Fifty years ago, five unknown teenagers from Liverpool made their live debut as the band that would change popular music history forever.
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best walked onto the Indra Musikklub stage in Hamburg on 17th August 1960, to play their very first gig.
Little did they know that they were laying the foundations to become the biggest band in the world.
And now fifty years later, the city that propelled them from adolescence into adulthood has honoured the Liverpool pop legends by recreating the show at the same venue.
A collective of New York-based musicians, the all-star band Bambi Kino, which includes members from Cat Power, Nada Surf, Maplewood and Guided by Voices, tackled the Beatles' original first night set list to the delight of an enraptured crowd.
The man credited with bringing the infamous group to the city's stage, Horst Fascher, recalls the then unheard of Beatles' first performance.
The Hamburg club manager reportedly said: "Only 30 or so people were there, the club was nearly empty. They were an unknown band, an unknown name having not recorded anything. Also it was their first time playing with Best, they had not rehearsed at all.
Fascher added that the five-piece had something "different" about them, prompting him to take a chance on them.
"They looked good too. All in leather jackets, tight pants and pointed shoes. The girls went crazy straight away, they were the ones that stayed for all of the early shows, even when the music wasn't always good. The boys usually left after a couple of songs."
Beatles' expert Phil Coppell says that the group performed incessantly in the music metropolis with daily ten hour sessions, which transformed them from amateurs to expert musicians.
He said: "When they went to Hamburg the guys played ten hours a day, seven days a week for 103 consecutive nights. It was the making of them.
"It cannot be understated how important that amount of practicing was to their musical ability. They played constantly and that's why they became so good and far surpassed their amateur band status.
"Eventually they were thrown out of the country because they didn't have work permits and at the time George Harrison was only 17-years-old. So they hopped on a train and came back to Liverpool. But it was clear that things had already changed for the band.
"They continued to play on the night club scene but suddenly things started to take off when the audience started going for their music rather than the drinking.
"Paul McCartney always said that the start of Beatlemania was when the audience stopped dancing and started listening."
This time of year will always be remembered for the Beatles' Hamburg experiences, which created the foundations for the talent that would later make them world-famous.
They never grew tired of stressing the importance of the music metropolis, with Lennon confessing: “I was born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg.”
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