26

‘I’m John. I play a guitar, too. And sometimes I play the fool’

For the Beatles, 1963 was passing in a blur. Their work load was intense. They had all grown up lying in bed at the weekend, listening to disc jockey Brian Matthew presenting Saturday Club on the BBC Light Programme. Now they were stars on it themselves, appearing ten times during 1963 alone. Between joking with Matthew (‘I’m Ringo and I play the drums’; ‘I’m Paul and I play the bass’; ‘I’m George and I play the guitar;’ ‘I’m John. I play a guitar, too. And sometimes I play the fool’), they would dig out songs they couldn’t now perform in the restricted stage time they had while on tour. Then there was another radio programme called Pop Goes The Beatles and more and more TV appearances, usually where they simply mimed to their hits. Back on the road again, in that year alone they played over two hundred gigs across the length and breadth of Britain, as well as recording two albums and four singles. And when they weren’t doing that, John and Paul would be locked together writing new songs for themselves or for other Brian Epstein protégés. Former cloakroom girl at the Cavern Priscilla White metamorphosed into Cilla Black and got one. Billy J. Kramer got four.

The Beatles never stopped working. It might have seemed like overkill, and, with any group less charismatic, it might have been. But for them it was the opposite. Brian Epstein, as much by good luck as good management, was cementing them in the nation’s mind. The work load meant, of course, that none of them had any meaningful kind of home life. To all intents and purposes Cynthia was a single parent, pushing her baby in his pram around Woolton, and waiting for John to call. She was always waiting.

On 3 August the Beatles made their last appearance at the Cavern. Although the cellars were packed and celebratory there was grieving, too. The fans realised they were being left behind. For Cynthia it was another night when she was asked to stay away.

By the Sixties most families in Britain who could afford to would go away to the seaside in the summer, to stay, perhaps, in a boarding house and to hope that the sun shone. And it was for them that the Beatles performed during July and August during week-long seasons in resorts around the country, before finishing close to home, in Southport. Fittingly it was while they were there, and at last able to spend more than a couple of nights in their own beds, that the record that would become their biggest UK hit was released. It was ‘She Loves You’.

John and Paul had written it back in June in a hotel after an appearance in Newcastle, and had then grabbed a day off touring to record it. It was quite different from anything else in the charts, or anything they’d done before. From its opening drum announcement by Ringo, to the three-part harmony in the final chord which sounded strangely jazzy to some people, it was instantly arresting. Constructed as a message being passed to a friend, it suggests that Paul, who liked to write little stories in his songs (as Buddy Holly had sometimes done), was mainly responsible for the overall theme. But the descending ‘Three Blind Mice’ notes in the oft repeated refrain of ‘Yeah, Yeah, Yeah’ was absolutely John Lennon. John didn’t know it yet, but he would develop a knack for writing memorable phrases and slogans into songs, and the one in ‘She Loves You’ was so infectious that soon groups of teenagers were chanting it, and football fans were singing it in support of their team. ‘We love you, yeah, yeah yeah . . .’ they roared on the terraces, while across Europe the Beatles soon became known as the Yeah-Yeahs.

With ‘She Loves You’, the British national press finally saw what had been under its nose for months. And as the Beatles continued their odyssey around the country, now travelling in a huge black Austin Princess, just like the one that would carry the Queen, reporters hurried after them.

What they found often astonished them. Traditionally, most pop stars had been meek-working class lads who did what their manager told them. The Beatles weren’t like that. While Paul was usually helpful, and John could be funny or grumpy, depending on his mood, their confidence in themselves and with their new situation often strayed into arrogance. For a reporter, catching up with them as they waited before going on stage in a new hotel in yet another new town must sometimes have been not unlike stepping into a play by Beckett or Pinter.

American journalist Michael Braun captured their bored, deadpan conversation to perfection when he followed the group on tour in a fly-on-the-wall account for his book Love Me Do.

John: ‘One more ciggy, and I’m going to hit the sack . . . “Hit the sack” being an American thing . . . I never liked “sack”. It’s something you put potatoes in over here.’

Paul: ‘The whole thought of hitting the sack . . . It’s so dirty and can mean a lot of things.’

John: ‘You can sack Rome. Or you can sack cloth. Or you can sacrilege, or saxophone, if you like, or saccharine.’

Ringo: ‘Or sacrifice.’

This wasn’t the sort of banter that show business reporters were used to hearing from pop stars. But the Beatles were daring to be different. And on the nation’s most popular TV variety show Sunday Night At The London Palladium on 13 October, they shook their just-shampooed mop-top hair in unison as they hit the falsettos. It was a joke, almost against themselves, and John had been laughed at when he’d first suggested the head-shaking. But it worked. The entire country, all generations, was falling in love with these cocky nonconformists who were making all previous rock stars look old-fashioned. Now the popular newspapers ran stories about boys being sent home from school for having Beatle haircuts, or about cut-price Beatle-style jackets going on sale, or fans queuing all night to get tickets for Beatle appearances. In the midst of this, ‘She Loves You’ sold a million copies (the first single to do so in the UK), and, as the wave of excitement spread into Europe, the group went to Sweden for four days of concerts there.

Only when they flew back into London from Stockholm and saw thousands of fans awaiting their return at Heathrow airport did the group begin to fully comprehend the enormity of their success.

Four days later, on 4 November, came the final British hurdle when they appeared before the Queen Mother at the Royal Command Performance. In those days to be asked to perform for royalty was considered the greatest compliment that could be bestowed on an artist, and even the Beatles were on edge. As always, on big occasions it was John the group turned to as their onstage spokesman.

‘I was fantastically nervous, but I wanted to say something to rebel a bit,’ John remembered. So, squinting out at the overwhelmingly middle-aged and well-heeled establishment audience, and with a nod towards the tiaras in the royal box, which without his glasses he couldn’t see anyway, he said: ‘For our last number I’d like to ask your help. The people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands. And the rest of you . . . if you’d just rattle your jewellery.’ And off he went: ‘Well, shake it up, baby, now . . . twist and shout . . .’

Some commentators saw that night as the birth of Beatlemania, but, if so, it had been in the delivery room since August, with the word creeping increasingly into the English language to describe the bedlam and hysteria the group was provoking. From newspaper reporters, television presenters, radio disc jockeys and magazine picture editors to workers in offices, students at universities, nurses in hospitals, staff in shops, farmers in fields and old people in care homes . . . almost everyone in Britain, it seemed, wanted to be involved or associated with the Beatles. There had never been anything like them before. They weren’t just loved by teenagers. By being seen to smile and applaud, the Queen Mother, with 26 million people watching – that is, around half the population of the UK – had given the group a token royal imprimatur. The Beatles were the sound and face of modern Sixties Britain.

Quite what John’s feelings were as he bowed low, almost in a mock gesture of fealty to the Queen Mother’s party, we can only imagine. He was, once again, ‘playing the game’. He had no embarrassment about telling anyone who asked that his ambition was ‘to be rich and famous’. If it meant bending a knee before royalty, he was happy to do that, albeit with his fingers metaphorically crossed behind his back.

Inevitably there were those who were dismissing the Beatles as a passing fad, but they were ignoring the evidence of not only their own eyes, but their ears. Because, while the hysteria had been building in public, in hundreds of private hours of work in hotel rooms and snatched days back at Abbey Road, the Beatles’ creative engine had never stopped. Already a new album and single were waiting for release just in time for Christmas.

When the Beatles had first met George Martin, they’d felt like schoolboys in the presence of someone whose accent suggested that his social background was several cuts above theirs. Over the past year, however, their relationship with him had changed. As he amused them by talking about his work with Peter Sellers and his experiences as a young officer in the Fleet Air Arm section of the Royal Navy at the end of the Second World War, he also apprised them of his childhood. He hadn’t been born to educated, well-off parents, as they had assumed. On the contrary, his father had been a machine carpenter in London’s working-class Holloway Road, and, during the Depression, his mother had gone out to work scrubbing floors to make ends meet. Neither of his parents had been musical, but for some reason they had always owned an old piano, and, as a child, George had taught himself to play. When, later, he took piano lessons, he discovered that he’d been born with perfect pitch.

‘But what about your posh accent, George?’ they wanted to know.

So, George had explained. When he was sixteen he’d decided to make a private recording of a Debussy-like piece of music for the piano that he’d composed, and had gone to a little private studio. It had all gone well, until he listened to the playback, and for the first time heard his own speaking voice as he’d announced what he was about to play. Only then did he realise that he had a strong Cockney accent.

From that moment on, he told them, he realised that if he was to get anywhere in music he would have to change his accent, and speak like a BBC presenter – which he finally did. If the Beatles were impressed by his confession, history doesn’t record.

Martin had been born in 1928, so was from an earlier generation than them, and in a managerial position where accents were important. It was different for the Beatles. To Mimi’s despair, John would now exaggerate, rather than try to diminish, his Scouse accent, especially when he was on television. Indeed, throughout his career he would remain militantly determined not to lose the way he spoke, or his allegiance to his working-class origins – imaginary though they were. ‘We were the first working-class singers that stayed working-class . . . and didn’t try to change our accents . . . which were looked down on in England,’ he would insist. It would be more accurate to say that he had turned himself into something of a professional Liverpudlian.

Ironically, by the end of 1963, the Beatles’ influence was beginning to redefine how a Scouse accent was viewed across Britain. Within a few more months it would be almost fashionable to come from Liverpool.

If the greater part of the Beatles’ first album had been recorded in a single day, their second, With The Beatles, spent six months in development and was altogether a conscious and considered step forward. Right from the cover, photographed by Robert Freeman the previous August, and showing, in Astrid style, the monochrome four faces of the group in the natural half-light of a hotel corridor, style predominated. The cover for their first album had been a snatched job taken on a staircase at EMI headquarters in central London; but, from now on, current art student fashion would be applied to everything the group touched. Having set the musical trend, they were now defining the visual way records were marketed – with styles that would be immediately copied by rival rock groups. Already they were emerging as leaders of a new popular culture.

Musically, half the songs for the second album were covers of their favourite American R&B hits, with John choosing to sing the Marvelettes’ ‘Please Mr Postman’, Barrett Strong’s ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ and, best of all, the Miracles’ ‘You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me’, leaving George to sing Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’. But the style of recording had changed, as George Martin showed them how effective double-tracking could be on a single voice. ‘We double-tracked ourselves to death on that album,’ was John’s memory of the sessions.

Apart from being their producer, George Martin had another contribution to make. He might never have cared for rock and roll, but in the presence of the Beatles he turned himself into a real boogiewoogie man at the piano. There may have only been four Beatles but there were five musicians present on a third of the songs on that second album.

None of the six new Lennon and McCartney songs was chosen to be a single, although Paul’s ‘All My Loving’, yet another of his letter-writing songs, would become one of his biggest ever hits when recorded by many other artists. For John, ‘It Won’t Be Long’, with its call-and-response sequence, was familiar territory, while ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ was a throwaway song that he and Paul first gave to Ringo to sing, and then, in a moment of rock comradeship, also to the Rolling Stones. They’d met the Stones at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond after they’d finished making a TV appearance at nearby Teddington Studios. So when, while riding in a taxi through Central London, they spotted the Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham, they’d jumped out and followed him to Trident Studios in Soho where they found the Stones struggling to come up with anything for their second single. ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ wasn’t quite ready, but after a brief discussion the two Beatles finished the lyrics and left the Stones to it. It would become the London group’s first top twenty hit in the UK.

John always got on well with the Stones, particularly Keith Richards and Brian Jones, in spite of the fact that they would soon be seen by fans as the Beatles’ rivals. But John wasn’t a fool. He didn’t like the Stones enough to give them one of the Beatles’ better songs.

With The Beatles was released on Friday, 22 November 1963. They were playing at Stockton-on-Tees that night, and just before they were due on stage, news filtered through that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated while on a visit to Dallas.

Later that evening all four Beatles, together with members of the other groups who were with them on tour, gathered around a television in the lounge of the hotel where they were staying. As in many other places that night, no one had very much to say.

A week later, with ‘She Loves You’ still near the top of the charts after an unprecedented three-month run, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ was released. John could be vague when talking about the writing of many of his songs, but he remembered this one. He liked it. He’d been living in a hotel in London’s Russell Square at the time, and had gone over to work with Paul at Jane Asher’s parents’ house in Wimpole Street, where Paul was now staying. ‘We were downstairs in the cellar [it was probably known as the basement in the Asher household] playing on the piano . . . and we had the line, “Oh you, got that something”, and Paul hits this chord and I turned to him and said, “That’s it! Do that again.” In those days we really used to absolutely write like that . . . both playing into each other’s noses.’

For a writer who could be so deliberate with words, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ was almost infantile in its lyrics about adolescent love – so perhaps it wasn’t surprising that it was often jokily referred to more realistically as ‘I Want To Hold Your Gland’. But, for the moment, words didn’t matter. It was the impact of their records that was important. Interestingly, while the doo-wop, three-part harmony of the flip side, ‘This Boy’, with its contrasting attitudes of two boys towards a girl, was much more thoughtful, when I asked John about it seven years later, he said that he couldn’t even remember writing it.

To fans, that might seem strange, but there were so many songs then, with so much praise raining down on the heads of Lennon and McCartney, that sometimes even major moments in their careers failed to fully register. And, sometimes, that praise came from the most unlikely sources.

By 1963, The Times newspaper had for over a century been regarded as a sober and responsible pillar of the British establishment. So when its chief music critic, William Mann, in the spirit of the moment gave his column over to a review of the Beatles’ new album, he caused more than the light-hearted amusement in music circles that he had envisaged. Writing about ‘their flat, submediant key switches . . . chains of pandiatonic clusters’ and the ‘Aeolian cadence at the end of “Not A Second Time” (the chord progression which ends Mahler’s “Song Of The Earth”)’, he opened the gate for, at first, ridicule, but then more serious consideration of Lennon and McCartney songs.

John was still talking about it, in his usual robust way, in 1970. ‘“Not A Second Time” . . . that was the one that fucking idiot from The Times was talking about,’ he told me. ‘It was the first intellectual bullshit they wrote about us. It was really just chords like any other chords. Still, I know it helps having bullshit written about you.’