I don’t say we’re the chosen race but there is a feeling of being special if you were born in Liverpool and this can irritate outsiders. Liverpool poet Roger McGough: “If you were asked to choose somewhere to be brought up, you would pick somewhere else, but I was told I was lucky. You’re lucky to be born in Liverpool; you’re lucky to be born a Catholic; you’re lucky to be born short-sighted; and you’re lucky to be born during the Blitz.”
Even Raul Malo of the Mavericks has picked up on the special vibe of Liverpool. “Before I came to England, people were telling me how reserved the English were. Then I came to Liverpool and found the Scousers were fantastic. They remind me of the mid-west: good hard working people who love to be entertained and love music and want to have fun. Anyone who says the English are reserved hasn’t been to Liverpool.”
Liverpool comic Ken Dodd: “Liverpool exports more entertainers than any other city in the world and, whatever else Liverpool entertainers do, it’s always done with tremendous enthusiasm. People in Liverpool live their lives in a higher gear than most people. We’re very enthusiastic, and the Beatles were four young men with a tremendous desire for life and with the typical Liverpool trait of not caring what they said. They ad-libbed everything and they personified life and brought a lot of credit to Liverpool.”
Liverpool is often said to be the fifth Beatle, but it was so important that it could almost be the first Beatle. Dr Ian Biddle, lecturer in music at Newcastle University: “Being a port city, Liverpool had an influence on the Beatles. There was a constant inflow and outflow of people from all over the world, and it was an outward looking city. There were lots of venues and a large young population with growing amounts of disposable income. Large port cities always inspire creativity and the Beatles’ natural Scouse ingenuity enabled them to draw on influences from everywhere leading to a mishmash of musical styles. Hamburg, being a similar sort of city, naturally went crazy for the Beatles.”
To answer why Liverpool is so special would merit a book in itself. Frankie Vaughan, talking to me in 1998, summed it up. He was raised in poor housing just outside the city centre but it didn’t bother him. “I consider Liverpool to be the great melting pot. People from all walks of life with different faiths and different colours have settled here. In Liverpool, you were accepted as long as you were a kindly, reasonable person. I really understand Liverpool, with its wonderful people and its great sense of humour. We took a bashing during the war and then were promised that the city would be rebuilt and yet I am still looking at bombsites. The heart of Liverpool is something very, very special. We don’t want much out of life, just a break occasionally and a chance to make a reasonable living. The sooner we get the people back into the city itself the better as that is where the heart is.” Though Frankie Vaughan died the following year, the regeneration he wanted is now taking place.
The rebuilding of the city centre with the Liverpool One development is very impressive, yet you only have to walk a quarter of a mile to see neglect and dereliction. Despite the recession, Liverpool is, for the most part, thriving. Tourists flock to the city and many feature films are made here. The opening sequence of Nowhere Boy shows John Lennon running amidst the columns of St George’s Hall. The city looks magnificent, but this is the Liverpool of today. Fifty-odd years earlier, in the chronology of the film, the building was black and grimy and being law courts back then, it is unlikely that anyone would have run across the front. On the other hand, the scene can be accepted as a dream sequence.
Nowhere Boy is the story of the adolescent John Lennon and how his group, the Quarry Men, developed into the Beatles. A director’s main concern is usually to tell a good story and as a result, historical accuracy often falls by the wayside. Although I would quibble over details with any film that covers 18 years of life in an hour and a half, Nowhere Boy has been exceptionally well made and is a superb reflection of growing up in Liverpool in the 1950s.
The tug of war between John Lennon’s mother, Julia, and his aunt, Mimi, does not concern this book, except inasmuch as John’s character was shaped by his relationships with them. John did poorly at school, not for lack of intelligence but because he couldn’t apply his mind to studying. Mimi’s attempts to bring him into line failed, largely because John’s interests lay elsewhere.
Late in 1954, rock’n’roll came to the UK with Bill Haley and his Comets’ ‘Shake, Rattle And Roll’, to be followed in the new year by the battle-cry of the new music, ‘Rock Around The Clock’. To outsiders, rock’n’roll appeared to be a short-lived novelty music, but then, in May 1956, came the evidence that this music was here to stay – Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, which climbed to No.2. It was a very different sound to ‘Rock Around The Clock’ – Albert Goldman called it a ‘psychodrama’ – and it shows that critics who said rock’n’roll sounded the same were talking nonsense. Rock’n’roll was to split the generations. At the time, I never met anyone over 30 with a good word for it, but we know John Lennon’s mother, Julia, loved Elvis.
It was so hard to hear the new music as the BBC was very restrictive about what it played. I was too young to hear ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ in a record shop listening booth, and I eventually heard it in the Five To Ten slot on the BBC Light Programme, where it was being denounced by a minister as an example of delinquency. I had no interest in fairground rides but I liked to go to Pleasureland in Southport and soak in the rock’n’roll music being played over the loudspeakers on the rides. Rock’n’roll always sounded great in that context, one reason why the David Essex film, That’ll Be The Day, was so evocative.
Steve Turner, author of The Gospel According to the Beatles: “It was as difficult to hear music then as it is to get away from it now. It made rock’n’roll even more exciting and when you bought a single, you couldn’t play it in the living room because your parents didn’t want to hear it. You had to go to your bedroom and it was a special experience, it wasn’t like walking around with an iPod. When you played the single in your bedroom, you couldn’t play it too loud and anyway, record players didn’t have a lot of volume. Even jukeboxes weren’t that loud. A fairground was the only place where you could hear rock’n’roll at full volume. A generation growing up today wouldn’t understand what the music meant to us at the time, what kind of impact it had. Seeing somebody with long hair in the 50s was staggering: you’d stand and stare at them. Now you can have your hair cut any way you want. To be a Teddy Boy was making a really big statement.”
Up until that time, the popular music of the day had been safe, well-sung ballads and cheerful, often novelty, songs, but the hipper youngsters, especially university students, preferred jazz. Chris Barber’s banjo player, Lonnie Donegan, encouraged Barber to include American folk songs in their performance such as Huddie Ledbetter’s ‘Rock Island Line’. Redeploying an American word for house party music, it became known as skiffle and although Donegan recorded ‘Rock Island Line’ for the album New Orleans Joys in 1954, it wasn’t a hit single until January 1956, just a few months before ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Although Donegan was forever knocking rock’n’roll, the two forms of music had much in common. Donegan largely ignored the skiffle trademarks of washboard and tea-chest bass, preferring professional instrumentation.
With a cheap, mail order acoustic guitar, John Lennon formed the Quarry Men, largely with schoolfriends, and on Saturday 6 July 1957, they played a fête at St Peter’s Parish Church, close to his home in Woolton. The tapes surviving from this period indicate that the Quarry Men in Nowhere Boy were more accomplished, but then they had to keep the audience in the cinema.
Paul Du Noyer, author of a history of Liverpool music, aptly called Wondrous Place: “It’s tempting to say that I can see the seeds of genius in the Quarry Men but of course I can’t. ‘That’ll Be The Day’ is a bunch of lads singing a hesitant version of a Buddy Holly song. The Beatles came to life when Lennon and McCartney began to ignite as a songwriting partnership. Prior to that, they were a very accomplished band with terrific power; they were a storming rock band at the club stage, and they didn’t have much competition in terms of live rock’n’roll at the time. It wasn’t until they began to write original songs that something truly magical took place.”
During that afternoon at St Peter’s, John Lennon met Paul McCartney: in the film, John seems old for his years and Paul too young and gawky, but maybe that’s the way it was. The meeting is skilfully handled and, in cultural terms, is as significant as Stanley greeting Livingstone. The date is significant too – just go forward two weeks. The aftermath of the war brought further hardships and rationing but on 20 July 1957, the Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan announced, “Most of our people have never had it so good.”
Owned by a dockland doctor’s son, Alan Sytner, the Cavern club opened in the basement of a warehouse building in Mathew Street, close to Liverpool’s city centre, on 16 January 1957. Its policy was to “put Liverpool on the map as the leading jazz cellar in the country outside London”. At the time, you were more likely to find jazz and dance bands in the city centre, but the new beat and skiffle music was being played in the suburbs. Because of the connection to Leadbelly and Josh White, skiffle groups were tolerated at the Cavern and the Quarry Men with John Lennon as leader and lead vocalist played there on 7 August 1957, Paul McCartney being at scout camp in the Lake District.
Colin Hanton was the Quarry Men’s drummer: “We did some skiffle numbers to start off with at the Cavern but we also did rock’n’roll. John Lennon was passed a note and he said to the audience, ‘We’ve had a request’. He opened it up and it was Alan Sytner saying, ‘Cut out the bloody rock’n’roll.’”
Alan Sytner: “Skiffle was a breeding ground for musicians - one or two of them became jazz musicians, but more ended up doing rock’n’roll. I knew John Lennon quite well as we lived in the same area: he lived 400 yards up the road from me. He was 16 and arrogant and hadn’t got a clue, but that was John Lennon.”
John Lennon’s childhood friend, Pete Shotton: “I’d known John since he was seven years old. The fame, the money, the status he achieved, never affected the fundamental person that he was. He was a classic example of what Kirk Douglas said, ‘Success doesn’t change you: it changes the people around you.’ A lot of people do change and become full of their own self-importance but that never happened to John, maybe because he felt pretty self-important from the time I met him. He always had enormous confidence in himself.”
By 1958, John and Paul were writing together. Although usually one would have the main idea and structure, they would complete the song together. Most of their early songs are forgotten now, but several did emerge in the 60s. Although they didn’t know it, they had written several hit songs before they signed their EMI contract in 1962. Not always in their finished state, they included ‘Love Me Do’ (written in 1958), ‘Hello Little Girl’, ‘Love Of The Loved’, ‘A World Without Love’, ‘Like Dreamers Do’ and even ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’. Sometime during the summer of 1958, they made a private recording at Percy Phillips’ small studio at 38 Kensington, Liverpool: John sang lead on both the Crickets’ ‘That’ll Be the Day’ and a rare Paul McCartney and George Harrison composition, ‘In Spite of All the Danger’. Today there’s a plaque above the doorway.
When we think of the individual members of the Beatles, we recite John, Paul, George and Ringo. It doesn’t sound right in any other order and it is the correct hierarchy as well as historically noting when they joined. John Lennon formed the group and Paul McCartney came second. Although John was the leader (dominantly so in the early years), Paul recommended George Harrison and so, early on, he was capable of getting his way. The drummer Pete Best joined them for club dates in Hamburg in 1960 and he was replaced by Ringo Starr in 1962.
Laurence Juber, session guitarist and member of Wings, says, “When I worked with George Harrison, he told me that when he was 13, he had some jazz guitar lessons from someone on the boats who was familiar with Django Reinhardt. Those diminished chords that George uses came from Django, so he was a very sophisticated guitar player.” For proof, listen to George and Pete Ham from Badfinger play ‘Here Comes the Sun’ on acoustic guitars during the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh.
With a new owner, Ray McFall, the Cavern succumbed to beat music and the Beatles were to play there around 280 times. There were many other venues for beat music in the area including the Jacaranda (owned by Allan Williams), the Casbah (run by Pete Best’s mother Mona and opened by the Quarry Men in August 1959), the Iron Door, the Mardi Gras, the Grafton Rooms, Blair Hall, Lathom Hall, Wilson Hall Aintree Institute, the Orrell Park Ballroom and, over in Birkenhead, the Majestic Ballroom. By 1962, the Cavern was one of the UK’s leading beat venues.
The 1960 Scottish tour on which the fledgling Beatles backed Larry Parnes’ protégé, Johnny Gentle (born John Askew), also from Liverpool, had not led to regular work from the London impresario. As Parnes was a shrewd businessman, this suggests that their own spot was not as good as some reports suggest. John Lennon helped Gentle to complete ‘I’ve Just Fallen for Someone’, which he released under a second pseudonym, Darren Young, in 1962. We’ve only Gentle’s word for this but I believe him, chiefly because Lennon’s contribution, the middle eight, is clearly derived from one of his favourite records, ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ by Barrett Strong, released in 1959. It is the first example of John Lennon’s songwriting, albeit uncredited, on record.
Pete Frame, famed for his Rock Family Trees, remarks: “When all the bands were starting in Liverpool, the records they were playing and getting excited about were by Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers and Elvis Presley. They were records made for the white American teenage market or the mixed American market as it was becoming clear that you couldn’t segregate the airwaves. These records sounded so much more exciting than the English ones, which at the time were very tinny. Americans think it is bad that they had to put up with Pat Boone and the Crew Cuts, but we had to put up with The Billy Cotton Band Show and Ray Pilgrim with the David Ede Orchestra: absolutely rubbish versions which murdered the original records. We idolised American records, as indeed we idolised everything American. Their sports were more exotic, and we thought that they had better coffee and better candy and better architecture. They had the skyscrapers, the cars, the girls, the mountains, the rivers, the Grand Canyon, the cowboys, the gangsters and the movies. Everything about America was better than England. All our parents had had it really bad in the war but we were liberated from that and we just wanted to enjoy ourselves and have a great time.”
The standard group format emerged of four white teenagers playing lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass guitar (the electric bass was then a new instrument) and drums: that is, the same as the Shadows and the eventual line-up of the Beatles. There were variations such as Les Maguire playing keyboards with the Pacemakers or Brian Jones on saxophone with the Undertakers. There was the occasional female vocalist – Beryl Marsden, in particular, gigged far more than Cilla Black – and some black performers: Derry Wilkie and the Chants vocal group.
The 300-plus groups drew their inspiration from American rock’n’roll and obscure rhythm and blues. It is often said that the Liverpool sailors going to New York on the liners – the so-called Cunard Yanks – brought a lot of these records back to Liverpool. Although this happened with jazz and country, I am less convinced about beat music. How did the Cunard Yanks know which records to buy? Moreover, this theory ignores the fact that the original version of every one of the 300-odd covers recorded by Liverpool beat bands was released in the UK at the time on such labels as Oriole, London American (for the Decca group), Stateside (EMI) and Pye International.
The most likely source for their repertoire was Brian Epstein’s record shop NEMS in Whitechapel, some 400 yards from the Cavern. Epstein had the enlightened policy of stocking every record that was released in the UK and potential customers could sample the records in listening booths.
Pete Best: “We were very friendly with the girls behind the counter at NEMS, which worked in our favour. We would go into the listening-booths and they would play us the new releases. If there was one we liked, we’d hear it a couple of times, write down the chords – there was nothing very complicated in those days – and then disappear very quickly to rehearse it before we forgot what it sounded like. We owe those girls a debt of gratitude but Brian didn’t approve. He’d glare at us when we came in. We were taking up his valuable selling space.”
Billy Bragg: “If the Beatles had grown up only listening to English music, how boring would they have been? They would have been awful. They grew up listening to the music of black America. Conversely, that inspired them to write the most English music of the latter half of the twentieth century. What that says about the process of writing the music of your country is very interesting. We shouldn’t overlook this: it is an example of the diversity and multiculturalism that has enriched English culture.”
A key reason for the multiplicity of beat groups in Liverpool and indeed around the country was the abolition of National Service. Pete Frame: “Our generation was very lucky – it was the first generation not to be called up. When they did abandon National Service, a lot of youths, instead of going into the army for two years, went into a group for two years. Then they got married and settled down, and their wives cut their guitar strings!”
Playing in Hamburg for hard German club managers was no piece of cake. Horst Fascher, the tough-minded manager of the Star-Club, admits: “Some English military bands played swing and we had some jazz and rhythm and blues in Hamburg, but no rock’n’roll. The very first group we had was led by Tony Sheridan. It was a surprise to see rock’n’roll music live on stage. He was wild and he’d sweat all over. Within five minutes he looked as though he’d come out of the baths and we liked him very much. He did mach schau. You see, to have a band on stage, standing there and only singing and playing, was not enough. You have to mach schau, do a show, put on a show. That was what I wanted and I liked the Beatles doing funny things on stage, although I had to be strong with them. Sometimes they got heavily into drink and I would say that work is work and drink is drink. When they were too pissed, I had to kick them in the arse.”
Tony Sheridan, a disruptive rock’n’roller from Norwich who had worked for Larry Parnes, found himself at home in Hamburg. “When I got to Hamburg, I found that there was no German musical scene as the war had left a void. We shocked everybody and they all flocked in. You could get killed in Hamburg but the musicians were blessed. All the gangsters, all the pimps and all the prostitutes loved us.”
Pete Best: “There are lots of anecdotes and funny stories about the things we did in Hamburg. If you compare them with today’s standards of living, they seem tame, but, going back to when it happened, we were wild. We wrecked places; we’d fall about drunk and act the goat on stage. Women in Hamburg were no bother – they were ours for the taking – we were healthy young lads and we enjoyed ourselves.”
Gruelling nights in Hamburg developed both the groups’ repertoires and their stamina, although Tony Sheridan was equally influential. John Lennon’s famous stance was copied from Sheridan as well as Gerry Marsden placing his guitar high on the chest.
Johnny Hutchinson, drummer with the Big Three: “It was as though the Beatles had gone to Hamburg with an old banger and had come back with a Rolls-Royce. The Beatles owe everything to Tony Sheridan because they copied him to a T. They copied his style on guitar. Sheridan was a fantastic guitarist, the governor.”
Tony Jackson of the Searchers: “Tony Sheridan was a tremendous guitar player with a wonderful sense of feeling and a great image on stage. He had a magnetic personality and you couldn’t take your eyes off him. Every Liverpool guitarist picked something up from Sheridan’s way of playing. Instead of just playing major chords, he would make it into a 7th to give it more of a bluesy feel.”
Paul McCartney founded the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA), but he has acknowledged that the courses might not have been suitable for the Beatles. Music writer Paul Du Noyer: “Very few bands get the kind of intensive apprenticeship that the Beatles got in Hamburg. They played several sets a night, day in and day out, and it must have helped them in forming an affinity with each other. Lennon and McCartney could read each other’s mind on stage and it stood them in good stead when they became a songwriting team. It toughened them up as people and as musicians.”
The Beatles’ appearance at Litherland Town Hall on 27 December 1960, for which they were billed as ‘Direct from Germany’, was the turning-point. From then on, they wanted to sound distinctive and look different from their rivals, although, of course, many bands were to copy them. They set new standards in scruffiness, although they were uniform in their untidiness, i.e. “Leather jackets tonight, chaps.”
Tony Sanders of Billy J. Kramer’s first group, the Coasters: “A friend of mine told me about the fabulous group he’d seen at Litherland Town Hall. He said ‘They’re all German. They wear cowboy boots and they stamp on the stage.’ A few weeks later we were coming off stage at Aintree Institute and these guys were coming on next. Lennon wore a leather jacket and McCartney had a jacket that looked as though he’d been sleeping in it for months, but when they kicked off it was unbelievable. They were all smoking cigarettes and that tickled us because it went right against convention. They were so cheeky with it. Instead of trying to look good, they didn’t give a damn. They played ’Wooden Heart’ with Pete Best on bass drum and hi-hat. He was only using one hand and he was smoking with the other. We thought this was tremendous. We were all smoking next time we went on stage, but it didn’t go with our short haircuts and boy-next-door image.”
John McNally of the Searchers: “They had just come back from Hamburg and they appeared at St John’s, Bootle with us – Johnny Sandon and the Searchers. They went on before us and they made ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ last for ten minutes because they put three guitar solos in it. Most of the bands were playing very controlled, rhythmic bass drum patterns but Bestie was playing straight fours. It was thump, thump, thump all of the time, which was really unusual at the time.”
Don Andrew from the ultra-slick Remo Four: “We were shocked that they commanded such a following when they looked so dirty and made such a horrible, deafening row. We were intent on making our guitars sound as nice as possible, and Colin Manley changed his strings religiously. He got the real Fender sound out of his guitar and they came along with big amplifiers and a big throbbing noise.”
Unlike other Liverpool beat groups, the Beatles were professionals, i.e. no day jobs, which gave them time to discover obscure American songs and so develop a large repertoire. It enabled John and Paul to work on their writing partnership although those songs only emerged gradually in their performances. Supremely confident in their ability, they thought nothing of switching from menacing rhythm and blues to ‘Over the Rainbow’ or Wilfred Pickles’ ‘Have a go, Joe’ theme. Late at night they might slip into straight blues.
No one had been surprised when the Beatles’ then bass player, Stu Sutcliffe, left the Beatles in April 1961 to remain in Hamburg and develop his artistic talents, although his death a year later shocked the Beatles. Stu was close to John Lennon and his death added to the complexity of Lennon’s psyche. Mike Evans, author of The Art of the Beatles: “The Beatles had been a fairly ad hoc band, thrown together, an electric skiffle group if you like, and they grew better by hard practice which occurred mainly in Germany. Stu Sutcliffe didn’t leave the group for conspicuous musical reasons such as not being good enough. He simply wanted to get back to painting.”
Pete Frame: “Most of the musicians who went to art school did it because it was a good lig and you could get by with doing very little work. You could get your posters done for nothing and you could rehearse. Very few musicians who went to art school produced anything in the way of real art. Stuart Sutcliffe was an exception, perhaps the exception. You could tell by the sheer number of paintings that he produced that he was intensely interested, and from what one reads, he wasn’t concerned about pursuing a musical career at all. The others – Eric Clapton, Ray Davies, Pete Townshend, right through to the Belle Stars, the Clash and Wreckless Eric – used art school as a lig so that they could practise.”
In 1961, Tony Sheridan and the Beatles (John, Paul, George and Pete) recorded a session for the German bandleader and record producer, Bert Kaempfert, at the Friedrich Ebert Halle in Hamburg, which was a school assembly hall.
Tony Sheridan: “Bert Kaempfert came into the Top Ten club with his entourage and he bought us all drinks. He told us that he would like to record myself and the Beatles. When we did the session in June 1961, we went to bed at five and got up at eight to record. We took uppers to keep awake. Bert told us to record something that the Germans would understand. They knew ‘My Bonnie’ because it was taught in English lessons. ‘My Bonnie’ is public domain, so I would have expected to get the royalties for arranging it. However, the guy who wrote the German introduction got it instead. It wasn’t a bad record. The guitar was all right.”
Five songs were recorded with Sheridan as well as John Lennon working through Gene Vincent’s arrangement of ‘Ain’t She Sweet’ and John and George’s instrumental, ‘Cry for a Shadow’. That title is deliberate: they had been trying to convince Rory Storm that this tune was the Shadows’ new single. In 1964, ‘Cry for a Shadow’ became a hit in Australia.
By far the best track, ‘My Bonnie’, was issued as a single in Germany, credited to Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers and becoming the Beatles’ first-ever chart entry. This exuberant track is underrated today. It is among the best examples of British rock’n’roll (albeit recorded in Germany): not quite up there with ‘Move It!’ (Cliff Richard), ‘Shakin’ All Over’ (Johnny Kidd and the Pirates) and ‘Wondrous Place’ (Billy Fury) but close.
Bonnie Raitt: “I was 13 when the Beatles were on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 and it was not lost on me that their first single was ‘My Bonnie’, I know it wasn’t their first hit but it was the first thing that they recorded. I love all their stuff and the fact that the Sgt. Pepper and the Abbey Road era are so different from what they were doing at the beginning. I loved all their R&B covers. They really nailed ‘Twist and Shout’. John had a brilliant vocal on that and it certainly won my heart. He was the one I had a crush on.”
A request for ‘My Bonnie’ became the catalyst for Brian Epstein’s interest. At lunchtime on 9 November 1961, he walked from his record store, NEMS, up an alleyway, round the corner into Mathew Street and down the steps into the Cavern. By then, the Beatles were the most accomplished group on Merseyside and he became their manager.
One of Epstein’s friends was the painter and club owner, Yankel Feather. Although homosexuality was against the law, Yankel Feather was as openly gay as Epstein was furtive. “Brian had problems with being queer. Being gay has never been a problem for me: it’s been a blessing in many ways. As there were no places for homosexuals to meet, it was inevitable that if you hung around pubs and clubs, you were going to meet low life. One day I went into NEMS, I was buying records and he wasn’t looking at me and I said, ‘Look Brian, I wish you’d look at me,’ and he said, ‘I’m just looking at that young man in the corner.’ ‘What are you looking at him for?’ ‘Well, he’s the man who attacked me and he’s just come out of prison.’ I said, ‘You’d better ring the police’ and he replied, ‘Oh no, I’m taking him to lunch.’”
Brian Epstein arranged a recording test with Decca on New Year’s Day, 1962. The Beatles had to travel overnight to London in appalling weather and they were tired. The recordings are still okay (this is, after all, the Beatles) but they didn’t do themselves justice and Decca turned them down. The fifteen songs replicate their stage act and it’s good to hear them having fun with the Coasters’ novelty, ‘Three Cool Cats’, while John Lennon offers a plaintive ‘To Know Her is to Love Her’, written by Phil Spector.
The Decca tapes include such oddities as George Harrison singing ‘The Sheik of Araby’. Many critics cite this as the Beatles’ worst performance but it is an engaging oddity. Joe Brown performed ‘The Sheik of Araby’ and, as we now know, George Harrison was working his way through Joe’s repertoire. In November 2002 Joe Brown ended the Concert for George at the Royal Albert Hall with ‘I’ll See You in My Dreams’, a standard associated with Django Reinhardt, and there are these wheels within wheels throughout the Beatles’ story.
Recording engineer Mike Smith: “Someone at Decca had to show some interest in the Beatles because Brian Epstein ran NEMS, which was an important account for the sales people. I thought the Beatles were absolutely wonderful on stage and, in retrospect, I should have trusted my instincts. They weren’t very good in the studio and really we got to the Beatles too early. I’ve nothing against Pete Best, but Ringo wasn’t in the band and they hadn’t developed their songwriting. Had I picked up on them six months later, there was no way I would have missed the quality of their songs. I think they were overawed by the situation and their personalities didn’t come across. I took the tape to Decca House and I was told that they sounded like the Shadows. I had recorded two bands and I could take one and not the other. I went with Brian Poole and the Tremeloes because they had been the better band. So much in this industry depends upon being in the right place at the right time and whether I did the right thing or not, I’ll never know. In fairness, I don’t think I could have worked with them the way George Martin did – I would have got involved in their bad habits and not encouraged the good ones. When I met them later on, they gave me a two-fingered salute.”
Billy Kinsley, later with the Merseybeats, saw the band for the first time in January 1962, at the Cavern. “They opened with ‘Memphis Tennessee’ with John hunched at the microphone: he had his Rickenbacker held really high. I know now that he had got that stance from Tony Sheridan in Hamburg. I could see that Paul’s bass was a Hofner but I hadn’t seen a violin bass before, although it had the same control panel as any other Hofner instrument. At least I thought I hadn’t but it turns out that Little Richard’s bass player in those rock’n’roll movies like The Girl Can’t Help It had one, and maybe that’s why Paul chose it. Actually, John and Paul’s instruments were so dirty that you couldn’t see the names on the headstock. I had seen a lot of rock’n’roll stars at the Empire and so I knew how to compare them, and I thought right from that moment that the Beatles stood out.
Albeit reluctantly, the Beatles followed Brian Epstein’s suggestions, wearing stage suits for the first time in March 1962 at Barnston’s Women’s Institute on the Wirral, a prestige gig if ever there was one. Paul Du Noyer: “Brian Epstein put them into suits – they hated that but it was the next stage commercially. It helped to get them a record deal and it got them to EMI and George Martin. That’s when history really moves forward for the Beatles.” Du Noyer may be right: when Johnny Kidd signed with EMI, he was told, “You’ll have to change your clothes. We’ve already got one scruff here with Adam Faith and we don’t want another.”
When the Beatles conformed, they usually did it unwillingly, adding their own touches. The high-buttoned jackets and tight trousers were an integral part of Beatlewear, but note how John often had his top shirt button undone. The Beatle mop came from Jürgen Vollmer: “When I came into the club in Hamburg, I had this brushed forward hairstyle and they thought it was funny. I moved to Paris in late 1961 and John and Paul visited me and they wanted to change their clothes. I took them to the flea market and they dressed in the style that I had: corduroy trousers and turtle-neck sweaters. They wanted my haircut and that is when I cut their hair. I had been forced to cut my own hair as the German barbers always cut hair too short. It was inspired by the French bohemians on the Left Bank. I was influenced by that style ever since I first went to Paris and I did want to look like Marlon Brando in Julius Caesar.” A less flattering comparison would be Moe from the Three Stooges.
Mike Evans, author of The Art of the Beatles: “Stu Sutcliffe and his girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr foisted the flat, mop top haircuts and the leather jacket look upon the Beatles, but, more interesting and more subtly, Stu influenced John in artistic concepts such as surrealism and Dada. John was very much a primitive – you can either do it or you can’t – whereas Stu was academic and articulate. Arthur Ballard, who taught them both in college, says that, before he knew Stuart, John didn’t know a Dada from a donkey and his reading matter didn’t get much further than The Beano. John was a very primitive, intuitive person, which came out in rock’n’roll ’cause he did that off the top of his head.”
Klaus Voormann saw the Beatles playing several hours a night in Hamburg: “The Beatles had an amazing repertoire, the biggest of all the bands I’ve ever heard. They would pick up songs really quickly and when they were not playing them on stage, they were rehearsing. People were asking them all the time to play this song or that song and so they might repeat themselves because people wanted to hear them, but they could have played different songs all night. I especially liked to hear ‘Please Mr. Postman’ and ‘Twist and Shout’.”
Mike Gregory of the Escorts: “I love the sound of the bass with the Beatles. Paul McCartney had a big cabinet that Adrian Barber had made. It had an 18 inch speaker and the sound would hit you in the chest. It was really driving stuff and I loved them doing ‘Besame Mucho’ and ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’. They also did the Crickets’ ‘Don’t Ever Change’, but I preferred that by Gerry and the Pacemakers as they had a pianist and it sounded better. The trend had been to have a singer with a band like Cliff Richard and the Shadows, and the Beatles changed all that.”
Billy Kinsley of the Merseybeats: “I remember feeling the pangs of Beatlemania at a lunchtime session at the Cavern when Pete Best was still there and they were finishing the session with ‘Money’. I felt my whole body reacting to it. It was getting more extreme and more exciting as it went along. Only the Beatles did that for me.”
Chris Curtis, drummer with the Searchers: “You could ask Pete Best to play for 19 hours and he’d put his head down and do it. He’d drum like a dream with real style and stamina all night long and that really was the Beatles’ sound – forget the guitars and forget the faces – you couldn’t avoid that insistent whack, whack, whack! The rhythm guitar went along with it and the bass chucked in the two and four beats and George was wonderful on the guitar. His little legs would kick out to the side when he did his own tunes. He’d go all posh and say, ‘I’d like to do a tune now from Carl Perkins, ‘Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby’, and it’s in A.’ Who wanted to know what key it was in? But he always said that.”
Back to Billy Kinsley: “The Beatles sang ‘A Shot of Rhythm and Blues’ in unison and then broke into a little harmony with some backing vocals from George. ‘Some Other Guy’ was also in unison and it became a Liverpool thing to sing in unison. George had a monotone Scouse accent and he sang like that when doing harmonies, which was the perfect way to do it. You wanted that in there because John and Paul were so melodic. That was good luck – they thought, ‘Doesn’t it sound great?’ and did it. It was the same with Badfinger: they had two incredible singers with Tommy Evans and Pete Ham, and then Joey Molland came in, a bit like George Harrison. He was the perfect guy for them.”
Cynthia Powell, who became Cynthia Lennon: “When they were in Hamburg, we would write to each other every day. John was always asking me for the words of songs. I remember slowing down Ketty Lester’s ‘Love Letters’ on my little record player and so if he got the words wrong, it was down to me.”
In 1992, there was a unique CD release for its time, Under the Influence, on Sequel Records, which featured the original versions of twenty-four songs that the Beatles covered. There was Pre Fab! on Connoisseur in 1999, and five years later, EMI released a 2CD set, John Lennon’s Jukebox, which featured forty-one tracks that were listed on a portable jukebox that John Lennon carried around with him (or rather someone else did). This project was a little nebulous as I couldn’t come across anyone who had seen the jukebox in action. I suspect that John put the collection together one day, played with it for a couple of weeks and then forgot about it. In 2010, Rhythm and Blues Records released three albums in the series, Beatles Beginnings, which featured original versions of songs performed by the Quarry Men and the Silver Beatles. More volumes would follow.
Stu Slater, lead singer of the Mojos: “The Beatles played a much wider spectrum of music than most groups. Paul McCartney sang ballads like ‘Til There Was You’ and ‘Over the Rainbow’; John Lennon did the more abrasive stuff; and George Harrison was singing Joe Brown’s songs. They were fantastic and like the Big Three and the Undertakers, they had real musical power. Gerry and the Pacemakers never did it for me as they were of the show business generation.”
Tony Crane, who formed the Merseybeats: “I went down to the Cavern when I was 15 to see Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers who impersonated the Shadows, and I thought they were marvellous. After they had been on, I stayed around to see this scruffy band from Liverpool called the Beatles, who would drink soup on stage and wore leather jackets and old jeans. Paul jumped into the audience singing ‘What’d I Say’ and ‘Long Tall Sally’ and screaming his head off. Lennon would lie on the floor and play guitar solos. It was marvellous and such a contrast to the smarmy, smiling balladeers we heard on the radio, like Bobby Vee and Bobby Rydell. The Beatles were playing rock’n’roll, raw and alive, just as it should be played.”