23

‘When the dirty work came, I had to be the leader . . . When it came to the nitty gritty, I had to do the talking’

As the pace began to accelerate, with dates being booked increasingly further afield and the Cavern gigs becoming ever more packed, the Beatles’ support group began to expand, too. A friendly giant of a fan called Mal Evans, who was twenty-six, married with a wife and child, gave up his job as a Post Office telephone engineer to assist road manager Neil; and a true Cavernite called Freda Kelly moved into Brian’s NEMS office to eventually run the Beatles Fan Club. ‘It was my dream job, but at first I couldn’t understand why the Beatles should even have a fan club because to me they were just a Liverpool group,’ she would remember. A young woman of great devotion, she was as loyal to them as John was unfaithful to Cynthia. ‘John was seeing a girl who I knew and I was dying to tell her that he was married, but I couldn’t because I’d promised not to,’ she would admit decades later. ‘I felt torn. It was awful.’

With its docks and many suburbs, Liverpool might seem a big city, but for rock groups the centre of town was more like a village where the musicians would get off with girl fans. Thus, Thelma Pickles, with whom John had had a relationship when he was at college, went out with Paul for a short time, while Maureen Cox, who would become Ringo’s first wife, had previously had a couple of dates with Paul.

It was a cosy place and an exciting time, but what none of the Beatles could possibly have realised was that the summer and autumn of 1962 would be the last time any of them would enjoy anonymity before fame took over their lives.

They had expected ‘Love Me Do’ to be released in July, but it was postponed, and then at the end of August, Brian received a demo copy of a new song from George Martin. It was ‘How Do You Do It?’ and had been written by a young London songwriter called Mitch Murray. Part of the job of a head of artistes and repertoire in those days was to find suitable songs for the artists under contract, and to Martin this sounded much more like a hit than ‘Love Me Do’. So, accompanying the demo was a terse order that the group arrange and rehearse the song and prepare to record it at the beginning of September.

The Beatles didn’t take kindly to their producer’s instructions. Not only was ‘Love Me Do’ obviously going to be relegated to a B-side, which meant it would probably never be heard on the radio, but they hated ‘How Do You Do It?’. It was commercial, but it just wasn’t for them. But what could they do? George Martin was the boss. If they wanted to get a record out they would have to do what they were told.

They did. Returning to London they recorded it, as professionally as they could. But then, at the urging of the others, John went to work on Martin. ‘When the dirty work came, I had to be the leader,’ he would later say. ‘Whatever the scene was, when it came to the nitty gritty, I had to do the talking.’ So now he put it to Martin that ‘we can do better than this’.

Martin was unimpressed. ‘When you write something as good as that song, I’ll let you record it. Otherwise that’s the song that’s going out.’

It looked like an impasse. But, as Beatles chronicler Mark Lewisohn has unearthed, there was, unknown to the Beatles, another pressure on Martin. This time it came from EMI publishers Ardmore and Beechwood, who had delivered the group to Parlophone in the first place. As the publishers of ‘Love Me Do’ they, too, wanted the Lennon and McCartney song to be the A-side. In the end, Martin had no choice but to back down and, a week later, set about making a better recording of ‘Love Me Do’.

John reckoned, with his usual exaggeration, that he must have sung it ‘about thirty times’ before Martin was satisfied. On some of the takes Ringo played, and on others it was a session drummer called Andy White, who had been brought into the studio in case Ringo was no better than Pete. But at last the Beatles’ first record, ‘Love Me Do’, with Andy White on drums (although Ringo’s version would go on their first album), was ready for release. It had taken a lot of work, and George Martin would never regard it highly. (He was, however, to be proved right about ‘How Do You Do It?’. A few months later Brian Epstein would begin to manage another Liverpool group, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and ‘How Do You Do It?’ would become their first number one.)

Martin had challenged the group to write a better song, and John soon had one in mind. It was called ‘Please Please Me’ and the producer’s first reaction was to suggest a change to the tempo as it sounded like a dramatic Roy Orbison piece. John took that on board and went back to Liverpool to work on it. He now had an added inducement. With ‘P.S. I Love You’ scheduled to be the flip side of ‘Love Me Do’, that meant that the two songs on the first Beatles record would have been written mainly by Paul. The competitive instinct in him was stirred. It would be his turn next.

Before any of that could happen, however, all four Beatles were asked to sign a five-year contract with Brian Epstein and NEMS. Despite their reservations, they agreed that Brian would take a management share of 25 per cent of their earnings, with the other 75 per cent being shared equally between all four Beatles – Ringo having joined as a full partner. This arrangement only covered records and public appearances, however, and as John and Paul were now going to have their songs recorded and therefore published, an additional arrangement was now necessary to formalise their relationship as songwriters. Accordingly, a separate, secret meeting was held at the Falkner Street flat where John and Cynthia were living.

The two Beatles hadn’t until then considered themselves serious songwriters. It was just something they did on the side, and they knew nothing about song publishing. What they did know was that a lot of the American hits they played were written by songwriting duos, such as Pomus and Shuman, and most recently husband and wife Gerry Goffin and Carole King. So they decided, with little discussion, to become either Lennon and McCartney, or McCartney and Lennon, depending upon who was the main instigator of the song, and to share equally in credits and income any song, written either by both of them or by one or the other.

As an agreement it was a fine testament to their working friendship as well as an acknowledgement that they were already a songwriting team who needed each other to get the very best results. But, while it was good for Brian Epstein, who was to act as their songwriting agent and who would take 20 per cent of their royalties, it was to prove short-sighted for them – as events would eventually show.

For John and Paul, the immediate positive side was that it locked them ever closer together. But for George and Ringo there was a negative aspect, in that they were left out of this side deal – which irked George particularly, because he was a songwriter, too. He would never be as confident a singer as John and Paul (‘I used to scream at him to open his mouth and sing,’ John would later tell me. ‘I encouraged him like mad’), nor as prolific a songwriter. But, then, he had no writing partner, John and Paul deciding that a trio might be too cumbersome, and that they would work better as a traditional twosome. Eternally optimistic as George had been when times had been bleak, he was still the youngest, as he would increasingly discover after the older boys sewed up the songwriting between them, making them, quite clearly, the first two among equals.

‘Love Me Do’ went on sale on 5 October 1962, and Mimi’s opinion was typically straightforward. ‘Well,’ she told John, ‘if you think that’s going to make you your fortune, you’ve got another think coming.’ Unfortunately, her judgement seemed to be shared by Parlophone, who gave the record little more than minimum exposure on their sponsored programmes on Radio Luxembourg – which was just two plays a week for three weeks. Even so, it was a giant step forward for the Beatles, and they would get Neil to stop the van so that they could listen to it on the few occasions their record was played. Naturally, BBC radio ignored it completely at first.

Brian, meanwhile, was relishing his new life in pop management. As the Beatles played every night and most lunchtimes, plugging their record, he was also trying his hand at being a rock promoter, booking no less a star than Little Richard to two headline Liverpool shows – with the Beatles co-starring of course. John later summed up his manager’s thinking: ‘Brian used to bring rock stars who were not making it any more . . . like Little Richard, and he would put us on the bill with them. So, we’d use them to draw the crowd. It’s hard for people to imagine just how thrilled the four of us were to even see any great rock and rollers in the flesh . . . We were almost paralysed with devotion.’

For Little Richard’s second Merseyside show Brian even took over the Empire Theatre and treated some of his staff to seats in a box with him. Freda Kelly, whose main job was sending out the first publicity photographs of the group and taking the Beatles’ wages to wherever they were playing on Friday nights, was flattered to be included. ‘I’d never been in a box before,’ she remembers. ‘And when the Beatles came on stage and Paul sang “A Taste Of Honey”, I couldn’t believe it! The Beatles at the Empire! The biggest theatre in Liverpool!’ She’d bought a copy of ‘Love Me Do’ on the day it came out, even though she didn’t have a record player. ‘Lots of Liverpool fans did that,’ she explains. ‘Out of loyalty.’

Such support was not evident in London, where on a tour of Britain’s pop music newspapers they were met with indifference, and the general feeling that ‘Beatles’ was a funny name for a band. ‘We were treated like provincials by the Cockneys,’ John would say afterwards, before adding a typical exaggeration: ‘They looked down on us like we were animals . . .’

They returned to Liverpool disappointed, aware that another problem was approaching. The release date for ‘Love Me Do’ had been arbitrarily decided by Parlophone, but the Beatles were under contract to return to the Star-Club in Hamburg for the first two weeks of November. This meant they would be away when they should be promoting their record. John and Paul had had enough of Hamburg and didn’t want to go back.

‘If we’d had our way we’d have copped out of the engagement because we didn’t feel we owed them fuck-all . . .’ John would admit. ‘But Brian made us go back to fulfil the contract.’ That was Brian, ever the honourable man. So, off the Beatles went, back to a Hamburg they’d now outlived, cursing their rotten luck – although, as usual, John would have a girlfriend waiting there to soften the blow.

Then a curious thing happened. In the Beatles’ absence their record began to sell, not in prodigious quantities, but enough for it to slowly begin to climb the charts. All the Mecca dance halls around the country had been sent copies, and some were now playing it, as were some of the clubs. The BBC even put it on Two-Way Family Favourites, a record programme that linked British soldiers serving in Germany with their families and girlfriends back in the UK. Tens of millions of homes were tuned to the show every Sunday at midday, so millions of young people must have heard it.

Although, over the next few weeks, it reached the top of the local chart in Liverpool, where the sales were so big that a rumour emerged that Brian had bought ten thousand copies – he hadn’t – it would never get higher nationally than number seventeen. But it sold steadily over several weeks, and by the time the Beatles returned to Liverpool in mid-November the mood towards them had changed. Brian’s phone at his office in Liverpool’s Whitechapel was now beginning to ring, TV producers and tour promoters wanting to talk. The ‘Beatles’ had stopped being just a funny name to Londoners, and Liverpool didn’t seem quite so far away any more.

Having a hit, even if it was only a small one, meant that George Martin was now keener, too. And on 26 November in Studio Two at EMI’s Abbey Road, John showed him what he and the other Beatles had done with ‘Please Please Me’. Years later John would remember how he had started writing it in his bedroom at Mendips, and that he could still picture the pink bedspread there as he had played around with lyrics from an old Bing Crosby hit that had started ‘Please, lend your little ear to my pleas’.

John had always enjoyed doodling with words, and the double use of ‘please’ intrigued him. Now, after work with Paul and George, the main inspiration for the song had gone from being Roy Orbison’s ‘Only The Lonely’ to the Everly Brothers’ ‘Cathy’s Clown’. The effect was immediate. In popular music terms ‘Please Please Me’ was a masterpiece of attention grabbing, from the guitar and harmonica opening, to the call and response passage of ‘Come on, come on, come on, come on’, which had been picked up from American R&B records, and which built excitement for the leap into falsetto in the chorus ‘Please, please me, oh yeah, like I please you’.

John sang most of it pell-mell, with Paul harmonising a third higher, and George also coming in for the refrains. It was as though they knew they were finally on the cusp of stardom and were hurrying to get there.

It was such an obvious hit that, even before the end of the session, George Martin was congratulating them somewhat portentously: ‘Gentlemen, you’ve just made your first number one record.’

The Beatles just laughed. They knew how good it was. What they didn’t know was how big a turning point it would be in their lives. Years later, John would often talk nostalgically about the great days of playing the Cavern and the Liverpool ballrooms before he’d been famous. ‘We were the best bloody band there was,’ he would tell me. ‘When we played straight rock . . . there was nobody to touch us. Basically I’m just a rocker, and that’s the way I’ve always been.’

He might have liked to say that, but it wasn’t true. He was a cultural magpie who took from whatever he came across, be it Bing Crosby, The Owl And The Pussy Cat or the Everly Brothers by way of Roy Orbison.

Neither he nor Paul had ever given much serious thought to music publishing. From seeing sheet music and the names of publishers on records, they knew that such companies existed, but they had no idea of how large a part publishing played in the music business. But they’d seen little effort by Ardmore and Beechwood to promote ‘Love Me Do’, which gave them cause to wonder what exactly those publishing guys did, apart from owning the copyright of a song and taking 50 per cent of the royalties from records and radio plays. And then they met a music publisher called Dick James.

Luck had taken Brian to George Martin, and now Martin’s friendship with James opened another door. Unlike Epstein and Martin, James, at forty-two, was already middle-aged when he first heard the Beatles. But after twenty years in show business, first as a singer with the Geraldo and Henry Hall bands, he knew a good song when he heard one and had become a small-time music publisher. On top of that, to use one of his own favourite expressions, he was ‘hungry’. The son of Polish immigrants, and born Leon Isaac Vapnick, he was an East End boy always hungry for songs he could publish from his little West End office in London’s Charing Cross Road. At Martin’s suggestion, Brian went to see James, who, after one hearing of ‘Please Please Me’, agreed to publish it, and the record’s flip side ‘Ask Me Why’. But there was more. After so many years in the business, he knew who to phone, and he immediately got the Beatles booked on to Thank Your Lucky Stars, a nationally networked pop music programme, for the week of the record’s release in January 1963. He was a new ally in London for the Beatles and a very influential one. Some years later John would, perhaps with some justification, be critical of him. But in those heady days of anticipation, as Dick James became Brian’s experienced guiding hand through the maze of necessary promotion, all the Beatles, and especially John and Paul, had reason to be grateful to him.

There were just eight weeks between the recording of ‘Please Please Me’ and its UK release on 11 January 1963, fifty-six days when, so confident were the Beatles of success, that they found themselves impatiently saying goodbye to one life as they waited to begin their new one.

Earlier in the year Brian had been offered a hike in money for them to play a final fifth season in Hamburg for two weeks at the end of December, and, not knowing how quickly events would change, he had accepted it. It meant that for the first time in their lives all four boys would be away from home for Christmas, and that John and Cynthia would be separated during their first Christmas of married life.

Relations had now been somewhat repaired with Mimi, and Cynthia had returned to live at Mendips during her pregnancy, but it was a bleak and lonely time for the first Beatle bride. John would phone home regularly, but, according to Cynthia, Mimi would always be the first to the phone, chatting happily with her nephew, while his secret, pregnant wife waited to grab a few words with her absent husband. Already it wasn’t much of a marriage.