Michael Brocken's excellent new book, The Twenty-First-Century Legacy of the Beatles: Liverpool and Popular Music Heritage Tourism, provides a forum for contemplating the, at times, vexing relationship between the Beatles and their Scouser roots. It offers new contexts for reading the place of Liverpool in the band mates’ lives and work, as well as the variety of mythologies about the Beatles’ origins that persist into the present day. Perhaps most significantly, Brocken makes inroads into our understanding of the burgeoning field of heritage tourism.

As the author of such books as The British Folk Revival: 1944–2002 (2003) and Other Voices: Hidden Histories of Liverpool's Popular Music Scenes, 1930s–1970s (2010), Brocken has already produced valuable historical studies in contemporary popular music. The Twenty-First-Century Legacy of the Beatles builds upon this firmament, addressing the many ways in which Liverpool has experienced the group's cultural, musical, and economic legacy across the six decades since the band achieved unparalleled worldwide fame. As Brocken notes, a great many Liverpudlians initially came to view the group in negative terms, given rock music's stereotypical sexual and hallucinogenic contexts. Yet in recent years, city leaders have come to embrace the Beatles’ legacy for its tremendous economic import, banking on popular and traditional heritage tourism to create ongoing financial opportunities through the unceasing celebration of the band mates’ lives and work. In so doing, Liverpool's Beatles tourism industry has intentionally redefined Liverpool via new interpretations of the historical past in order to establish the city as a landscape for (re)presenting the Beatles in myriad ways.

In the book's finest moments, Brocken usefully and astutely debunks a number of lingering mythologies, including the oft-told narratives about the so-called Cunard Yanks, those old salts who plied the shipping trade between New York and Liverpool, leaving scads of records behind in their wake. As a July 2015 article in the Guardian trumpeted, the Cunard Yanks worked on the transatlantic liners … in the 1950s—and every time they docked, they brought fresh sounds and fashions to an eager city.” Brocken takes no issue with the Cunard Yanks’ existence. On the contrary, he carefully demonstrates their place in the shipbuilding and port city's landscape. But at the same time, he convincingly demonstrates that the Cunard Yanks did not play a meaningful hand in developing the region's Merseybeat sound. Drawing upon his lifelong pursuit of record collecting in Liverpool and its environs, Brocken attributes such mythmaking to a certain “view of a local past which serves to raise people of Liverpool and the river Mersey. However, it simply must be suggested that a great deal of this kind of storytelling, while inspirational, is romanticist in its nature” (59).

Brocken succeeds admirably, moreover, in tracing the historical development of Beatles tourism in Liverpool from a cottage enterprise in its early years to a full-blown industry in the present. After decades of economic desolation, riots, and unemployment, the city's leadership made a conscious effort to cash in on Liverpool's heritage in order to stimulate tourism dollars and investment. Indeed, as Brocken points out, since the mid-1980s, Liverpool has seen the completion of phase one of the vaunted Albert Dock project, “the opening of Beatle City, the ‘Art of the Beatles’ exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, and the first Tall Ships visit (together with the arrival of Cavern Walks in Mathew Street)” (80). In the intervening years, the city has instituted similar efforts by protecting Beatle birthplaces via the National Trust and serving as a catalyst for the evolution of the Beatles Story museum, a massive permanent exhibition as part of the Albert Dock Merseyside-renovation project.

For Brocken, such urban-renewal efforts, while vital in terms of creating much-needed economic infrastructure for the greater Liverpool region, are inevitably fraught in terms of issues of authenticity and cultural heritage, especially when “fandom does not simply respond to music spaces and places, it creates them” (212). In this way, Brocken makes valuable inroads into our understanding of the cultural power of sites of heritage tourism, particularly in the convoluted historical worlds of popular and mass culture, where all too often the influence of storytelling and mythology rules the day. “Once hagiography takes over any narrative,” Brocken perceptively writes, “the worship of place and space almost naturally follows: apostles and disciples are seen to have ventured from a place of significance and this tends to be followed by pilgrims and authenticators traveling to that place” (55). As sites of heritage and pop-culture tourism abound among our contemporary landscapes, Brocken's The Twenty-First-Century Legacy of the Beatles provides a useful primer for interpreting their meaning and significance in our lives.