Nick Goss

bar stools
defunct snare drums
palms
kettle leads
battered amps

The associated detritus of playing in a band. I wanted to paint an imagining of the rehearsal spaces and small venues that the fledgling Beatles would have faced arriving in Hamburg. The hours spent in liminal/non-space rooms. When emptied out in the daytime, these Hamburg venues, like the Indra or the Kaiser Keller, must have had a peculiar melancholic atmosphere – spaces clad in cheap insulating material that offered limited comfort, but allowed ideas and musical potential to gestate and flourish.

Stuart Sutcliffe’s story is fuelled with melancholy, an emotive feeling I wanted to convey through this work.