"We had the impression of getting the gold ticket": Paul McCartney plays at Cavern Club | The music

Gordon Smith was visiting his brother in Manchester on Wednesday night when he saw rumors online for the first time that there would be a secret Paul McCartney concert at Liverpool's Cavern Club the next day. Around 8 am Thursday, the 21-year-old student from Edinburgh, and the Beatles' mega-fan, were lining up in front of the venue of the event.

He joined the line behind people who had camped overnight. The chance to see the former Beatle occur in the famous place to be the cradle of the Beatlemania. At 9am, McCartney's official Twitter account announced that 200 tickets for the 14h concert would be available for free on a first-come, first-served basis at the Echo Arena – a 15-minute walk – not the Cavern Club as so many did.

"I heard a man screaming behind me," Smith said. "I did not hear what he said, but I saw a group of people who were running away from the line." He asked a group to go upstairs. in a cab where they were going and they told him that they were going into the arena. "I'm not a sportswoman, but I ran as fast as I could from the Cavern club to the Echo arena and I managed to get a ticket, thankfully."

Others did not have that chance. Emma Ley wrote on Twitter that she had been waiting outside the Cavern Club for about 10 hours overnight to hear that they were being distributed at the arena. "I arrived five minutes too late," she wrote. "Gutted is an understatement – I'm not even happy for people with tickets – I'm sad and tired."

The first Cavern Club opened in a warehouse cellar on Mathew Street in Liverpool in 1957 and the Beatles would have played nearly 300 times in the early 1960s. The club closed in 1973 and the cellar was filled as part of the construction of the Merseyrail underground system.

In the 1980s, the club was rebuilt using several of the original bricks and reopened in 1984. Paul McCartney played at the Cavern Club only once since the 1960s, when 39, a concert in 1999 that was turned into a film Live at the Cavern Club

Paul and Tina Magee, officials in their fifties, patiently waited for the queue to enter the Caverns club around 1 pm. They had gone to work when a parking attendant told them that free tickets for the concert were available at the arena. The couple arrived to find only about 30 people online. "It felt like Charlie and the chocolate shop, as if we had received the gold bill," says Paul

Helen Brown, 37, was in a cab to join the waiting line in front of the Cavern club when she lives on Twitter that tickets would be donated to the arena. "I hijacked the taxi and when I went out, I threw him a lot of money and I did not even wait for the change.I just did it," says- she. "If I had been caught at a red light, I would have missed it."

"Over time, you realize how much the Beatles influenced everything," she said. "They changed things culturally, socially, musically … I grew up here with Liverpool parents, who saw the Beatles in the '60s and went to the Cavern Club, so it's me who starts a bit of that action … There is also the feeling that there would not be much more chances to see him play again. "