John watched the ever-growing waves of Beatlemania with a mixture of astonishment, glee and incomprehension. The Beatles might have been at the centre of the whirlwind, but, as John would say, most of the time it felt as though it was happening to something else called the Beatles – not to John, Paul, George and Ringo. They had been a very good rock and roll band, but now, as the screaming grew ever louder, and the press followed them wherever they went, the excitement was puzzling as much as flattering.
Of course, there were advantages. ‘What success does for you is give you a real feeling of confidence in yourself. It’s an incredible feeling, but once you’ve had it, you never want it to stop,’ John would say. But he was becoming aware, too, that success on this scale brought problems he’d never anticipated. Recently he’d been appalled to discover that his Scottish cousin, Stanley Parkes, whom he’d known all his life, now looked on him, he said, as ‘some kind of God’.
Like everyone, he could see that Beatlemania was a sociological phenomenon, and he was particularly tickled to read the attempts by pundits and social psychologists to explain the mystery of it all in the quality Sunday newspapers. But no one could quite explain it – not the screaming, anyway, other than to agree that the uproar when the Beatles went into falsetto was an expression of shared joy, all part of the ritual of going to see them. For young female fans there wasn’t much point in seeing a Beatles concert unless you were going to enjoy a jolly good scream along with everybody else.
Even the Beatles themselves couldn’t agree about the reasons for their appeal. In one edition of the BBC’s Juke Box Jury, when the Beatles comprised the whole panel, Paul suggested that the fans liked them because they were ‘like the fans themselves’. At which point, John virtually snorted, saying that most of the Beatle fans were thirteen-or fourteen-year-old girls. ‘You mean, you’re like them?’ he teased. Paul looked embarrassed to be shown up on national television. But he needn’t have been. John didn’t have any better explanation to offer, other than to say on another occasion, as he came off stage leaving behind a bedlam of screaming: ‘This isn’t show business. It’s something else.’
It was. And whatever that something was, everyone agreed, from Brian, to EMI and to the Beatles themselves, it should be exploited for all it was worth before the magic wore off.
So, in the festive spirit of traditional British pantomimes, Brian booked his four young magicians into an eleven-day, twice nightly Beatles’ Christmas Show at the huge Astoria Theatre in North London’s Finsbury Park. With a few comic sketches inserted between the songs it was a family outing – definitely not something the Beatles would have even contemplated in their leather-jacket Hamburg days.
John never enjoyed the shows. ‘It didn’t seem natural seeing old people out there in the audience looking at us,’ he said. ‘They should be at home, doing the knitting.’
For the past few months Cynthia and baby Julian had been living in Hoylake with Cynthia’s mother, and although the Beatles flew back to Merseyside on Christmas Eve, the focus of their careers was inevitably now in London. Brian already had a NEMS headquarters in Mayfair, Paul was living in Jane Asher’s parents’ London house and George and Ringo were sharing a flat just north of Hyde Park. So, John and Cynthia went house-hunting in London, and, at the suggestion of photographer friend Robert Freeman, rented a flat at the top of a very grand, if rather gloomy, house at Emperor’s Gate in South Kensington. Freeman lived with his very pretty model wife Sonny on the ground floor.
John liked Freeman. He was intelligent, Cambridge-educated (rare for a photographer), and good to talk to – the sort of intelligent sophisticate, with experiences far outside popular music, to whom John would always be drawn. Living above the slightly bohemian, artistic Freemans in the faded Victorian grandeur of South Kensington was perhaps a glamorous reflection of the student life he’d once enjoyed with Stuart in Liverpool’s Gambier Terrace. It had its drawbacks, though. A top-floor flat up six flights of stairs was hardly ideal for a young mother, baby and pram.
Not that John would have been particularly aware of the problem. He was hardly at home. Live performances were where the instant money was, and as soon as the Astoria season finished, Brian whisked the Beatles off to Paris for three weeks. And it was there, at the Paris Olympia, starring alongside French favourite Sylvie Vartan and Trini (‘If I Had A Hammer’) Lopez, that, for the first time since fame had found them, Les Beatles flopped. The sound system was bad, the French didn’t seem to get them and the French critics were mocking.
After the opening night there was some consternation in the Beatles headquarters at the plush Hotel George V. But John didn’t care. He’d spent the rest of the evening sitting in a café talking to his journalist friend Maureen Cleave.
‘The French haven’t made their minds up yet about the Beatles,’ a Paris-based BBC reporter asked him the following day. ‘What do you think of them?’
‘Oh, we like the Beatles. They’re gear,’ John deadpanned back.
In truth, if the Paris opening had been a disappointment, it hardly mattered. Any country where Johnny Hallyday was considered a serious rock star didn’t have much taste, the Beatles laughed to each other as, holed up in their hotel, they played a new album that Paul had been given by a French journalist. It was The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the tracks of which included ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’, ‘Girl From The North Country’ and ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, and its effect on all the Beatles, but mostly on John, would be far-reaching. They’d scarcely even heard of Dylan until that album, but his message was clear: this is what could be achieved if songwriters paid more attention to the lyrics of their songs.
Discovering Dylan wasn’t the only distraction in Paris. As always, there was more studio work to be done, and George Martin joined them to re-record ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ in German for the German market. Then there was a new song that Paul had just written called ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. The hit songs just kept coming and coming.
America, was, of course, the big prize. After reading about Beatlemania in Britain as cover stories in Time, Newsweek and Life, and a year of sending polite rejection notices back to London, Capitol’s resistance had broken.
‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ had been released across America during the last week of December 1963, amid a blitz of hype. This had included five million ‘The Beatles Are Coming’ stickers for telegraph poles, washrooms and walls across the country, and Beatles records to every disc jockey in the nation, none of which the independent labels had been able to do for the group’s earlier single releases. And, now, as reports reached Paris of massive airplay across the States, the Beatles began to realise that, far from the magic running out, it was gathering potency. America was surrendering, too.
On 25 January 1964 Brian got a phone call from New York. ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ had leapt to the top of the Billboard Hot 100. ‘It just seemed ridiculous,’ John would remember thinking. ‘I mean, the idea of having a hit over there. It was just something you could never do . . . We didn’t think we stood a chance. We didn’t imagine it at all. Cliff Richard had gone to America and died.’
But Cliff Richard had gone to America without a number one hit record. That had been something the Beatles had been determined not to do.
It was time to celebrate. So Brian took them all out to an upmarket but somewhat louche restaurant he’d heard about where there were sponge-covered breasts stuck on the walls and, according to George Harrison, where ‘the bread rolls were shaped like penises and the soup was served out of chamber pots’.
John had always thought Brian’s rule that Cynthia must be confined to the shadows to be silly and unreasonable, so when the call came to go to New York, he insisted that she be among the accompanying party. That she was John’s wife wasn’t a secret any more anyway, the tabloid press having printed the story two months earlier, to no discernible dip in the Beatles’ popularity. So, for the first time in their marriage, Cynthia wasn’t left behind as Pan Am flight 101 took off from Heathrow on the morning of 7 February 1964 to a crescendo of screams from thousands of young girls watching from the viewing terrace of the Queen’s Building.
For the Beatles themselves it was obviously an exciting moment, but, so much had they become part of the daily national conversation, it was thrilling for an entire generation of young Brits, too, who now identified with them. And as the jet set out across the Atlantic that morning, flying with it, along with reporters, photographers, TV film-makers and businessmen hoping to cut a Beatle franchise deal with Brian in mid-air, was a newfound youthful pride in simply being, like the Beatles themselves, British.