Liverpool Olympia: Historical venue to celebrate 120th anniversary
When the Olympia's huge auditorium was built, with stalls and three levels of balconies, it could accommodate almost 4,000 people while animals were housed in a large basement area dubbed the "elephant pit".The aquatic extravaganzas staged in a vast tank below the floor held up to 80,000 gallons of water.It was awarded listed status in 1975 when it was described by English Heritage, now Historic England, as "a well-preserved example of the work of the foremost Edwardian theatre architect".
In its time it has also been a pioneering cinema as one of the first regional picture houses to show talkies, a wartime Royal Naval depot and a renowned dance hall – the Locarno – where couples would foxtrot and jive the night away under its grand domed ceiling, as well as a Mecca bingo hall.In 1990, the current owners purchased the neighbouring Grafton Rooms and while operating it as a nightclub, they began to refurbish it to bring it back to life after several years of closure.
The venue eventually reopened in February 2000 and over the last 25 years it has become a much-loved live music venue.It also holds club events, sports and comedy, as well as providing a location for TV shows, films, adverts and music videos such as Peaky Blinders and Tin Star.
'A cornerstone'
The independent venue's managing director Chris Zorba said: "I'm proud to take this iconic venue into its 120th year. "The Olympia has been a cornerstone of Liverpool's entertainment history since 1905."We'll celebrate the year from 24 April with an eclectic programme of gigs, comedy and sporting events."And along with our unmissable 120th anniversary evening, we also have Liverpool's Shack reforming for a sold-out gig on 25 April, followed by the likes of the Liverpool Gospel Music Festival, Supergrass, Michael Kiwanuka, Father John Misty and Future Islands before the summer alone," he added.
Listen to the best of BBC Radio Merseyside on Sounds and follow BBC Merseyside on Facebook, X, and Instagram. You can also send story ideas via Whatsapp to 0808 100 2230.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Graziadaily
2 hours ago
- Graziadaily
From Power Struggles To Philanthropy: Meet The Real Guinness Family
If you're missing the Succession shaped hole in your TV viewing schedule, then Netflix's upcoming drama The House of Guinness is sure to be a huge hit with you. The drama will tell the story of the Guinness family, the Dublin lineage behind the infamous drink we know so well. The brand was founded by Arthur Guinness in 1759, with the company's chairman position being passed through the family. The Netflix show, from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, will focus on the power struggle that unfolded after the death of Benjamin Guinness in 1868 - leaving his four young children to navigate the business. 'The Guinness dynasty is known the world over – wealth, poverty, power, influence, and great tragedy are all intertwined to create a rich tapestry of material to draw from,' Knight told Netflix. 'I've always been fascinated by their stories and am excited to bring the characters to life for the world to see.' Here's what we know about the real family behind the drama. Benjamin Lee Guinness was the grandfather of Guinness founder Arthur, and is often credited with increasing the success of the brand. In the show, he is portrayed as the patriarch of the family, whose death paves the way for drama to unfold. 'House of Guinness is the extraordinary story of a family who happens to be the inheritors of the biggest brewery in the world,' says Knight. 'They're young and are given the task of taking on this incredibly successful brand. The first priority is: Don't screw it up. And the second priority is to make Guinness even bigger.' Like his father, Edward has a fascinating true story. He was the second oldest son of the four, and is portrayed in the Netflix series by Louis Partridge. When his father died in 1868, he took over the company, and bought out his brother's half-share in 1876. When he was just 29, he gained full ownership of the Guinness company. From there, Edward rapidly expanded the business, and its value. By 1886, the company was brewing 907,000 hogheads across the globe. When he floated two-thirds of the company in 1886 for £6 million, he became the richest man in Ireland and retired as a multi-millionaire age 40. He married Lady Adelaide Maria Guinness, his first cousin, in 1873. Arthur Guinness, the eldest son of the four, went down a different route to his brother, being voted in as a Conservative MP for Dublin in 1868. However, the election was then declared void due to his agent's misconduct, leading to his resignation. In 1876, he made the crucial decision to withdraw from the family brewery enterprise, leaving his brother Edward to expand it. He followed his father in becoming a landlord, and owned several estates in Galway. Arthur, who is played by Anthony Boyle in the show, was also deeply philanthropic, contributing to cultural and healthcare institutions in Dublin, including the restoration of Marsh's Library and expansion of the Coombe Women's Hospital. He married Olivia Hedges-White in 1871. Knight told Netflix that Arthur and Edward are the 'heart' of the House of Guinness. 'I won't give away the plot — but they were given joint stewardship of the brewery for very interesting reasons,' he said. 'Before he died, their father very deliberately chained Arthur and Edward together in responsibility for the brewery. You'll find out why when you watch.' Anne Guinness, played by Emily Fairn in the Netflix show, was Benjamin's only daughter. Like Arthur, she became well known for her philanthropy and charitable work, especially with the poor and sick. In 1876, she founded St. Patrick's Nursing Home in Dublin, and together with her husband, William Conyngham Plunket, she also played a major role in setting up educational institutions such as the Irish Clergy Daughters' School. She had six children with her husband, two sons and four daughters.
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘The King Lear in I Am the Walrus? That came from John Cage': Paul McCartney on the Beatles' debt to great avant-garde composers
It is a sunny October afternoon and I am sitting in a long wood-panelled hallway in an old converted townhouse in London waiting to be called into the office of Paul McCartney. I am dressed in my best clothes and trying not to let nerves get the better of me. I am here to ask him about an aspect of his career that is rarely discussed but which, I believe, helped cement his reputation as a world-conquering compositional force and which made the Beatles the most interesting and influential band of all time. In the mid-1960s, as well as topping the charts, turning a generation of teenage girls hysterical and finding themselves the focus of obsessive media attention, the Beatles were also engaged with, and educating themselves about, the work of classical music's most audacious and important composers. McCartney watched the communist and free improviser Cornelius Cardew play the prepared piano at the Royal College of Art in London. He saw Karlheinz Stockhausen deliver an address about the development of synthesised sound. And he went to meet Delia Derbyshire ('She was in a shed at the bottom of her garden full of machines') to ask if she wanted to write an electronic score for Yesterday. He attended a lecture by the Italian composer and electronic experimentalist Luciano Berio, who later arranged a series of songs by the Beatles for his first wife, the mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian. The Beatles, McCartney tells me, also took their cue from the 1956 piece Radio Music by John Cage for one of the band's most famous songs: 'Cage had a piece that started at one end of the radio's range,' he says, 'and he just turned the knob and went through to the end, scrolling randomly through all the stations. I brought that idea to I Am the Walrus. I said, 'It's got to be random.' We ended up landing on some Shakespeare – King Lear. It was lovely having that spoken word at that moment. And that came from Cage.' On a purple velvet sofa in his office, McCartney talks to me with the same irrepressible energy that has driven his contribution to music for more than 60 years. He also has a very endearing way of never assuming knowledge and very politely checks, for instance, that I know about his friend, John. 'You know, John Lennon?' (I do.) And did I know the Beatles had 'this song called Yesterday?' (I did). He seems delighted to talk less about his own achievements and more about the people who helped broaden his scope. Two men who certainly did that were French composer-engineers Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer who, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, pioneered a style of composition called musique concrète. Working in Parisian studios set up for propaganda broadcasts during the second world war, the pair used turntables and tape machines to forge an entirely original method of composing which, in line with French movements in art and philosophy at the time, sought to deconstruct established ideas and build from scratch a new means of making music. This was iconoclasm driven by an erosion of trust in a ruling class that had led millions to their deaths during two brutal international conflicts. Schaeffer and Henry recorded natural or found sounds on to magnetic tape – the bark of a dog, the whistle or chugging of a train, a cackling voice – and then, using tape machines to slow down, speed up or reverse the original sound, they created collages of altered or 'manipulated' recordings that are completely bewildering and mesmeric. Our ear is lured by that which is familiar and then unsettled by its abstraction. The suggestion is that all is not what it seems – the very essence of psychedelia. 'Not everything we see is clear and figurative,' McCartney says to me, pointing to a Willem de Kooning painting next to us on the wall. 'Sometimes when you're asleep or you rub your eye, you see an abstract: your mind knows about it. We know about this stuff. It was the same with music. We were messing around, but our minds could still accept it because it was something that we already kind of knew anyway. Even though we were in another lane to more classical composers, we were kind of equal in that we also wanted freedom.' After buying a pair of his own Brenell tape machines, McCartney set about looping and spooling these ideas into the work he had to do for 'his day job'. He describes the recording of Tomorrow Never Knows, 'which was shaping up to be kind of a far-out Beatles song'. McCartney remembers carrying a plastic bag full of tape loops – on which he'd recorded various sounds at home – to Abbey Road during sessions for Revolver. 'I set up the tape machines to create popping, whirring and dissolving sounds all mixed together. There could have been a guitar solo in it – straightforward or wacky – but when you put the tape loops in, they take it to another place because when they play, you get all these kind of happy accidents. They're unpredictable and that suited that track. We used those tricks to get the effect we wanted.' The result is a myriad of strange musical textures and meditative drones, a sonic vacuum into which all our troubling thoughts and feelings are swallowed up and disappear. It's a big part of what made the Beatles as colourful as the recreational substances that were so popular at the time. It's also the alchemical element in their work that helped put them in a different league, in terms of their legacy and influence. Eventually John Lennon also procured a pair of Brenell machines and entered new realms of experimentalism. This produced the hypnotic track Revolution 9: 'John was fascinated and he loved the craziness of it,' McCartney says. He, meanwhile, preferred to use these new studio gadgets 'in a controlled way', working within the pop-song format, cherrypicking interesting stylistic elements and twisting them into the Beatles' established song-writing template. Together the pair fashioned a new, intelligent and avant garde-informed kind of pop music – a reminder, as if we need it, of the magic of the Lennon-McCartney partnership. The push and pull of two genius creatives working together to upend the status quo. 'You think, 'Oh well our audience wants a pop song,'' McCartney says. 'And then you might read about William Burroughs using the cut-up technique and you think, 'Well, he had an audience, and his audience liked what he did.' And eventually we decided that our audiences would come along with us, rather than it being down to us to feed them a conventional diet.' My quest into the roots of this trippy magic in the Beatles' music is just one of many explorations I made into the way the 20th century's most innovative pop musicians borrowed from the classical avant garde, for my book Everything We Do Is Music. In it, I draw a line from John Cale's drone in the Velvet Underground to the extraordinary Indian classical-inspired sounds in music by La Monte Young; and connect the blistering microtonality of Polish sonorism to the angst-ridden rock of Radiohead. The feminist philosophies of Pauline Oliveros formed a blueprint for techno, meanwhile, and US composers such as Edgard Varèse, John Cage, Steve Reich and Philip Glass found ways to reflect the energy and freneticism of the urban metropolis in their work. In each case, I found that artists on both sides of the pop/classical divide reached across it, disregarding those things that usually separate us – education, class, nationality, gender – to do something epochal. At the end of our conversation, I ask McCartney if he ever felt restricted by the expectations of fans, or limited by his schooling and background. Actually, he says, he always felt a real sense of freedom to engage with the open-minded atmosphere of the time. This was largely thanks to his late wife Linda. 'She used to say, 'It's allowed.' And that lit up the skies for me. I'd think, 'Yeah, it's allowed.'' Everything We Do is Music by Elizabeth Alker (Faber & Faber, £20) is published on 28 August. To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Daily Mirror
10 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
House of Guinness release date, plot and cast as Peaky Blinders creator lines up new Netflix drama
Peaky Blinders maestro Steven Knight is releasing a highly anticipated new Netflix drama about one of the world's most iconic breweries House of Guinness is undoubtedly one of the most highly anticipated new Netflix series for 2025 - and its release is just around the corner. Created by Peaky Blinders showrunner Steven Knight, the eight-part drama will bring the startling true story of the Guinness family to life like never before. Featuring a cast stacked with familiar faces from the best of British TV, the series is shaping up to be a must-watch new release when it drops in just over a month. Moreover, with Peaky Blinders running for six seasons and even launching an upcoming sequel film, there's a strong possibility House of Guinness will spark yet another successful franchise for Netflix. With just a few weeks before the series hits screens, let's take a look at all the vital details fans need to know before tuning in. What is House of Guinness about? Knight's sprawling period drama will turn the clocks back to the 19th Century and chronicle the rise of the Guinness brewery to become one of Dublin's most successful businesses. Set during the days immediately following the death of the patriarch and businessman Sir Benjamin Guinness, the drama will focus on his four children as well as other major players who crossed paths with the iconic Guinness dynasty. An official synopsis from Netflix reads: 'House of Guinness explores an epic story inspired by one of Europe's most famous and enduring dynasties - the Guinness Family. 'Set in 19th-century Dublin and New York, the story begins immediately after the death of Sir Benjamin Guinness, the man responsible for the extraordinary success of the Guinness brewery, and the far-reaching impact of his will on the fate of his four adult children, Arthur, Edward, Anne, and Ben, as well as on a group of Dublin characters who work and interact with the phenomenon that is Guinness.' A trailer has yet to be released so precise plot details have yet to be confirmed, although fans can get a sense of the story through the first-look stills of the cast released this week. Who stars in House of Guinness? House of Guinness will primarily follow the four children of Sir Benjamin, Arthur, Edward, Anne, and Ben. Bringing them to life are Anthony Boyle (Masters of the Air, Manhunt) as Arthur Guinness, Louis Partridge (Disclaimer, Enola Holmes) as Edward Guinness, Emily Fairn (The Responder, Saturday Night) as Anne Plunket (née Guinness) and Fionn O'Shea (Normal People, Dance First) as Benjamin Guinness. Plus, James Norton of Happy Valley fame will portray Guinness foreman Sean Rafferty. The rest of the main cast is as follows: Dervla Kirwan (True Detective: Night Country, Smother) as Aunt Agnes Guinness Jack Gleeson (Game of Thrones, In The Land of Saints and Sinners) as Byron Hedges Niamh McCormack (Everything Now, The Magic Flute) as Ellen Cochrane Danielle Galligan (Shadow and Bone S1 & S2, Obituary) as Lady Olivia Hedges Ann Skelly (The Nevers, The Sandman S2) as Adelaide Guinness Seamus O'Hara (Blue Lights, An Irish Goodbye) as Patrick Cochrane Michael McElhatton (Game of Thrones, The Long Shadow) as John Potter David Wilmot (Station Eleven, Bodkin) as Bonnie Champion Michael Colgan (Say Nothing, The Regime) as Rev Henry Gratton Jessica Reynolds (Kneecap, The Wolf, The Fox And The Leopard) as Lady Christine O'Madden Hilda Fay (The Woman In The Wall) as Sultan Elizabeth Daulau (Andor, Wicked) as Lady Henrietta St Lawrence Watch Stranger Things on Netflix for free with Sky from £15 Sky Get the deal here When will House of Guinness be released? Netflix subscribers don't have too much longer to wait as the series is slated for release on Thursday, 25th September. The streamer will release all eight episodes at once in line with previous original programmes. With just a few short weeks left before its premiere, a House of Guinness trailer is expected to drop very soon to reveal more enticing details about the drama. House of Guinness will be released Thursday, 25th September on Netflix.
