Despite Tommy’s misfortunes and opinion of him, John could at last see that the future was beginning to look just a little less opaque. The Beatles had played every night for over a week and he’d enjoyed his first proper glimpse of show business. The band had developed, too. Instead of either he or Paul singing the lead, they would increasingly now, on some songs, sing together in a basic harmony. It didn’t happen all the time, but when it did they both enjoyed it. Other groups didn’t do that. The fashion then was for there to be one lead singer and a backing band. They were two lead singers. But they didn’t sound like the Everly Brothers, who sang in such close harmony, with such similar voices, that they sometimes sounded as though they were singing in unison. John and Paul didn’t ever sound the same. They had two distinct voices when they sang together.
Meanwhile, now that they were back in Liverpool, Allan Williams was finding the Beatles more work. Much of that meant crossing the Mersey and risking the wrath of rival Teddy boy gangs from Wallasey and Birkenhead. A band could get caught in the middle of a turf war there if it didn’t take care, and for some reason the Beatles’ version of the Olympics song ‘Hully Gully’ would often be the spark that lit the fuse for mayhem to begin.
With Tommy Moore having returned to his regular evening shift at work, Paul, much against his will, stepped in on the drums, using his brother Michael’s rarely used set. Competent drummer as he was, he didn’t enjoy it. He was proud of his rendition of the Ray Charles song ‘What’d I Say’, but it wasn’t easy to sing with much passion in a sitting position while hitting the drums at the same time. On top of that, it bugged him to see Stuart, who was still struggling with his bass, up there at the front of the stage with John, while he was stuck at the back.
All the same, those appearances in ballrooms around Liverpool were rarely less than exciting as, with new confidence as well as new hire-purchased amplifiers, the Beatles were learning how to turn up the heat on rock and roll.
Less boisterous was an afternoon that Williams arranged for them to back a striptease artiste called Janice in a small club in Liverpool’s Upper Parliament Street. It was a bizarre gig in that when the Beatles arrived, Janice presented them with the sheet music for ‘The Sabre Dance’ and ‘The Gipsy Fire Dance’. That was the music she liked to strip to.
None of the Beatles, however, could read music. Could she hum the tunes, they enquired. Apparently not. In the end, with Paul on a tom-tom, they improvised by playing Duane Eddy’s ‘Ramrod’ and John’s interpretation of the ‘Harry Lime Theme Cha-Cha’ as, bra by tassel by knicker, Janice took off her clothes.
By mid-summer, Paul could go back to his guitar when another drummer joined them. He was a year older than John and he was good. Unfortunately, hardly had he settled in than he was issued with his call-up papers for National Service, and would soon find himself in the British Army in Kenya fighting the Mau Mau insurrection.
John had mixed thoughts as he watched the drummer go. All his life he’d heard teachers telling him ‘the Army will make a man of you’, which had seemed a terrifying prospect. But then, like a gift from God, had come the government decision to abolish National Service in 1960. No one born after 3 October 1939 would be called up. John had missed it by just over a year.
Would the Beatles have survived had John, or any of the group, been forced to take two years out of his life at the age of eighteen to become a soldier? It seems unlikely. The Education Act of 1944 had funded grammar schools and art colleges, both of which would have a profound effect on the Beatles and their music. Now, another side effect of government policy further helped create the climate that made some of the Sixties cultural changes possible.
Not that John had any idea of what his future would hold. The only certainty in his life was that, as with Quarry Bank High School, he left art college, having done virtually no work for three years, without a single qualification.
Back in Mendips, Mimi had her say. ‘That’s very nice, John. So, what are you going to do now?’
Which was pretty well the attitude being taken by Paul’s father, who was naturally upset when the A-level results came through. His son had passed in only one subject – English Literature. George was in trouble, too. On returning from Scotland in May, he’d been sacked from his job for taking time off without permission. His parents, usually so encouraging, hadn’t been pleased, so, to escape their nagging, he’d moved into Gambier Terrace with Stuart and John. Not for long. Following some bad publicity in a national tabloid Sunday newspaper, Stuart and the other students there had been given notice of eviction.
Once again it was Allan Williams at the Jacaranda who came up with an unlikely solution to their problems. Just as he had linked up with Larry Parnes, Williams had now forged a relationship with a German club owner from Hamburg called Bruno Koschmider. Rock music was rapidly becoming popular in Germany, and Koschmider wanted American-sounding bands who sang in English to play for the US servicemen who would flood into Hamburg when they were on leave. There was a reason for Hamburg’s popularity. Having been a port for more than a thousand years, the city had built a reputation for being a place which, with its strip clubs, bars and prostitutes, welcomed single men who were away from their wives and girlfriends. Williams had already supplied Koschmider with the Liverpool group Derry and the Seniors to play in his main club, the Kaiserkeller. Now, spotting a good business, the German wanted another group for the imminent opening of a smaller club around the corner, the Indra.
The Beatles were not Williams’s first choice. But the successful Gerry and the Pacemakers, Cass and the Cassanovas and Rory Storm and the Hurricanes were all unavailable. So, who else was there? ‘Well,’ Williams must have been thinking, ‘I suppose there’s always the Beatles . . .’
But, once again, the Beatles didn’t have a drummer. And a proper rock and roll band had to have a drummer.
They soon found one, back in Mona Best’s Casbah Club in West Derby. Mona’s son Pete had a brand new set of drums. Quickly an audition was arranged. Pete, they agreed, on hearing him play, was good enough. ‘He could keep one beat going for long enough, so we took him to Germany,’ John, somewhat snidely, would say of the Beatles’ first full-time drummer.
Pete, who had been a promising rugby player at his grammar school, Liverpool Collegiate, was a year younger than John, quiet and good-looking. Would he fit in with the Beatles? It’s unlikely that John gave it much thought. None of the Beatles had passports, and, with less than a week to get them before leaving for Hamburg, such finer considerations were put on hold.
With the exception perhaps of Mona Best, none of the group’s parents was happy about the venture. George’s father thought his son should settle down and get a proper job, while his mother fretted that at seventeen George was too young to go abroad. Jim McCartney was dismayed that his son wasn’t going back to school to retake his A-levels and blamed John. As he’d warned, John was leading his son into trouble. For his part, Stuart didn’t have to go to Hamburg. He could have stayed at the art college. But John wanted him to go, so he’d agreed. His mother was distraught that he was walking away from a brilliant career. She blamed John, too, as did lecturer Arthur Ballard. He’d had such high hopes for Stuart. As for Mimi, not for one minute did she believe John when he told her that he would soon be earning £100 a week. She knew, though, that when he wanted something badly enough, he would get it.
Cynthia knew it, too. Mimi was staying with one of her sisters in Birkenhead the night before John left, so he and Cynthia slept together in his single bed at his room in Mendips. Swearing undying love and fidelity to one another while they were apart, they promised to write to each other every day. Cynthia meant what she said about being faithful, and John kept his promise to write her lots of letters.