The Cavern Club opened in Mathew Street in 1957 as an unassuming jazz cellar, the sort of place nobody would have bet on making history. Within a few years it hosted a young John Lennon and his skiffle group, the Quarrymen, and by 1961 a rebranded outfit called the Beatles were playing there with suspicious regularity, clocking up close to 300 performances before 1963 was out.
Brian Epstein, a local record shop owner, saw them here and pronounced the group "absolutely awful" yet strangely compelling, a verdict that changed pop music forever. Cilla Black once worked the cloakroom, badly by all accounts, before finding fame of her own.
VoiceMap's audio tours trace this transformation from backstreet cellar to pop mythology, following the Beatles from the Cavern's stage to the pub where they collected wages, and on to the statues and Wall of Fame marking Mathew Street's place in music history.