HE WAS the man who helped put The Beatles in the spotlight way before the advent of social media or online ticket touts. If you wanted to know about upcoming gigs by stars in the 1960s Mersey Beat era, a Tony Booth poster was your first port of call.
One Cavern Club poster, produced for a fee of 25p, sold for £27,500
Now, more than 50 years later, 83-year-old Booth - still working Eight Days a Week producing posters - has faithfully reproduced 40 of his favourite works for an exhibition celebrating International Beatleweek 2016.
Only a handful of the original posters produced by Booth in the 1960s have survived, with the vast majority discarded as waste paper once the gigs had taken place.
One Cavern Club poster, which he produced for a fee of ‘five bob’ (25p) sold to an American collector in a London Auction House for £27,500.
Booth got his gig hand-painting posters for the furniture business and record shop run by the family of Brian Epstein, future manager of The Beatles. When Epstein’s interests turned to emerging stars, he was paid to produce posters for gigs and concerts across the region.
“I must have produced many hundreds of hand painted posters for Beatles gigs and shows by other popular groups. I was only paid five shillings for each one, but it was non-stop work. I got to know Brian Epstein and The Beatles very well. It was great to be part of what was happening in Liverpool when Merseybeat was born, though we never knew how big it would become.”
Tony Booth in his studioBooth now spends every day at his Wirral studio producing replica posters for fans and collectors across the world, using the same materials and paper he used over 50 years ago. He was recently commissioned by an ITV drama - starring Sheridan Smith as a young Cilla Black - to re-create the posters always plastered outside the Cavern Club.
The iconic Beatles birthplace has also commissioned Booth to produce posters for their 60th anniversary in January next year. He will be designing the anniversary poster in the same size and style as the original poster he hand-painted for The Grand Opening of the club on 16 January 1957.
Booth's first ever poster exhibition takes place on Liverpool’s world famous Matthew Street, above John Lennon’s Bar and just yards away from the Cavern Club, at View Two Gallery. It will run until 30 September.
