The Nerk Twins Plaque at the Fox and Hounds, Caversham

The Nerk Twins plaque is a blue plaque on the Fox and Hounds pub at 51 Gosbrook Road in Caversham, a district of Reading. It marks 23 April 1960, when John Lennon and Paul McCartney played the pub as a two-man act called The Nerk Twins. Paul's second cousins Kate and Jane Robbins unveiled it on 15 June 2017.

An Easter week behind the bar

In the Easter holidays of 1960 Lennon and McCartney hitchhiked south from Liverpool to Caversham. Paul's cousin and her husband, Mike Robbins, were running the Fox and Hounds, and the two stayed for about a week and worked behind the bar. On Saturday 23 April they played in the pub as The Nerk Twins. In Liverpool slang a "nerk" was someone with no street credibility. They had acoustic guitars and no microphones, drew their own posters, and opened with "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise" in the Les Paul and Mary Ford arrangement. The plaque calls it their only gig under that name. Reading Civic Society and Berkshire Live both describe a second performance the next day, Sunday, at lunchtime. Neither drew much of a crowd, and one report puts the Saturday audience at three.

The 2017 unveiling

The plaque went up on BBC Music Day, 15 June 2017, one of a series placed by the British Plaque Trust with BBC Music and BBC Radio Berkshire. Kate and Jane Robbins, McCartney's second cousins who grew up in the pub, unveiled it. The text is short and gives the names, the pub and the date.

It is on the outside wall at the corner of Gosbrook Road and Elliotts Way, so you can see it from the street at any hour.

The pair had met three years earlier at St Peter's Church, Woolton, in Liverpool.