertight (he’d probably claim all his facts are, but I’m not so sure – that one about humans being genetically pre-disposed to vegetarianism is very suspicious), but of course the kind of musos who hang out at the Cavern Club are so knowledgeable about The Beatles that they too knew this to be true. Indeed, far from causing a riot, Tony had in fact played an absolute blinder.

And the rest is history. We threw out a spirited rendition of ‘You Can’t Do That’, and it went down a storm.

At the bar afterwards, we were toasting our success over drinks when our good friend Steve Lally – a born and bred scouser – concluded with raised eyebrows: ‘That was stupid, lads. Really stupid.’

A smile spread across his face.

‘But you absolutely nailed it.’

So here’s to you, John, Paul, George & Ringo. Thanks for starting a band, and for changing the world.

Chris Lightyear

ps. This is just the kind of story that crops up in my Lightyears book ‘Mockstars’, so if you enjoyed this wee anecdote, visit www.ProjectLightyears.com for some novel readings (and maybe leave us some juicy comments on YouTube). Or, you’re feeling really lazy, just press play below:

The Lightyears’ International 5-Star Hotel Breakfast Richter Scale

As you will probably be aware if you have been following our band for a while, food is incredibly important to us. We just got back from a storming tour of Cape Town, South Africa, and the many hours spent anticipating, enjoying and rating the various breakfasts on offer has prompted me to create something which I really should have dealt with a long time ago – The Lightyears’ International 5-Star Hotel Breakfast Richter Scale.

Man cannot live on chord sequences alone and when you’re out on the road it is imperative that you are adequately fed, lest your capacity to rock serious ass is threatened by low blood-sugar levels.

In short, eat your heart out Lonely Planet – this is the intrepid explorer’s real guide to eating abroad. Venues are listed in top five order, with number one representing the crème de la crème of hotel breakfasts:   

5. Somerset Palace, Seoul
The Somerset was our first experience of 5-star hotel breakfast-buffet eating and as a result will always hold a special place in our hearts. It has a simple elegance to it and is the only hotel on this list to offer live TV news during your meal. It opens early, at 6am, which is obviously of no use to us until the morning after the gig, during which we have become infamous for turning up at 6am on the dot, still suited, for a post all-nighter nosh-up before crashing into the jacuzzi and, eventually, bed. Pastries are reasonable, eggs are adequate and the bread-toasting machine is a pleasing little gadget, almost Wallace & Gromit-esque in its inventiveness. Slightly suspicious of the little sausages though. Always gotta wonder about the sausages.

4. The Laguna Beach Resort, Phuket
The Laguna scores points early on for effectively being outdoors. It rates highly on the Yoghurt Counter too for variety of flavours and from what I can remember also serves decent baked beans. Beans are often a problem when one is abroad – some hotels consider themselves too chic to serve baked beans (this is obviously ridiculous) and others go for a sort of posh bean medley containing butter beans, kidney beans, mung beans and the like, which I’m not averse to per se but which if I’m honest only over-complicates a classic breakfast staple. The Laguna also turned a blind eye to us appearing for our morning meal dressed only in matching hotel bath-robes and sunglasses, for which I believe the staff deserve a special commendation. Oh, and where else but in Phuket are you joined for breakfast by a dancing, juggling, harmonica-playing elephant? Mind you, I requested “Love Me Do” and received only a blank look in response. One-trick pony, if you ask me. 

3. The Table Bay Hotel, Cape Town
Like Thailand’s Laguna Resort, the Table Bay boasts the accolade of being one of the “500 Leading Hotels In The World”. However, it inches ahead of it’s Phuketian classmate by the skin of its teeth, thanks to a few high-class cherries on the cake that might surprise even the most discerning traveller. How imaginative, I thought, how recherché, to serve freshly roast duck in hoisin sauce for the opening dish of the day! The sushi was a pleasing touch too, although I couldn’t quite stretch to oysters. It’s one of my many travelling mantras that one should avoid eating anything that closely resembles phlegm for breakfast. Oh, and Michael Jackson, Snoop Doggy Dog, Kanye West and Jack Bauer have all dined here (although I doubt Bauer got much eating done – he was probably too busy uploading government schematics to his PDA and de-wiring suitcase nukes using only his eyelids).

2. British Airways Business Class Cabin, International Airspace
Yes, alright, this is technically not a hotel; however, I feel it warrants its place in the Top Five because we had to sleep in it and nice ladies bought us whatever we asked of them without once ticking us off for being immature and in that sense it mimicked my experience of hotels precisely. Plus I have stayed in hotels with less comfortable beds, believe me, and none of them faced the challenge of being 40,000 feet above the ground and hurtling around at 600mph. The thing about this particular breakfast experience was that, well, the attendants had furnished us with fine champagne before we’d even sniffed a soupçon of the food on offer. And a day that starts with champagne can never, ever be a bad day. What followed was a preposterously sumptuous smorgasbord of delights that included quails’ eggs, salmon roe, truffles and fillet steak. And I got to watch The Big Lebowski whilst I was eating. Everybody left happy. 

1. The Grand Hyatt Hotel, Seoul
And so we have a winner. As a hotel, The Hyatt may not have the flare of the Table Bay or the easy charm of the Laguna, but by George it steals the breakfast crown with flying colours. It has a carvery. It has pastries that will melt your face with desire. It covers every corner of the juice gamet. It boasts a view of the entire city. When we ate there we rubbed shoulders with the Dutch national football team. It has everything – and, most importantly, the Hyatt has Eggman. Eggman stands solemnly by a majestic breakfast hob, awaiting instructions, weaving his yolky magic on request as if it were the easiest thing in the world. He is a mythical figure, very much like Zeus or Agamemnon, except that Zeus couldn’t simultaneously flash-fry five immacuate omelettes whilst also scrambling a cheese, chive, pepper, bacon and egg combo to perfection. He has nothing to do with John Lennon’s eggman, who as far as I know was never employed by the Hyatt hotel chain and in any case can’t speak fifteen languages like Eggman can. He is our saviour. He is Eggman.

And so there you have it. Next time you visit one of these locations on tour you can dispense with your over-priced Rough Guide and instead simply heed my words. For it is impossible to feel sorrow when God bestows upon you a plentiful and resplendent breakfast buffet. 

Munch it down. 

Chris Lightyear