One-time Beatle Pete Best has turned the legendary Casbah Coffee Club into an Airbnb.
The musicians who would become the Beatles played some of their earliest shows at the Casbah Coffee Club, a music venue in the basement of a Liverpool home. The house was owned by Mona Best, the mother of the band’s one-time drummer, Pete Best, who lived upstairs as a teenager.
“The Beatles played here, the Beatles partied here and the Beatles slept here,” says Pete, now 82.
Mona bought the home after winning an unlikely bet. At the 1954 Epsom Derby, she pawned all of the jewelry she owned and placed the money on an inexperienced jockey riding a horse named 'Never Say Die.' She watched the race with her family, who didn’t know about the bet.
“As the horse was winning and coming past the finishing post, she suddenly jumped up and started screaming: ‘I’ve won the house, I’ve won the house, I’ve won the house!’” Pete tells the Guardian. “It was only then that she told us what she’d done.”
The bet was just one of many shrewd gambles in her life. Another was her decision to transform the house’s cellar into a music venue. When she opened the Casbah Coffee Club in 1959, she also acted as its promoter.
The Beatles played more than 40 performances and, when the club closed in 1962, the Beatles performed on the final night. In 2006, the British government granted the venue protected heritage status, and it reopened as a tourist attraction. Now, guests can come and stay where the legendary group started out.
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