For readers of Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us comes a fiercely feminist, heartwarming story of friendship and music about The Liverbirds, Britain’s first all-female rock group.
In The Other Fab Four: The Remarkable True Story Of The Liverbirds (Kindle Edition), Mary McGlory and Sylvia Saunders share the electrifying rise and bittersweet legacy of Britain’s first all-female rock band. Inspired by a 1962 Beatles show at The Cavern Club, four self-taught teenage girls from Liverpool—Mary, Sylvia, Valerie Gell, and Pamela Birch—set out to prove women could rock just as hard as the boys. Touring with icons like the Rolling Stones and Chuck Berry, The Liverbirds came heartbreakingly close to lasting fame before life pulled them apart. This memoir is a fierce, feminist look at music history through the eyes of its true pioneers.
The idea for Britain’s first female rock band, The Liverbirds, started one evening in 1962, when Mary McGlory, then age 16, saw The Beatles play live at The Cavern Club in Liverpool, the nightclub famously known as the “cradle of British pop music.” Then and there, she decided she was going to be just like them—and be the first girl to do it.
Joining ranks in 1963 with three other working-class girls from Liverpool—drummer Sylvia Saunders and guitarists Valerie Gell and Pamela Birch, also self-taught musicians determined to “break the male monopoly of the beat world”—The Liverbirds went on to tour alongside the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and Chuck Berry, and were on track to hit international stardom—until life intervened, and the group was forced to disband just five years after forming in 1968.
Now, Mary and Sylvia, the band’s two surviving members, are ready to tell their stories. From that fateful night in 1962, when Mary, who once aspired to become a nun, decided to provide for her family by becoming a rich-and-famous rocker, to the circumstances that led to the band splitting up—Sylvia’s dangerously complicated pregnancy, and the tragic accident that paralyzed Valerie’s beau—The Other Fab Four tackles family, friendship, addiction, aging, and the forces—even destiny—that initially brought the four women together.