"It stank of disinfectant and stale onions. It was very hot, sweaty and oppressive"
Gerry Marsden
The Cavern Club opened in Matthew Street on Wednesday 16th January 1957. Owned by Alan Sytner, it was set to become the 20th century’s most famous nightclub. Sytner owned two other nightclubs in Liverpool, the West Coast Jazz Club and 21 Jazz Club. The Cavern was to continue Sytner’s musical preference , and in his eyes, this dank warehouse basement which was used in World War Two as an air raid shelter, was the perfect setting. His inspiration came from the West Bank of Paris, where he had seen many jazz clubs actually built into caves. One of his favourite was "Le Caveau", consisting of a series of small damp caves.
The basement looked like a section of subway tunnels. There were three parallel vaults, each about 100 feet long and 10 feet wide, joined by 6 feet archways. Sytner and a large group of volunteers, mainly jazz enthusiasts and those involved with his other clubs, made improvements to the cellar's interior. They painted all the brickwork black to keep a cave like atmosphere, corrected floors and invested in a large quantity of wooden chairs.
The opening acts at the club were The Merseysippi Jazz Band, followed by the Wall City Jazzmen, Ralph Watmough Jazz Band and the Coney Island Skiffle Group. Tickets were very plain. They pulled in six hundred people as well as twice as many waiting outside in the cold. Within three years, there were a total of 20,000 members. Word was spreading and everybody wanted to be seen there.
Alan Sytner's main ambition was to bring some big jazz names to The Cavern Club. Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights brought traditional jazz while on Thursday the cellar became "Club Perdido" and ran modern jazz nights.
Sytner was always thinking of new publicity stunts to make sure his club was the centre of attention. He was often known to go into other rival jazz clubs and announce to the bands playing "I've come to see if you are good enough to play at the Cavern!" Another one of his exploits was an invented story of a ghost being seen in the ladies toilets, which was actually run in the Daily Herald. Soon enough, jazz greats such as Chris Barber and Louis Armstrong were becoming regulars at the Cavern.
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