Hamburg pays tribute to Beatles

The club where the Beatles played their first gig 50 years ago in the German city of Hamburg is hosting four anniversary concerts featuring a tribute band , the organisers said.

The Beatles, at that time a not-so-fab five-piece grouping Liverpudlian teenagers John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best, first took the stage at the Indra club August 17, 1960.

To mark the anniversary there were concerts by “Bambi Kino”, a group formed by four US rockers in 2009 and named after the cinema where the Beatles lodged at the time, said organisers Hamburg Marketing.

The group featured musicians Ira Elliot from Nada Surf and Maplewood, Erik Paparazzi from Cat Power, Mark Rozzo from Maplewood and Doug Gillard from Guided By Voices, and played some of the Beatles’ first songs, it said.

The show half a century ago at what was then a strip joint launched a formative two-year period in five different stints, when the Beatles would belt out rock ‘n’ roll covers for hours on end in various Hamburg clubs.

Their Hamburg experiences were credited with creating the foundations for the talent that would later make them world-famous. It was also in the port city that the band first performed with their eventual drummer, Ringo Starr.

A new museum dedicated to the Beatles, called “Beatlemania”, opened in Hamburg in May 2009, set in the same seedy Reeperbahn area where the Indra club is located.

AFP