Four Lads Who Shook the World, Arthur Dooley's Beatles Sculpture on Mathew Street

Four Lads Who Shook the World is a Beatles sculpture by Liverpool artist Arthur Dooley, put up in 1974 high on the wall of Eric's on Mathew Street, opposite the Cavern Club. A robed Madonna, standing for Liverpool, holds the Beatles as babies. A small Lennon figure was added after his death in 1980.

Liverpool as the Beatles' mother

Dooley's idea was to show the city as the mother of the band. A robed Madonna holds three babies standing for John, George and Ringo. Paul was the fourth, given a cherub's wings, which Dooley said was for obvious reasons. The infant Beatles were made from plastic children's dolls. The title, Four Lads Who Shook the World, runs underneath.

The Arthur Dooley Archive at Liverpool John Moores University holds photographs of the piece as it looked when it went up in 1974 and after it was altered.

Put up while the Cavern was a car park

The timing is easy to overlook. The original Cavern Club closed on 28 May 1973 and the warehouses above it were demolished that June. The rebuilt club didn't open until 26 April 1984. Dooley's sculpture went up on the other side of the street in 1974, while the old Cavern site was being used for storage and then parking. It is ten years older than the rebuilt club.

Dooley himself was born in 1929 and died in 1994. He left school at 14 to weld at the Cammell Laird shipyard before studying at Saint Martin's School of Art in London.

The missing Paul and the added Lennon

The winged Paul is no longer there, and the sources don't agree on why. A Beatles archive site says the figure disappeared and was never replaced, with a plaque saying Paul had taken wings and flown. The LJMU archive post says the Paul cherub was taken off and a Lennon baby added instead. A blog about the sculpture, citing the Liverpool Echo, says the stolen cherub was later left anonymously in a bag outside the Cavern Club with an apology. We could not read the Echo report itself, so treat that last account as unconfirmed.

The Lennon figure is better documented. After his death in December 1980 a small figure holding a guitar was added at the lower right, with the words "Lennon Lives" and lines from one of his songs. Accounts differ on whether it has wings.

Where to look

The sculpture sits above eye level on the wall of Eric's, so it is easy to walk under without noticing. By map coordinates it is roughly 25 m from the Cavern Club entrance and 35 m from the John Lennon statue. Tommy Steele's Eleanor Rigby on Stanley Street is about 90 m away.

Why Dooley gets credited with the Lennon statue

The bronze Lennon leaning on the Cavern Wall of Fame, a few metres along the street, is often credited to Dooley in captions and even a Wikimedia Commons category. It is by David Webster and was unveiled in January 1997, three years after Dooley died. The Mathew Street Lennon statue page covers that work. Dooley's piece on Mathew Street is this one.