Book Description

The Casbah Coffee Club, which opened in Liverpool on 29 August 1959, was the brainchild of Mrs. Mona Best, the mother of Pete Best. It is well known that Pete Best was the drummer for The Beatles in their early days in Liverpool and Hamburg. Less well known is that The Beatles' origins were in fact at Pete's mother's club - it was at the Casbah and with Mona Best's blessing that the greatest popular music phenomenon of the twentieth century began. This book tells the story of how Mona Best created the Casbah, and in the process played a major part in creating The Beatles. The band played the Casbah over ninety times, first as The Quarrymen, then as The Silver Beatles and finally as The Beatles. The Casbah's significance cannot be overestimated - it brought together some of the greatest names in rock music and became the catalyst for the Mersey Beat phenomenon which swept Liverpool in the early sixties. Seen here for the first time in forty years is the club's interior as it was at the very beginning, juxtaposed with the rooms as they are today, and still showing the ceilings that were painted by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Pete Best. A wealth of rare material from the Casbah and the Bests' own archives, together with newly commissioned images by photographer Sandro Sodano, documents the club's and The Beatles' intertwined story. Accompanied by a personal memoir of this extraordinary time, written by Roag Best with his brothers Pete and Rory, this is both a moving family tribute from the Bests to their mother, and a unique insight into a remarkable period of Beatles history.