In the 1960s, Valerie Gell, who has died aged 71, was part of the all-female Liverpool teenage beat group the Liverbirds. They had their greatest success in Hamburg, with residencies at the Star-Club, where the Beatles had played on and off throughout 1962 before their chart breakthrough and where the Liverbirds were billed as “die weiblichen Beatles” (the female Beatles). Although presented as a gimmick, they could play well and were trend-setting in that other girls saw it was possible to be in a beat group.
The proliferation of teenage groups had started in the mid-1950s with the advent of skiffle music on acoustic instruments and went electric with rock’n’roll. When, in 1961, the disc jockey at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, Bob Wooler, drew up a list of local beat groups, of the nearly 300 he identified, almost all were male. The audiences preferred it that way, it seemed: the girls wanted to see the lads, and John Lennon spoke for the lads when he told the Liverbirds that girls couldn’t play guitars. They set out to prove him wrong.
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