In the early evening of 6 June 1962, Neil Aspinall drove his van through the opened gates of EMI Recording Studios in Abbey Road, St John’s Wood, and parked on the gravel that had once been a rich family’s large front garden. The early nineteenth-century London mansion that faced the Beatles as they climbed from the van didn’t look anything like a modern recording studio, but, as they soon discovered, the house was only a facade, with the studios having been built on to the back of it over the previous forty years. Getting instructions from the EMI sound engineers, in their white laboratory coats, Neil and the Beatles carried their guitars and equipment through the tradesmen’s entrance at the side of the building and into the large Studio Two. Dressed up in their new stage suits for the big occasion, and with their hair combed forward, the EMI staff who greeted them were amused. ‘Well, what have we got here,’ one was heard to say.
The plan was that Ron Richards, George Martin’s thirty-three-year-old assistant, would start the session by getting the group to set up and play a few songs while Martin was in the canteen having his evening meal. The Beatles had got as far as ‘Love Me Do’ when a message was sent to the canteen that Martin should come and take a listen. Unknown to them, the producer then approached the studio up the back stairs to the control room and sat at his console watching the four very nervous boys below him as they also went through ‘Ask Me Why’, ‘Besame Mucho’ and ‘Hello Little Girl’. Nothing he heard excited him particularly, but although he considered ‘Love Me Do’ as ‘not much more than a riff’, it seemed the most likely of their songs, and he liked John’s harmonica playing. It reminded him of the guitar and harmonica blues of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.
Paul had written ‘Love Me Do’ a few years earlier and he and John had always quite liked it; but only quite liked it. ‘It was the first one we dared do of our own,’ John would say. ‘It was quite a traumatic thing because we were doing such great numbers by Ray Charles and Little Richard and all of them. So, it was quite hard to come in singing “Love Me Do”. We thought our numbers were a bit wet.’
The problem had been that the original arrangement they’d played in the clubs had lacked something. Then Bruce Channel’s ‘Hey Baby’ had been released. It was a good record, but what made it a great record was the way the singer sang a duet with a harmonica played by a man called Delbert McClinton. John loved it. He hadn’t often taken out his own harmonica – the one he’d shoplifted in Arnhem on the Beatles’ first visit to Germany two years earlier. But its moment had now arrived and the stolen harmonica’s bluesy sound would haunt its way through ‘Love Me Do’.
Before the session George Martin had been puzzling over whether it was John or Paul who was the lead singer, whether it would be ‘John Lennon and the Beatles’ or ‘Paul McCartney and the Beatles’ on the record’s label. But the realisation that there were two and sometimes even three lead singers when George Harrison was given a chance only fully dawned on him when he noticed that John, who was singing the lead of Paul’s song, couldn’t quite finish the line ‘love me do-oo’ at the end of every verse, because he had to then immediately play his harmonica. So, it was agreed that Paul would step forward to sing that bit. With the Beatles it wasn’t going to be one or the other. This was something quite new, a group who worked as a whole and shared singing and playing responsibilities.
After their stipulated three hours, the session in the studio finished, and Martin invited the boys up into the control room to get to know them better. Having first played the results of their evening’s work, he then gave them a good talking to, in what to them sounded like the posh accent of a young public school housemaster. None of them, he would remember, uttered a word in reply. So, finally, he asked if there was anything they didn’t like.
At first there was another silence until George drolly, and ultimately famously, said: ‘Well, I don’t like your tie.’ It was challenging and slightly provocative, a typical Liverpudlian rejoinder, going off on a tangent, but said with a smile.
George Martin laughed. The ice was broken. Instantly, with the exception of the determinedly silent Pete, all the Beatles were laughing and joking and talking at once. ‘We liked each other,’ Martin would tell me. ‘They were charismatic. I thought that if they could charm the pants off me, they could charm the pants off an audience. And if I could find them a hit song, I’d have a hit group.’ In other words, secretly, he was by no means convinced of their songwriting abilities.
As the Beatles left Abbey Road that night they were feeling pleased with themselves. George Martin and assistant Ron Richards, however, knew there was a problem to be overcome. That first recording of ‘Love Me Do’ wasn’t good enough. It would need to be recorded again, and the next time with a better drummer than Pete Best. As Martin firmly told Brian Epstein when he explained the problem, it wasn’t unusual for record producers to use different musicians on record from those who appeared in the clubs. What was acceptable in a dance hall, wasn’t when the record was heard on the radio.
This was an opinion Brian didn’t want to hear, but one which, having overheard the conversations between John, Paul and George, he’d seen coming. It didn’t mean that Pete had to be immediately replaced. But the moment the Beatles had been putting off was approaching. For John, it was particularly difficult, as he and Pete had regularly gone out drinking together in Hamburg. And although Pete may not have been on the same mental wavelength as the other three, he was pleasant enough company. None of them ever disliked him. That, however, wouldn’t be enough to save him.
‘We were always going to dump him when we could find a decent drummer,’ was John’s memory. ‘But by the time we got back from Germany we’d trained him to keep a stick going up and down – four to the bar. He couldn’t do much else. He looked nice and the girls liked him.’
Years later John would talk about how the Beatles were ‘bastards’ in their determination to succeed, and so it would prove in their disposal of Pete, when they were wily, conspiratorial and, at the end of the day, two-faced. Through all of June, July and half of August 1962 they played dozens of gigs with Pete at the Cavern and all over Merseyside as Brian secretly plotted with lawyers about how to edge Pete out – all the time suggesting other drummers to the Beatles. He was wasting his breath in that respect. George had been pushing John and Paul to bring Ringo Starr into the group since they’d first played with him in Hamburg. ‘Ringo was a star in his own right before we even met him . . . a professional drummer,’ was John’s opinion, ‘the best drummer in Liverpool.’
But that wasn’t Ringo’s only attraction. Having taken up playing the drums while in a long-stay children’s isolation hospital for tuberculosis, he’d missed much education, but had made up for it with a street wisdom, a quirky gift for jokey malapropisms and a disarming honesty. Brought up in a particularly poor area of Liverpool, he could also make people laugh, but not in John’s often snide way. For Ringo to be ‘so aware having had so little education’ was, John would later conclude, ‘rather unnerving to someone who’s been to school since he was fucking two years old onwards’.
The Ringo manoeuvres all had to be worked out very delicately. But, meanwhile, totally unaware of what was going on behind his back, Pete was faced with an unusual situation at home, when his mother Mona gave birth to a baby boy. The baby’s father was the Beatles’ road manager Neil Aspinall, Pete’s close friend. And although John, Paul and George wanted Pete out, they definitely wanted to keep Neil in. He was a rock of common sense. All of which meant they couldn’t tell Neil what they were planning to do to Pete. It was becoming an ever more tangled web.
Since John had been home from Hamburg, Cynthia had been living in a bedsit in South Liverpool. It wasn’t ideal as not only was she now being discouraged from going to the Cavern, ‘gentlemen guests’ in her new home were not allowed to stay the night. So John and she would get together in the afternoons or whenever he wasn’t playing.
One day, early in August, Cynthia had two pieces of news when he arrived. The first was that she’d failed her final exams at college and couldn’t now become a teacher. The second was that she was pregnant.
Cynthia would remember that John sat silently for some moments as the implications sank in. ‘There’s only one thing for it,’ he said at last. ‘We’ll have to get married.’ Getting married was the last thing he wanted to do. But . . . ‘I didn’t try to fight it,’ he would recall.
Actually, for a boy from his background, marrying Cynthia was the only decent thing he could do. Abortion was illegal in the UK in 1962, and if a boy got a girl pregnant it was universally considered his duty to marry her. Cynthia would always insist that not for one moment did he try to get out of it.
‘I thought it would be goodbye to the group,’ were his first thoughts, but he didn’t share them with Cynthia, as he joked: ‘I’ll make an honest womb of you.’
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the pregnancy was that it hadn’t happened sooner. In the two and a half years that John and Cynthia had been lovers they had never used any kind of contraception. The birth control pill had only very recently been invented and was definitely not available to young unmarried women in the UK, the general attitude being that if it were it would inevitably lead to much promiscuity. But condoms were readily available. John had just never bothered to buy them.
The first person John told of the new complication was Brian, who immediately and calmly took it on himself to organise the marriage licence and the register office. John, meanwhile, had to tell Mimi. Knowing what her reaction would be, he put it off.
One of the first people Cynthia told was her neighbour, Paul’s girlfriend Dot. She chose a bad time. Paul had just been to see Dot to tell her that although he loved her, as he didn’t want to get married, they would have to break off their relationship. And that was that.
It was a busy time for Brian. Putting John’s problems to one side, he turned to the drummer situation, and, after a Cavern gig, asked Pete to go to see him the next day. Pete assumed it was to discuss a business matter and took Neil with him.
On arriving at Brian’s office, Neil waited outside. Inside, Pete noticed that the manager was very nervous.
Finally, Brian came to the point. ‘I’ve got some bad news for you, Pete,’ he said. ‘The boys have decided that they don’t want you in the group any more, and that Ringo is replacing you.’ Then he added the excuse that producer George Martin didn’t think Pete was a good enough drummer.
Pete was devastated. Other possibilities were offered to him, but that afternoon he went home and cried.
‘We were cowards,’ John would later tell me, opening a hitherto guarded vein of guilt. ‘We got Brian to do our dirty work for us.’ But he never had much time for sentiment when it interfered with his ambition. Life was for living and getting on with. ‘If we’d told him to his face that would have been much nastier. It would probably have ended in a fight.’
Neil Aspinall was upset for his friend and considered giving up his job with the group. Mona’s advice was for him to stay with them. She was, understandably, angry and hurt for her son, as she let Brian Epstein know. But she was a realist, too.
With Ringo having agreed to join the Beatles, a record deal signed and Granada TV about to film a performance by the group at the Cavern, everything was falling into place. And, eight days after Pete’s sacking, with Ringo now behind the drums, the Beatles were filmed for the first time. What Neil Aspinall would describe as ‘the chain’ was now complete. John had found Paul; Paul had introduced George; and now George had brought Ringo into the band.
Wearing white shirts, black waistcoats and ties, along with their black Anello and Davide Chelsea boots, the group played and sang ‘Some Other Guy’ for the TV cameras with John and Paul singing together at separate microphones. Although at the time the performance wasn’t televised, that strip of film was a scoop for Granada TV, and has been seen since then by hundreds of millions of fans.
With his wedding for Cynthia planned for the following day John couldn’t keep the secret from Mimi any longer. That night when he got home from the Cavern, Mimi was, as always, waiting.
John’s recollection of the encounter would be: ‘I said, “Cyn’s having a baby. We’re getting married tomorrow. Do you want to come?”’
Mimi reacted as he had expected. ‘She let out a groan . . .’ before saying with much anger all the things he already knew. ‘You’re too young,’ she shouted, almost certainly with the image of her feckless sister Julia arriving home to tell the family that she’d just married the ne’er-do-well Freddie Lennon in her mind. She would not, she declared, be going to the wedding. Later she would tell biographer Ray Coleman that John cried that night.
The following morning Brian picked up Cynthia in a chauffeur-driven car and drove her to the Register Office in Liverpool’s Mount Pleasant. John was waiting, accompanied by Paul and George, all wearing suits and ties. John didn’t know it, but this was the office where his parents had married in 1938. Unable to afford anything new for her wedding, Cynthia was wearing her best purple and black checked suit and had put up her hair in a French pleat. John, she would later write, immediately told her how beautiful she looked. There were no bridesmaids, nor had Ringo been invited, because, although he was now a Beatle, John didn’t know him well enough to be sure he could be trusted to keep the marriage a secret. And secrecy would now be the order of the day. The only other guests were Cynthia’s brother Tony and his wife Marjorie, for whom it was their lunch hour.
Throughout the short ceremony a road drill was hammering in the back yard of the building behind the register office, making it difficult for the couple to hear what the registrar was saying, and forcing them to shout their responses. John found this funny. And when the registrar asked the groom to approach and, by mistake, George stepped forward instead everyone began to giggle. Then, as the rain began to pour down outside, John Lennon and Cynthia Powell became man and wife. There was no one there from John’s family, not even his half-sisters. Most probably Mimi hadn’t told anyone, and no one had any idea where his father might be.
If he was hurt by Mimi’s absence – and he probably was, because, despite her irascibility, he loved her – he didn’t let anyone see. Instead he hid behind jokes. ‘It was all a laugh. But I did feel embarrassed walking about married. It was like walking around with odd socks on or with your flies open . . .’
No wedding reception had been planned, and, because Cynthia’s brother Tony and his wife had to get back to work, Brian suggested that the three Beatles, Cynthia and he went for lunch to the nearby Reece’s café. Again, history was repeating itself. That was where John’s parents had gone for lunch after their wedding twenty-four years earlier. As it was more of a cafeteria than a restaurant, the little wedding party had to queue for soup, chicken and trifle, and, because Reece’s had no licence, glasses of water were raised to toast the newly-weds.
Did John still love Cynthia at that stage? Probably, in his way, and certainly more than anyone else. Years later he would say unkindly that their son Julian was ‘born out of a bottle of whisky on a Saturday night’. But that was untrue and unworthy of him. He had loved Cynthia very much when they’d first got together in the year after his mother had been killed.
Brian was a solicitous manager. He didn’t have to do it but he very kindly decided to lend John and Cynthia a little flat, which, unknown to his parents, he had secretly acquired for himself not far from the Liverpool College of Art in Falkner Street. It was somewhere he might meet friends of whom his parents might not approve, but he happily gave it up for John and his new bride.
‘Well, Mrs Lennon, how does it feel to be married?’ John asked Cynthia that afternoon as he returned from Menlove Avenue with some of his belongings.
That evening Brian’s Ford Zodiac was at the front door to pick John up. The Beatles had a gig in Chester that night. Cynthia wasn’t invited. She stayed at home. In fact, great efforts would be taken to make sure that she would not be seen anywhere with John over the next few months as her pregnancy began to show. It would be a lonely life.
‘We didn’t keep the marriage a secret,’ John would fib later. ‘It was just that when we came on the scene nobody really asked us. They weren’t interested in whether we were married or not. The question they used to ask was, “What sort of girls do you like?” . . . I wasn’t going to say, “I’m married . . . ”’