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Postcards from Hamburg

16 August 1960

George is just seventeen years old when he climbs into the cream and green Austin van owned by the band’s tubby Welsh manager, Allan Williams. He holds a tin of scones baked by his mother. Before watching her son set off, Mrs Harrison takes Williams to one side. ‘Look after him,’ she says.

None of the Beatles has ever been abroad. Jim McCartney entertains misgivings, but doesn’t feel he can stand in Paul’s way. The contract they have just signed gives them 210 deutschmarks a week, or £17.10s; the average weekly wage in Britain is £14. ‘He’s being offered as much money as I make a week. How can I tell him not to go?’

The van is packed with a motley crew. George sits in the back with the other Beatles. Allan Williams is at the wheel, with his Chinese wife Beryl and Beryl’s brother Barry sitting next to him. Also on board are Williams’s business partner, ‘Lord Woodbine’, so-called in homage to his devotion to Woodbine cigarettes, and George Sterner, the second-in-command to Bruno Koschmider, the German club-owner with whom the boys have signed a contract.

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It’s the start of a long journey. There is a five-hour wait at Newhaven, and four hours at Hook of Holland while Williams insists that the Beatles don’t require permits and visas because they are students. They stop off in Amsterdam for a short break. John seizes the opportunity to shoplift two pieces of jewellery, several guitar strings, a couple of handkerchiefs and a harmonica. In his managerial role, Williams orders him to return them to the shops, but John refuses.

As they drive through Germany, they sing songs – ‘Rock Around the Clock’, ‘Maggie May’ – but when they arrive at the Reeperbahn they are momentarily struck dumb, dazzled by so much neon, and so many open doors through which women can be glimpsed taking their clothes off. But they soon regain their natural ebullience, shouting ‘Here come the scousers!’ at the top of their voices.

Off the Reeperbahn runs Grosse Freiheit. The lights of the strip clubs are being switched on as they arrive, and the prostitutes are beginning to emerge. Still at the wheel, Allan Williams notes that the streets are ‘swarming with all the rag-tag and bob-tail of human existence – dope fiends, pimps, hustlers for strip clubs and clip-joints, gangsters, musicians, transvestites, plain ordinary homosexuals, dirty old men, dirty young men, women looking for women’.

Nevertheless, it seems like a dream destination for a band whose achievements in their homeland have bordered on the pitiful. In the autumn they failed to qualify for the talent show TV Star Search; in the first three months of this year they had no professional engagements at all; in May they failed an audition to be Billy Fury’s backing group. So things are looking up. The people of Hamburg are bored by the lifeless efforts of their home-grown groups: Williams says Germans turn rock’n’roll into a death march. But British bands who have played in Hamburg – Dave Lee and the Staggerlees from Kent, the Shades Five from Kidderminster, the Billions from Worcestershire – have never looked back. The Germans seem to love them all, good, bad and indifferent.

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The Beatles are met at the Indra Club by Bruno Koschmider, an unprepossessing manager of an unprepossessing venue, cramped and clammy, with just two customers at the bar. Koschmider shows them to their lodgings. They haven’t been expecting much, but what they see confounds even their most meagre expectations. Between the five of them, they are expected to occupy two dark, dank, tiny rooms around the back of Koschmider’s grubby cinema, the Bambi Kino. There are no lightbulbs: they will have to make do with matches. The walls are concrete. The first room measures five feet by six. It is furnished with an army-surplus bunk bed and a threadbare couch.

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‘What the fucking hell!’ says John, more used to Aunt Mimi’s cosy interior décor. ‘Fuck me!’ chorus the others. ‘Only temporary,’ Koschmider reassures them; but he is lying.

This first bedroom is to be shared by John, Stu and George. John and Stu bag the bunk. George, being the youngest, has to make do with the couch.

The second bedroom is exactly the same size, but without a window. There is no means of telling if it is night or day. There are few blankets, and no heating.

Their rooms are a hair’s breadth from being en-suite, because the wall is paper thin, and on the other side is a toilet, also used by customers of the cinema. The smells seep through into their rooms.

They have to wash and shave with the cold water from the basin next to the public urinals. George never has a bath or a shower during either of his first two seasons in Hamburg.

It’s all a far cry from Las Vegas. Understandably, their natural high spirits are deflated. Their first performance at the Indra is lacklustre. They stand still and chug their way through cover versions of popular hits, while half a dozen punters look glumly on. Koschmider is unimpressed. He hired the Beatles to provide energy; instead they just stand around looking woebegone.

‘Mach Schau, boys! Mach Schau!’ he demands. Make show! Make show! It does the trick, and becomes the catalyst for any amount of japes: from now on, the Beatles go all-out to enjoy themselves, strutting and dancing and screaming, hurling abuse at the audience and fighting among themselves.

They regularly play the same song for ten or twenty minutes at a time, just for the hell of it. One night, for a bet, they play a single song – ‘What’d I Say’, by Ray Charles – for over an hour. While the others rag about, Pete remains sombre, drumming as though it were a chore, a bit like washing up.

K & K Ulf Kruger OHG/Getty Images

Pete is also the only one who refuses stimulants. The others are helped in their high-jinks by a smorgasbord of cheap drugs – Purple Hearts and Black Bombers and Preludin, a slimming pill with an active ingredient1 that charges up the metabolism, keeps you wide awake and ensures that you never stop talking. Stu’s German girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr is blessed with an in-house supplier: her mother. ‘They were fifty pfennigs each and my mummy used to get them for us from the chemist. You had to have a prescription for them, but my mummy knew someone at the chemist.’ In time, they toss them back like Smarties, with beer chasers. They even talk of eating ‘Prellie sandwiches’.

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Unsurprisingly, it is John who pops the poppermost, and to the greatest effect, yelling obscenities, rolling around on the stage, throwing food at other band members, pretending to be a hunchback, jumping on Paul’s back, hurling himself into the audience, delighting in calling them ‘fucking Krauts’ or ‘Nazis’ or ‘German spassies’.

Diplomacy has never come naturally to him. One night he takes to the stage wearing nothing but his underpants, with a loo seat around his head, marching around with a broom in his hand, chanting ‘Sieg heil! Sieg heil!’ On another, he appears in swimming trunks. Halfway through ‘Long Tall Sally’ he turns his back to the audience and pulls the trunks down, wiggling his bare bottom at the audience. Unversed in Liverpudlian manners, the Germans applaud politely.

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Cynthia comes to Hamburg on a visit, and witnesses John so out of his mind on pills and alcohol that he falls about the stage in ‘hysterical convulsions’. Offstage, he can be equally feral. He urinates from a balcony onto a group of nuns in the street below. Not that the others are models of sobriety: between numbers, Paul says something rude about Stu’s beautiful girlfriend Astrid, who all the band fancy, and Stu duly punches him. Paul fights back, and before long they are grappling onstage in what Paul comes to remember as ‘a sort of death grip’. But – Mach Schau! Mach Schau! – these spectacles prove popular. They begin to be known locally as the benakked Beatles – the crazy Beatles.

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Hamburg audiences prefer to pick fights with each other, rather than with the band. The waiters – hired from the Hamburg Boxing Academy, so rusty on matters of etiquette – wear heavy boots, suitable for energetic kicking, and carry spring-loaded truncheons in the backs of their trousers, discreetly hidden beneath their jackets. Clubs keep tear-gas guns behind their counters, for use when a skirmish threatens to expand into a riot. In time, the Beatles are allotted the prefectorial duty of making the nightly announcement in German of a ten o’clock curfew for the under-eighteens: ‘Es ist zweiundzwanzig Uhr. Wir mussen jetzt Ausweiskontrolle machen. Alle Jugendlichen unter achtzehn Jahren mussen dieses Lokal verlassen.’2

Bruno Koschmider is no jolly, thigh-slapping Mein Host. Kosch by name, Kosch by nature: he patrols his club brandishing the knotted leg of a hardwood German chair. If a customer proves unruly, or is too noisily dissatisfied, he will be bundled into Koschmider’s office, pinned to the floor, and beaten black and blue with it.

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In the early hours of the morning, Koschmider’s fellow club-owners drop by for a nightcap. They like to send trays of schnapps up to the band, to be downed – ‘Beng, beng – ja! Proost!’ – in one. They think it hilarious that this band from England is called the Beatles, which they pronounce ‘Peadles’, German slang for ‘little willies’. ‘Oh, zee Peadles! Ha ha ha!’

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The band’s japes are not confined to the stage. One afternoon they dare Paul to don a Pickelhaube and goose-step up and down the Reeperbahn with a broom for a rifle, while they yell ‘Sieg heil!’ They also enjoy playing leapfrog in the street. These fun and games prove infectious: Pete Best remembers passers-by joining in, forming ‘a long trail of Germans of varying ages all leapfrogging behind us … At some intersections, friendly cops would hold up the traffic to wave us through.’

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In the heart of the Reeperbahn, sex – ‘almost limitless sex’, in Pete’s words – is freely available. ‘How could we possibly invite a dame to our squalid digs alongside the cinema urinals, dark and damp as a sewer and about as attractive?’ Pete asks, decades later, and then answers his own question. ‘But we did, and not one girl ever said no.’

George Harrison loses his virginity at the Bambi Kino, while Paul, John and Pete look on. ‘They couldn’t really see anything because I was under the covers … After I’d finished they all applauded and cheered. At least they kept quiet whilst I was doing it.’

In these conditions, nothing is private. A fan from Liverpool, Sue Johnston,3 receives a letter from Paul in Hamburg. He tells her that one night John ended up with ‘a stunning, exotic-looking woman, only to discover on closer inspection that she was a he’. The other Beatles found it hilarious.

Perhaps, in years to come, Pete’s description will be the subject of a question in a GCSE mathematics paper: ‘For the nightly romp there were usually five or six girls between the four of us … We found ourselves having two or three girls a night each … the most memorable night of love in our dowdy billet was when eight birds gathered there to do the Beatles a favour. They managed to swap with all four of us – twice!’ Many of the girls are prostitutes from Herbertstrasse, happy to waive their usual fees for these boisterous young Englishmen. Pete will never forget them: ‘I still remember some of their names: Greta, Griselda, Hilde, Betsy, Ruth … The Beatles’ first groupies.’

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John is as avid as any of them, but, characteristically, will recall those days of sexual wonder with a mixture of disgust and disappointment.

‘I used to dream that it would be great if you could just click your fingers and they would strip off and be ready for me,’ he will tell Alistair Taylor. ‘I would spend most of my teenage years fantasising about having this kind of power over women. The weird thing is, when the fantasies came true, they were not nearly so much fun. One of my most frequent dreams was seducing two girls together, or even a mother and daughter. This happened in Hamburg a couple of times and the first time it was sensational. The second time it got to feel like I was giving a performance. The more women I had, the more that buzz would turn into a horrible feeling of rejection and revulsion.’

Equally characteristically, Paul will look back on these sexual adventures largely in terms of self-advancement. ‘It was a sexual awakening for us,’ he tells Barry Miles in 1997. ‘We didn’t have much practical knowledge till we went to Hamburg. Of course, it was striptease girls and hookers … But it was all good practice, I suppose … So we came back from there reasonably initiated. It wasn’t so much that we were experts, but that we were more expert than other people who hadn’t had that opportunity.’

1 Phenmetrazine.

2 ‘It is twenty-two hours. We must now make a passport control. All youth under eighteen years must now leave this club.’

3 At that time she was going out with Norman Kuhlke, drummer with the Swinging Blue Jeans. She later worked as a tax inspector, and then for Brian Epstein, before embarking on a successful acting career. In 2000 she received a BAFTA for Best TV Comedy Actress.