"I was born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg," John Lennon revealed after The Beatles reached global superstardom. Now 50 years later, Hamburg is celebrating the anniversary of the Beatles' first performance in Germany this week.
On August 17, 1960, the Beatles played their first Hamburg gig at the Indra music club. Over the next two and a half years, the band played 281 gigs in Germany, and laid the foundations of their career.
In commemoration, the all-star band Bambi Kino, which includes members of Maplewood, Nada Surf and Moby, performed the exact set-list of the Beatles from that very day.
Playing 10 hours a day, seven days a week in the gritty Hamburg music clubs transformed The Beatles from amateurs into expert musicians, explains one Beatles expert.
Hamburg is where the Beatles became stars, and the city now invites everybody to come and discover this magnificent legacy. The Beatles themselves never failed to stress the importance of their apprenticeship years in Hamburg. They even recorded two of their hit songs in German in tribute to their German fans: "Sie Liebt Dich" (She Loves You) and "Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand" (I Want to Hold Your Hand).
Now, five decades later, Germany is reciprocating with special Beatles landmarks. In 2008, a plaza was designed with four statues representing the Beatles at the intersection of the Reepberbahn and Grosse Freiheit and was renamed “Beatles Place”.
Last year, in 2009, a new five-story Beatles museum called "Beatlemania Hamburg" opened on the Reeperbahn celebrating the Beatles' history in Hamburg.
See photos from the Beatlemania Hamburg museum
The Kaiserkeller, where the Beatles played after their guest slot at the Indra, today serves as a basement club, while the Grosse Freiheit 36 is one of the main stages of the Reeperbahn Festival, which is Germany's biggest club festival. According to a press release, every year about 170 international bands congregate in the creative neighborhood of St. Pauli for three nights of music in September.
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Comments
Thanks for the mention here, Trina. Just two small corrections- first, that our friend from Moby, Daron Murphy, was replaced with Guided By Voices' Doug Gillard on guitar and that the set we played was not an "exact" set list but rather an approximation based on research. The actual songs they played are the subject of much speculation but I think we did a respectable job. We're listening to the recordings that we made at the Indra right now and we'll likely have a "Live from the Indra" album out in a month or so. Thanks!
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