The Liverbirds’ Mary McGlory recently had a chat with The Guardian about the band’s earlier days as UK’s first-ever all-female rock band. She explained what the band wanted to do when they first started:
“We wanted to be the female Beatles, and we wanted to do it first. Everybody was really curious at first; people were like, ‘I don’t know what to think about this.'”
Among these curious people, there was John Lennon too. After The Liverbirds heard him say ‘Girls don’t play guitars’, they knew they needed to prove him otherwise. She continued:
“We thought: let’s prove to him that we can. It gave us more enthusiasm rather than putting us off.”
The bassist mentioned Lennon’s comment on the band earlier too, in an interview in 2019. She said:
“Of course it made us more determined and you never knew with John, he had that strange sense of humour. Maybe it was his way of encouraging us.”
The band, indeed, proved him wrong. They got a lot of attention, toured with The Rolling Stones and The Kinks, and hung out with Jimi Hendrix.
Inspired by Lennon’s comment, The Liverbirds’ remaining members McGlory and Sylvia Saunders conveyed their own story with the musical ‘Girls Don’t Play Guitars’, which took place in Royal Court in 2019. You can see the band’s performance from the musical here.
