TONY BOOTH
The Beatles Poster
24th August -
30th September 2016
Tony Booth presents a rare collection of early Beatles gig posters at Liverpool's Mathew Street 'View Two Gallery' during the International Beatleweek 2016 Festival.
Liverpool Docks and the Overhead Railway / Stitched textiles / 35cm x 35cm
Eight-days-a-week Beatles poster artist Tony Booth is holding his first ever exhibition, more than 50 years after Mersey Beat era
He was the man who helped put The Beatles in the days before twitter, facebook, and social media, with posters created by artist Tony the main way of telling fans of upcoming gigs by The Beatles, Cilla Black and other stars of the 1960s Mersey Beat era.
Tony, now 83, and still working eight-days-a-week producing posters, has faithfully reproduced 40 of his favourite posters for an exhibition in August in Liverpool’s world famous Mathew Street.
The show starting August 24 at View Two Gallery (above John Lennon’s Bar), just yards away from the iconic Cavern Club, takes place during Liverpool’s “International Beatles Week” Festival.
Only a handful of the original posters produced in the hundreds by Tony in the 1960s have survived, with the vast majority discarded as waste paper once the gigs had taken place.
One Cavern Club poster, which Tony produced for a fee of “five bob” (25p) sold to an American collector in a London Auction House for £27,500.
Tony still hand-paints Beatles and other posters using the same materials and paper that he used over fifty years ago. He has already been commissioned by the famous Cavern Clubn to produce posters for their 60th anniversary in January next year.
Tony Booth: Original Artist for The Beatles (BBC1)