He was often to be found at Lime Street station during that early spring of 1962, if not always in the same jokey mood. With John, George and Pete, he’d meet Brian Epstein off the train from London; they’d go to a nearby coffee bar named the Punch and Judy and Brian would give them the usual depressing news. Armed with the Decca audition tape–which, since he’d paid for it, could now be termed a demo–Brian visited one London record company after another, pitching an act which, he said, was potentially ‘bigger than Elvis’. The record company men smiled at that, smiled even more patronisingly at the idea of such a thing coming out of Liverpool. ‘You’ve got a good business, Mr Epstein,’ said one, meaning his family’s NEMS electrical stores. ‘Why not stick to it?’
At the same time, smoothing out his boys’ rough edges was proving a laborious process. In April, they were booked for a two-week return visit to Hamburg–the first of three that year–to appear at the Reeperbahn’s brand-new Star-Club. ‘Don’t be raping on the Reeperbahn,’ Iris Caldwell’s irrepressible mum admonished Paul when he called at ‘Stormsville’ to say adieu.
Under the band’s new management, there were no more punishing trans-European journeys by road or rail. John, Paul and Pete flew out from Manchester on 11 April, leaving George, who had flu, to follow later with Brian. At Hamburg airport, the first-comers were met by Astrid and Klaus Voormann, who told them Stu Sutcliffe had died from a brain haemorrhage the previous day. His mother, Millie, was also en route from Liverpool to identify the body.
Stu’s death was a devastating blow to John (who always regarded the premature demise of those he loved as a personal betrayal). Paul, for his part, suffered pangs of extreme guilt, remembering the friction there had often been between Stu and himself in their battle for John’s attention. But in truth he had nothing to reproach himself for; the pity was that he and Stu, with their common passion for art, never became the friends they should have been.
Stu’s fatal haemorrhage was attributed to ‘trauma to the brain’, generally believed to date back to a year earlier, when he still played bass with the Beatles and they would often be targeted by the disgruntled boyfriends of their female fans. After a gig at Lathom Hall, Stu had been alone backstage when he was set on by a gang of toughs, knocked to the ground and kicked in the head. John came to his rescue, fighting off the attackers with such reckless ferocity that he broke the little finger of his right hand.
Forty years after the event, however, Stu’s younger sister, Pauline, published a different theory, allegedly based on what he’d told her and his mother shortly before his death. This was that during the Beatles’ second stint in Hamburg, Paul, John and Stu had been out walking and John had attacked Stu without provocation or warning, knocking him down, then kicking him in the head with savagery enough to cause trauma to the brain and then some. John had immediately fled the scene, leaving Paul to pick up Stu–by now bleeding from the face and one ear–and help him back to the Beatles’ dorm above the Top Ten club. As a result, John had always believed himself responsible for Stu’s death and been haunted by guilt and remorse until his own dying day.
Yet no plausible explanation was forthcoming of why John, however unhinged by drink or pills, should have brutalised someone he loved, admired–and protected–as much as he did Stu. And had Paul truly been the sole eyewitness to such an incident, it would presumably have stayed seared on his memory for ever. ‘It’s possible Stu and John had a fight in a drunken moment,’ he says now. ‘But I don’t remember anything that stands out.’
The Star-Club’s manager, Horst Fascher, was one of St Pauli’s most renowned tough guys, a former featherweight boxing champion who’d done time for accidentally killing a sailor in a street brawl. Fascher loved rock ‘n’ roll and adored the Beatles; consequently, they’d always been immune to any harm from the Reeperbahn’s criminal community, both the gangsters and protection racketeers at its top and the muggers and pickpockets at its bottom.
Apart from a team of extra-brutal waiter/bouncers known as ‘Hoddel’s gang’, Fascher’s main innovation at the Star-Club was bringing over American rock ‘n’ roll legends whose careers had shrunk to almost nothing in their homeland. The first of those with whom the Beatles overlapped was their greatest hero after Elvis–Gene Vincent.
At close quarters, however, their hero turned into a bit of a nuisance: a borderline psychopath who always carried a loaded gun (‘Not much point in carryin’ it if it ain’t loaded,’ as he explained) and liked to show off the unarmed combat techniques he’d learned in the US Marines. He was particularly keen to use Paul to demonstrate how he could put someone ‘out’ simply by touching a couple of pressure-points. ‘C’mon… it’ll only last for a coupla’ minutes,’ wheedled the same sacred voice that had sung ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’. But Paul would have none of it, and got less and less polite about saying so.
At the Star-Club, the Beatles also shared the bill–and, often, the stage–with Roy Young, a high-octane singer/pianist, dubbed ‘England’s Little Richard’, whom they’d once watched on the BBC’s first all-rock ‘n’ roll television show, Drumbeat. ‘I’d arrived to play at the Top Ten club a few months earlier, just as they were leaving after the trouble with Bruno Koschmider,’ Young recalls. ‘When I got out of my car outside the Top Ten, they ran over and lifted me bodily into the air.’
Paul loved Young’s piano-playing and suggested Brian should offer him a permanent place in the Beatles. But he had already signed a three-year contract with the Star-Club’s owner, Manfred Weissleder.
Young also worked for Weissleder, in a managerial capacity, booking American acts like Jerry Lee Lewis and Ray Charles, for which he was rewarded with a luxurious apartment and a swish Ford Taunus convertible. ‘The Beatles were always asking me to take them for a drive to the seaside. When I did, they all started jumping around in the sea in their clothes and calling to me to do the same. I knew that if I didn’t, I’d be thrown in. Then I turned around and saw John driving my brand-new Taunus down the beach towards the water… On the way back to Hamburg, I made them all sit forwards like little kids, so they wouldn’t make the upholstery too wet.’
In the aftermath of Stu Sutcliffe’s death, and without Brian around to restrain him, John’s behaviour, both on and offstage, was more manic than even St Pauli had seen before. ‘He’d take so many pills that he literally wouldn’t be able to shut his eyes to go to sleep,’ Roy Young says. ‘Paul, on the other hand, would always want to be up early, to write songs or rehearse. And he used to worry that they weren’t saving any of the money they earned–that they’d end up with nothing to show for all the struggle they’d had to get this far, and have to take ordinary everyday jobs that they hated.
‘One night when the Beatles were due onstage, John wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Eventually, Horst Fascher found him in a toilet near the stage, having sex with a girl inside one of the cubicles. Horst got a bucket of water and emptied it over the top of the door onto the two of them. In retaliation John wrenched off the toilet-seat, hung it around his neck and went onstage wearing it. Horst started screaming that the Beatles were fired and they’d better pack their bags and be on the next plane home.
‘When I looked into their dressing-room, I found Paul in a corner–in tears. He said he’d borrowed some money from his father to buy a car and if they were fired from the Star-Club, he wouldn’t be able to pay it back.’
But the Reeperbahn forgave them yet again. And a few days later came the momentous (if not wholly truthful) telegram from Brian:
CONGRATULATIONS BOYS. EMI REQUEST RECORDING SESSION. PLEASE REHEARSE NEW MATERIAL
The Beatles weren’t only the greatest pop band in history; they were also arguably the luckiest. Their first massive stroke of good fortune was acquiring Brian Epstein as their manager; their second came when Brian stumbled on Parlophone Records and George Martin.
In 1962, there wasn’t another label boss in London with Martin’s special combination of qualities. He was a trained classical musician who had studied piano and oboe at the prestigious Guildhall School and was a talented composer, arranger and conductor. Yet he also had a love of comedy in its more outrageous forms and felt something of a mission to capture it on record. Parlophone at that time was best-known for albums by the Goons–whose radio show had entranced John and Paul long before there was an Elvis–and live recordings of West End comedy hits like Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and the groundbreaking satirical revue Beyond the Fringe.
Parlophone was the least significant in the constellation of labels belonging to the giant EMI organisation and Brian had already pitched the Beatles to the others without success. It was during what he’d decided would be his final foray to London on their behalf that everything changed. A chance tip-off led him to Martin, a tall, elegant man of 36 with a cultured accent and the aura (so he later recalled) of ‘a stern but fair-minded schoolmaster’.
At Brian’s assertion that the Beatles could be ‘bigger than Elvis’, Martin’s eyes glazed over–for he knew nothing could ever be bigger than that. But he heard something in their demo that no one else had, and agreed to audition them on tape at EMI’s Abbey Road studios on 6 June after their return from Hamburg. That was the real meaning of ‘EMI request recording session’.
For anyone who doesn’t already know, Abbey Road studios are on a leafy boulevard through north London’s wealthiest quarter, St John’s Wood. Their frontage is an unassuming white townhouse with a spacious drive and steep front steps, behind which a maze of technical departments and offices occupies perhaps three times the area. In 1962, the place looked much as today except that its low white street-wall had yet to be covered with adoring graffiti and the nearby zebra pedestrian crossing was considered no different from any other.
The Beatles’ audition there could not have been more unlike their Decca one six months earlier. Although George Martin spoke like a BBC announcer, he came from quite humble north London roots and, while crisp and authoritative, was genial and welcoming. He impressed the band by not treating them like hicks while they instantly won him over with their Scouser charm and cheek.
In Abbey Road’s orchestra-sized Studio Two, they demoed three Lennon–McCartney compositions, ‘Love Me Do’, ‘P.S. I Love You’ and ‘Ask Me Why’, plus various cover versions including Paul’s semi-comic version of ‘Besame Mucho’, a Mexican bolero dating from 1940 that was part of his musical legacy from his father.
Ironically, George Martin at this point was not seeking anything particularly original. The comedy albums in which Parlophone specialised–and which Martin usually produced personally–were hugely effortful to put together, yet only rarely achieved major sales or listing in the record charts. Meanwhile, over at EMI’s prestigious Columbia label, Cliff Richard’s producer, Norrie Paramor, turned out a golden stream of pop hits to a virtually identical formula. Martin’s initial hope was that the Beatles might be his very own Cliff and the Shadows.
So the unsuspecting John, Paul and George were each tested singing solo, to see which of them might be moulded into a Cliff-style front man. ‘I thought of making Paul the leader,’ Martin later recalled. ‘Just because he was the prettiest.’ Then–going against all pop fashion, and possibly his own interests, too–he decided to leave the pattern of their voices as was.
He also made a decision one cannot imagine from any other British record producer at the time. If and when the Beatles recorded on Parlophone, it must be Lennon–McCartney material they performed. Indeed, Paul and John were a bit surprised by Martin’s preference for ‘Ask Me Why’ and ‘Love Me Do’ over ‘Besame Mucho’ or ‘The Sheik of Araby’. Paul remembers how he and John still regarded their own songs as ‘a bit wet’ compared to those of Chuck Berry, Ray Charles and the other giants they covered.
There was a further caveat, for Brian’s ears only. Martin had decided Pete Best wasn’t a good enough drummer to record; if he did sign them to Parlophone, he’d want to use a session-player of his own. It was not a demand that Pete be dropped from the line-up only that he shouldn’t play on the records. But it brought to the boil John, Paul and George’s long-simmering ambition to sack Pete and replace him with Ringo Starr.
The main reason is said to have been Paul’s insecurity about Pete’s good looks and the numbers of female fans he attracted. It’s certainly true that at more than one Liverpool gig his drums were placed at the front of the band rather than the back, and that screams of ‘Pete!’ could sometimes drown out those of ‘Paul!’ Such, anyway, would be Pete’s solace in later life, when he possessed one of the world’s most tragic pairs of eyes. Asked why he’d been dropped on the very eve of Beatlemania, he’d simply answer, ‘Jealousy.’
But the truth was that Pete had never really fitted into the band: he was too quiet and self-contained and lacking in John’s and Paul’s verbal and intellectual sparkle. He had seemed even more of an outsider since the other three had started combing their hair forward over their eyes while his remained in a neat, no-nonsense cockade. In fact, he now says he would have been perfectly willing to copy the others but was never asked to because Astrid thought his hair too curly.
Ringo, by contrast, fitted the line-up like a comfortable old carpet slipper even before he joined it: he was friendly, easy-going and apparently devoid of self-importance or temperament–qualities that would prove more valuable than he knew. Although raised in Liverpool’s tough Dingle area and robbed of education by childhood illness, he had a droll, dry wit and love of wordplay that chimed perfectly with John’s and Paul’s. They’d become friends in Hamburg when Ringo was there as one of Rory Storm’s Hurricanes and, later, playing in Tony Sheridan’s band; John, Paul and George had once even cut a demo record with Ringo drumming and the Hurricanes’ Lu Walters on vocals (billed as ‘the Beatles mit Wally’).
But firing Pete and hiring Ringo had ramifications far beyond the inevitable outcry from Pete’s Liverpool fans. After his stint in Hamburg with Tony Sheridan, Ringo had rejoined Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and was about to depart with them for a summer season at Butlin’s holiday camp in Skegness, Lincolnshire. Poaching Rory’s drummer, and perhaps jeopardising the Skegness gig, would be a tricky matter, the more so with Paul still dating Rory’s sister, Iris.
Almost as big a problem was that Pete’s best friend was Neil Aspinall, the Beatles’ invaluable driver/roadie. What if Neil were to quit out of loyalty to Pete and the Best family, in whose home he lodged? In a further twist, worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan, Neil had been having a Mrs Robinson-style affair with Pete’s mother, Mona, whose Casbah club had given the Beatles their first real break and who’d been their de facto manager before Brian Epstein came along. To cap the Gilbertian plot, Mrs Best was on the point of giving birth to Neil’s child.
In fact, Pete’s firing and Ringo’s poaching were mainly orchestrated by George. Although Paul had long been unhappy with Pete’s drumming–shown up in all its heavy-handedness on the first ‘Love Me Do’ demo–he was too civilised not to feel twinges of conscience, especially since Pete had no idea of what was in the wind. One evening, when the Beatles had met up at the Bests’ house, he was talking excitedly about a new car he intended to buy. Paul looked uncomfortable and mumbled, ‘You’d be better saving your money.’
George Martin had by now decided to offer the band a recording contract–a fact carefully concealed from Pete. It was to last for seven years and pay a royalty of one old penny per double-sided record, 1.25 per cent of the retail price, rising by yearly increments of a farthing, or a quarter of a penny. Later, it would be held up as one of the stingiest contracts ever, but at that time, when even major artistes considered making records an honour rather than an earner, it was standard.
In the end, John, Paul and George couldn’t face telling Pete he was out, but deputed Brian to do it. The task was doubly awkward for Brian, who’d relied on Pete as a kind of sub-manager to the band as well as once proposing they should sleep together. During their painful conversation in Brian’s office, the telephone rang: it was Paul, asking whether the deed had been done yet. For Pete, that would always be final proof of Paul’s culpability.
Thereafter, everything was sorted out with the ease of a less mercenary age. Rory Storm released Ringo from the Hurricanes with no ill will towards the Beatles, least of all his sister Iris’s boyfriend. The Bests made no attempt to extract financial compensation from Brian, contenting themselves with his promise to put Pete into another band (the All Stars, fronted by the brother of his friend Joe Flannery). At Pete’s unselfish urging, Neil Aspinall elected to remain the Beatles’ roadie, while the baby boy Neil had fathered with Mona Best was christened Roag and brought up as a member of the Best family.
For some time after Pete’s firing, the Beatles guiltily stayed away from the Bests’ house. Then one evening, Paul–viewed by the whole family as the arch-villain of the affair–knocked on the front door and asked if he could park his car in their driveway. Mrs Best, as she later recalled, managed to hold her peace but Pete’s girlfriend, Kathy, ‘gave him a damned good talking-to’.
It was a different story with Pete’s fans when Mersey Beat broke the news on 23 August. There were riots outside the Cavern and, unprecedentedly, heckling of the Beatles inside; as George Harrison made his way to the stage, someone ‘nutted’ him and gave him a black eye. Brian was the target of so many threats and recriminations that he hired a bodyguard.
The only film footage of the Beatles at the Cavern dates from this turbulent week, shot in grainy black and white by Manchester’s Granada Television. Ringo, with his new Beatle cut, sits at his drums, clearly disconcerted by the audible shrieks of ‘We want Pete!’ To try to drown the protests, Paul and John do a good old R&B standard–the unwittingly appropriate ‘Some Other Guy’.
Concurrent with the Pete Best problem was one which seemed to threaten the Beatles’ career just as it was about to take flight. John had found himself in the same fix Paul had been in two years earlier, without the same providential get-out. He’d made his girlfriend, Cynthia, pregnant and saw no alternative but to marry her.
Back then, it was considered risky enough for a pop artiste to have a steady girlfriend, as Iris Caldwell was Paul’s. Being married was thought to destroy any appeal for young women, whose fantasies depended on their idols being–at least theoretically–available and within reach. Such had been the fate of Marty Wilde, once kingpin of the Larry Parnes stable; Brian Epstein was determined it shouldn’t happen to his lead Beatle at this pivotal moment in the band’s career.
After John and Cynthia’s lower-than-low-key civil marriage, therefore, the new Mrs Lennon spent her first months of pregnancy secreted in a flat in Falkner Street belonging to Brian (where in fact he’d once hoped for a first romantic tryst with John). To keep an eye on Cynthia, her friend Dot Rhone–Paul’s former fiancée and so nearly the mother of his first child–agreed to move into the flat below, even though it would inevitably mean frequent painful encounters with Paul. He would later describe his first wife, Linda, as the kindest person he ever knew, but Dot certainly ran her close.
Everything had thus been beautifully tidied up by early September, when the Beatles returned to Abbey Road studios to record their first single. There was some initial awkwardness when they filed into Studio Two to find a strange drum-kit already set up there. George Martin had not been told of Ringo’s accession and–as he’d stipulated–had hired a session-drummer, Andy White, to take Pete Best’s place. With the unchallengeable authority of all producers, he refused to change this arrangement. Ringo was therefore relegated to bashing a tambourine and glumly thinking they’d ‘done a Pete Best’ on him.
As the A-side–the one considered more likely to chart–Martin had chosen ‘Love Me Do’, an early song of Paul’s, originally titled ‘Love Love Me Do’, with atypically rudimentary lyrics and chords, although the title had a faintly literary ring. The B-side was to be ‘P.S. I Love You’, a joint John–Paul memory of writing billets-doux from Hamburg. ‘Yes, “P.S. I Love You” was probably a better song,’ Martin admits now. ‘But it wasn’t a hit.’
Through ‘Love Me Do’ ran a harmonica riff jointly inspired by Bruce Channel’s ‘Hey Baby’ and ‘I Remember You’, the recent UK number one by Frank Ifield, Paul’s main rival for Iris Caldwell’s attention. (Quick off the mark as always, Paul had already added ‘I Remember You’ to the Beatles’ stage act.) Their live version of ‘Love Me Do’ featured John playing the riff and singing the ‘Whoa-oh love me do’ chorus. But on record he didn’t have time to do both, so Paul (though equally capable of playing harmonica) handled the ‘Whoa-oh’s’.
‘Love Me Do’ was scheduled for release on 5 October. At EMI, the fact that it came from Parlophone, and was by such a bizarrely-titled act, led most of the top brass to think it must be a comedy record. On the pop side, no one regarded it as a potential hit and everyone thought the name ‘Beatles’ almost self-destructively terrible. Still, the company promotion machine went through the motions: ahead of release-day, 250 advance copies were circulated among music journalists, radio deejays and television producers, crediting the writers as John Lennon and Paul McArtney.
For the Beatles, their families and hometown fans, it was astounding enough to have a single out and, still more so, to hear it on the radio, even if most of the deejays did add a sarky little dig at their name. So, for the first time, Paul could hear himself through his headphones in bed at 20 Forthlin Road, amid the same nocturnal barking of police dogs that had accompanied his first discovery of Elvis and Little Richard.
But now his favourite of all those rock ‘n’ roll ravers was no longer just a voice from far away. On 12 October, at New Brighton Tower Ballroom, Brian celebrated the release of ‘Love Me Do’ with a marathon concert headlined by Little Richard, who was currently touring Britain, with the Beatles as second on the bill. Merseyside could not mistake the euphoric message: now there was only one person who outranked and out-rocked their boys.
Richard was somewhat different from the anarchic figure of the mid-Fifties, having exchanged his baggy Dayglo suits and liquorice-whip hair for tailored sharkskin and a Nina Simone crop. Paul and John were initially so awed that they dared not even speak to him, let alone ask if they could all be photographed together. Instead, they begged help from Paul’s brother, Mike, who’d proudly brought along his brand-new camera. ‘[Mike] found a hole in the scenery and shot pictures of Richard onstage while we stood in the wings, taking it in turns to try to get in the shot with him,’ Paul would remember. ‘It didn’t work. Mike said Richard moved too fast for him to catch. I think one shot of Ringo and Richard’s shoulder came out.’
Before long, they had forgotten their shyness and were all over the star like pin-collared puppies, plying him with questions. ‘They asked me, “Richard, how does California look?”’ Richard writes in his autobiography, The Quasar of Rock. ‘“Are the buildings in New York real tall? Have you ever met Elvis Presley? Is he nice-looking?”
‘I developed a specially close relationship with Paul McCartney, but me and John couldn’t make it… He would do his no-manners [fart] and jump over and fan it all over the room, and I didn’t like it. He was different from Paul and George–they were sweet. Paul would come in and sit down and just look at me. Like he wouldn’t move his eyes. And he’d say, “Oh, Richard! You’re my idol. Just let me touch you.” He wanted to learn my little holler [i.e. banshee scream] so we sat at the piano going “Ooooh! Ooooh!” until he got it. I once threw my shirt in the audience and Paul went and got one of his best shirts and he said, “Take it, Richard.” I said “I can’t take that” but he insisted, “Please take it, I’ll feel bad if you don’t take it. Just think–Little Richard’s got on my shirt! I can’t believe it!”’
The Little Richard/Beatles night was such a success that Brian staged a second one a week later, this time at the Liverpool Empire. Being on a Sunday, the show was subject to Britain’s arcane sabbath entertainment laws which forbade performers to appear ‘in costume’. To circumvent this, the Beatles simply took off their jackets, revealing shirts in a–for Liverpool–daring shade of pink. ‘When the curtain went back, the stage was in complete darkness,’ Frieda Kelly remembers. ‘Then a spotlight lit up Paul’s face as he sang “Besame Mucho”. I remember thinking, “Wow, the Beatles at the Empire! Now they’ve really made it.”’
All the Beatles’ Cavern following bought ‘Love Me Do’–even those, like Frieda, who didn’t own a record-player. Brian reputedly ordered 10,000 copies for his two Liverpool stores, far more than he could ever sell, having been told that was the quantity needed to get it into the Top 10. Though EMI made no special promotional effort, the single aroused a smattering of interest in the trade press and on radio, slowly climbing the Top 40, breaking into the Top 20 in early November but then stalling at 17. That month, the Beatles were committed to a further two-week stint at the Hamburg Star-Club, which meant going away just when the music media might have stepped up coverage of them. So Britain was only dimly aware of a new band who broke every mould with their peculiar hair and clothes, and whose bassist played an instrument more like a violin, its neck pointing in the wrong direction.
At least EMI now realised they weren’t a comedy act and had potential enough to justify a second single. And George Martin believed he had the very song to do it: a perky ballad called ‘How Do You Do It?’ by the young songwriter Mitch Murray. Martin had sent an acetate of the song to Liverpool for the Beatles to learn before their September recording sessions; it had been taped along with ‘Love Me Do’, indeed for a time earmarked as their debut single. The good humour of the occasion had been slightly marred when John and Paul protested that ‘How Do You Do It?’ wasn’t them and they wanted to do another of their own compositions. ‘When you can write material as good as this, I’ll record it,’ Martin told them icily. ‘But right now we’re going to record this.’
Back in September, they’d submitted another possibility, ‘Please Please Me’, originally conceived by John as an angst-ridden ballad in the style of Roy Orbison and developed by the two of them sharing a piano keyboard. Paul had previously run it past Iris Caldwell, who remembers being far from enthusiastic. ‘It went “Last night I said these words to my girl… you know you never even try, girl…” He asked me what I thought and I said, “I think it’s bloody awful, Paul.”’ When Iris next saw Paul’s rival, Frank Ifield, she tried the words on him. ‘Do I have to worry?’ Ifield asked–i.e. that the song might challenge him in the charts. Iris thought not.
Originally John and Paul had put forward ‘Please Please Me’ as a possible B-side to ‘Love Me Do’. However, George Martin felt it wasn’t right yet and suggested they should work on it some more in a new form which he suggested; speeding up the tempo, using a harmonica riff again and lengthening it by repeating the first verse at the end.
When the Beatles returned to Abbey Road on 26 November, with ‘How Do You Do It?’ still threatening to be their second single, John and Paul persuaded Martin to listen to a new version of ‘Please Please Me’ in which all his suggestions had been followed. The producer agreed to let them tape what was no longer in any way the lachrymose ballad it had started out as. After the eighteenth take, Martin switched on the intercom from a control room that was never again to be so much under his control.
‘Gentlemen,’ he told them, ‘you have just made your first number one.’