They drove down to London on New Year’s Eve in a van specially hired for the trip by Neil. London was two hundred miles away by busy, winding roads, roundabouts and traffic lights, and it was snowing heavily as they travelled south. Somewhere in the Midlands they got lost, and when they did arrive at their hotel near Russell Square in the Bloomsbury area of London it was already nine in the evening. Brian had travelled down by train in a first-class carriage, but the Beatles had to bring their instruments and amplifiers with them, so rail hadn’t been an option. Brian had paid for the hire of the van. As John would remember, they were all terrified about the forthcoming audition, but they were hungry, too. So, setting off through the snow again, they went with Brian into a restaurant, only to be asked to leave when they complained too noisily about the cost of the soup. Brian was probably embarrassed by the behaviour of some of them.
It’s impossible to emphasize how strange and yet enticing London looked to the Beatles that night. All their lives they’d been told that London was where everything happened, and now this little gang of musicians who were so sure of themselves in Liverpool felt awkward and overawed, aware that they didn’t belong here, but desperately hoping they soon would.
Finally finding something to eat that they could afford in Soho, they then made their way down Charing Cross Road and gazed in a shop window at some black ankle boots with Cuban heels. They all agreed they liked the look of those. The shop was Anello and Davide, and they made a mental note of the name. Then, on they went, to Trafalgar Square to join the New Year celebrations, and watch as drunken and hardy revellers fulfilled an annual tradition by getting themselves soaked in the fountains. No one did that in Liverpool. There weren’t any big, fancy fountains there.
They arrived early at the Decca studios in West Hampstead the following morning and carried their amplifiers from their van into the studio – only to be told they wouldn’t be needed as they’d be using the company’s own equipment for the audition. Brian was already there, fussing a little when the technicians were late. It was New Year’s Day – although not then, as now, a public holiday in the UK. Presumably the Decca crew had been celebrating the previous night.
All the group were on edge. George would later say that the red light which came on when they were recording put him off, and Paul, usually so confident when performing, found his voice cracking under the strain. For once there were no jokes from John; no playing to the gallery. He would always be concentrated when he was most tense, although he did snap at Brian when he thought the manager was interfering in how they were playing.
Then, very professionally, they set to work. What, in their innocence, they didn’t realise was that even before they’d left Liverpool they’d made an enormous mistake. Brian had many qualities – issuing neatly typed military-style movement orders to road manager Neil, telling him where they would be playing and at what time precisely, was one; and suggesting that the Beatles cut the ends off the strings on their guitars because they looked untidy was another. But Brian was a Sibelius fan, a Philharmonic habitué, not a rock and roller. That he should have suggested that they audition by performing a variety of numbers to demonstrate their versatility, comedy included, only demonstrated his naivety.
‘The Sheik of Araby’ was a comic interlude, which, with John goofing about on stage as George sang, might have amused Cavernites as the former got his voice back after singing ‘Money’, but it didn’t work on record. Nor did ‘Three Cool Cats’ or the Latin-flavoured ‘Besame Mucho’, pleasantly Latin as it was. Yet nearly half of the fifteen-song audition tape they made that day consisted of odd middle-of-the road numbers.
This wasn’t the Beatles that had knocked the German spivs off their chairs in the Top Ten Club or caused a crush in the Cavern. What those song choices did was to demonstrate that Brian was a rookie manager who didn’t yet know which way to pitch his group. And nor did they. Though John sang the Chuck Berry song ‘Memphis, Tennessee’, and Paul and George harmonised with him on the Teddy Bears’ ‘To Know Her Is To Love Her’, the Beatles’ stage magic didn’t transfer to tape. Apart from the three Lennon and McCartney numbers, ‘Hello Little Girl’, ‘Love Of The Loved’ and ‘Like Dreamers Do’, they could have been any competent group of the time. Interestingly, usually shy about singing their own songs on stage, as the fans in the ballrooms only wanted to hear hits, the fact that they included three that morning showed their intent.
Had they done enough? John wondered as the session ended. ‘We didn’t sound natural,’ he worried, self-doubt never far away.
By mid-afternoon, they were back in the van and driving north again. Mike Smith had told them he would let them know what his superiors thought, and, in the meantime, Brian had already booked them for twenty-nine more gigs to play in and around Liverpool before the end of the month.
The changes that Brian was insisting upon didn’t come at once, but soon, as the Beatles were measured for new Italianate mohair grey suits with tight trousers, and dates at venues outside Liverpool were arranged, including a big one at the Floral Hall up the coast in posh Southport and another in Manchester, his influence became increasingly evident. And, going along with it, John was soon hurrying back to see Bill Harry at Mersey Beat to ask for the return of a couple of his most pornographic poems. Brian wouldn’t have wanted to see those in print. John even agreed to do little smiley bows to the audience after every song. He later thought of it as ‘selling out’, but the Cavernites didn’t care whether the Beatles bowed, or chewed or argued onstage, or even wore the poncy new Anello and Davide boots they’d ordered from London. They were still their Beatles.
From the moment Brian had first seen the Beatles he’d been struck by how much the young girls in the audience loved them, how much his boys had become romantic fantasies for them. That was good. But, it seemed to him that to keep it that way, it would be better if Cynthia and Dot weren’t seen with John and Paul so much, so that all the Beatles would appear to be romantically unattached. That was said to be the way the Colonel handled Elvis’s busy love-life, thus making him available for every girl’s longings.
Some girls might have been cross at being told to stay away from the Cavern, but Cynthia, and apparently Dot, too, weren’t about to make trouble for their boyfriends. As Cynthia would later admit, if it helped make the Beatles a success, she was ready to take a back seat. John might have argued on behalf of his girlfriend, but he chose not to. Actually, Cynthia’s absence suited him rather well, and when he would be chatting up a new girl after a gig, he would ask the watching fans not to tell Cyn what he’d been up to. Before long he would have a couple of new regular girlfriends on the side – girls Cynthia didn’t know about.
Not everything that Brian suggested would be met with such obedient compliance. While the Beatles had been in Germany, John had taken to occasionally mimicking the mentally handicapped while on stage, sometimes seeming to claw with an inane smile on his face, while at other times mindlessly swinging his leg backwards and forwards while Paul was trying to introduce the next song. It was part of a scene-stealing routine, or what John would call his ‘spazzie’ act – which was short for ‘spastic’. Quite why he behaved like that – even giving his behaviour the wrong name, since his actions aped the traditional idea of the mentally challenged rather than someone with a muscular disorder – was something else he never explained, though it was in line with his cartoons of misshapen people and enjoyment of sick humour.
Today it would be unthinkable that an artist would get laughs out of pretending to have learning difficulties, but John grew up in a time when there was a very famous music hall act on radio and television in which a gossipy comedienne, Hylda Baker, would be accompanied on stage by a very tall, mute, unsmiling stooge. ‘She knows, you know,’ the comedienne would tell the audience, to roars of laughter as the stooge remained expressionless. So, John was following in a well-trodden, cruel path at mocking the handicapped. But why?
In George’s opinion, John was simply ‘allergic to cripples’. Interviewed for The Beatles Anthology he said: ‘You can see it in the home movies. Whenever you switch a camera on John, he goes into his interpretation of a spastic.’
It was something Brian had spotted from the beginning at the Cavern, and, finding it distasteful rather than funny, he asked John not to do it. John ignored the request. The spazzie moments stayed in the act for now. What was going on in his mind?
Whatever it was, it doesn’t appear to have turned Brian off him. He was always in the manager’s thoughts. Paul put it this way: ‘I’m sure Brian was in love with John. We were all in love with John, but Brian was gay so that added an edge.’
John would later agree: ‘I was the closest to Brian – as close as you can get to somebody who lives a sort of fag life, and you don’t know what they’re doing on the side.’
In contrast, Paul’s relationship with Brian was more distanced from the beginning. Whether this was once again a touch of jealousy because he felt another person was coming between John and himself, as Stuart had, only he would know. It’s a common enough human trait, but Brian had to tread carefully to keep Paul as well informed as John on all developments.
As John and Brian lived fairly close to each other in South Liverpool, Brian made sure he visited Mimi and got to know her well. She took to him straight away with his middle-class manners and charm. In return, John would sometimes go over to the Epsteins’ house to make Beatle plans and talk; and John did love to talk. He might have liked to think of himself as a rocker, but he would always be attracted to sophistication, something that Brian’s conversation always suggested. He was flattered when Brian told him how much he liked his column in Mersey Beat, and fascinated when Brian told him about his year in London at drama school. He would later boast that he introduced his manager to the amphetamine-like Preludin to get him to talk. ‘If someone’s going to manage me I want to know him inside out,’ he said. So it was to John that Brian would admit his homosexuality. It hardly came as a surprise.
For weeks Brian had tried to keep up the fiction to the Beatles that he wasn’t gay, as he did at home with his parents. But the Beatles weren’t fooled for a moment. They didn’t care. Sexual inclination just didn’t matter to them.
Decca didn’t keep them waiting very long. At the beginning of February 1962, Brian was invited down to lunch in the Decca boardroom, where Dick Rowe, the head of artistes and repertoire, told him that he would not be signing the group. Brian was astonished. Having been summoned all the way from Liverpool he had, quite reasonably, assumed he would be hearing good news. Nor could he understand it. But these boys were going to be ‘bigger than Elvis’, he later said he told Rowe. If he did say that, Rowe must, also reasonably, have thought he was mad. Brian would later write bitterly in his autobiography that when he asked Rowe for a reason, he was told that ‘groups of guitars are on their way out . . . The boys won’t go, Mr Epstein. We know these things. You have a good record business in Liverpool. Stick to that.’
Dick Rowe would later deny that that was an accurate report of his conversation, and it does sound extraordinarily blunt. But, although an alternative independent deal was apparently discussed, at the end of the day, Decca chose to sign instead a North London group, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, who were obviously more conveniently based. Poor Dick Rowe would forever be labelled as the man who turned down the Beatles.
John, Paul and George were in the habit of waiting in the Punch and Judy snack bar at the entrance to Lime Street Station in Liverpool when Brian was returning from London with news for them. So it was probably there that they heard about the rejection.
John immediately blamed it on a London prejudice against everything northern . . . ‘Oh, yes, Liverpool on the banks of the Khazi,’ he is said to have retorted, as though Londoners considered Liverpool to be somewhere far away in the African jungle. There may have been some truth in that attitude, because Liverpool was by no means a fashionable place then, and certainly a very long way from Big Ben.
‘We really thought that was the end,’ he would remember. ‘We didn’t think we were going to make it . . . They always said we were too bluesy, too rocky . . . I think they expected us to be all polished . . . They should have seen our potential.’
They should, and the depth of the Decca wound could be measured years later by the way John would so often bring it up. But Decca weren’t the only culprits. And, as Pye, Philips, Ember and Oriole also turned them down, the Beatles’ faith in their new manager began to slip. ‘Brian would come back from London and he couldn’t face us . . .’ John would recall. ‘He was terrified to tell us.’
The single piece of good news in those first months of 1962 was an audition on the only BBC radio programme that gave an opportunity to first timers. It was called Teenager’s Turn, and was produced in Manchester. This time the Beatles stuck to what they did best. They sang rock and roll songs – Roy Orbison’s ‘Dream Baby’, the Marvelettes’ ‘Please Mr Postman’, and Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis, Tennessee’, adding John’s composition ‘Hello Little Girl’ for good measure. They passed that audition. They were learning.
Despite the odd ungrateful comments from his four disappointed clients, Brian never gave up. But it didn’t help that he was hawking a reel-to-reel tape recording of the Decca audition to play to record companies, instead of demo records. So, when he learned that EMI offered a little tape-to-disc service above their HMV record shop in London’s Oxford Street, he went in to get a few private acetates of the Decca session cut as demos.
It was another serendipitous moment. The disc cutter there, a man called Jim Foy, became interested in the Lennon and McCartney songs he was hearing on the tapes as he worked. ‘I asked whether they had been published,’ he would tell Beatles chronicler Mark Lewisohn. When Foy learned that they hadn’t, he suggested Brian talk to a man called Syd Colman, who was the head of EMI’s music publishing company, Ardmore and Beechwood, which just happened to be on the floor above in the same building.
Going up the stairs, Brian played Colman the songs. The music publisher liked them. So Brian made him an offer. If Colman could help get the Beatles a recording contract, Ardmore and Beechwood could publish the songs.
For two years the Beatles had been playing and singing cover versions of their rock heroes’ work that had turned them into a terrific band. But it was the songs that John and Paul wrote that proved to be the key that would unlock the door to the recording studio for them. And it had taken a humble disc cutter to spot the talent that the record makers had missed – the songs of Lennon and McCartney.