DAILY TELEGRAPH - 3rd FEBRUARY 2007
'Rockin' all over England' - Article by Nigel Richardson

Taken in the pre-moptop era, the photograph hangs nearby. Paul looks geeky in glasses - presumably Lennon's as John isn't wearing any. The four of them (Pete Best, not Ringo) are sitting on a bench drinking stout, with that wallpaper behind and above them.

Forty-five years later, I was sitting on the same bench. I thought I was immune to this kind of nostalgia, but the back of my neck was tingling ever so slightly. They. Were. Here!

The Grapes is in Mathew Street, a few yards down from the Cavern Club where the Fab Four performed hundreds of times between March 1961 and August 1963. After gigs they would come to the Grapes for a pint. Their first manager, Allan Williams - known as "the man who gave the Beatles away" - still drinks in the pub, although he wasn't there the night I dropped in.

Neither was Paul McCartney. But I was happy to be with Pete Wylie, founder member of the 1980s band The Mighty Wah!, collaborator with members of other famous Liverpool outfits such as Echo and the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, and genial musical ambassador for his beloved home patch (he has just narrated a musical tour of the city for MP3 players).

"The Beatles fixed Liverpool as a black-and-white city," he said, nodding at the old photograph. "And with Eric's [the legendary nightclub] and punk rock we made the city go colour." Liverpool, he averred, is a place of urban myths. But the 'pool's greatest story - how four lads shook the world - is no myth. The admittedly improbable tale of the Beatles is the turntable upon which Liverpool continues to spin. It's the reason why almost every tourist visits the city - and the undisputed chart-topper in a new national tourism initiative.

The "England Rocks!" campaign, which Enjoy England (formerly the English Tourist Board) launches on Monday at Abbey Road recording studios in north London, identifies the holy sites of English rock'n'roll: musicians' birth - and resting - places; their lyrical inspirations; the places where songs were written, album covers were shot and pints were sunk.

If you're on a musical quest you can't not come to Liverpool - it's like the Vatican of the pop religion. But before "travelling on the one after 909" I had started my pilgrimage at one of the quirkier and more arcane of the locations featured in the campaign.

It's a straggly sycamore tree, permanently pinned with tributes, next to a busy road called Queen's Ride in south-west London. I must have driven past it a thousand times without stopping or even looking properly. But now, finally, I paid it the attention it deserves. For this is where, on September 16 1977, Marc Bolan of T Rex fame was killed outright when his purple Mini GT, driven by his American girlfriend Gloria Jones, crashed just before 5am. The charismatic glam rocker, who had started out as a mystical folkie, was two weeks shy of his 30th birthday.

"I've been visiting the site since six days after he died," said Fee Warner, whom I had arranged to meet at the tree. "I was a sufficiently fanatical fan to change my name to Bolan. Much to my father's disgust." Fee, a 47-year-old web designer from Hove, is the founder of TAG, the T Rex Action Group, and official guardian of the Bolan tree - she leased the land on which it stands from Railtrack.

We talked in Gipsy Lane, on the opposite side of the tree from the busy road. Thanks to Fee's efforts, the site is smart and dignified. Steps made from railway sleepers lead up a bank to the tree and a bust of Bolan, which was unveiled by his son, Rolan Bolan, in 2002.

The notice board Fee put up next to the tree is covered in poems and pictures. One message says: "I meet [sic] you in a restaurant in the King's Road some few months before you died. I always remember that. You are my precious star. Luv Clive X."

Nobody knows just how many people are drawn to the site. "But I'd say it's into the thousands each year," said Fee. "We rarely come here and not see somebody."

By happy coincidence, a fan was there when we arrived. Billy Sharpe, a 51-year-old musician from Leytonstone, east London, was sitting on the crash barrier next to the tree strumming his guitar. Resplendent in Crombie overcoat and pinstriped strides, he sang Hot Love, Get It On and Cosmic Dancer (which was used in the film Billy Elliot). "You feel a lot of peace," he said. "A lot of people have put a lot of love and prayers there. And when you play you get inspiration. A funny sort of feeling."

It's the same feeling I had on the back of my neck while sitting in The Grapes, and it's the reason why the "England Rocks!" campaign is such a good idea. Rock'n'roll is old enough to have a past, a venerable history. The places associated with it deserve the tourist treatment, being rather more interesting to the baby-boom generation than, say, ruins where dead royalty lived.

When I got to Liverpool - for only my second visit to the city - I quickly realised I had brought a bag of preconceptions with me, and I spent the next 24 hours shedding them. Why, for instance, did I think the rebuilt Cavern Club was a cynical tourist trap that bore little relation to the original, which was knocked down in 1973?

In fact, the new Cavern, which opened in 1984, retains the original address of 10 Mathew Street, though the entrance is 15 yards or so from the old one. It is located on roughly 75 per cent of the original site, using many of the old bricks to recreate the cellar arches but sensibly forgoing complete authenticity with the addition of toilets.

Those old bricks are covered in tributes from across the world: "In my life I love you more. Jorge from Mexico"; "Donna Sykes from Bolton"; "Finally at the Cavern - Liverpool!!! Daniel Lozano (Colombia)." But the Cavern is not simply a monument - fresh bands continue to come out of it, most recently The Coral.

Why, equally, had I suspected that Liverpool would be a bit of a dump? Its Georgian quarter is glorious, its municipal waterfront visionary and grand - it looks like a mini-Manhattan from the Mersey ferry - while the dug-up pavements and skyline of cranes testify to a frantic smartening towards its tenure next year of the title of European City of Culture. Pete Wylie had a theory for such misperceptions. "It's a lazy stereotyping thing," he said - Liverpool has never been properly understood by the rest of England because it has always felt apart.

This would explain why one of my companions on that day's "Magical Mystery Tour" of Liverpool had been so pleasantly surprised. Dorothy, from Atlanta, Georgia, said she was a "huge, huge" Beatles fan. The tour had been a birthday present from her husband. "I've so enjoyed it," she said, "but what surprised me is that I thought they came from just slums. I only came to Liverpool because of the Beatles, and I never expected the town to be as nice and pretty as it is."

Two prejudices in one, in fact, and I'm afraid I shared them both. Another prejudice to be comprehensively demolished was that the Magical Mystery Tour, which takes in all the key locations of the Beatles story, would be naff. Actually it's a revelation - though, like Hey Jude, it takes a while to lift off.

On a bitterly cold afternoon I had boarded an old Bedford bus with eight other hardy - you might say, rubber - souls: three Americans, three Britons and an Italian couple. Past Netto, Iceland and Matalan we drove, into the suburb of Wavertree, where we disembarked and cut down a cul-de-sac of two-up, two-downs called Arnold Grove.

"This is it," said Neil Brennan, who is a DJ at the Cavern when he isn't doing his amusing turn as a scally tour guide. "Number 12. George was actually born in the downstairs front room [on February 24 1943]."

It was faintly embarrassing to be mooching around outside. People live in George Harrison's old house. A Liverpool FC flag hangs from an upstairs bedroom window. There's a hanging basket of plastic flowers by the front door. We shuffled back to the bus.

Beyond Mosspits Junior School, from which Lennon was expelled, we reached the suburban village of Woolton, whose evident affluence had Dorothy and me metaphorically scratching our heads. The Victorian sandstone parish church of St Peter looked moreVicar of Dibley than Lady Madonna, but Neil pronounced it "one of the most important places in the history of rock'n'roll music."

For it was here, half a century ago - on July 6, 1957 - that Paul and John first met, when John's band, the Quarrymen, were playing at the church summer fete. "First thing Paul did was pick up John's guitar and tune it," said Neil. Eleanor Rigby's grave also happens to be here.

Outside the locked, red-painted iron gates of Strawberry Field (no ''s'' on Field, unlike in the song title), a former Salvation Army orphanage, Jim McDowell, who works in the music business in Seattle, asked me to take his picture. "It's all cool," he said wonderingly.

We paused, but did not disembark, outside the smart semi called Mendips in Menlove Avenue where Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi. "John's bedroom was the little one above the front door," said Neil.

Paul lived in nine different houses in Liverpool, but he spent the longest time, nine years, at 20 Forthlin Road. With its cream sash windows, which were taken from another house in the street, and lilac-coloured drainpipes, it looks like a piece of preserved heritage - which is what it is. Now owned by the National Trust, along with Mendips, it is accessible by guided tour only, from March to October.

"The front room is where the Quarrymen used to rehearse. And then the Beatles," said Neil. "Over 100 songs were written in that house - the majority of them in the bathroom because the acoustics were better there, apparently."

It was unexpectedly moving, seeing this little terraced house where Paul continued living with his dad even when he had achieved world-wide fame (he left in 1964). Colin Marriott, from Nottingham, stood and stared, feeling chuffed and choked. This tour was a birthday present for him, too. "I think they were just nice people, and people could relate to them," he said.

Penny Lane is a nondescript road of red-brick terraces: we trundled past the wine bar with the song lyrics painted outside, the boards advertising student accommodation, the chip shop... "Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes," sang the Beatles over the bus loudspeakers, and I felt that tingle on my neck.

It is touching that such a funny and proud song could have been written about such an ordinary place. In those few minutes I understood more clearly than ever before how this music must have exploded into the drab England of the early 1960s. To turn Pete Wylie's analogy on its head, the Beatles put colour into black-and-white lives.

The tour bus dropped us in Mathew Street, which is really the heart of the story. Here tourists pose by the statue of John, with its too-big head, and gaze on the Liverpool Wall of Fame, which commemorates songs by local acts that reached number one, starting with Lita Roza 's How Much Is that Doggie in the Window? in 1953 and including I Like It by Gerry and the Pacemakers and You're My World by Cilla Black.

Limbering up for my appointment with Pete Wylie, I had a drink with Neil, the DJ and tour guide, in the Cavern Pub (not to be confused with the club on the other side of Mathew Street).

There, among signed guitars and other Cavern Club memorabilia, I met the Liverpool musician known as The Amazing Professor Longhair, who told me a story that sums up Liverpool and the Beatles. It may be apocryphal but, hey, this is the city of urban myth.

Paul occasionally returns to his childhood home in Forthlin Road, apparently. On one such visit, a local scally saw McCartney's car parked in the road and, surmising he was a fan, tapped on the window.

"Hey mister," he said, "if you give us a nicker I'll show you where Paul McCartney lived."