By Ian Salmon Directed by Bob Eaton
Liverpool Royal Court Theatre, till 26th of October 2024. Book tickets here: https://liverpoolsroyalcourt.com/main_stage/girls-dont-play-guitars/
2,925 words, 15 minutes read time.
The play tells the story, through words and music, mostly the latter, of Merseybeat band The Liverbirds from their inception in 1962 to their break-up in 1968, with a brief update on the girl’s life after the split and a nice surprise at the end of its two-hour running time.
I didn’t do any research before the play, though I had an awareness of the band and a vague outline of some of their history, so I was unaware that the play had enjoyed a successful run at the same venue, with the same lead players, back in 2019. From some of the reactions of the mainly ageing demographic at the almost packed theatre, I wouldn’t be surprised if many in the crowd were returning customers.
After a couple of false starts, beginning in 1962 as The Squaws and then as The Deputones, with the earliest incarnation including Mary’s sister Sheila and Irene Green as members (both of whom went on to play in other Liverpool bands), the established line-up of Valerie Gell on lead guitar, Pamela Birch on rhythm guitar, Mary McGlory on bass, and Sylvia Saunders on drums was in place by the following year, the year that, through the ascendency of the Beatles, and lesser Brian Epstein managed artists like Gerry and the Pacemakers and Cilla, established Merseybeat as a national rather than simply local phenomena.
Girl groups weren’t, of course, a new thing in 1963. American artists like the Ronettes, the Crystals, the Shangri-las and the Shirelles had all enjoyed great success and greatly influenced the Merseybeat sound. The latter’s song Boys was a staple of the Beatles’ live set from their early days and throughout their touring career, being used as a rare vocal showcase first for Pete Best and then for Ringo Starr. Ringo, I believe performs it live to this day, and we also get a rousing version during tonight’s play.
But these hit girl groups were vocal-only outfits. They didn’t play guitars or any other instruments, either in the studio or live, that being largely the job of men, including, on the records, some of the top session musicians of the day (an exception was the great female bassist Carole Kaye who, as part of the legendary Wrecking Crew graced many of the top hits of the sixties).
The titular phrase ‘Girls don’t play guitars’ is attributed to John Lennon, and he’s depicted in the play as saying this when introduced to the Liverbirds at the Cavern.
That was what made this band different: they were an all-girl foursome who did play guitars, and drums, as well as them all being accomplished singers, both individually and in harmony.
In retrospect, it seems inevitable that there would be an all-girl vocal/instrumental group on the thriving Merseyside music scene. But, although the Liverbirds’ billing as ‘The world’s first all-girl Beat-group’, which is repeated several times during the play, might be a touch hyperbolic, I can’t recall any that came before, or even, now six decades later, a great many since.
Like their contemporaries Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, for whom Ringo played drums before becoming a Beatle, the Liverbirds did not achieve great commercial success, their best effort being a number five hit in Germany with a cover of Bo Diddley’s Diddley Daddy.
They released two albums on the Star Club Hamburg’s in-house record label in 1965, so we do have a fair idea of how they sounded, which is more than be said for Rory and his group, of whom only some very Lo-Fi live recordings exist.
Guitarist/vocalist Pamela Birch wrote three tracks spread across these albums, but they were essentially a covers band, as were the Hurricanes, and again, in common with them, it’s mostly as a hard-driving live act for which they are fondly remembered among the sadly dwindling number of those who can truthfully say ‘I was there’, as a part of the scene in Liverpool and Hamburg in the early and mid-sixties.
It was therefore essential, if the play was to be a success, that the music was done justice, and that through that the audience could experience something of the vibe that those attending a performance by the Liverbirds might have felt.
On this criterion, I can happily say that the play was indeed a resounding success.
It’s obvious from the beginning that the four chief cast members are playing their own instruments and doing their own singing live, and they’re excellent, with great musicianship and superb vocal harmonies. Best of all musically was Mary Grace Cutler as Valerie Gell on lead guitar, even though she was responsible for the only musical fluff of the evening, on the intro to Roll Over Beethoven. But that made the music more real as, had you been there at the time you would have expected the occasional fluff from all of the local groups, including the Beatles.
I haven’t delved into the careers of any of these four actor/musician performers outside the confines of the show. But they sounded so tight together that it wouldn’t surprise me if they worked together on musical projects other than this, perhaps performing their own material.
The set for the play was designed as a standard stage set-up for a four-piece band, with amps, drums and microphones, all looking suitably period, from where the ‘Liverbirds’ performed their songs. At each side of the stage were two large, wavy cut-out guitars rising towards the ceiling, ending at a bank of small screens designed to look like retro 1960s T. V’s, upon which photographs and the small amount of footage that exists of the band, as well as topical signifiers that helped situate us in time were displayed.
At the rare, was a narrow raised area where the all-male supporting cast made their own musical contributions, with these supporting players also coming forwards in ones or twos to join the girls’ front-centre in the non-musical, dialogue-based sections of the play, playing multiple cameos, as the girl’s fathers, Mick Jagger, Ray and Dave Davis of the Kinks (the Liverbirds supported both the Stones and the Kinks on tour and Jagger and the Davis brothers also played with them on an unreleased, possibly lost, demo), Brian Epstein, Bob Wooler, a pivotal Merseybeat figure who is unfortunately best remembered for being beaten up by John Lennon at Paul McCartney’s twenty-first birthday party and, once we get to Hamburg, Klaus Voorman and others. These dialogue scenes tended towards the comedic, and were sometimes rather perfunctory, although they were well-performed and efficiently accomplished their role of relating the band’s story as a coherent narrative.
Less successful and the weakest element of the play in my view, was the narrative songs performed by the boys at the back in a sub-Merseybeat style, sometimes including little snatches of Beatles songs, such as the intro to I Feel Fine or a quick ‘Beep, Beep, Yeah’ and the like. They weren’t long enough to get the Beatles lawyers onto the productions back, but they were long enough to be annoying and, in my opinion, the cheesy lyrics of these original songs added nothing to the production, although they were played and sung well enough.
The acting itself was good all-around and did a decent job of giving us a sense of the environment in which the girls lived and played, partly through mentions of bygone Liverpool landmarks like Hessy’s music shop, and the Littlewoods Pools building, which once employed thousands of young women, and the dilapidated shell of which is still standing just down the road from me.
As we move through the Liverbirds story, the unchanging nature of the stage-set is perhaps another slight weakness of the production. We are told that we’re now in the Cavern or at the Star Club on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, but with nothing visual, besides the contents of the faux-T. V screens, to reinforce these switches of location. The play is fast-paced enough for me to happily suspend belief, but I did feel that if cost or logistics meant that only one set was feasible, then something a little grittier may have been better. After all, the Cavern and the clubs on the Reeperbahn were noted for their grittiness and in the latter case for the ever-present hint of violence.
If the play is to be believed, the girls passed on the chance to be signed by Brian Epstein by agreeing to a residency, against his advice, at the Star Club in 1964. Liverpool bands had of course been making the trip to Hamburg for around six years by this point and it would still have been something of a right of passage, as well as an amazing adventure for four young working class girls, though with the Beatles having performed at the Star Club for the final time in December 1962, and even the likes of Gerry and the Pacemakers having moved on to much bigger things, the Hamburg scene was past its zenith by the time Liverbirds made the trip.
The story of how the girls raised the money for the fair to Hamburg led neatly to one of two moments of audience participatory hissing when the cast revealed that one Jimmy Saville helped them out by securing a little paid national exposure in the Sunday People. We were assured that he didn’t ask for anything in return from them, perhaps because, at between seventeen and twenty-one years old, they were a little above his preferred upper-age range.
The second well-deserved hiss of the night came when we were told that, towards the end of their time together, another regular performer in the Hamburg clubs was Paul Gadd, still two or three years away from becoming Gary Glitter.
What was unusual about the Liverbirds among the Liverpool bands, apart from the fact that they were girls who played guitars, was that, once they made it to Hamburg they never really left, though they did tour extensively elsewhere in Europe. Three of their members even continued to live Germany after the band split in 1968.
‘Girls Don’t…’ is more of a nice family night out than a work of social realism. It must have been hard to be female performers on the Reeperbahn scene, and this is indicated through some of the dialogue and straight narration, though not explored as deeply as it might have been.
It’s a positive play, and through the excellent chemistry between the cast we get something of the thrill it must have been to be four girls coming of age away from the restraints of family, enjoying the acclaim of audiences, drinking, partying, indulging their healthy sexual appetites, and discovering, as the Beatles and others had before them, that tiredness could be alleviated by a little yellow pill or two.
(The Catholic Church also has a cameo in the play, in the form of Mary’s Parish Priest. Mary was still considering becoming a nun when she set off for Hamburg, though this is another theme which could have been developed further)
By 1967, musically, the Liverbirds were in a musical time warp, still playing mostly American covers from the late fifties/early sixties. They were never going to be in the vanguard of the psychedelic revolution, nor, I suppose, did they want to be. But they did get stoned with Jimi Hendrix because he’d heard that Mary rolled the best joints in Hamburg, although she didn’t smoke them herself, we are told, and it’s a nice moment when this story is relayed to us, as suitably vivid colours swirl on screens above us.
The play becomes more poignant after the interval and the closer we get towards the end, as the focus switches from the good times to the fragmentation and final dissolution of the band.
We learn that the first to leave was drummer Sylvia after she fell pregnant and did what most girls did in that situation at this time, she got married and swapped her ambitions for the role of housewife and mother.
That this decision had to be made on the eve of a Japanese tour, added an extra layer of resigned sadness to this part of the story.
The band continued, and the actors made it clear that the Liverbirds still had their moments, but that it could never be quite the same when the line-up had lost one of the original four.
In the most touching scene of the night, we discover that Valerie was the next to leave after her fiancé was paralysed from the neck down following an accident that happened while he was driving back from his eighteenth birthday party. The band was on stage at the Star Club at the time, extending their set as Valerie eagerly awaited the arrival of her boyfriend.
The remaining two originals, Sylvia and Pamela, carried on for a while with ‘whoever Manfred’ (their manager) could find, until finally calling it a day, and beginning their lives post-Liverbirds, with only Pamela continuing in music, still performing and working in other capacities in the Hamburg clubs. She also struggled greatly with addiction to alcohol and cocaine, though this isn’t mentioned in the play, contributory factors to her relatively early death, aged sixty-five in 2009.
Before the last song, regret is expressed that they never got the chance to perform together just one more time, announcing the song as the reunion the girls never had. Strangely, their Wikipedia entry mentions a brief reunion in 1998, though I’m not sure if this is an error or a rather unnecessary use of artistic licence by the writer.
As it turned out, this wasn’t the last song of the evening. At its conclusion, one of the players announces ‘two very special guests’ and the surviving Liverbirds, bassist Mary McGlory and drummer Sylvia Saunders arrive onstage to a fabulous reception, joining those who had so ably portrayed their younger selves for the truly final song of the night, a raucous rendition of Peanut Butter, obviously a favourite from their repertoire in their heyday.
If I had done any research before seeing the play, I would have known that Sylvia and Mary were still with us and that the two had performed this cameo throughout the 2019 run. Hopefully, they will do so throughout this new one-month run at the Royal Court. I suspect I would still have found their appearance moving if I had known it was coming, and I should add that the way Sylvia, a woman in her late seventies, pounded the drums was impressive.
After the song was over the lights went up and she, Mary and the cast received a well-deserved standing ovation.
The Liverbirds may only be a footnote in music history, but such footnotes deserve to be remembered and celebrated. Perhaps they were and perhaps they weren’t the ‘World’s first all-female Beat group.’ But they were indisputably four young working class girls trying to make it in a decidedly male environment, and as such they were trailblazers.
We should add that, for the time their image was also groundbreaking. It might have been expected that they would dress in the type of sexy, revealing outfits that was the norm among many female performers, and increasingly the fashion for young British women. But their choice of masculine shirts, trousers and thin ties (arrived at after some experimentation) was interesting, and something I would have liked to hear more about. It’s not a great surprise to learn that one of the band, Sylvia, after the failure of her marriage, should end up in a committed relationship with another woman, and though we get only a brief hint of it in the play, I’m guessing that they had a substantial following among gay women.
Omissions aside, Girls Don’t Play Guitars is a great night out with great music and solid acting with a special mention on the latter front to Alice McKenna as Mary McGory.
If the play is at all close to the truth, then those four young women had the time of their lives.
Girls Don’t Play Guitars can be seen at the Royal Court until October 26th. Hopefully, it will get the chance to tour outside of Liverpool.
Mary and Sylvia’s biography of the band, which is on my to-read list The Liverbirds: Our life in Britain’s first female rock ‘n’ roll band: Amazon.co.uk: McGlory, Mary, Saunders, Sylvia: 9780571377022: Books
Their two Hamburg albums combined in a single compilation. Many of these songs are performed in the play. The Liverbirds – Complete Recordings Star-Club Hamburg Sixties (Full Album 2009) (youtube.com)
Appearance on German TV, playing their No. Five-hit Diddley Daddy The Liverbirds – Diddley Daddy (Beat Club, 1965) (youtube.com)
Anthony C Green, October 2024
A short American documentary which fills out some of the gaps in the Liverbirds story, featuring contributions from Sylvia and Mary, and a brief clip of them performing with the cast during the 2019 run of the play We’re Britain’s First Female Rock Band. This is Why You Don’t Know Us. | ‘Almost Famous’ by Op-Docs (youtube.com)
A BBC Breakfast interview with Mary and Sylvia from March this year Sylvia Saunders, Mary McGlory (The Liverbirds Members) On BBC Breakfast [14.03.2024] (youtube.com)
And The Liverbirds own YouTube Channel (2043) The Liverbirds – YouTube
Anthony C Green, October 2024
What made Phil an ‘outsider’? Well, was this rowdy rocker and party goer, really an outsider? I think so. Of course just the hue of his skin in Dublin at the time would have ‘marked him out’. A black Irishman in the 50s and 60s – there was a novelty. Either he had to live up to that difference or retreat from it – Phil, ostensibly, lived up to it. In fact he had been born at West Bromich in the West Midlands of England close to where I grew up. But Phil was sent to Dublin to live with and be brought up by his grandmother and family. He pays tribute to her in one of his songs titled ‘Sarah’. He wrote another ‘Sarah’ for his first born.