Come together, right now, in the Beatles’ Liverpool

How does it feel to ride a bus down Penny Lane and take in the very sights and shops that inspired Paul McCartney to write his song based on a leafy Liverpool street?

How about standing in front of the Cavern Club stage where the Beatles first made history?

What fan doesn’t want to walk in the Beatles’ footsteps?

On Trafalgar’s tour of Liverpool, you can savor a more personal view of the Fab Four, visiting the places where John, Paul, George and Ringo grew up, went to school and played gigs. It’s all part of Trafalgar’s “Insider Experiences,” which bring destinations to life through close encounters with local people.

One way to get closer is to spend a few hours with Philip Coppell. The tall John Cleese lookalike with the colorful Beatles tie describes himself as “the world’s most qualified Beatles guide” (and he has the master’s in popular music to prove it). As he leads small tour groups around Liverpool on a bus — as he did our Trafalgar group on a sunny October day recently — he spills facts, figures and quotes. He’s sort of a Beatles detective, piecing together narratives, cross-checking facts, debunking myths. There are a lot of Beatles myths.

“John liked to say he was born during an air raid over Liverpool in 1942, but it’s not true,” Phil says as we stop by 251 Menlove Avenue, the middle-class suburban home where John Lennon grew up with his Aunt Mimi. (It’s now owned by the National Trust after Yoko Ono bought the house and donated it.) “It just sounded more dramatic.”

He also notes that it wasn’t always “the Fab Four.” Some 27 musicians have come and gone from the Beatles’ original lineup since they began as the Quarrymen in 1958.

Let Coppell take you down to Strawberry Field, and you’ll find a bright red gate — now decorated with Lennon graffiti — that is not the original entrance to the Salvation Army headquarters, which John obliquely mentions in his song, but a restoration. No matter: Beatle fans still love to take selfies there.

For fans, seeing the places where the Fab Four failed to make headway — such as the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, which flunked out Paul and George, and the John Moores Arts University, where John performed “dismally” (he once said, “The only thing I got out of that place was a couple of amplifiers I stole when I was there”) — is all part of the experience. Noting a glass-enclosed building called The Palm House in one of Liverpool’s parks, we’re told George donated 150,000 pounds for its restoration in the ’90s. “I felt guilty, because I used to throw rocks through the windows when I was a kid,” George said.

What’s more striking is realizing that John and Paul grew up just a few kilometers apart: when they started writing songs together, they would meet upstairs at Paul’s house on Forthlin Road (now a National Trust site that allows visitors by appointment). There they collaborated on their first song — I Saw Her Standing There — among others. (It was cheeky John who suggested changing Paul’s line “She was just 17 and a true beauty queen” to “and you know what I mean.”)

One highlight of the Liverpool tour is Penny Lane where, as Coppell plays the bouncy Beatles track over the coach speakers, you can visualize how Paul actually wrote the song: imitating the “ding-ding” of the bus bells and the conductor calling out the stops (“Penny Lane!”). And yes, there is a barbershop, a bank and a fire station down Penny Lane. But no “pretty nurse selling poppies from a tray.”

On the Trafalgar tour, you’ll stop by the modern Liverpool Cathedral designed by Giles Gilbert Scott (who also designed London’s familiar red telephone booth); it’s where Paul premiered his Liverpool Oratorio in 1991 featuring the church’s youth choir (a choir that turned him down as a kid). And you’ll find that Liverpool, far from the place the Beatles couldn’t wait to escape, is actually rich in charm and history. (A couple hundred million pounds pumped into its regeneration by the European Union must’ve helped.) Down at Albert Dock, you’ll see the famous Mersey Ferry of Gerry and the Pacemakers pop fame, and the White Star shipping line, which built and operated the RMS Titanic (before it sank). In fact, Liverpool was the biggest port in Europe at the time, bringing in floods of immigrants from Ireland (during the ’30s Potato Famine) and elsewhere. This is one reason, Coppell says, that bands like the Beatles flourished: abundant musical heritage. “It’s a combination of influx of Welsh and Irish, who both brought musical tradition with them. It was very much the Irish, their heritage via the music.” (In fact, Liverpool is in the Guinness Book of Records for producing the most number one pop singles — everyone from the Beatles to Frankie Goes to Hollywood to Echo and the Bunnymen.) Add to that the ships bearing American pop records in the ’50s — Ray Charles, Isley Brothers, Everly Brothers, Elvis Presley — and the Beatles had a pretty solid exposure to songwriting and record-making.

But all that hard work first came to fruition on a local club stage, and the Liverpool tour is capped by a visit to the Cavern, the former wine cellar down cobblestoned Matthew Street where the Beatles played regularly in the early ’60s. (The entrance ticket bills it, perhaps rightly, as “The most famous club in the world.”) Descend the winding stairs and approach its tunnel-like stage and it’s still as lively as it looks in early Beatles footage; bands play here all day long, as tourists snap shots and down pints and take in the cave-like ambience that makes this an unbeatable tourist attraction. Across the street, a brick wall bears the names of hundreds of famous bands that have played here since — The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, The Kinks, The Faces, Thin Lizzy, even Adele. Downstairs, behind a nearby glass case are actual Beatle instruments, and if you stand next to the empty stage after the band finishes its set, you can feel a special electric hum inside: it’s the inner knowledge that hey, the Beatles actually played here! Right in front of me!