They met outside the Jacaranda, where they stuffed their guitars, drums, amps and suitcases into the back of an old Morris minibus. John was the last to arrive, having only that morning managed to obtain his passport from the Liverpool Passport Office. Mimi didn’t come to wave him goodbye, but Cynthia was there.
It was a crush in the minibus, because as well as the Beatles, there was Williams, who was driving, his wife Beryl, her brother-in-law, Barry Chang, and Williams’s friend ‘Lord Woodbine’ who led a steel band. They faced a long journey. First were the two hundred miles to London, where, at a stop in Soho, they picked up a German waiter who wanted to go home. That made it ten on the bus, which was then driven a further eighty-five miles out to Harwich on the Essex coast, after which came the one-hundred-and-twenty-five-mile North Sea crossing to the Hook of Holland.
None of the Beatles had ever been abroad before, so everything seemed distant and strange, except perhaps the amount of bomb damage that was still visible as they drove through the Netherlands. Parts of Liverpool, mainly near the docks, had areas of wasteland where whole blocks of houses had been blitzed and then pulled down. But the war had raged street by street right through Holland only fifteen years earlier, and the signs were still everywhere.
Being more than ten years older than most of his passengers, the war meant more to Williams than the Beatles. So, when they reached Arnhem, the scene of one of its most famous battles at the bridge over the Rhine, he insisted they pay their respects at the war memorial. For some unexplained reason John stayed in the minibus. After that, they drove on into the town itself, where, while looking around the medieval streets, John stole a harmonica from a music shop.
It was a strange and risky thing to do, and Alan Williams was not pleased when he found out, as, back on the bus, John began to play his stolen toy. Other than wanting to be the centre of attention and to show off in front of everyone, perhaps especially before new boy Pete Best, it is again difficult to understand John’s rationale. Hamburg was the biggest break the Beatles had ever had, but, with twenty-five miles still to go before they even reached Germany, he had deliberately chosen to jeopardise his part in the venture for the momentary thrill of shoplifting. As with his escapades with Pete Shotton when they’d been kids, he only pulled these stunts when he had an audience there to gasp at his audacity.
Everything about Hamburg came as a surprise, and not always a pleasant one. Although John’s work permit described his purpose in Germany as being that of ‘musical entertainment’, it was soon clear that the Beatles weren’t going to be treated like professionals. Their living quarters hadn’t been negotiated before their arrival, and only when Williams complained did Koschmider arrange for them to be billeted in two very low cell-like storerooms, behind the screen at a soft porn cinema, the Bambi Kino. For sleeping there were four camp beds and a couch and very few, very old covers. There were no cooking facilities and the only water was from the cold tap in the cinema’s ladies’ toilet down the corridor. With no drawers or coat hangers, they lived out of their suitcases. ‘It was a pigsty . . . a run down fleapit,’ was John’s most polite description of his new home as he, George and Stuart grabbed the slightly larger room and Paul and Pete got the other. Not surprisingly, during all the months that they would be in Hamburg on that first visit, they spent as little time as possible in their rooms.
One of the first songs John had learned to play had been ‘Maggie May’, which is about a mythical Liverpool prostitute, and the Beatles were well aware of the girls who patrolled some of the streets of their own city. But the neon-lit Reeperbahn in the St Pauli dockside district of Hamburg, where they were living, was unlike anywhere they had ever seen before. Everywhere they looked, sex was brazenly, guiltlessly, joyfully on offer. Whether it was the half-naked women sitting, somehow simultaneously both provocative and bored, in the upstairs windows of a terrace of houses along Herbertstrasse, or the cheeky girls in the strip clubs – the message was unavoidable. The women they were now going to meet had a totally different outlook on sex from the more cautious English girls with whom they had grown up.
The Indra wasn’t a big club, and for the Beatles’ first night there, John, Paul, George and Stuart wore a stage uniform of black jeans and lilac jackets that had been specially made for them by a tailor neighbour of Paul’s in Liverpool. Unsure of what to play, and what to say to the customers – and not knowing how much English was understood – they were too diffident and not an immediate success. Bruno Koschmider, a formidable-looking guy who had been a circus clown, a fire-eater and an acrobat in earlier life, knew what was missing. If the Beatles were going to draw the punters into his club, they were going to have to do more than just play and sing. ‘Mach schau, mach schau’ (‘Put on a show!’) would be his clarion call, so that was what they did.
‘I did Gene Vincent all night . . .’ John would recall, ‘lying on the floor and throwing the mike around and pretending I had a bad leg . . . We all did mach schauing all the time from then on.’
It worked. Things soon picked up, and when they realised that it didn’t matter what they played so long as it was rock and roll they did their whole repertoire. They even tried doing a couple of their own compositions, but that didn’t work. The club-goers, and they were overwhelmingly male, only wanted the hits they already knew. Interestingly, John and Paul would rarely write any new songs while they were in Germany, the conditions being hardly conducive.
Before they’d left Liverpool, all excited by the promise of £18 a week each, none of them had realised how much they would be expected to work in Hamburg. The hours were punishing – six hours a night Tuesday to Friday, eight on Saturdays and eight and a half on Sunday, with just half-hour breaks for food and drink during the shifts. It was rock and roll on an industrial timetable.
‘We’d have to eat and drink on stage,’ John would remember. ‘And to get the Germans going . . . we really had to hammer . . . The Germans liked heavy rock so we had to keep rocking all the time. That was how we got stomping.’
There was also, however, another purpose to their stamping on stage. It helped keep the tempo going and encouraged their novice drummer, Pete. ‘We kept that big heavy four-in-a-bar going all night long,’ George would remember. As for Paul, he would sing ‘What’d I Say’, complete with instrumental breaks, ‘for about an hour and a half,’ John would add. That was obviously an exaggeration, but it gives an indication of the expectations put on this group of boys who, as John said, ‘had never played regularly together for more than about twenty minutes’ until then.
‘My voice began to hurt from the pain of singing,’ he often recalled, ‘but we learned that you could stay awake by eating slimming pills . . .’ They were Preludin, a kind of amphetamine, which the management was happy to supply, and which would be routinely passed up to the musicians by the waiters, along with free glasses of beer. They called them ‘prellies’. Paul was always cautious about what he swallowed, but John would rarely know the meaning of the word ‘caution’. Within a couple of weeks in St Pauli he would, he said later, be frothing at the mouth as the prellies kept him singing and playing into the early hours.
The Beatles were obviously being exploited, but, grateful for the chance to play to growing and enthusiastic audiences, they accepted the situation. Besides, they’d all signed contracts written in German, which they’d barely understood. John had a German-to-English dictionary but hardly opened it, and only Pete had studied German at school – a course that was unlikely to have included contract law.
There was, however, a plus to the marathon sessions. With their amps turned up to max they were beginning to knit together as a group in a way they never had in their sporadic gigs around Liverpool. ‘We got better and we got more confidence,’ John said. ‘We couldn’t not . . . with all the experience, playing all night long. It was handy them being foreign, too. We had to try even harder, and put our hearts and souls into it.’ With so many hours of intense practice on stage, he was also becoming a competent rhythm guitarist. He would never be a virtuoso: never as good as George. He never wanted to be, happily admitting that he ‘only ever learned to play to have something to busk along with when I sang’.
They’d played some rough places on Merseyside, but the Teddy boys there had been at worst merely teenage delinquents with a fashion fetish. In Hamburg, the Beatles discovered the reality of violence when professional gangsters would come into the Indra late at night, and call out their song requests . . . demands, more like. There would be seamen from all around the world, too, including some from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who would be looking for a good time. And American soldiers out for a weekend of ‘rest and recuperation’ from their units in other parts of West Germany, where they might have spent weeks on manoeuvres, or been out all night keeping watch on the border with East Germany. They would want fun as well, and girls and drink. In all, the Indra could become a fiery ferment of too much rival testosterone and booze, and, regularly, fights would break out.
The staff there could take care of themselves, too. ‘The waiters would get their flick knives out, or their truncheons, and that would be it,’ John would relate. ‘I’ve never seen such killers.’ One of Koschmider’s minders, Horst Fascher, had once accidentally killed a guy in a street fight. The Beatles liked Horst. He’d once been a professional boxing champion. It was good to have him on their side, they thought, should there ever be any trouble involving them.
There never was, as, watching from the stage, they would be wryly amused by the violence, until their eyes would sting as police teargas used to break up street fights seeped into the club. As John would say: ‘I might have been born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg.’
Not that it was only drunks, sailors, prostitutes and gangsters who came to hear the Beatles play. Working-class boys and girls who worked in St Pauli’s shops and offices came too, as well as leather-clad rockers and their girlfriends, thrilled to find the kind of music that, until then, they’d only heard on American Forces Network stations.
Very soon, as they improved, the Beatles began building up the nucleus of a following, so that within a few weeks Koschmider moved them down the street to his bigger club, the Kaiserkeller. Derry and the Seniors had now left and Allan Williams had returned to Hamburg with yet another Liverpool group – Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, with whom the Beatles would now alternate every night. The two groups had hardly known each other in Liverpool, but now they were in friendly competition. And, almost immediately, the Beatles would notice what a great drummer the Hurricanes had. His stage name was Ringo Starr, but his real name was Richard Starkey. They would always know him as Richie.
The year 1960 now belongs to a bygone age of letter writing, but in those days, for young people away from home, letters were more than important, and that applied to the Beatles as much as anyone. Subsequently letters were the subject of popular songs, and although they hadn’t yet heard the Marvelettes’ ‘Please Mr Postman’, which they would famously revive, Paul had already written a version of ‘P.S. I Love You’. So, as they sang about letters, and waited for letters, every one of them frequently wrote home. John and Mimi may have sometimes had a tempestuous relationship, but that didn’t prevent him writing to her, or stop Mimi from delivering money to Hessy’s music shop that he sent to pay for the instalments on his new guitar.
Most important to John, though, and despite the exciting life he was now experiencing, were the letters that Cynthia would write, telling him how late summer was turning into autumn in sleepy Hoylake and how she was getting on without him. Often they would be accompanied by photographs she had taken of herself in a Woolworths photo booth, which showed her with her bosom pushed out and her eyes half-closed, in an expression that she hoped made her look sexy, as he would always request. She didn’t know what was going on in Hamburg but she knew her man and his appetites, so she did her best to please.
His letters in reply, and there were several a week, were detailed and long about everything that was happening to him. Well, not quite everything! They were also loving and affectionate and inevitably ‘X-rated’, as she would later coyly describe his references to his ‘throbber’ when he thought about her. ‘The sexiest letters this side of Henry Miller,’ he would boast later. ‘Forty pages long, some of them.’
But there was another element to them. Still insecure, he was always desperate to know that she hadn’t found another boy while he was away. ‘I love, love, love you,’ he would write. ‘Please wait for me.’ She did.
For his part, however, shortly after he arrived in Germany, he was casually unfaithful with a girl who worked in a bar. Did he ever reflect on the hypocrisy in the devotions he regularly posted to Cynthia? Probably. But it was her fidelity to him that was important; not his to her.