Girl's Don't Play Guitars writer on the return of the hit show

Standing among his fellow shortlisted competitors, Ian Salmon was willing his name NOT to be mentioned as the inaugural Liverpool Hope Playwriting Prize winners were announced in reverse order.

“It came to Highly Commended, and I was sitting there going ‘don’t say my name, don’t say my name!’ because obviously I wanted to win the main prize,” he recalls of that moment back in 2015. “And then when my name did come up I was like – yeah!”

His play The Comeback Special may not have taken the top accolade (and £10,000 prize) in the competition run by Liverpool Hope University and the city’s Royal Court, but it doesn’t seem to have held back the former HMV Church Street worker.

Over the past (almost) decade Salmon has written half-a-dozen plays which have all been performed at a variety of venues across the city – The Comeback Special itself at both the Hope Street and Epstein theatres.

Meanwhile his Hillsborough drama Those Two Weeks (Salmon’s dad and two brothers were at the match in 1989 and escaped physical injury but were all psychologically affected by what they witnessed) was premiered at the Unity in 2018 and transferred to the Epstein the following year.

But his biggest success – so far at least – has been his stage musical Girls Don’t Play Guitars which premiered to acclaim at the Royal Court in 2019.

In a world where pretty much every aspect of Liverpool’s 60s music scene has been minutely pored over and chronicled in books, and on stage, TV and film, one amazing tale appeared to have slipped through the net. Until Salmon’s music writer friend Paul Fitzgerald spotted an old black and white photo posted online.

It featured four young instrument-wielding women and was captioned The Liverbirds.

So began an odyssey of discovery, first by Paul who wrote an initial online feature about the all-but forgotten Merseybeat all-girl rock band and then, after a chance meeting with actor Drew Schofield, who suggested the story deserved to be a play, by Salmon.

And it’s quite the story. Four Liverpool teenagers – bassist and singer Mary McGlory, guitar and vocalists Pam Birch and Valerie Gell, and drummer Sylvia Saunders – stormed the city’s music scene before making their way to Hamburg where they settled and had even more success. All despite a certain John Winston Lennon telling them that ‘girls don’t play guitars’.

Perhaps it’s because they did decamp to the bright lights of St Pauli (where they were known as ‘the female Beatles’ and a star attraction at the famous Star-Club) that while they were huge in Europe, and a hit in Japan, they were mostly forgotten at home in Britain.

Above: The Liverbirds outside the Star-Club in Hamburg

Salmon’s subsequent stage dramatisation of their career, directed by Bob Eaton, was a smash hit with the Royal Court audience – and with Mary and Sylvia, the two surviving Liverbirds, too.

“They absolutely loved it,” he smiles. “It gave them the attention that they should have had in this country, because as massive as they were in Germany, and across the Continent, and in Japan, they weren’t known in England really, past obviously the people who saw them tour early on.

“So all of a sudden they were getting spoken about, with the acclaim they always should have had for who they were and what they did.”

It was, he admits, a huge responsibility, not least because the Liverbirds’ families attended the opening night.

Salmon explains: “I was showing their families their sisters’, aunties’, mums’, grandmas’ lives on stage. And I was showing them meeting the partners who would form those families. I showed Mary meeting Frank (her late husband Frank Dorstal) and Sylvia meeting John (her late husband), and at the end we tell you what they did with the rest of their lives, what happens afterwards. Both the good, and the tragic.

“When Frank introduced himself to Mary on stage, I was in tears. And I could hear her family in tears, because they were seeing their mum meet their dad on stage in front of them.”

Meanwhile Mary and Sylvia themselves loved it so much that they appeared – unannounced – live on stage each night for an encore where they played with the actor-musos telling their story.

And they have since gone on to write their own book, The Liverbirds: Our Life in Britain’s First Female Rock ‘n’ Roll Band, which was published earlier this year.

Above: Girls Don't Play Guitars was a smash hit when it premiered at the Royal Court in 2019.

Now, after a hiatus caused by the big C (Covid), Girls Don’t Play Guitars is back on the Royal Court stage, complete with the fab four actors who played the band last time around. The band is, indeed back together. And in fact, eight of the 10 cast are returning to their roles.

As for Salmon?

“I never studied (playwriting),” he says. “I don’t have a theatre background. I didn’t go to the theatre a great deal in the 80s, and when I did it was the Playhouse. My inspirations were Cavern of Dreams, Be Bop a Lupa and The Sound of Fury.

“I didn’t plan it. I became a playwright by accident.”

Perhaps, but having started, he’s become a prolific one. He has, he hints, three future music-based stage projects currently in the pipeline (including something new with the Royal Court) as well as hoping to revisit several of his current stable of plays.

And then there’s also a two-hander about another (mostly) forgotten woman – the silent film star Mabel Normand who as well as being a key part of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios (as told in Mack and Mabel) was also mentor to a young actor called Charlie Chaplin.

First up though is those Liverbirds and their amazing story, for which he retains further ambitions.

“It deserves to get out to the wider country,” he says. “Stick it in the West End, stick it on Broadway!”

Girls Don’t Play Guitars is at Liverpool’s Royal Court from tonight until October 26. Tickets HERE