娱乐英语新闻:Beatles' home Cavern Club to land cruise liner

LONDON, Nov. 19 (Xinhua) -- It was a small basement club that changed the world of music in the western world more than half a century ago.

Today hundreds of thousands of people make the pilgrimage every year to visit the Cavern Club in Liverpool, where one of the most popular pop groups ever, the Beatles, had teenage girls in early 1960s dancing and screaming to a new era of music.

A replica of the Cavern will soon be attracting a new generation of club goers aboard one of the world's biggest cruise liners.

The Cavern will be taken to the high seas as an attraction on the Norwegian Cruise Line's 4,228-passenger liner, MS Norwegian Epic.

An exclusive deal between the owners of the Cavern Club and the cruise line company was signed Tuesday night at the venue in Liverpool's Mathew Street, epicenter of the Cavern Quarter in the city centre.

Club owners said the deal was a case of "having a foot in the past and a hand in the future."

As part of the contract the Cavern Club, where live music is still played every day, will supply talented groups to play at the new floating Cavern.

The cruise company said it had undertaken intensive research before deciding the Cavern Club and The Beatles had a matchless appeal to European and American guests, far beyond any other international music venue.

The plan is to create the new Cavern Club at sea, with its authentically-replicated trademark brick arches, when the 155,000 gross tonne Norwegian Epic heads to a French shipyard in France in 2015 to be refitted.

The first visits to the new Cavern will dance the night away from next October when the Epic starts cruising from Barcelona.

Francis Riley, Norwegian Cruise Line vice president international, said: "The Cavern and the Beatles transcend all nationalities, backgrounds and generations, as we found out when we tested the idea with a series of shows onboard our ships. The kids have as much fun as the adults as this is lovely music which all people like."

In the 1960s the so-called Mersey beat exploded onto the music scene, with a distinctive brand of music headed by the Beatles, heralded even today as "four lads who shook the world."

From the dark underground brick cellar where they attracted scores of fans the group shot to worldwide fame, conquering the United States in 1964, leading to a host of events this year to mark the 50th anniversary of their first tour "across the pond."