WHEN I left RADA I was determined to throw myself into the family business and make an increasing, and lifelong success of it. It was 1957—I was twenty-three and full of resolve to do well for my own and my parents’ sake.
My brother Clive had now joined the firm and my father hoped for great expansion. We opened a new store in Liverpool—our first in the city centre and although there had been a record section in Walton which I had run, the new store in Charlotte Street, was far more promising.
There was quite a large record section, I was placed in charge with one assistant and we started to do quite well. In Walton we had been fortunate to take £70 for records in a week’s sale, but we took £20 on the first morning in Charlotte Street. Anne Shelton opened the store and we were away to a swinging start.
At that time, of course, I was only vaguely interested in popular music though I had always been a keen concert-goer. My favourite composer in those days was Sibelius, but in these changing times, he is now placed in my affections alongside Paul McCartney and John Lennon.
The Christmas which followed the opening became known in the record world as ‘Mary’s Boy Child’ year. It was a massive seller and we were one of the few shops where the disc was always in stock. But this was only the beginning of our reputation for I was determined to be known as the record-dealer who had everything the customer wanted—hit-songs, small-sellers, specialist records—the lot.
I established a fool-proof system in showing when a record pile needed renewing. This meant we never ran out of any given disc.
I turned no one away with a ‘Sorry. We don’t have it.’ If for instance a customer ordered: ‘The Birth of a Baby’ on L.P. I would order not one but another for permanent stock, for I believed that one query was indicative of some sort of constant demand, and two or three queries suggested a potentially larger scale.
A few years later this policy was to change my life.
But for the time being, sales at Nems—North End Music Stores—were mounting and the staff increased slowly by twos and threes to an eventual thirty, all working very hard. I built up a best-seller list which I checked twice daily and from this I expanded the pop music department and pushed the classical discs upstairs. I put in ridiculously long hours, working from 8 a.m. until long into the night and on Sundays I used to come into the store to make out orders.
In 1959, we opened another store, this time in the heart of Liverpool’s shopping centre. It was opened by Anthony Newley, then a very popular film-actor and pop-singer who, everyone knew, was going to be a great star. I had not met him before and although I was still shy of stars and anxious not to be a bore in their dressing-rooms, I persuaded a Decca representative to introduce us.
Newley was an exceedingly friendly, diffident young man, very modest and easy-going and we got on well. He agreed to open the store and spent a day with me and my family, just relaxing, without pretensions, and I recall thinking that this was how a real star should behave. In fact it is precisely the way my artistes behave, when they are permitted by press and public.
The traffic on opening day in Whitechapel was stopped by Newley. Central Liverpool had never seen such scenes except for a victorious cup-final team, and the mood and varied ages of the fans suggested that pop-singing was becoming more than a passing three-week wonder.
Finally that day the road was closed and Newley was able to open the store into which, years later, on a Saturday afternoon, walked leather-jacketed Raymond Jones. And eighteen months after that, the traffic was stopped again—when the Beatles visited the store.
By autumn 1962 the store was running like an eighteen-jewelled watch. It was showing good returns and the ordering and stocking systems were so automatic that I was, once again, becoming a little restless and bored. Life was getting too easy. On Saturday, October 28th, I had just come back from a long holiday in Spain during which I had wondered how I could expand my interests.
And then, suddenly, though quite undramatically, a few words from Raymond Jones brought the solution. The words, of course, were ‘Have you got a disc by the Beatles?’
I had never given a thought to any of the Liverpool beat groups then up and coming in cellar clubs. They were not part of my life, because I was out of the age group, and also because I had been too busy. But I knew that a lot of boys had taken up the guitar because of the influence of teenage stars since the early days of Presley and Tommy Steele, through the late fifties to the Shadows, who, by the autumn of 1962, were the star instrumental group backing Cliff Richard, unchallenged British pop idol.
The name ‘Beatle’ meant nothing to me though I vaguely recalled seeing it on a poster advertising a university dance at New Brighton Tower and I remembered thinking it was an odd and purposeless spelling.
Raymond Jones was one of any average dozen customers who called in daily for unknown discs and there seems now no valid reason why, beyond my normal efforts to satisfy a customer, I should have gone to such lengths to trace the actual recording artistes. But I did and I wonder sometimes whether there is not something mystically magnetic about the name ‘Beatle’?
Now they are world famous, the Beatles defy analysis as to the specific ingredients of their success but I do wonder whether they would have been quite as big if they had been called, for example, The Liverpool Four, or something equally prosaic.
One interesting feature of the Beatles’ entry into my life was that without being conscious of it, I had seen them many times in the store.
I had been bothered a little by the frequent visits of a group of scruffy lads in leather and jeans who hung around the store in the afternoons, chatting to the girls and lounging on the counters listening to records. They were pleasant enough boys, untidy and a little wild and they needed haircuts.
I mentioned to the girls in the shop that I thought the youth of Liverpool might while their afternoons away somewhere else but they assured me that the boys were well behaved, and amusing and they occasionally bought records. Also, said the girls, they seemed to know good discs from bad.
Though I didn’t know it, the four lads were the Beatles, filling in part of the long afternoon between the lunch-time and evening shows in the best cellars.
On October 28 Raymond Jones left the store after I had taken a note of his request. I wrote on a pad: ‘“My Bonnie”. The Beatles. Check on Monday.’
But before I had had time to check on Monday, two girls came into the store and they too asked for a disc by this curiously-spelled group. And this, contrary to legend, was the sum total of demand for the Beatles’ disc at this time in Liverpool. It is untrue that there was a milling fighting crowd around Nems waiting for the disc to arrive.
That afternoon I telephoned a few of the agents who imported discs, told them what I was looking for and found that no one had heard of the thing, let alone imported it. I might have stopped bothering there and then if I hadn’t made it a rigid rule never to turn any customer away.
And I was sure there was something very significant in three queries for one unknown disc in two days.
I talked to contacts in Liverpool and found, what I hadn’t realized, that the Beatles were in fact a Liverpool group, that they had just returned from playing in clubs in the seamy, seedy end of Hamburg where they were well known, successful and fairly impoverished. A girl I know said: ‘The Beatles? They’re the greatest. They’re at the Cavern this week.’ … The Cavern. Formerly a jazz-club which had been a huge success in the mid nineteen-fifties, it was now owned by Raymond McFall, an ex-accountant who was filling some of his jazz programmes with raw ‘Made in Liverpool’ beat music played, usually, on loudly amplified guitars and drums. The Cavern was a disused warehouse beneath Mathew Street, Liverpool and I remember that I was apprehensive at the thought of having to march in there among a lot of teenagers who were dressed as if they belonged, talking teenage talk and listening to music only they understood. Also, I was not a member.
So I asked a girl to have a word with the Cavern, to say that I would like to pop in on November 9th at lunch-time and to ensure that I wasn’t stopped at the door. I have never enjoyed scenes on doors with bouncers and people asking for ‘your membership card, sir,’ or that sort of thing.
I arrived at the greasy steps leading to the vast cellar and descended gingerly past a surging crowd of beat fans to a desk where a large man sat examining membership cards. He knew my name and he nodded to an opening in the wall which led into the central of the three tunnels which make up the rambling Cavern.
Inside the club it was as black as a deep grave, dank and damp and smelly and I regretted my decision to come. There were sometime 200 young people there jiving, chatting or eating a ‘Cavern lunch’—soup, roll, cokes and things. Over all the speakers were loudly-amplified current hit discs, then mainly American, and I remember considering the possibility of some ‘tie’ between Nems and the Cavern in connection with the Top Twenty.
I started to talk to one of the girls. ‘Hey,’ she hissed. ‘The Beatles’re going on now.’ And there on a platform at the end of the cellar’s middle tunnel stood the four boys. Then I eased myself towards the stage, past rapt young faces and jigging bodies and for the first time I saw the Beatles properly.
They were not very tidy and not very clean. But they were tidier and cleaner than anyone else who performed at that lunchtime session or, for that matter, at most of the sessions I later attended. I had never seen anything like the Beatles on any stage. They smoked as they played and they ate and talked and pretended to hit each other. They turned their backs on the audience and shouted at them and laughed at private jokes.
But they gave a captivating and honest show and they had very considerable magnetism. I loved their ad libs and I was fascinated by this, to me, new music with its pounding bass beat and its vast engulfing sound. There was quite clearly an excitement in the otherwise unpleasing dungeon which was quite removed from any of the formal entertainments provided at places like the Liverpool Empire or the London Palladium, though I learned later that the response to the Beatles was falling off a little in Liverpool—they, like me, were becoming bored because they could see no great progress in their lives.
I hadn’t appreciated it but I was something of a figure in the Liverpool Pop Scene as a Director of Nems, and I was surprised when after the Beatles had finished, Bob Wooler, the Cavern Disc Jockey, who later became a great friend of mine announced over the loudspeaker that Mr. Epstein of Nems was in the Cavern and would the kids give me a welcome.
This sort of announcement then, as now, embarrassed me and I was a little diffident when I reached the stage to try to talk to the Beatles about ‘My Bonnie’.
George was the first to talk to me. A thin pale lad with a lot of hair and a very pleasant smile. He shook hands and said ‘Hello there. What brings Mr. Epstein here?’ and I explained that I’d had queries about their German disc.
He called the others over—John, Paul and Peter Best—and said ‘this man would like to hear our disc’.
Paul looked pleased and went into the tiny band-room next to the stage to get it played. I thought it was good, but nothing very special. I stayed in the Cavern and heard the second half of the programme and found myself liking the Beatles more and more. There was some indefinable charm there. They were extremely amusing and in a rough ‘take it or leave way’ very attractive.
Never in my life had I thought of managing an artiste or representing one, or being in any way involved in behind-the-scenes presentation, and I will never know what made me say to this eccentric group of boys that I thought a further meeting might be helpful to them and to me.
But something must have sparked between us because I arranged a meeting at the Whitechapel store at 4.30 p.m. on December 3rd, 1961, ‘just for a chat,’ I explained, without mentioning management because nothing as precise as that had yet formed in my mind.