The Place of the Beatles within Liverpool as a UNESCO City of Music

Abstract

In 2015 Liverpool was recognised as UNESCO City of Music. This award contributed to the city’s ongoing reinvention of itself following decades of decline. Liverpool is not the only city to have pursued a cultural strategy towards regeneration, but it has been significantly successful in this regard; for example its year as European Capital of Culture was regarded as a positive watershed. In formulating, sustaining and developing such a strategy, though, the relationship between Liverpool and the Beatles (and the Beatles and Liverpool) represents a constant challenge. By the 1960s, Liverpool’s prosperity was a distant memory and, save for a brief renaissance which coincided with the success of the group, the city continued its steep decline. So it was that Liverpool became saddled with a Beatles-led image of vitality and optimism when its reality became one of shrinking population, contracting resources and mounting social deprivation and conflict. The reinvention and reassertion of the city has not been Beatles-led or even Beatles-focused but it is still the case that the Beatles represent a cultural resource that most other such cities would envy. Liverpool’s challenge has been to publicly re-embrace the group while resisting an adjunct status in relation to them. This chapter explores how the city has found a new sense of itself and a place for the Beatles within this. This sense-making remains a work in progress and the tensions are identified as those between the city’s desire to rebrand itself and Apple Corps own exercise in Beatles brand management.