Frank Hessy's shop location

Here I am in central Liverpool outside the former premises of Hessy's music shop where the Beatles bought some of their instruments. It was just round the corner from the Epstein's record shop and the favourite haunt of so many Merseyside musicians. Young kids used to hang around here as it was considered hip.

The first Hessy’s music shop was opened in Liverpool about 1923 selling records rather than instruments. The shop which The Beatles visited opened in 1956. A local chap called Jim Gretty worked there and demonstrated instruments. The first guitar John Lennon ever saw was in the hands of "a fully dressed cowboy in the middle of Liverpool"....and this was probably Jim Gretty. There was a showroom here and on Saturdays instruments were demonstrated without obligation. On Monday evenings Jim taught thirty to forty locals some guitar chords and techniques.

John and Paul both got their first guitars from here in 1957. Paul had little money and it was a long wait. He ended up trading in the trumpet his dad had bought him two years earlier. He bought a Zenith guitar at the screaming expensive price of £15. John's first guitar was bought by his Aunt Mini for £14.

Nowadays the premises house Wong's jewellers but there's a blue plaque on the wall remembering the Beatles. The general brickwork and columns haven't changed much since the fifties. Once the front window was chock full of drums and guitars. A few weeks before Brian Epstein signed The Beatles he wrote a personal cheque to Hessy's to clear all hire-purchase debts the lads had with them (nearly £200 - a lot then.) Of this action John said, "Now that's what I call bloody managing."

As I was reading the plaque an old grubby woman approached me, "Oh you like the Beatles do you?" she said with a weak smile. I knew she was begging for money and that Sunday afternoon she was about the fourth person to engage me. They strike up a conversation and after a few minutes ask if you've any loose change.

Due to finances Paul didn’t buy the new guitar he and the Beatles badly needed. After paying his dad £3-a-week house-keeping he saved the surplus and said that, as he was only now completing payments for the Rosetti, he didn’t want to be saddled with another ‘drip’. The cost of his caution, and his reluctance to at least buy proper bass strings at Hessy’s, was pain, because - as Paul would remember - the piano strings would ‘make a nice sound . . . but kill the fingers’.