BERLIN?A new museum dedicated to the Beatles opened in Hamburg on Friday, 49 years since the band, at that time a five-piece with no Ringo Starr, first played in a run-down strip club in the German city.

The museum, called Beatlemania, includes five floors of artifacts and interactive exhibits and is in the same seedy Reeperbahn area of Hamburg where the band appeared during five different stints between 1960 and 1962.

The Beatles -- at that time John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best -- first took the stage at the Indra club on August 17, 1960.

The band would belt out rock'n'roll covers for hours on end in four different Hamburg clubs, an experience credited with creating the foundations for their prodigious talent that would later make them world-famous.

It was also in Hamburg that the band first performed with Starr, at the time drummer with another English band.

"When there were the four of us with Ringo, it always felt rockin'," Harrison would recall later.