The Jacaranda, Liverpool: the Beatles' Slater Street Coffee Bar

The Jacaranda is a bar and music venue at 21-23 Slater Street in Liverpool. Allan Williams opened it as a coffee bar in 1958, and the band that became the Beatles rehearsed in its basement and played there in 1960. A World Origin Site plaque unveiled in August 2024 marks it as where they first played as The Beatles.

Allan Williams's coffee bar

Allan Williams leased a former watch-repair shop on Slater Street and opened the Jacaranda in September 1958, taking the 2i's coffee bar in Soho as his model. It sat close to the art college and the Liverpool Institute, and art students became regulars. John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe came often; Paul McCartney and George Harrison less so.

Williams did not pay the young band in cash. He let them rehearse in the basement during the day in return for redecorating the place, and when they played there, as the Silver Beetles, the fee was beans on toast and Coca-Cola. The Beatles Story puts the number of those shows at about a dozen.

The murals in the basement

Paintings from those years are still on the basement walls, restored and kept when the club reopened in 2014. Who painted them depends on the account. Wikipedia's article on Williams says he asked Stuart Sutcliffe and his fellow student Rod Murray to do them. The article on the Jacaranda itself and a Liverpool venue guide credit Sutcliffe and Lennon. Sutcliffe is the name common to both versions.

From Slater Street to Hamburg

The club also led the band abroad. The steel band of Lord Woodbine, a Trinidadian calypso singer, played at the Jacaranda, and in January 1960 Williams and Woodbine went to Hamburg, where they met the club owner Bruno Koschmider. That contact produced bookings for Liverpool groups. On 15 August 1960 Williams set off in his Morris J2 van with the Beatles, his wife Beryl, her brother Berry Chang and Woodbine, and they reached Hamburg by 17 August for the start of the Indra Club run. Williams later told the story in his 1975 book The Man Who Gave the Beatles Away. He died in Liverpool on 30 December 2016.

The 2024 plaque and its evidence

On 23 August 2024 Leah Williams, Allan's daughter, and the venue director Graham Stanley unveiled a plaque from World Origin Site. It marks the Jacaranda as the place where Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Sutcliffe and Pete Best first played under the name The Beatles, in August 1960. Julia Baird and the band's former secretary Freda Kelly were among the guests.

World Origin Site cited three pieces of evidence: research by the Beatles historian David Bedford, a handwritten McCartney letter from that summer spelling the name The Beatles, and a 1990 video in which Allan Williams said this was where they first played as The Beatles. Some headlines shortened this to "the first place The Beatles ever played", which goes further than the plaque. Earlier line-ups had played elsewhere, among them the Quarrymen at the Casbah Coffee Club from 1959. Accounts also differ on the exact date of the first show under the new name. The Beatles Story gives 15 August, the day Williams's van left for Hamburg, and other reports give only August 1960.

The Jacaranda now

Graham Stanley took over in 2010. After a closure the venue reopened in 2014, and it runs across three floors: a basement room for bands (capacity about 80) with the murals, a bar at street level, and Jacaranda Records upstairs, opened in 2015, with listening booths and a 1948 Voice-O-Graph recording booth that no longer works. A CAMRA Pubs in Time plaque from 2006 is also on the building. The Cavern Club is a short walk away.