The Kaiserkeller was a much bigger place with a floor for dancing and a neon sign outside, and, while walking home one night, a young commercial artist called Klaus Voorman heard some rock music coming from inside. With nothing else to do, he went inside and sat listening as Rory Storm and the Hurricanes were finishing their set. They were enjoyable enough, but then the Beatles came on stage, and, as John went straight into ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’, Klaus was mesmerised. He went back the following night and the one after that – finally convincing his girlfriend to accompany him. She was Astrid Kirchherr. The Kaiserkeller was not the sort of rough place she would normally go, but when she did, she was fascinated by the energy that the Beatles generated, as John would jokingly berate the audience as ‘Nazis’ with ‘Sieg Heil’ salutes. The audience found it funny.
Astrid, a pretty, sophisticated photographer’s assistant, had recently graduated from Hamburg’s art college. With her black clothes and modish, fairish, short hair, she was the sort of girl you couldn’t fail to notice. The hit French film of that year was Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless in the UK and the US) and Astrid had the look of the young Jean Seberg. France was the style capital of Europe, and, as a middle-class, educated bohemian, she wanted to look French rather than German. As she and Klaus started to bring their friends to the Kaiserkeller, the Beatles began to realise they were attracting a new kind of audience, a student group, whom John would christen the ‘exis’ – short for ‘existentialists’.
John would always be drawn to intelligent women, girls he could talk to, and he was impressed by Astrid. She was twenty-two, and had such presence that, back in Hoylake, Cynthia was immediately worried as his letters would be full of references to this wonderful, new, fascinating woman they’d met.
Obviously, he fancied her. Astrid was smitten, too, but not with him. Stuart, the quiet artist of the group, with his pimples, James Dean hair brushed up at the front and dark shades clipped on to his glasses, was the one she went for, the one for whom she would break up with boyfriend Klaus.
At this time in their development, girlfriends didn’t have much say in what the Beatles did. John’s gag that women should be ‘obscene and not heard’ might have been funny, but, as he would later admit, the Beatles were indeed a very macho band. Their girls were always kept in the background. Astrid, however, who had her own car and her own career, represented a new generation of young, modern women. She was totally unlike Cynthia, who was still trying to please John with a Brigitte Bardot look.
Nor was Astrid shy, and although she spoke no English, very soon she asked, using Klaus as an interpreter, if the Beatles would let her take their photographs. They were flattered. In those days most photographs of pop groups were taken in five minutes with a quick flash from a camera and a cheesy grin from the group. But, showing that she was years ahead of her time, Astrid did the Beatles’ first real photo session by taking them in her Volkswagen to a Hamburg fairground, where she shot them against the heavy machinery of a rollercoaster. All her images were in black and white, but it was her portraits of them that were most effective. Three years later a similar half-light monotone technique would be used on the cover of the group’s second album With The Beatles.
After the photo session, she took them back to her flat which was at the top of the house where her parents and grandparents lived, as well as Klaus, in a middle-class area of suburban Hamburg. It was the first time the Beatles had been outside St Pauli and the free-living elegance of Astrid’s home left a lasting impression, not least her bedroom which was painted completely black – with black furniture, black sheets on the bed and black curtains. You didn’t get bedrooms like this, or girls like this, in Liverpool. Today we might think that she was trying too hard to show how different she was . . . although everything in black would certainly have saved on the washing. But in 1960, as far as the Beatles were concerned, Astrid was different. No wonder John wrote to tell Cynthia about her.
Was he disappointed that Astrid went for Stuart instead of him? Almost certainly. Most boys would have been. But he would never have admitted it. Over the next decades there would be other women who were similarly intelligent and avant-garde in their looks and lifestyles to whom he would be attracted. That was John. At least Astrid hadn’t chosen Paul. That would have been disastrous. John could live with the idea of Stuart and Astrid, and by November the two were engaged, with Stuart living in the Kirchherrs’ house in the room now vacated by ex-boyfriend Klaus Voorman. Apparently, Klaus took it very well.
The Beatles felt that they were old hands in Hamburg by this time, and John loved the nightlife. ‘They roll up the pavements at eleven o’clock in Liverpool, but in Hamburg they’re just rolling them out at midnight,’ he would say. And, confident now in matching black leather jackets and high leather boots worn outside their black jeans, the group walked the streets, looking in on drag acts in clubs or chatting to prostitutes on the pavements. Some mornings, after a late session, they might wander down to the Sailors’ Society (also known as the Seamen’s Mission – although John had his own interpretation of the ‘semen’s mission’) for some breakfast with Ringo and the other Hurricanes who were, wisely, staying there. At first, they’d been wary of Ringo with his beard, that silver streak in his hair and his Teddy boy clothes. But he was nothing if not affable, and in mid-October John, George and Paul played with him for the first time when they backed one of the Hurricanes in a recording session in a little Hamburg studio.
John was playing another new guitar that day, a Rickenbacker Capri 325 that he’d found in a shop that imported American instruments, and which allowed him to lend Paul his Hofner Club 40. A new, better guitar wasn’t just a status symbol or even just a tool of John’s trade. To a rock musician a good guitar is a companion, too, something to be nursed and treasured, a friend to turn to in lonely times.
So, with a new guitar, it’s easy to imagine that he must, at that point, have been feeling particularly good about himself. Things were going well. And yet . . . he still did crazy, sometimes cruel, inexplicable things. One night, presumably while drunk, he decided to rob a drunken sailor of his wallet, taking Pete along as an accomplice. ‘I thought I could chat him up . . . kid him on we could get him some birds,’ he would remember. ‘We got him drinking and drinking, and he kept on asking, “Where’s the girls?” We were trying to find out where he kept his money. We never made it. We just hit him twice in the end, then gave up. We didn’t want to hurt him.’ In Pete’s version of the incident, the venture failed when the sailor fought back with teargas.
Quite why John would want to rob a sailor, who was probably earning less than he was, he never explained, other than hinting that it was just a bit of devilry carried out for no better reason than the fun of it.
After three months in Hamburg the Beatles were having second thoughts about the Kaiserkeller. Every night they could hear how good they’d become, and see how popular they were. They wanted better money and living conditions. And when better was offered to them at a different, bigger venue along the street, the Top Ten Club, they told Koschmider they would be taking it, despite their contract with him. Considering the reputation that Koschmider had for violence, they were taking a risk, and threats of broken fingers were made.
Koschmider had a more subtle revenge in mind, however. George was still only seventeen, which meant that for three months he’d been violating a local by-law that stipulated a curfew of 10 p.m. for everyone under the age of eighteen. He should never have been allowed to play in Hamburg after ten at night in the first place. Now, someone who knew how old he was tipped off the police. George was arrested and questioned, and, the following day, put on a train back to England.
Paul and Pete were the next to fall foul of the law. While collecting their belongings at the Bambi Kino to take over to the Top Ten Club, as a final riposte to Koschmider they set fire to some condoms which they hung in the passageway outside their room. The smell of burning latex in the little cinema was horrible, but apart from a slight singeing of the wall there was no damage, and the pair went off to the Top Ten Club for the Beatles to make their first appearance there – albeit now as a four-man group.
The next morning Paul was walking blithely along the Reeperbahn when he was arrested, locked in a police cell and charged with attempted arson. John and Pete were arrested next, and, last of all, Stuart, who had been with Astrid at her home when the alleged offence had taken place. After being left to sweat for a bit, Paul and Pete were deported.
John hung around Hamburg for a few more days, then he, too, followed. ‘It was awful,’ he told Hunter Davies. ‘I had my amp on my back, scared stiff I was going to get it pinched. I hadn’t finished paying for it. I was convinced I’d never find England.’
It was the middle of the night when he reached Liverpool and took a taxi home to Woolton. Mimi was upstairs asleep and didn’t hear the bell, so he had to throw pebbles at her bedroom window to wake her.
Of course, when he asked her to pay the taxi for him, she made a fuss and pretended to be cross. But that was just her way. She was delighted, and relieved, to see him home again.
‘He had these awful cowboy boots on, up to his knees they were, all gold and silver,’ she would remember. ‘He just pushed past me and said, “Pay that taxi, Mimi.” I shouted after him, “Where’s your hundred pounds a week, John?”’
‘Just like you, Mimi, to go on about a hundred a week when you know I’m tired.’
Her response was all it took to remind him that he was home again: ‘And you can get rid of those boots. You’re not going out of this house in boots like that.’