Beatles Heritage Tourism in Liverpool

Abstract

This chapter explores the tension between the Beatles’ story and Liverpool, with imagery and imagination conjuring up compelling beliefs that command narratives of authority. Such heritage strategies have smacked a little of desperation, perhaps masking the changed relationship between surviving Beatles fragments in Liverpool and popular-music heritage tourism across the globe. The rhetoric of the Beatles, Liverpool, and “the ’60s, man” today represents an outdated, white, gendered, anglophone rock meta-narrative in what is now a multifaceted global popular-music (tourism) marketplace. Liverpool’s position as the authentic site for Beatles and Merseybeat tourism and a World Heritage Site has never been more precarious. How can the city continue to attract Beatles tourists as the ’60sslip away into the annals of popular-music historiography? An additional question is how the Beatles’ legacy might be explained to visitors with little knowledge of them as a global popular-music phenomenon.