The Beatles at The Azena Nightclub, Sheffield

Here I am outside a Co-Op store in Gleadless in Sheffield (I was engrossed in a radio play and drove passed it three times.) In the sixties this was The Azena nightclub. The lads performed two sets here on 12th February 1963 and then about three weeks later on 2nd April 1963.

The famous nightclub promoter Peter Stringfellow booked the Fab Four for what equates to £90 in today's money. The premises normally held 500 people but the band was starting to get well-known across Britain and Stringfellow sold 2,000 tickets (it's thought another 1,000 showed up on the second night.) For the first gig tickets were four shillings (20p) rising to five shillings (25p) for the second gig.

I didn't both going inside as Co-Ops are expensive. I'm sure they do very well - making money from feeding people and then handling their deaths via their funeral service. Over the years this place has been a Somerfield store and then a Kwik Save store. A man in a car wolfing down chips and curry kept looking up from his steaming pile to watch me. I think he thought I was deducing which car was easiest to steal. He almost stopped when I started doing a few salutes but it's something to tell his wife later I suppose.

The motorway network was rather threadbare in 1963 (the M1 was only four years old) so I guess it took the lads two hours to get here from Liverpool. I'd never heard of Gleadless and down I'll pass that way again. I had one last look, did a salute and left.

The song list written by Paul...