Cilla Black – The Zodiac
by Bill Harry – Mersey Beat
This is a photo taken in the Zodiac Cub in Duke Street, Liverpool. Cilla worked there during evenings.
So many sites, magazines and publications wrongly caption the pic, naming the club as the Cavern. Cilla did a few lunchtime sessions at the Cavern as a cloakroom girl, but her association with the Cavern was exploited by Brian’s publicity people in order to tie her name to the club most associated with the Beatles.
The Zodiac was a small coffee cub with a jukebox. The Big Three were regulars and also performed there. Paul Murphy (who was to become the man who changed the Beatles destiny, which I’ll reveal in a book) had just recorded a single ‘Four and Twenty Thousand Kisses’, which he kept playing on the jukebox. The Beatles also hung around. The club didn’t have a back entrance, there was only a sturdy door at the bottom of the front steps. One night with me and Virginia, the Beatles, Big Three, Paul, Cilla and other friends, a gang tried to get into the club and kept banging and kicking the door, but they couldn’t get in.
The Zodiac was the club where Cilla first met Bobby Willis, the love of her life. He worked in a bakery not as a singer as the publicists were later to claim.
In her last documentary, Cilla visited the premises, now empty. The man in the photo with Cilla was Dick Matthews, my Mersey Beat photographer at the time.
Thanks for reading, Bill Harry.
