You Can Stay at the Club Where the Beatles Played Some of Their Earliest Gig
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.
Source: Julia Binswanger/smithsonianmag.com
