Brian Epstein’s discovery of the Beatles is always portrayed as the luckiest accident in entertainment history. One day in November 1961, so the story goes, a teenage boy walked into the record department which 27-year-old Brian ran in the basement of NEMS, his family’s central Liverpool electrical store, and asked for a single called ‘My Bonnie’ by the Beatles.
Brian had never heard of the group or the record, but offered to order it for his young customer. In the process, he found that these Beatles were not foreigners, as he’d assumed from their weird name, but Liverpudlians who had made the track in Germany as backing musicians to Tony Sheridan. His curiosity aroused, Brian decided to go and see them at a Cavern club lunch-time session, only at that point realising that the Cavern was just a couple of hundred yards from his shop. So the young businessman in his bespoke suit ventured gingerly down the 18 steps–and stumbled on pure magic.
In reality, Brian was well aware of the Beatles long before he visited the Cavern. His record department thronged with their fans and also sold Mersey Beat, the local music paper whose pages they dominated (and to which he himself contributed a record column). He’d taken Mersey Beat’s editor, Bill Harry, out to lunch twice to pick Harry’s brains about them and sent his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, to the Cavern ahead of him to check them out. Taylor’s advice was grab them before anyone else could.
Nor was it relevant that Brian had no qualifications for managing a pop group beyond an interest in theatre and a flair for design and presentation; nor that the still largely blue-collar world of pop was at the furthest possible extreme from his own genteel middle-class one. In Britain’s nascent music business, almost every manager was a social cut above his artisan artistes, with little or no understanding of youth culture. Those first impresarios were making up the rules as they went along: Brian’s, uniquely, would be all about quality, value for money and good taste.
Uniquely, too, he was not motivated primarily by money; the Epstein chain of NEMS shops generated all he could ever want. His needs were more complex and rooted in a private life as troubled as it was privileged. The elder son of highly respectable Jewish parents, he was gay in an era when sexual acts between males were a crime punishable by imprisonment as well as an offence against his religion. To compound his feelings of guilt and self-loathing, he was drawn to casual sex in its riskiest forms–soliciting in public toilets or kerb-crawling the Liverpool docks, where entrapment by the police and ‘queer-bashing’ gangs were continual hazards. His daily life as a dapper, sophisticated man-about-town had a dark underside of shame, fear and violence.
His epiphany at the Cavern therefore had little to do with the Beatles’ music. In their all-over black leather, they were four delectable bits of juvenile ‘rough trade’; a quadruple fantasy he could enjoy without his usual shame or fear of grievous bodily harm. He was to love them in a platonic, almost paternal way, calling them ‘the Boys’ until well after they became men, and dedicating himself to their welfare and protection.
But he was in love with just one. Not with Paul, the most obviously attractive, but with John, whose tough-guy exterior hid a middle-class upbringing not unlike Brian’s own, and who’d needed an all-protecting father figure since the age of six. So, yet again, a back seat for Paul–one which this time he took with some relief.
On the Beatles’ side, there was never any doubt that being managed by such a prominent local businessman, for whatever reasons, would be a major step forward. But, as lords of the Mathew Street underworld, they had developed a super-sized attitude from which even their most career-conscious and punctilious member was not immune. When an exploratory meeting with Brian was arranged at the NEMS store after hours, Paul failed to turn up. George telephoned 20 Forthlin Road to ask what had happened to him and learned he was taking a leisurely bath. Brian blushed with irritation–an unfortunate trait he had–and spluttered, ‘He’s going to be very late.’
‘But very clean,’ the deadpan George pointed out.
At further meetings which didn’t clash with Paul’s bath-time, Brian set out what he’d do for the Beatles if they put themselves in his hands: firstly, secure them a contract with a major British record label rather than an obscure West German one, then make them nationally famous. It was all pure bluff–and in the end, of course, incalculable understatement.
Paul was the one who questioned Brian most closely, asking if the plan involved changing the music they played or the way they played it. Reassured that they’d be left just as they were (a false promise, it would turn out), he deferred to John for the final verdict, delivered with typical Lennon directness: ‘Right, Brian. Manage us.’
Although there were already two people with managerial claims on the Beatles, neither stood in Brian’s way or tried to take any share of them. Allan Williams willingly gave them up without a penny but–still fuming over his unpaid Hamburg commission–advised Brian not to touch them ‘with a bargepole’. Mona Best, Williams’s successor, acknowledged that Brian could do more for them than she ever could, and was content with the benefit which would accrue to her son.
As Paul, like George and Pete, was under 21, Brian couldn’t put him under contract without his father’s consent. Jim McCartney offered no objection, believing in the popular stereotype of Jewish people as ‘good with money’. It helped, too, that the McCartneys’ upright piano, on which Jim showed Paul his first chords, and on which he wrote his very first songs, had come from the Epstein family’s original NEMS shop in Walton.
Living on the fringe of Liverpool’s underworld as they did, the Beatles knew all about Brian’s secret gay life and quickly guessed his fixation on John. (Strangely, none of their families ever seemed aware of any of it.) Although John hadn’t a gay bone in his body, he took malicious pleasure in playing up to Brian, pretending to lead him on, then rebuffing him as cruelly as only John knew how. John wasn’t the only Beatle to arouse Brian’s ardour: Pete Best has since claimed to have been propositioned by him on a car journey to Blackpool while John and Cynthia were sitting in the back. But never once would he show the tiniest flicker of attraction to Paul.
‘I think Brian felt a bit guilty because he ought to have fancied Paul, but didn’t,’ a former NEMS employee recalls. ‘That always seemed to make him a bit uneasy around Paul and try extra hard if he ever had to do anything for him.’
Soon after Brian’s takeover, Mersey Beat announced a readers’ poll for the most popular of Liverpool’s 350-odd bands. Like many others, the Beatles sent in dozens of voting slips nominating themselves and putting their greatest rival, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, last on the candidates list. Rory’s band in fact received more votes but Bill Harry let the Beatles win by a landslide. Their picture occupied the upper half of Mersey Beat’s front page, in their Hamburg black leather suits (of which numerous Cavern habitués, girls as well as boys, now wore copies). Once again, Paul’s surname was spelt ‘McArtrey’.
In this heady atmosphere, a management contract was drawn up between John Winston Lennon, James Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Randolph Peter Best, binding them to NEMS Enterprises, a company newly created by Brian, for five years at a commission of 10 to 15 per cent. Though all four ‘boys’ signed the document, he himself forgot to do so, making the whole exercise pointless. Not until the following October would a proper contract be sealed, giving him 25 per cent. At Paul’s instigation, the boys tried to beat him down to 20 per cent, but he argued the extra five was for the expenses he’d incur–on his crusade to make them ‘bigger than Elvis’.
Their entourage, such as it was, also became absorbed into NEMS Enterprises. Apart from their driver/roadie, Neil Aspinall, this consisted of just one other, a droll teenager named Tony Bramwell, who’d known George since childhood–and had been one of the many babies delivered by Paul’s mother. Bramwell followed them around to all their gigs, so ubiquitous that John nicknamed him ‘Measles’, and would carry their guitars for them. ‘I’d been doing it for nothing for months,’ he recalls. ‘Now Brian offered to pay me to do it.’
Brian’s first step was to make the Beatles run as efficiently as his record department at the family store. The smallest and lowest-paying of their gigs were now treated like Royal Command performances; before each one, they and Neil Aspinall would receive a detailed briefing, typed on Brian’s headed notepaper, giving the address of the venue, the promoter’s name, the rendezvous times with Neil and the duration of the performance. Every week, the NEMS wages clerk would make up regulation pay packets for them, each containing £20, which were hand-delivered by Tony Bramwell.
Brian also personally took over their promotion, designing lavish display ads for the Liverpool Echo and other local papers, and posters heralding the coming of ‘Mersey Beat Poll Winners! Polydor Recording Artists! Prior to European Tour!’ [i.e. Hamburg again]. ‘Just billing them as Polydor recording artists instantly raised the level of their gigs,’ Bramwell says. ‘Now they weren’t playing church halls any more, but Top Rank ballrooms.’
While keeping his promise not to interfere with their music, Brian (going back on that promise to Paul) revolutionised the band’s stage-presentation or, rather, lack of it, decreeing there was to be no more onstage smoking, eating, clowning or backchat with the audience. Drinking, of course, couldn’t be prevented, but between sets they must no longer adjourn to the nearest bar, where trouble–usually involving John–was always liable to start. Instead, Neil would bring them drinks and sandwiches backstage. So from here on the black-leather Cavern scruffs had a Green Room.
Brian’s final target was those Hamburg-bought outfits which, ironically, had been one of the band’s main excitements for him in the first place. It happened that Cliff Richard’s Shadows, now a successful act in their own right, were appearing at the Liverpool Empire. Brian took John, Paul, George and Pete to the show, then told them that if they wanted to make it, they must wear the same kind of dapper matching suits.
Paul has always been portrayed as Brian’s ally in smartening up the Beatles and so robbing their stage performance of an excitement and authenticity that only their Cavern audience fully experienced–the first step in the ‘selling out’ that John would condemn so bitterly in retrospect.
Paul certainly was all for going into suits, indeed had already made some sketches of a possible Beatles stage uniform. But John at that point was just as hungry to succeed by whatever means it took; he later admitted he would have worn ‘a balloon if someone [was] going to pay me’. Besides, as Tony Bramwell points out, the suits Brian provided weren’t ‘tatty, flash stuff like other bands wore onstage’, but tailor-made, in ‘grey brushed tweed’, costing £40 apiece, the equivalent of £1000 today. Nor did he object when Brian–supported by Paul–said they should end every show with a deep bow in unison like actors taking a curtain-call.
Brian was not working totally blind. Early on, he enlisted the help of Joe Flannery, a fellow member of Liverpool’s clandestine gay community with whom, some years earlier, he’d had an atypically happy, stable relationship. Flannery already managed a band, Lee Curtis and the All Stars, fronted by his younger brother. ‘I met up with Brian only about a week after he’d started managing the Beatles,’ he remembers. ‘It was at the Iron Door club [the Cavern’s main rival, in Temple Street]. My brother’s group needed to borrow a bass amp, so I asked Paul for a loan of his. But he just nodded at John and said, “Ask the boss.”’
After late gigs, the Beatles would often crash out at Flannery’s comfortable flat in Gardner Road. ‘When they’d sleep in my sitting-room, I noticed there was a pecking-order. John always had the couch while Paul made do with two armchairs pushed together.
‘I used to have a part-Norwegian housekeeper named Anne, who’d stay late to make them sandwiches, helped by her very attractive 17-year-old daughter, Girda. Paul took a fancy to Girda and would always be in the kitchen chatting to her. One night, her mother pointed the breadknife at him and said. “You shouldn’t be out here. Get back in the sitting-room where you belong!”’
Flannery negotiated bookings with the tougher promoters who would have been put off by Brian’s genteel accent. He also joined in Brian’s little subterfuges to impress the Beatles–like telling him in front of them that Elvis Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, was calling long distance from America.
But Brian was very far from being all bluff. Thanks to NEMS’s reputation as one of the north’s largest record retailers, he was able to get the Beatles an audition with the mighty Decca label almost immediately. A Decca producer named Mike Smith came up to Liverpool, saw them at the Cavern and was sufficiently impressed to offer them a studio audition on 1 January 1962.
On 31 December, they set off for London separately, Brian by train, the Beatles in Neil Aspinall’s van. Unfortunately, Neil lost his way and a journey that should have lasted only about four hours took more than ten. Having finally reached central London, they got caught up in its traditionally rowdy New Year’s Eve celebrations around the Trafalgar Square fountains. At one point, a man approached them, offering something called ‘pot’ which he suggested they should ‘smoke’ together in the back of Neil’s van. The Liverpool lads turned and fled.
As a result, they were all viciously hung-over when they met up with Brian the next morning at Decca’s studios in Broadhurst Gardens, St John’s Wood–Paul’s first glimpse of the leafy north London enclave he would one day call home. They were kept waiting a long time in reception, to Brian’s blushing annoyance, then were informed that their amps weren’t good enough to record, so they’d have to use the studio’s own. They had just one hour to demo 15 songs, chosen (by Brian) from their huge repertoire of R&B and pop cover versions and standards, plus three Lennon–McCartney originals.
The Beatles’ Decca audition has gone down in history as a disastrously below-par performance that gave no real idea of who or what they were. In fact, despite the hangovers and haste, it was a showcase of enormous versatility and charm, ranging from Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’, delivered with all John’s bitter brio, to Paul’s heartfelt ‘Till There Was You’ and George’s surprisingly sweet version of Bobby Vee’s ‘Take Good Care Of My Baby’; from the semi-comic ‘Sheik Of Araby’ and ‘Three Cool Cats’ to a quickstep version of Harry Warren’s ‘September In The Rain’, sung by Paul as if there wasn’t a rock ‘n’ roll bone in his body. The Lennon-McCartney songs were John’s ‘Hello Little Girl’ and Paul’s ‘Like Dreamers Do’ and ‘Love of the Loved’.
In the end, versatility proved to be their undoing; the Decca people could see no way of marketing such an unfocused bunch of musical eccentrics in the simplistic British pop scene of 1962. That they hailed from so distant and inaccessible a part of the country also helped tip the balance against them. So the Beatles were turned down and a north London butcher named Brian Poole and his band, the Tremeloes, were signed instead.
The Liverpool bands who competed with each other so ferociously onstage were privately the best of friends who liked nothing better than to meet up and drink together after a long night at the Cavern or the Iron Door. Their favourite rendezvous–offering entertainment as good as any city nightspot–was the home of the Hurricanes’ flamboyant front man, Rory Storm.
Rory carried his ‘Mr Showmanship’ tag into everyday life, having changed his name by deed poll from Alan Caldwell and even renamed his family’s house in Broadgreen Road ‘Stormsville’. His mother, Vi, was his most ardent fan and welcomed his musician friends to Stormsville at any hour of the night, providing non-stop food and hot drinks, plus a mixture of straight talking and zany humour that could put even John Lennon into the shade.
Often present at these sitting-room soirées would be Rory’s younger sister Iris, a bubbly 17-year-old who’d had a childhood romance with George Harrison. Iris had kept up the family tradition of unconventionality by running away, joining a circus and becoming a trapeze artiste: she now worked as a dancer in pantomimes and summer variety shows, specialising in the French cancan.
‘Paul and John used to love my parents,’ she recalls. ‘My dad was the most totally good man I’ve ever known. Each week, he used to open his pay packet, take only what he needed to feed and clothe us, then give the rest to charity. He’d usually have gone to bed when the Beatles arrived; they called him “the Crusher” because he had these nightmares that made him shout out and roll around the bed. And they called my mum “Violent Vi”, I suppose because they could never best her in an argument.’
Iris had known Paul for years as a friend of Rory’s but one night at a Beatles gig she noticed him looking at her in a different way. ‘It was at the Operation Big Beat show at New Brighton Tower, when they were on with [black American singer] Davy Jones. The Twist had just come in and I demonstrated it with the Beatles backing me.
‘People have always thought Paul wrote “I Saw Her Standing There” about me because I was “just seventeen” when he asked me out. But in the two years we were together, he always used to say he couldn’t write a song about me, because the only thing that rhymed with “Iris” was “virus”.’
It turned into another ‘going steady’ arrangement, fitted in between Beatles gigs and Iris’s commitments as a dancer. ‘We’d go to the cinema every Tuesday: Paul would pay one week, I’d pay the next. Or we’d go to the Empire if a big name was on–always sitting in the cheap seats. Paul liked what I thought were quite square entertainers, like Joe “Mr Piano” Henderson. He knew all of Joe’s numbers and sang along with them, which I found a bit embarrassing.’
Even with the feisty Iris, he remained something of a couture control-freak. ‘Because of being in show business, I was used to glamming myself up. But Paul only liked me to dress very plainly… dark skirts and jumpers, my hair in a bun. Later on, I laughed when I read that he’d turned into such a vegetarian. When we were going out, his favourite meal used to be lamb chops, chips and peas.’
Iris had always been a regular at the Cavern, cheering on both her brother’s band and the Beatles. But that changed when Brian Epstein came along. Brian feared the Beatles’ female fans would desert them if they were known to have wives or even girlfriends. ‘He asked Rory to ask me not to go down the Cavern any more,’ Iris recalls, ‘in case anyone found out we were dating.’
Paul by now had a car of his own, bought with the aid of a loan from his father. The model he chose was typically aspirational: one of the new Ford Classics in a colour named Goodwood Green, after Britain’s poshest motor racing circuit, and advertised as ‘suitable for the golf-club car park’.
‘Wherever we went, he always had to be the centre of attention,’ Iris says. ‘John used to love to imitate Quasimodo or what he called “Spassies” [spastics] and Paul had picked it up from him. One night we’d gone to this coffee bar in Birkenhead called The Cubic Club because everything was cube-shaped–the tables, the seats. Paul’s showing-off got on my nerves so much that I picked up the sugar-bowl–the sugar was the one thing there not in cubes–and emptied it over his head.
‘We were always having rows and breaking up. And whenever we did, George would be round the next day, asking me to go out with him again.’
Much of their time together was spent in the sitting-room at ‘Stormsville’, listening to the wild cries of Iris’s dad having his spectacular nightmares in bed upstairs. ‘My dad used to sleepwalk as well. One night he came downstairs in his pyjamas fast asleep and ran out into the street, saying he was looking for his car. Paul went after him and talked him back indoors and up to bed again.
‘After the Beatles had been out on a gig, Paul used to like my mum to comb his legs. He’s quite hairy, and having his legs combed seemed to relax him. He’d say “Oo, Vi, give me legs a comb” and roll up his trouser-leg, and Mum would get a comb and do it.
‘She loved him but she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind about the way he used his good looks and charm to get away with things–like always smoking other people’s cigarettes instead of buying his own. I remember her saying to him once, “You’ve got no heart, Paul.”’
Through her dancing, Iris moved in higher show business circles than young men who strummed guitars in Liverpool cellars. While going out with Paul, she also saw a lot of Frank Ifield, an Australian singer/yodeller whose ‘I Remember You’ topped the UK singles charts for seven weeks in early 1962. The friendship was purely platonic, though Ifield clearly wished it could be more.
‘When Frank came to Liverpool to appear at the Empire, Paul told me he’d got tickets–and for a change, we weren’t in the cheap seats but the front row. When Frank came onstage, he could see the two of us sitting there, cuddled up together and holding hands. He didn’t give any sign of having seen us, but I knew the next song he sang was aimed directly at Paul. It was Jim Reeves’s “He’ll Have to Go”.
‘I was in two worlds at the same time. After the show, I’d be having drinks at the Lord Nelson [pub] with Frank and the Shadows and the other stars on the bill. Then I’d go outside and find Paul waiting for me, and we’d get fish and chips on the way home.
‘When the week was over, I saw Frank off on the train from Lime Street station. Then I turned round and saw Paul coming along the platform, doing his Quasimodo act.’