Hello, hello!

My name is Barry de Gooijer. I live in Bolsward a small town in the North of the Netherlands.

I’ve know the Beatles for all my life, since most part of my family is a Beatle fan. At the age of 14 however, I got my first guitar and started to learn a couple of Beatle songs. At that time I discovered that a lot of songs I love are actually from the Beatles (the age of 14 is an important age for identifying yourself with a music genre I think).

So to speed a couple of years, I became obsessed with the Beatles and the way they play their songs (the exact chords George plays on the Ed Sullivan show are different from the studio versions of most songs for instance). At the age of 19 my father introduced me to a colleague of him, he was a Beatle fan himself too and had a book collection with over 600 books all dedicated to the Beatles. He also played guitar, so we jammed a bit and talked and talked and talked only Beatles. A couple of weeks later I got a phonecall from him telling me that he had something special for me. He said that he didn’t want any possessions and he knew that I was becoming an Beatles expert, so he told me that I am the new owner of the book collection if I keep the collection safe and read some books and, when I have the same age as him, I must give the collection to another Beatle fan who I trust.

So that starts the story were I have a room full of Beatles books. I have registered them, lend them to other Beatles fans (like a library). I knew I could never read all the books I now owned, and with all these books in my room I felt I had a job to do. To share my luck with others. I wanted to spread more Beatles stories, so I started my own website:http://www.beatlesuniversity.com where I put some stories from the books on, wrote some guitar tabs for Beatles songs I knew were always thaught the wrong way and got my own Beatles Facebook page called: Beatleology.

I have visited Liverpool twice, and been to the Beatles story three times and I am thrilled to be a part of the growing understanding of the museum and the Beatles story. To be an Ambassador is a great honor.

26th November, 2015