The Reeperbahn, Hamburg — where the Beatles became a band

The Beatles made five trips to Hamburg between 1960 and 1962, playing at a series of clubs in the St. Pauli entertainment district — the Indra, the Kaiserkeller, the Top Ten Club, and the Star-Club — for audiences of sailors, sex workers, locals, and tourists who were not looking for the kind of experience the Beatles were providing and who required the band to hold their attention anyway. The education this produced cannot be overstated. John Lennon said: "I grew up in Hamburg, not Liverpool." He meant it literally: the Hamburg years transformed a group of promising teenagers into a professional band capable of playing eight hours a night.

The key venues were on or just off the Reeperbahn, the main street of the St. Pauli red-light district, and on Grosse Freiheit — the side street where the Kaiserkeller and Star-Club were located. The performance demands were extreme: four, six, eight hours a night, every night, for weeks and then months at a time, with audiences who could and would leave if the music wasn't compelling enough. To hold a room for that long, without a catalogue and without the infrastructure of a British pop career, required the band to expand their repertoire far beyond what any UK venue had required, to develop the improvisational stamina that their subsequent studio work drew on, and to refine the collective musical intelligence that made the Beatles what they became.

Stuart Sutcliffe — the fifth Beatle — stayed in Hamburg with his girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr after the band's second visit and died there in April 1962 of a brain haemorrhage. The Star-Club on Grosse Freiheit, where the Beatles played their final Hamburg engagement, is closed and the building has been converted; a plaque marks the address. Hamburg now acknowledges its role in the Beatles' formation with plaques and a small Beatles-Platz near the Reeperbahn.