In John’s eyes, the Top Ten Club was the best place the Beatles had ever played – because the microphones had a new echo built into them. Now, when he sang ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ he could sound the way Gene Vincent did on the record. The boost that the reverb gave him was immense, covering up for his lack of confidence in his voice, as his playing the comic on stage was perhaps compensating for his uncertainty about his looks.
Not everything was perfect about the Top Ten Club, however. The Beatles were now expected to appear alongside, and live with, London guitarist/singer Tony Sheridan, meaning there would be six on stage every night, with Paul now playing the piano. After the show Stuart would go home to Astrid in the suburbs, while the others, including Sheridan, would climb up to their narrow camp beds in an attic room. There would be five in this makeshift dormitory, and, should Tony Sheridan’s German girlfriend, Rosi, join him, six, and even more if one of the Beatles got lucky. This was where George lost his virginity with a girl he’d met, believing his companions to be sleeping until they all cheered, upon his completion of the act. ‘At least they kept quiet while I was doing it,’ George would happily remember.
All in all, there wasn’t much in the way of privacy for any of them, as Paul’s account of accidentally entering the attic when John was busy illustrates. ‘I’d walk in on John and see a little bottom bobbing up and down with a girl underneath him. It was perfectly normal. You’d go, “Oh, sorry,” and back out of the room.’
For a rock musician, girls were a perk of the job, and, as many will testify, one of the abiding reasons why teenage boys took up the guitar in the first place. A decade later John would tell Rolling Stone about some of the girls who would attend their gigs. ‘There was a certain type . . . you’d call them groupies now . . . who went for any performer. They didn’t care if it was a comedian or a man who ate glass, as long as he was on the stage.’
When they’d agreed to play at the Top Ten, the Beatles had been promised more money than Koschmider had paid them, but what they hadn’t realised was that they would now have to pay tax at their new venue – something their former employer had, probably fraudulently, neglected to do. They were always underpaid wherever they played, but on seeing their tax deductions, they decided to make a saving where they could – by not paying Allan Williams his 10 per cent agent’s commission on their wages. This was shabby behaviour, and a bitter Williams immediately ‘saw the hand of Lennon’ in it. ‘He was the leader and the dominant figure among the Beatles,’ he would write in his book The Man Who Gave The Beatles Away – which John would wickedly rename The Man Who Couldn’t Give The Beatles Away.
Morally, if not legally, because there had been no contract to breach, Williams had right on his side, and he threatened to blackball the group when they got back to Liverpool. But he wasn’t that kind of guy, as the Beatles surely guessed. He had never been their manager in the usual pop music sense, but he’d done more for them than simply acting as a booking agent. As he reminded them, in a surprisingly conciliatory letter, without him they ‘wouldn’t even have smelled Hamburg’. It was true, but it didn’t help. They still didn’t pay him.
During the Easter break from college, Cynthia, accompanied by Paul’s girlfriend Dot, arrived in Hamburg. It was the first time Cynthia had been abroad, and John mischievously showed her the sights of the Reeperbahn, as well as introducing her to the staying powers of Preludin. Then at night the two girls would sit in the audience watching their boyfriends on stage, with John sometimes hurrying Cynthia upstairs to the communal room when no one else was there for a quick ‘five-miler’ in the fifteen minutes between sessions. ‘Those weeks in Hamburg were among the happiest times John and I had together,’ Cynthia would later write. ‘We were free and in love. Life was full of promise and the sun shone.’
Astrid had already given the Beatles their ‘look’ as a photographer, and now she had a couple more contributions to make. When Stuart admired her new, black, collarless leather jacket and trousers she had a similar outfit made for him. The other Beatles quickly ordered some for themselves, too. But what Astrid did next would be her greatest gift to them. She cut Stuart’s hair, combing it forward into a fringe in a style that some of her German friends were copying from the ever-groovy French.
On seeing what she’d done to their bass player, the other Beatles were amused. It looked sissyish, they thought, and stuck to their slicked-back rocker styles. What had been good enough for early Elvis was good enough for them . . . for now.
Neither John, nor any of the others, knew much about Bert Kaempfert other than that he was an easy listening orchestra star in Germany, and that his record ‘Wonderland By Night’, the sort of slinky trumpet music that ice skaters liked to glide to, had topped the American charts. More intriguing was that Kaempfert had also been involved in turning the German folk song ‘Muss i denn’ into ‘Wooden Heart’ for Elvis. Paul would sing it sometimes, partly in German, but John never liked it much, seeing it as further evidence of Elvis’s selling out to Hollywood. But when told that Kaempfert had been to see them at the Top Ten and wanted to record them with Tony Sheridan, he was excited.
The Beatles felt confident when, having been up all night high on pep pills, they turned up at Polydor’s Hamburg studio ready to show Kaempfert what they could do. ‘We thought it would be easy. The Germans had such shitty records, ours was bound to be better,’ John would remember.
As it transpired, the cultural collision did no one any favours. Not at first, anyway. Mainly present as backing musicians for Tony Sheridan, who sang ‘My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean’, which was an odd choice for a rock singer, the Beatles even had to change their name to the Beat Brothers for the record’s release. Kaempfert didn’t like the name Beatles.
As for the Beatles, they hated the finished record. ‘It was terrible,’ John said. ‘It was just Tony Sheridan singing with us banging in the background. It could have been anyone.’ The one song on which John sang was the oldie ‘Ain’t She Sweet’. It was one of the first songs his mother had taught him to play, so there must have been some emotion involved when he recorded it. But Julia hadn’t imagined it as the marching song that the German producer wanted.
It was the band’s first proper recording session, and they were disappointed, but it was already June and their second stay in Hamburg was drawing to a close. By now Stuart had decided that a musician’s life wasn’t for him, and had already begun studying at the Hamburg College of Fine Art. He cried on his last night as a Beatle, but everyone was emotional, with Paul regretting some of the sharp comments he’d made about Stuart’s playing. Musically, he’d been right – Stuart wasn’t good enough. But John had enjoyed his company more than anyone else’s.
Whether Stuart had been holding back the development of the Beatles, no one has ventured to suggest. But his friendship with John was probably impeding the progress of Lennon and McCartney as songwriters. Feeling left out, Paul’s writing partnership with John had dried up. Had Stuart stayed a Beatle, would Lennon and McCartney have become the two most famous songwriters in the world? Or would Paul have eventually given up, tired of feeling sidelined by John, and gone off on a solo career at the beginning of the Sixties rather than at the end of that decade?
By leaving the Beatles, Stuart wasn’t just leaving the band. He was abandoning music. George was given his amplifier and Paul was offered his bass. It wasn’t welcome. In Paul’s eyes the bass was usually ‘played by a fat guy at the back’, and that wasn’t how he saw himself at all. But, if the Beatles were going to be a four-man group, someone would have to play it, and, as John made clear, it wasn’t going to be him; and it would have been a waste if George, the best guitarist in the group, played it. So, it had to be Paul.
‘I really got lumbered . . .’ Paul would say. But for the sake of the group, he got on with it, and, going to the Steinway music shop, he ordered a violin-shaped Hofner 500/1 for a left-handed player. He didn’t know it then, but it would signal an inspired change of direction for him.
Paul wasn’t the only one whose role was changed by Stuart’s decision. He might not have wanted Stuart’s bass, but Klaus Voorman had decided that he wanted to be a musician, too, so he took it. A decade later, Klaus would play bass on John’s Imagine album.