I've Just Seen a Place I Can't Forget / Colin Unwin (ePub)

I was fourteen when I got a job in a garage. I was that passionate about pop music I was always getting in trouble for switching customers' car radios on, to listen to the latest songs. For four years in the 1960s I went to the Oasis coffee bar in Manchester to listen to all the best bands and twice tried in vain to get in and listen to this up and coming group called The Beatles. Forty years later I was overcome by a great passion to find out where in Liverpool's back streets those four lads grew up to become the biggest band in the world.While wandering the streets of Liverpool over a period of sixteen years my interest in The Beatles was noticed by somebody who worked for the National Trust and who encouraged me to take over the tenure as custodian at the Trust's John Lennon and Paul McCartney childhood homes.Some of the stories in this book are about The Beatles' places I discovered and some are about living in the two iconic pop star homes and the strong feeling that John was there with me on one of the nights that I stayed in his Aunt Mimi's house.Then there's the reason why I had to paint Strawberry Field gates and why I needed to safely secure Stuart Sutcliffe's headstone back in the ground at Huyton cemetery.Frustration was my only reward when I tried to have a plaque put up to commemorate the time and place where Beatlemania was born, only to have my request turned down.In the last seventeen years I have travelled hundreds of miles around Liverpool, driving and walking down the back Streets that sang out to me, to find the places where John, Paul, George, Ringo and Stuart Sutcliffe lived there lives. This book records the stories I uncovered about them.