Beatles fans can study for a master’s degree in the Fab Four at the University of Liverpool
- Professor Holly Tessler says course is centred not just on their music but the growth of Beatles-connected tourism in the city 50 years after they split up
- In spite of the pandemic, the course has attracted widespread publicity and interest from potential students worldwide
They were the shots that were heard around the world … and for a bookish 10-year-old girl in Philadelphia, in the United States, the assassination of John Lennon, in 1980, ignited a passion for The Beatles that would transplant her from stateside to Merseyside.
“Day in, day out, all you would see on TV was thousands of people in floods of tears, and I thought, ‘Who was this guy? He must have been really important,’” Holly Tessler recalls.
“That set me off wondering who The Beatles were. Being a nerd, I went to the library and found a biography and I became fascinated.
“I would come home and say to my parents, ‘Did you know Paul McCartney is left-handed?’ After weeks of endlessly studying trivia, my parents said, ‘Listen to the music, kid.’ So, I did – and that’s what really did it for me.”
Two decades later, Tessler made a pilgrimage to The Beatles’ birthplace, Liverpool, in northwest England, to do an MBA specialising in the music industry, arriving just in time for the death of a second Beatle, George Harrison.
“Walking through Liverpool you saw floods of media people from around the world,” she recalls. “It was remarkable. I thought, ‘The Beatles left Liverpool decades before. Why are they here?’ Usually when someone dies the attention is on the city where they died, not where they were born. I realised there was a very strong connection between Liverpool and The Beatles.”
