Liverpool's first ever girl band that proved John Lennon wrong

It's now been over 60 years since Liverpool's first ever girl band burst onto the music scene and also proved Beatles legend John Lennon wrong. In 1963, the music world was exploding and the Merseybeat scene was already well-established.

Our city was flooded with talented bands, many of whom were flying to the top of the charts, but among them was also a group which soon became the country's first all-girl rock ’n’ roll group. The Liverbirds consisted of Mary McGlory on bass, Pam Birch on rhythm guitar and vocals, Valerie Gell on lead guitar and vocals and Sylvia Saunders on drums and before the band knew it, they went from nights performing at The Cavern to Hamburg’s Star Club and beyond.

The Liverbirds were born after Val learned to play the guitar while her friend Sylvia took up the drums, the ECHO previously reported. Then they saw a story in the Mersey Beat newspaper about a group called The Squaws, formed of Mary and her cousins and by 1963, they became the Liverbirds and recruited a new singer and guitarist, Pam Birch, after the other Squaws, Sheila and Irene, left.

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The band relocated to Hamburg in 1964 and all four members would eventually put down roots abroad. In their time, the group performed with legends including Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix and The Rolling Stones.

They were also famously residents at Hamburg's Star Club, where The Beatles also played. They were managed by Manfred Weissleder, the owner of the club and they also built up fan bases in Switzerland, Denmark and Japan, where they played a farewell concert in front of 12,000 people before splitting up in 1968.

But in the early days of the band, Beatles fans Mary McGlory and Sylvia Saunders met John Lennon backstage at the Cavern Club and he had one thing to say to them - "girls don't play guitars." The quote famously stuck with their story and at the time, the pair, who with two friends had just formed the band, set out to prove him wrong.

Back in 2019, bass player Mary told the ECHO's Beatles City podcast: "We promised (Cavern owner) Bob Wooler that our first gig would be at the Cavern. One dinner time he said 'would you like to come and meet the boys?'. We went in and there was John Lennon and Paul McCartney getting changed.

"Bob Wooler said, 'This is going to be England's first all-female band.' And John Lennon just looked at us and said, 'No, girls don't play guitars." Drummer Sylvia added: "So we proved him wrong. And on drums as well of course.

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"But later we thought maybe he was saying that to encourage us - and it did." They never got to see Lennon again to point this out as The Beatles became too famous, but they did follow in their fellow Liverpudlians' footsteps to receive thunderous applause at the Star Club in Hamburg.

Sylvia previously said: "There was a massive balcony and they had all these lights. If they liked you they used to swing the lights. Even Brian Epstein had said, 'If you go to Hamburg you won't come back. We never did.

"We worked all over Europe. Just like The Beatles, when we used to go to other countries like Holland, Norway, Sweden and Spain there were crowds waiting for us at the airport, screaming and shouting."

The story of The Liverbirds hasn't been forgotten and in recent years has been turned into a book and a musical - which is set to return to Liverpool's Royal Court this month. Written by Ian Salmon and directed by Bob Eaton, Girls Don’t Play Guitars is back on stage from September 27.

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The musical first hit the stage in 2019 and is back and packed with all of the great 60s songs that shook The Cavern, including the Liverbirds hits Peanut Butter and Diddley Daddy. Ahead of its return, Liverpool's Royal Court delved into the archives to find these brilliant photos of The Liverbirds from the 1960s.

Here, you can see everything from The Liver Birds backstage to promotional photos and the band on tour. Many fans will likely not have seen these photos for years, or even at all.

Writer Ian Salmon said The Liver Birds story is one of those Liverpool stories that had to be told. He said: "As a Liverpool writer there aren’t many stories from the Merseybeat era that remain untold; it turned out that one of the few was one of the greatest.

"I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to tell this with the help of two of the girls themselves. These are the stories that need to be known, need to be recorded, need to be passed down to the generations that follow so that they’re remembered forever, and the theatre is a fantastic place to do that.

"There’s a line that I wrote toward the end of the show; “On nights like this, in rooms like these, you make dreams come true”. That was about giving the Liverbirds the homecoming gig that they never had, but it’s really about what we do as writers; we create something from nothing, we give stories life."

The cast includes Molly Grace Cutler, Alice McKenna, Lisa Wright, Sarah Workman. and Jonathan Markwood. On stage from September 27 to October 26, you can find out more here.