56

On page 598 of James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, an unnamed clergyman puts in the briefest of appearances. Boswell and Dr Johnson are in the middle of an argument about the best sermons in English when ‘a Clergyman, whose name I do not recollect’ pipes up with a suggestion. Johnson slaps him down – ‘They were nothing, Sir …’ – and the unnamed clergyman is never mentioned again.

One hundred and twenty-five years after Boswell recorded the incident, the essayist Max Beerbohm lamented the way this curt dismissal by Dr Johnson was now all that anyone would ever know of this anonymous clergyman: ‘Fragmentary, pale, momentary; almost nothing; glimpsed and gone; as it were, a faint human hand thrust up, never to reappear, from beneath the rolling waters of time …’

Jimmie Nicol makes the same sort of fleeting appearance in the story of the Beatles. In the 420 pages of Hunter Davies’ pioneering biography of the group he appears nowhere at all, and he pops up just twice in Bob Spitz’s 983-page biography, on pages 506 and 507, his Christian name mis-spelled as ‘Jimmy’. The Beatles’ own vast Anthology allots him a single entry, on page 139. In Philip Norman’s 400-page Shout! The True Story of the Beatles, he merits three passing mentions, all in the same brief paragraph:

In June they toured Scandinavia, Holland, the Far East and Australasia. Ringo Starr was having his tonsils out and missed three-quarters of the journey; in his place sat Jimmy Nicol, a session drummer small and obscure enough to scotch any rumour of permanent change. Nicol drummed with them until Melbourne, where Ringo rejoined: history from then on relates nothing further on Jimmy Nicol.

Fragmentary, pale, momentary; almost nothing; glimpsed and gone: such is the fate of Jimmie Nicol. Until June 1964, his career had been up and down, but largely down. He had drummed on ‘Giddy-Up-a-Ding-Dong’ by Colin Hicks & His Cabin Boys,1 but it had failed to chart. He then briefly joined Tony Sheridan and the Wreckers, before leaving them to play with Vince Eager and the Quiet Three.2 They toured Britain in 1960, on the same bill as Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. Cochran took a shine to them and promised to take them back to Los Angeles at the end of the tour; but on 17 April 1960 Cochran and Vincent were both killed when their taxi crashed on the outskirts of Chippenham.3 Having lost their mentor, Vince Eager and the Quiet Three were forced to stay in Britain, playing a summer season in Great Yarmouth instead of flying out to Los Angeles. Subsequently, after a row over money with their manager/promoter Larry Parnes, Eager and the band broke up, leaving Jimmie once more high and dry.

Going it alone, he formed Jimmie Nicol and the Shubdubs, but their ska version of ‘Humpty Dumpty’ failed to take off. In early 1964 he drummed on ‘Beatlemania’, a cut-price album of Beatles’ cover versions, and then he drummed for Georgie Fame’s backing band, the Blue Flames, by night, and worked in a music store during the day.

On the afternoon of 4 June 1964 he was sitting at home in Barnes, south-west London, when the telephone rang. ‘Hello, is Jimmie Nicol in please? This is George Martin calling. What are you doing for the next four days? Ringo is ill, and we want you to take his place on the Beatles’ tour. Would you mind going to Australia?’

Who would have said no? Martin told Jimmie to come to the EMI studios at 3 p.m., adding, ‘The Beatles want to run through some numbers with you.’

Earlier that day the Beatles had been posing for photographs to mark the beginning of their first world tour when Ringo had begun to vomit. Rushed to University College Hospital, he was diagnosed with tonsillitis and pharyngitis. Brian Epstein told the other three that they would need a replacement. George, never the most pliable of the Beatles, put his foot down: ‘If Ringo’s not part of the group, it’s not the Beatles. I don’t see why we should do it. I’m not going to go.’

Epstein talked them through the economics of cancelling a world tour, whereupon George, always beady about money, immediately changed his mind. They now had twenty-four hours to find someone who could drum, and who looked, however fleetingly, like a Beatle. As it happened, their first two choices – Raye Du-Val of the Blue Notes and Bobby Graham of Marty Wilde’s Wildcats – had prior commitments, but after a friendly phone call from Paul, Georgie Fame agreed to release his new drummer.

At Abbey Road, Jimmie successfully drummed his way through ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, ‘She Loves You’, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, ‘This Boy’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and ‘Long Tall Sally’.

‘Right then, you’re in,’ said John.

That evening, two women arrived at Jimmie’s house: a hairdresser, ready to give him a new Beatle fringe, and a wardrobe lady, carrying Ringo’s Beatle suit, which would need to be altered overnight for this taller, burlier new Beatle.

The following day, John, Paul, George and Jimmie flew to Copenhagen, where they were booked into the Royal Hotel, staying in the same suite of rooms President Khrushchev had occupied a fortnight before. Meanwhile, Ringo lay in his bed at University College Hospital, feeling sorry for himself: ‘It was very strange because I wasn’t well and they’d taken Jimmie Nicol and I thought they didn’t love me any more. All that stuff went through my head.’

But Ringo’s cloud was Jimmie’s silver lining. ‘The day before I was a Beatle, not one girl would even look me over. The day after, when I was suited up and riding in the back of a limo with John Lennon and Paul McCartney, they were just dying to get a touch of me.’

His first concert as the Beatles’ new drummer got off to a shaky start. ‘He was sitting up on this rostrum, just eyeing up all the women,’ recalled Paul. ‘We’d start “She Loves You” – “1, 2,” and nothing. “1, 2,” still nothing.’ But he soon got the hang of it.

For the next ten days Jimmie was treated as a full member of the Beatles, appearing alongside John, Paul and George at press conferences, grinning broadly and laughing at all their jokes. However, film footage shows that he himself contributed little in the way of banter. Asked in Holland how he feels about his first two shows with the group, he replies, ‘Sweat was rolling off my cheeks in buckets.’ But the rest of the questions – ‘Do you wear something on your head when you go swimming?’ ‘Do you do it for the money?’ are directed at the others, with George struggling to explain the pun within the name of the Beatles through a Dutch interpreter.

In Hong Kong, the Beatles’ press officer, Derek Taylor, introduced them as ‘John, Paul, George and Jimmie Nicol’, at which the first three hooted and whistled in his support.

‘Mr Nicol, how do you feel being rushed into this vast world of publicity all at once?’ asks a reporter.

‘It’s a most exciting experience,’ replies Jimmie.

‘Correct!’ chorus John and George.

Even now, photographs of the Beatles taken during their ten-day tour can bring the viewer up with a jolt: it is as if a random tourist has thrust his head through the hole of a ‘Picture Yourself as a Beatle’ stand at a funfair. He leaps out at you, an intruder in a family album.

Icon and Image/Getty Images

On their flight from Hong Kong via Darwin to Sydney, Jimmie sat next to John. The two of them seemed to hit it off, and it even crossed Jimmie’s mind that if he played his cards right, he could be in with a chance of replacing Ringo on a permanent basis.

At their first press conference in Sydney, the three regular Beatles batted away questions with their usual chirpy banter.

‘What do you expect to find here in Australia?’

‘Australians.’

‘Have you been practising up your Australian accents?’

‘No, cobber, not at all.’

As the conference progressed, the chain-smoking Jimmie was put on the spot.

‘How about you, Jimmie? You haven’t said anything. How do you feel, Jimmie, being in with the Beatles – a new talent – standing in for Ringo?’

‘It’s a good experience, man.’

‘How is Ringo?’

‘Erm, he’s much better. He joins them on Sunday.’

‘What do you do then?’

‘Erm, I go back to London and they’re fixing up a band for me, and I do some television.’

The spotlight swung back on John, Paul and George, who were better equipped to answer the more general questions. But, noticing Jimmie’s silence, one reporter asked, ‘Have you got an agreement that Jimmie mustn’t speak?’

‘Ask him a question,’ said George.

‘I can’t answer questions that, erm, I don’t know anything about.’

‘What’s the group you play with in England, Jimmie?’

‘Well, I’ve played with a lot of groups in England. Just before I left, I was playing with a rhythm and blues band …’

‘Does Brian Epstein manage you?’

Jimmie thought for a few seconds. ‘Nobody … No, he doesn’t.’

The other three all laughed at his hesitant response.

‘You’d know it if he did!’ said John.

Three hundred thousand people packed the streets to welcome John, Paul, George and Jimmie to Adelaide, where they were greeted by the lord mayor and honoured with a civic reception in the town hall. Out on the balcony in front of the cheering crowds, each of the Beatles was introduced in turn. A noticeable drop in temperature came when Jimmie’s name was called, and even one or two boos.

At the press conference, one reporter observed: ‘There’s more people here than came to see the Queen.’

‘I should think so,’ said George. ‘She didn’t have any hit records.’

‘Jimmie, do you think that Brian Epstein is going to wave his magic wand at you sometime and include you as a fifth Beatle?’

‘That I don’t know.’

‘What’s it like being thrust in with the Beatles?’

‘It’s the end, you know!’ By this he meant ‘It couldn’t be better,’ though it now carries a hint of doom.

Throughout his time as a Beatle, Jimmie was in two minds about the man he had been hired to replace: ‘Until Ringo joined us in Melbourne, I was praying he would get well. At the same time, I was hoping he would not come back. I was having a ball.’ But in public, he remained sunny.

‘Jimmie, you’ve got your final performances tonight and then Ringo arrives tomorrow.’

‘Yeah, that’s right. I’m looking forward to meeting him.’

‘And then it’s all over for you. What’s going to happen? I hear you may not be going back to England?’

‘Not for a little while, no. I fancy going back to Sydney.’

At the end of the Beatles’ final concert in Adelaide, Jimmie’s very last show as a Beatle, Paul publicly thanked him for standing in as their drummer. He then added that Ringo would be returning the next day, and the audience burst into rapturous applause.

Ringo and Brian Epstein flew from London to Melbourne, arriving just before the others, who were flying from Adelaide. Up to a quarter of a million fans surrounded their hotel, screaming ‘We want the Beatles! We want the Beatles!’ The police called in the armed services, but they failed to prevent Ringo having clumps of hair pulled from his head as he rushed from his car to the hotel. The other three Beatles were then smuggled into the hotel through the back door, along with Jimmie. Once they were all inside, John, Paul and George were reunited with Ringo, and Ringo and Jimmie shook hands.

The five Beatles were escorted onto the hotel balcony. ‘Hello everybody, how are you?’ Paul said over a loudspeaker. ‘Hello, hey!’ added Ringo, and the crowd went wild. Jimmie joined in the waving, but said nothing. Sensing a bit of comical argy-bargy was in order, Ringo grabbed Jimmie’s neck and performed a mock-strangling for the camera.

At the press conference in the hotel ballroom, Jimmie sat at one end of the table. He was asked if he would be forming a new band, but no one seemed particularly interested in his reply. ‘I don’t know yet,’ he began. ‘Until I get back …’ Then John started to interrupt and Ringo signalled for Jimmie to be quiet. Feeling unwanted, Jimmie began drumming his fingers on the table. It was to be the last time he ever drummed with the Beatles.

That evening, Brian Epstein issued strict instructions that no one was to leave the hotel: if they wanted to have fun, they must have it in their suite. While John, Paul, George and Ringo had a party, Jimmie disobeyed orders and slipped out onto the streets. Realising he had absconded, Epstein despatched Mal Evans and Derek Taylor to look for him; they eventually tracked him down to a bar.

‘You mustn’t be on the streets,’ said Taylor. ‘You can’t come into a bar.’

‘What are you talking about? I’m not a Beatle any more.’

‘You’re a Beatle until we put you on the plane.’

Evans and Taylor settled his bill, and marched him back to the hotel.

The next morning, before his former bandmates had woken up, Jimmie was escorted to the airport by Brian Epstein. The atmosphere in their car was, he felt, a little testy. Was Epstein still cross about his behaviour the night before?

There were no fans at the airport, and no press or television. Sitting alone, he was spotted by a journalist who happened to be passing through. The journalist asked him what his plans were.

‘Well, I hope to do something that I want to do,’ he replied. ‘Now there’s a possibility that I might be able to do something.’

Before bidding him farewell, Epstein presented him with a gold watch, inscribed ‘To Jimmie, with appreciation and gratitude – Brian Epstein and the Beatles’. He also gave him an envelope containing £500 for ten days’ work. Jimmie then climbed the steps of the plane, giving a parting wave to a solitary cameraman. As the plane left the runway, he ceased to be a Beatle. He never spoke to any of the Beatles again: ‘After my part of the Beatles’ tour ended, I went back to England on my own. None of the Beatles ever phoned me after that. No phone call.’

For a few weeks, he felt the warm afterglow of celebrity: one or two people recognised him in the street, and when he went to watch Shirley Bassey performing at the Talk of the Town, she told the audience he was there, and asked him to stand and take a bow.

What next? In his position, which of us would not have felt, deep down, that, with a little bit of luck, all this fame and fortune, fun and adoration, might last forever?

At first, Jimmie seemed to have the wind behind him. Alert to his new-found fame, Pye Records re-released his ska version of ‘Humpty Dumpty’, slyly crediting it on the label to ‘Jimmy Nicol now with the Beatles’. The Daily Mirror ran headline ‘Jim Plans to Rival Beatles’, on top of a story in which he was quoted as saying he wanted to make Brian Epstein wish he’d made him a permanent Beatle. Georgie Fame had kindly kept his place in the Blue Flames open, but, bucked by his new celebrity, Jimmie felt he could do better, and told him he was moving on.

Luck seemed to be on his side. It so happened that, three days after Jimmie’s return, Dave Clark, the vocalist-drummer of the Dave Clark Five, was rushed to hospital with a duodenal ulcer, just when his band had been booked to top the bill for a three-week summer season at the Winter Gardens in Blackpool. This time, rather than simply step in for the drummer, Jimmie was invited to replace the entire band with one of his own. Understandably, he felt glad all over. ‘I just can’t find words to describe how I feel about taking Dave’s place,’ he told the Daily Mirror. ‘One week, you’re drumming away with the biggest group in the world. Then you hear they want you to take over from the second-biggest group.’

Within two days he had re-formed his earlier group, the Shubdubs, and they were on their way to Blackpool. Needless to say, a few of the supporting acts at the Winter Gardens – among them comedian Dick Emery and trumpeter Eddie Calvert – were put out by the news that Jimmie was now topping the bill. ‘Most of the cast were bemused that we had come from nowhere to top the bill, due to Jimmie’s sudden leap to fame,’ recalled a Shubdub.

It was while Jimmie Nicol was in Blackpool that things began to go wrong. A rush-released follow-up single, ‘Husky’, failed to make the charts, despite an appearance by the band on Ready Steady Go!. Jimmie had a three-single contract with Pye; after the failures of ‘Humpty Dumpty’ and ‘Husky’, it was vital that his next single was a hit, or he would be dropped.

For this crucial record, Jimmie chose to revive an old blues song from the 1930s, ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’. Little did he know that another band, Them, had recorded the very same track for Decca, with two unknowns – Van Morrison and Jimmy Page – on vocals and lead guitar, and a song called ‘Gloria’ on the B-side.

The version by Them went to number 10; the Shubdubs’ vanished without trace. From that point on, Jimmie’s life seemed to go into freefall. Pye refused to renew his contract; his wife filed for divorce. Undaunted, he bought himself a brand-new Jaguar, but within a fortnight the police had issued him with court summonses for four motoring offences.

He continued to pay each of the other five Shubdubs £26 a week, even though they were getting little work, and he himself was playing solo in bars for only £10 a week: ‘I borrowed everywhere because I believed that one day there would be a turning point.’ But the turning point never came. At the beginning of 1965 the Shubdubs’ trumpet player decided to call it a day; soon the others followed suit.

Jimmie then formed a seven-piece group – the Sound of Jimmie Nicol – and somehow managed to convince Decca that an upbeat version of ‘Oh My Darling Clementine’, renamed ‘Sweet Clementine’, had all the ingredients of a hit. In pursuit of this dream he borrowed £3,000 to equip his band. They made their debut at the Chelmsford Corn Exchange on 3 April 1965, but failed to attract a single review.

Failure craves a reason. Jimmie developed a theory to explain his fall from grace: obviously, Brian Epstein had turned against him, punishing him for his rebellious behaviour on that last night in Australia; Epstein had clearly put pressure on promoters to blacklist him. No one could see the logic behind this theory – why would Epstein do such a thing? – but the scepticism of others served only to fuel Jimmie’s burgeoning sense of conspiracy.

In April, George Harrison took the trouble to come to a performance by the Sound of Jimmie Nicol. Between sets, he asked a waiter to take a drink to Jimmie, but Jimmie sent it back. ‘I declined the offer,’ he explained later. ‘I do have my self-respect. I will not be bought by anyone.’ By now, he was finding hurt everywhere.

‘Sweet Clementine’ proved a flop, and Decca dropped Jimmie. He could no longer afford to pay the band. At the same time, he split up with his manager. On 30 April 1965, while the Beatles were filming Help!, he was declared bankrupt, his debts of £4,066 far surpassing the £50 in his bank account.

The Daily Mail ran the headline ‘The Rise and Fall of the Fifth Beatle’. In the accompanying interview, Jimmie complained that ‘standing in for Ringo was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Up to then I was feeling quite happy, turning over 30 to 40 pounds a week. I didn’t realise that it would change my whole life. Everyone in show business said I couldn’t miss. I was the hottest name there was. But after the headlines died, I began dying too. No one wanted to know me any more.’ Quizzed about his future, he replied, ‘The future? Nothing. There’s nothing for me now.’

Ringo Starr read this maudlin interview while he was filming the scene in Help! in which he fails to notice someone cutting out the floor around his drum kit, and tumbles through the hole. ‘I didn’t think he could fail,’ he said. ‘No one did.’ The following week Jimmie was taken to court by his ex-wife, who was seeking £30 in maintenance arrears.

For his part, Paul McCartney tried to lend a helping hand, persuading Peter Asher, brother of Jane, to hire Jimmie for a brief tour with his duet Peter and Gordon. Jimmie then moved to Gothenburg, where he played with a Swedish band, the Spotniks. He eventually went with them to Mexico City, where they were employed as the house band at the Alameda Hotel. Like the Beatles, Jimmie experimented with drugs in the second half of the sixties, though with notably less aplomb: one night he fell off his seat while attempting to play drums for the Spotniks, and was asked to leave.

Teaming up with a musician called Eddie Quinn, he then formed Los Nicolquinn, an awkward combination of their two surnames. Together they performed one of his songs, ‘I’m Lost’, which came with a gloomy lyric about being ‘badly beaten up’. The chorus consisted of the title, sung over and over again.

He remarried in Mexico, but his new wife soon grew tired of his endless complaints that Brian Epstein had ruined his life. One day he took off his Beatles commemorative watch and smashed it to bits. The marriage was to last barely a year.

And so the decades rolled by. Jimmie made an experimental movie called Gas, in which he can be seen drumming his hands on a naked woman; he formed a band called Blue Rain; he recorded a version of ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’. Returning to London in the mid-1970s, he abandoned music for the building trade. By now he had become too forgotten a figure even to feature in round-ups of forgotten figures.

Philip Norman’s book Shout!, with its single disobliging reference to Jimmie, was published in 1981. Three years later, the Official Beatles Fan Club of the Netherlands tracked him down and persuaded him to attend their convention in Amsterdam. During a question-and-answer session, Jimmie claimed that the Beatles had forced him to pretend he was Ringo Starr: ‘They did not want to admit, even though it was black and white in the press, that there was anybody else playing drums except Ringo.’

Since then, sightings of Jimmie Nicol have been few and far between. In 1988 there were unconfirmed rumours that he had died, but it emerged that they had been put about by Jimmie himself. In 2005 a reporter from the Daily Mail caught up with him in London, but he refused to say a word. In Mexico, his former wife continues to believe that he never recovered from his ten days as a Beatle: ‘Jimmie was affected for his entire life because of his experience with the Beatles. He didn’t get to stay with the Beatles. He thinks he failed because of that time with them. He was frustrated. So maybe his whole life has been frustrating, from being the Fifth Beatle. I think it affected his mental health.’

At a record convention in Utrecht in 2011, a Dutch record collector spotted Jimmie Nicol, or someone who looked like him. ‘I went up to the man and said, “Are you Jimmie Nicol? The drummer?” … He signed his name – Jimmie Nicol – on a piece of paper, but then headed off without saying a word.’

1 Colin Hicks was the younger brother of Tommy Steele. He had been a cabin boy on a Cunard cruise, returning in autumn 1957 to find his elder brother famous. Colin looked like Tommy, and sounded like him too: he would later ascribe his failure to crack the charts to this insuperable resemblance.

2 Vince Eager was born Roy Taylor, but was given a fresh name by his manager, Larry Parnes. Known by some as ‘Parnes, Shillings and Pence’, Larry Parnes made it a rule to select stage names for his protégés, among them Billy Fury (born Ron Wycherley), Marty Wilde (Reginald Smith), Dickie Pride (Richard Knellar), Lance Fortune (Chris Morris), Johnny Gentle (John Askew), Georgie Fame (Clive Powell) and Tommy Steele (Thomas Hicks). One of the few to mount a successful resistance to Parnes’s compulsive name-changing was Joe Brown, who refused to go by the name Parnes had allotted him: Elmer Twitch.

3 The first policeman on the scene of the crash was a young cadet called Dave Harman. Back at the station, he began strumming on Cochran’s Gretsch guitar, which he had rescued from the wreckage, and found he had an aptitude for music. Consequently he left the police force, changed his name to Dave Dee and formed Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich. Between 1965 and 1969 the group spent more weeks in the UK singles chart than the Beatles.