The Other Fab Four
The Remarkable True Story of the Liverbirds, Britain's First Female Rock Band
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
For readers of Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us comes a fiercely feminist, heartwarming story of friendship and music about The Liverbirds, Britain’s first all-female rock group.
The idea for Britain’s first female rock band, The Liverbirds, started one evening in 1962, when Mary McGlory, then age 16, saw The Beatles play live at The Cavern Club in Liverpool, the nightclub famously known as the “cradle of British pop music.” Then and there, she decided she was going to be just like them—and be the first girl to do it.
Joining ranks in 1963 with three other working-class girls from Liverpool—drummer Sylvia Saunders and guitarists Valerie Gell and Pamela Birch, also self-taught musicians determined to “break the male monopoly of the beat world”—The Liverbirds went on to tour alongside the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and Chuck Berry, and were on track to hit international stardom—until life intervened, and the group was forced to disband just five years after forming in 1968.
Now, Mary and Sylvia, the band’s two surviving members, are ready to tell their stories. From that fateful night in 1962, when Mary, who once aspired to become a nun, decided to provide for her family by becoming a rich-and-famous rocker, to the circumstances that led to the band splitting up—Sylvia’s dangerously complicated pregnancy, and the tragic accident that paralyzed Valerie’s beau—The Other Fab Four tackles family, friendship, addiction, aging, and the forces—even destiny—that initially brought the four women together.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McGlory and Saunders debut with a jaunty if somewhat disorganized account of growing up in postwar Britain and forming the nation's "first all-female rock band." Inspired by a Beatles performance at Liverpool's Cavern Club, McGlory, Saunders, and friends Valerie Gell and Pamela Birch founded the Liverbirds in 1962. They began playing local venues and soon became part of the thriving Liverpool music scene that gave rise to the Beatles, Herman's Hermits, and the Kinks. Propelled by their energetic covers of songs by Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley—and the novelty of being female performers at a time when "all-girl bands were as rare as UFOs"—the group's success at home led to a residency at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany, where a buzzy music scene forged bonds between English rockers and German fans ("We were a younger generation, trying to dissolve the... divisions that were a hangover from the war," McGlory recalls). The Liverbirds later toured Europe and briefly Japan before breaking up in 1968 when marriage and childcare responsibilities interfered. Though chapters from McGlory and Saunders's perspectives alternate in a way that can feel disjointed, and the post-band sections of the narrative tend to meander, for the most part it's a colorful and energetic look into an electric period of rock and roll history. Classic rock fans will be charmed.
