Does the hair salon in the Beatles song “Penny Lane” really exist?

Among the characters, places and pastimes we encounter in Penny Lane are the bus stop in the middle of the roundabout where the Beatles bought fish and chips and gave finger pies to girls their own age. There is also a banker who never wears a coat even when it rains, a fireman with an hourglass and a nurse who sells flowers.

But the most famous reference of all is the one that opens the song and reappears in the last verse. The barber in Penny Lane, on whose wall “hangs photographs of every head he has ever known”. McCartney confirmed that this lyric is based on a real hairdressing salon, where the barber “had those pictures that all barbers have, of the haircut you can have if you ask for it”,

So who was the barber?

The real barber shop McCartney was referring to is actually just past the end of Penny Lane, about 50 metres past the bus stop roundabout, on Smithdown Place in the Liverpool district of Wavertree. In the 1980s, the song’s composer gave an interview in which he mentioned the shop by name. “There was a barber called Bioletti, a small barber. I think he’s still there actually.”

At the time, Italian hairdresser Bioletti still ran his small shop at the end of Liverpool’s famous lane, but he has since sold the business. When current owner Tony Slavin took over, he renamed it Penny Lane Barber Shop. Among the photos that now adorn the shop’s wall is one of Paul McCartney himself, sitting in one of the chairs, having his hair styled by John Lennon in the early 1960s.

Tony Slavin’s barber shop is still in operation and generally open, except for a temporary closure for renovations. He received a visit from the man who made him famous six years ago, during his appearance on The Late Late Show‘s Carpool Karaoke. Apparently, however, he didn’t have time for a haircut, as he left the store with the same usual mullet hairstyle he went in with