By the time The Beatles began making their own records in the studio, they were already seasoned live performers. The band had been touring the German city of Hamburg since 1960, and had played venues around the northwest and the south of England. In two years of relentless gigging, they honed a new form of rock and roll which would come to be called the Merseybeat, after the river flowing alongside their home city Liverpool.

In fact, long before even their residencies at clubs on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison were performing to audiences in their local neighbourhood. While still in their mid-teens, they performed in a band put together by Lennon called the Quarrymen. This group was part of the skiffle music craze sweeping Britain’s youth at the time, who latched onto the genre’s DIY approach to instrumentation.

The Quarrymen began performing live in the spring of 1957 before either McCartney or Harrison had joined the band. They first played at the Cavern Club, which would later become the cauldron in which the early Beatles setlist was forged, on August 7th of that year. Two years later, guitarist Ken Brown joined three of the future Fab Four in a revamped lineup of the Quarrymen for a series of gigs at Mona Best’s Casbah Coffee Club.

It was through the club’s owner that the group’s members met her son, Pete Best, whose band often shared billing at the Casbah with The Quarrymen. As it happened, he played the drums, and Lennon, McCartney and Harrison were in need of a drummer. They recruited Best in August 1960, just in time for their first show under a new name, an insect-based pun on the “beat” of a drum, suggested by their new bass player Stuart Sutcliffe.

So, where was the show?
Finally, The Beatles had arrived. They’d actually gone through a dozen or so name changes to get there, but by August 1960, they’d settled on the moniker now known to billions of music fans worldwide. It was then that they secured their first trip to Hamburg via the Liverpudlian promoter Allan Williams.

The group had actually been playing at the two clubs Williams owned since Sutcliffe joined that May, under the name The Silver Beetles. It was only with a drummer in place, though, that they were ready to face the world, and face it with a proper name.

On Monday, August 15th, 1960, The Beatles played their first gig as a five-piece band with a full rhythm section. It was a warm-up performance for the shows they had planned in Germany, billed as their farewell to Liverpool before they headed on tour. By now, they were a well-known act in the city, and they regularly drew hundreds of teenagers to their shows.

When Williams advertised this hometown gig, he used the name “The Silver Beetles” on the poster, unaware that the group had changed it. It was hosted by one of his own venues, the Jacaranda Coffee Club on Slater Street, in Liverpool’s city centre, which had developed into a hub for Merseybeat music. Entrance cost two shillings and sixpence in old money, and by all accounts, the club was full to its 400-person capacity.

The next day, the band set off for Hamburg, driving to Harwich in a van without seats before taking the ferry to the Hook of Holland. They arrived in the evening on August 17th and went straight into their first show, officially billed as The Beatles, at the Indra Club on Hamburg’s Grosse Freiheit street. It was the first of their 48 consecutive nights performing at the venue.

Exhausting as that run might have been, it prepared them for all the madness that followed. It wasn’t easy being a Beatle, after all.