You Can Stay at the Club Where the Beatles Played Some of Their Earliest Gigs
One-time Beatle Pete Best and his brother have turned the legendary Casbah Coffee Club into an Airbnb
The musicians who would become the Beatles played some of their earliest shows at the Casbah Coffee Club, a music venue in the basement of a Liverpool home. The house was owned by Mona Best, the mother of the band’s one-time drummer, Pete Best, who lived upstairs as a teenager.
Now, Pete and his brother, Roag, are reopening the building as an Airbnb. Guests can stay in Beatles-themed rooms full of the band’s memorabilia.
“The Beatles played here, the Beatles partied here and the Beatles slept here,” Pete, now 82, tells PA Media’s Eleanor Barlow.
Mona bought the building, located in the West Derby area of the city, after winning an unlikely bet, according to the Guardian’s Hannah Al-Othman. At the 1954 Epsom Derby, she pawned all of the jewelry she owned and placed the money on an inexperienced jockey riding a horse named “Never Say Die.” She watched the race with her family, who didn’t know about the bet.
“As the horse was winning and coming past the finishing post, she suddenly jumped up and started screaming: ‘I’ve won the house, I’ve won the house, I’ve won the house!’” Pete tells the Guardian. “It was only then that she told us what she’d done.”
The bet was just one of many shrewd gambles in her life. Another was her decision to transform the house’s cellar into a music venue. When she opened the Casbah Coffee Club in 1959, she also acted as its promoter.
“There was no women promotion, she was the first to do that,” Roag told Far Out magazine’s Kelly Scanlon in January. “There’s so many groups that came through the Casbah doors that went on and had success.”
On opening night, Mona had booked a band called the Les Stewart Quartet. Unfortunately, this group never found success, as they broke up soon before the gig. One of the band’s members was a young man named George Harrison, who said he could bring along a few friends to play instead.
“They turned out to be John Lennon and Paul McCartney,” Pete tells the Guardian.
At that time, they were calling themselves the Quarrymen, and they played at the Casbah 13 times under that name. Later, when they became the Beatles, they returned for more than 40 performances. Pete joined the band in 1960.
When the club closed in 1962, the Beatles performed on the final night. In 2006, the British government granted the venue protected heritage status, and it reopened as a tourist attraction. Now, guests can come and stay where the legendary group started out.
The new rooms are decorated with posters, guitars, photographs and other Beatles-themed items. Some of the rooms are named after band members, including Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Best and even Stuart Sutcliffe, the Beatles’ original bass player who left to pursue painting.
There is no room named for Ringo Starr, who replaced Pete as drummer in 1962, but the Best brothers say this omission didn’t stem from any ill will toward the drummer.
“It’s nothing to do with Pete and Ringo and what happened,” Roag tells PA Media. “Everything we do is about being authentic, and the Beatles that performed and partied here were John, Paul, George, Pete and Stuart. Ringo was never a member when he was here.”
Mona died in 1988, and Pete believes his mother would be “delighted” if she could see the renovated house today. “She’s watching from above,” he tells the Guardian. “She’d be very proud of the legacy that’s been left, and the legacy that we’re building.”
