Copyright

Dedication

For Frances, Silas, Tallulah and Tom

Epigraphs

In five-score summers! All new eyes,

New minds, new modes, new fools, new wise;

New woes to weep, new joys to prize;

With nothing left of me and you

In that live century’s vivid view

Beyond a pinch of dust or two;

A century which, if not sublime,

Will show, I doubt not, at its prime,

A scope above this blinkered time.

From ‘1967’, by Thomas Hardy (written in 1867)

‘What a remarkable fifty years they have been for the world … Think what we would have missed if we had never heard the Beatles.’

Queen Elizabeth II, speaking in November 1997 at a celebration of her golden wedding anniversary

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Epigraphs

6  Contents

7  1

8 2

9 3

10 4

11 5

12 6

13 7

14 8

15 9

16 10

17 11

18 12

19 13

20 14

21 15

22 16

23 17

24 18

25 19

26 20

27 21

28 22

29 23

30 24

31 25

32 26

33  27

34  28

35  29

36  30

37  31

38  32

39  33

40  34

41  35

42  36

43  37

44  38

45  39

46  40

47  41

48  42

49  43

50  44

51  45

52  46

53  47

54  48

55  49

56  50

57  51

58  52

59  53

60  54

61  55

62  56

63  57

64  58

65  59

66  60

67  61

68  62

69  63

70  64

71  65

72  66

73  67

74  68

75  69

76  70

77  71

78  72

79  73

80  74

81  75

82  76

83  77

84  78

85  79

86  80

87  81

88  82

89  83

90  84

91  85

92  86

93  87

94  88

95  89

96  90

97  91

98  92

99  93

100  94

101  95

102  96

103  97

104  98

105  99

106  100

107  101

108  102

109  103

110  104

111  105

112  106

113  107

114  108

115  109

116  110

117  111

118  112

119  113

120  114

121  115

122  116

123  117

124  118

125  119

126  120

127  121

128  122

129  123

130  124

131  125

132  126

133  127

134  128

135  129

136  130

137  131

138  132

139  133

140  134

141  135

142  136

143  137

144  138

145  139

146  140

147  141

148  142

149  143

150  144

151  145

152  146

153  147

154  148

155  149

156  150

157  Epigraph

158  Acknowledgements

159  Sources

160  Other Books by Craig Brown

161  About the Author

162  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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1

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

In their neat black suits and ties, Brian Epstein and his personal assistant Alistair Taylor make their way down the eighteen steep steps into the sweaty basement on Mathew Street. Brian finds it ‘as black as a deep grave, dank and damp and smelly’. He wishes he hadn’t come. Both he and Taylor would prefer to be attending a classical concert at the Philharmonic, but curiosity got the better of them. Four young musicians saunter onto the stage. Brian recognises them from the family record shop he manages: they are the ones who lounge around in the booths, listening to the latest discs and chatting to the girls, with absolutely no intention whatsoever of buying a record.

Between songs, the three yobs with guitars start yelling and swearing, turning their backs on the audience and pretending to hit one another. Taylor notices Brian’s eyes widen with amazement. Taylor himself is undergoing one of the most shocking experiences of his life – ‘like someone thumping you’ – and he is pretty sure Brian feels the same.

After the show, Taylor says, ‘They’re just AWFUL.’

‘They ARE awful,’ agrees Brian. ‘But I also think they’re fabulous. Let’s just go and say hello.’

George is the first of the Beatles to spot the man from the record shop approaching.

‘Hello there,’ he says. ‘What brings Mr Epstein here?’

2

Other groups had a front man; your favourite was pre-selected for you. No one would ever pick Hank Marvin over Cliff Richard, say, or Mike Smith over Dave Clark.

But with the Beatles there was a choice, so you had to pick a favourite, and the one you picked said a lot about who you were. For their American fan Carolyn See, there was ‘Paul, for those who preferred androgynous beauty; John, for those who prized intellect and wit; George because he possessed that ineffable something we would later recognize as spiritual life; and Ringo, patron saint of fuckups the world over.’

In Liverpool, the twelve-year-old Linda Grant favoured Ringo ‘for reasons that are beyond me’. There was, she recalls, ‘a real goody-two-shoes at school who liked Paul. George seemed a bit nothing. John seemed off-limits, too intimidating.’

Ringo was the Beatle for girls who lacked ambition. Picking him as your favourite suggested a touch of realism. It went without saying that the others were already taken, but you might just stand an outside chance with the drummer. ‘If someone asked who my favorite was I always said, “Oh, I like Ringo,”’ remembered Fran Lebowitz, who grew up in New Jersey. ‘I liked the personality of Ringo Starr. I still do. He was not, of course, the favorite in my school among the girls. Paul McCartney was far and away the favorite. He was the cute Beatle. So it was probably just a contrarian position to choose Ringo Starr.’

Helen Shapiro was only sixteen but already a major star when the Beatles toured as one of her supporting acts at the start of 1963. Like any other girl, she had her favourite. ‘John was married but nobody knew about it at the time so along with a few thousand other girls I had a crush on him … George was the most serious. He would occasionally talk about what he was going to do when he was rich, and try to pick my brains about the financial side of things. I couldn’t have been a lot of help. I still wasn’t interested in the money. Paul remained the spokesman. Ringo was the quiet one.’

Pattie Boyd met the four Beatles after being chosen to play one of the schoolgirls in Hard Day’s Night. ‘On first impressions, John seemed more cynical and brash than the others, Ringo the most endearing. Paul was cute, and George, with velvet brown eyes and dark chestnut hair, was the best-looking man I’d ever seen.’ Unlike millions of other fans, Pattie was able to take her choice a stage further. Reader, she married him.

There was a Beatle to suit every taste. As a fan, you expressed yourself by picking one over the others. Each personified a different element: John fire, Paul water, George air, Ringo earth. Even their friends liked to paint them in primary colours, with sharply contrasting characters, like one of those jokes about the Englishman, the Welshman, the Irishman and the Scotsman. Carolyn See noted how, in A Hard Day’s Night, they enacted their given personas: ‘winsome Paul, witty John, thoughtful George, goofy Ringo’.

The actor Victor Spinetti once told this story about them. While filming Help! in Salzburg, he caught ’flu and was confined to bed. ‘The Beatles came to my hotel room to visit. The first to arrive was George Harrison. He knocked, came in and said, “I’ve come to plump your pillows. Whenever anyone’s ill in bed they have to have their pillows plumped.” He then plumped my pillows and left. John Lennon came in next and marched up and down barking “Sieg heil, Schweinhund! The doctors are here. They’re coming to experiment upon you. Sieg heil! Heil Hitler!” And he left. Ringo then came in, sat down by the bed, picked up the hotel menu and read out loud, as if to a child, “Once upon a time there were three bears. Mummy bear, Daddy bear and Baby bear.” And then he left. Paul opened the door an inch, asked, “Is it catching?” “Yes,” I said, on which he shut the door and I never saw him again.’ Paul was being the pragmatist, as usual. He knew that if he or the others had caught ’flu, there’d be no filming.

Working alongside Brian Epstein, Alistair Taylor observed the different ways the Beatles dealt with their earnings. ‘Every month, Brian would issue each of the boys with their financial statements, all neatly and accurately itemised, and sealed in a white manila envelope. They reacted very different. John would instantly crumple it up and stuff it in his pocket. George might have a look. Ringo certainly couldn’t understand it and didn’t waste any time trying. Paul was the one who opened it carefully and would sit in the corner of the office for hours going meticulously through it.’

As they grew older, the differences in their characters became sharper. It was as though the wind had changed, and each had been stuck with the face he last pulled. Asked to submit ideas for famous figures to include on the Sgt. Pepper album cover, George suggested a few Indian gurus, and Paul picked a broad variety of artists, from Stockhausen to Fred Astaire. John’s suggestions were more macabre or offbeat: the Marquis de Sade, Edgar Allan Poe, Jesus, Hitler. And as for Ringo, he simply said he’d go along with what the others wanted.

Of course, the Beatles revolved around the contrasting characters of Paul and John. Their recording engineer Geoff Emerick watched the two of them at work. ‘They couldn’t have been two more different people. Paul was meticulous and organised, he always carried a notebook around with him, in which he methodically wrote down lyrics and chord changes in his neat handwriting. In contrast, John seemed to live in chaos: he was constantly searching for scraps of paper that he’d scribbled hurried ideas on. Paul was a natural communicator; John couldn’t articulate his ideas well. Paul was the diplomat; John was the agitator. Paul was soft-spoken and almost unfailingly polite; John could be a right loudmouth and quite rude. Paul was willing to put in long hours to get a part right; John was impatient, always ready to move on to the next thing. Paul usually knew exactly what he wanted and would often take offence at criticism; John was much more thick-skinned and was open to hearing what others had to say.’

John was brittle, demanding and caustic; Paul emollient, engaging, agreeable. But there were those who detected something single-minded, perhaps even self-serving, beneath Paul’s charm. Tony Barrow, who worked as the Beatles’ press officer, felt that ‘John made the most noise, especially with Epstein. But it was Paul who let John do the heavy lifting when there was a dispute with Brian. Then Paul would finish the persuasion. John would make Brian cry at times, but Paul, more of a politician, would use a quiet influence to get his way. John’s bark was worse than his bite. He used the bark to cover up low self-esteem … Paul promised people everything, tickets, gifts, then left it to people like me to fulfil the promises. He wanted to look like a good benefactor, and he was long on promises, short on performance. He was a charmer who was a public relations delight, a man who was master of image-making. He is and was a sheer showman, from his bone marrow to his fingertips. He feeds on the approval of his public.’

Paul was baby-faced, meticulous, perky, diplomatic, energetic, tuneful, ingratiating, optimistic, outgoing, cheery, sentimental, solicitous. John was angular, slapdash, maudlin, difficult, lazy, dissonant, edgy, sardonic, pessimistic, solipsistic, sulky, cool, brutal. Paul considered himself lovable; John believed himself unlovable.

Paul once tried to explain how the two of them had become what they were. ‘John, because of his upbringing and his unstable family life, had to be hard, witty, always ready for the cover-up, ready for the riposte, ready with the sharp little witticism. Whereas with my rather comfortable upbringing, a lot of family, a lot of people, very northern, “Cup of tea, love?”, my surface grew to be easy-going. Put people at their ease. Chat to people, be nice, it’s nice to be nice … Mentally, no one could say much to hurt me, whereas with John: his dad wasn’t home, so it was “Where’s yer dad, you bastard?” And his mother lived with somebody and that was called “living in sin” in those days, so there was another cheap shot against him. John had a lot to guard against, and it formed his personality; he was a very guarded person … He had massive hang-ups from his upbringing.’

The peculiar power of the Beatles’ music, its magic and its beauty, lies in the intermingling of these opposites. Other groups were raucous or reflective, progressive or traditional, solemn or upbeat, folksy or sexy or aggressive. But when you hear a Beatles album, you feel that all human life is there. As John saw it, when they were composing together, Paul ‘provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for sadness, the discords, a certain bluesy edge’. It was this finely balanced push me/pull you tension that made their greatest music so expressive, capable of being both universal and particular at one and the same time.

Even as teenagers, they approached their songwriting with a sense of purpose. Paul would bunk off school, and John would join him in the McCartney house in Forthlin Road. Then Paul would open his school notebook, with its blue lines on white paper, and write, ‘Another Lennon-McCartney original’ on the next blank page, and the two of them would get straight down to composing their next song. Looking back, Paul struggled to recall a fruitless afternoon. ‘We never had a dry session … In all the years, we never walked away from a session saying, “Fuck it, we can’t write one.”’

Sometimes their contributions to the same song were so keenly differentiated that they seemed to be playing up to their caricatures. Paul comes up with ‘We can work it out’, and John immediately undercuts it: ‘Life is very short’. Paul sings ‘It’s getting better’ and John butts in with ‘Can’t get much worse’. In ‘A Day in the Life’ it is John, compulsive reader of newspapers, who just has to laugh at the man who’s blown his mind out in a car, while it is the happy-go-lucky Paul who wakes up, gets out of bed, drags a comb across his head.

Many of their songs have bright melodies but dark lyrics, or dark melodies but bright lyrics. The words of ‘Help!’, ‘Run for Your Life’, ‘Misery’ and ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ are all about depression and psychosis, but they are set to jaunty tunes. Deprived of this tug-of-war between the two competing partners, their solo songs often lack that dimension of otherness, with John falling back on self-pity and Paul giving in to whimsy.1

As time went by, their collaboration dwindled, and they composed more and more of their songs separately. But they remained driven by a shared sense of competition; each sought the other’s approval. ‘It was an ideal match,’ wrote the critic Ian MacDonald. ‘They laughed at the same things, thought at the same speed, respected each other’s talent, and knew that their unspoken urge to best and surprise each other was crucial to the continuing vitality of their music.’

1 Fourteen years after the Beatles broke up, Paul told Steve Grant of Time Out: ‘I know I’ve lost my edge … I need a kind of outside injection, stimulus, that’s not there any more. And remember the edge came from all the Beatles – if Ringo or George didn’t like anything, it was out. My stuff has got more poppy without that outside stimulus, but then I’ve always been more at home with love songs and anthems.’ At the same time, John remained frustrated at the relative lack of take-up of his own songs. ‘It would sometimes annoy him that Paul’s songs were more covered than his,’ Yoko told Philip Norman in 2008. ‘He’d say, “They always cover Paul’s songs – they never cover mine.”’ In 2019 Paul smiled as he told the BBC journalist Emily Maitlis how cross John would get when he walked into hotel lounges in New York and pianists, seeking to please him, would immediately launch into flowery renditions of ‘Yesterday’.

3

Late November 1940

Mary Mohin is thirty years old, and still unmarried. Mary’s mother died in 1919, while giving birth to her fifth child, who also died. At the time, Mary was ten years old. Perhaps influenced by this early tragedy, Mary set her heart on becoming a midwife. She achieved her ambition, and more: she is now not only a midwife, but a ward sister.

Jim McCartney is thirty-eight years old, and still unmarried. He was his mother’s fifth child, but only the third to live beyond the age of two. He left school just before his fourteenth birthday, and got a good job at a cotton brokers. He is now a cotton salesman, on a decent wage. His main love, though, is playing trumpet with his own six-to-eight-piece ensemble – Jim Mac’s Band. They perform all the latest dance tunes; Jim’s favourite is ‘I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise’.

Excused wartime service because he is deaf in one ear, Jim is attached to the Fazakerley Fire Unit. German bombs have been falling on Liverpool since August; London is the only city to have suffered more devastation.1 Somehow, the deadpan Liverpudlian humour sees them through. Over in Arnold Grove, the Harrison family have had their windows blown out, and their leather sofa, which they reserved for special occasions, was shredded by the flying glass. ‘If I’d known that was going to happen we could have been sitting on it all these years,’ observes Mrs Harrison.

Mary lodges with Jim’s sister Gin. Mary and Jim have known each other quite well for some years now, though they have never thought of each other in terms of romance.

(a)

Tonight the Nazi bombers fly overhead. Gin and Mary are visiting Jim’s mum in Scargreen Avenue when the sirens sound, so they have to stay over. As the bombs fall, Jim and Mary sit and chat for hours. By the time the all-clear is sounded, they feel they are meant for one another. After a brief engagement, they marry on 15 April 1941; just over a year later, Mary gives birth to their first child, a boy. They christen him James Paul McCartney.

(b)

Tonight is quiet. The sirens never sound. As it happens, they will tomorrow night, when Gin and Mary are planning on staying home. So Jim and Mary fail to have their heart-to-heart, and go their separate ways. James Paul McCartney is never born.

1 Over four thousand Liverpudlians were killed in the Blitz.

4

We had been told to gather outside Liverpool at Speke Hall, described by the National Trust as ‘a rare Tudor timber-framed manor house in a most unusual setting on the banks of the River Mersey’. The estate has, the guidebook advises, ‘witnessed more than 400 years of turbulent history’.

I was early, so I hung around in the ‘Visitor Complex’ – a building, not a condition – looking at mugs and scarves and soaps and books about the Tudors. ‘A bit of a bookworm? Thumb through our collection of adults’ and children’s books to find your next great read!’

Before long, a cheery driver called Joe shepherded us onto a minibus, then asked us where we were from. Three of us were from Spain, two from Italy, four from Australia, two from Austria, four from England. A couple of people who had bought tickets were missing, so we waited until two young women came running towards the bus, waving frantically. ‘Let’s give them a fright,’ said Joe, turning on the ignition and setting off. They waved more frantically. ‘And now let’s see those tears turn to laughter,’ said Joe, stopping the minibus and letting them in.

As the minibus left Speke Hall, Joe pressed a button and ‘Love Me Do’ came bursting from the speakers. ‘Whassis rubbish then?’ shouted an Australian at the back.

‘I can see who’ll be walkin’ back!’ said Joe. ‘When he gets off the bus, let’s jump ’im!’ It was all very merry.

Soon we were in Forthlin Road, the kind of unassuming row of nondescript houses most National Trust members would normally drive through, rather than to.

The National Trust bought 20 Forthlin Road in 1995, on the suggestion of the then director-general of the BBC, a Liverpudlian called John Birt,1 who had noticed it was up for sale. Seven years later the Trust also acquired John Lennon’s childhood home, ‘Mendips’, in Menlove Avenue, after it had been bought by Yoko Ono. In a statement around that time, she said: ‘When I heard that Mendips was up for sale, I was worried that it might fall into the wrong hands and be commercially exploited. That’s why I decided to buy the house, and donate it to the National Trust so it would be well looked after as a place for people to visit and see. I am thrilled that the National Trust has agreed to take it on.’

But it was a decision not welcomed by one and all. Tim Knox, at that time the National Trust’s head curator,2 declared himself ‘furious’. The Trust’s usual criterion for taking on a property – that the building should have intrinsic artistic merit – had, he felt, been abandoned in pursuit of shabby populism. ‘They’re publicity coups – not serious acquisitions,’ he said, adding, only half-jokingly, ‘Now we’re going to take four properties on so Ringo doesn’t feel left out.’

Others agreed. ‘Architecturally, the house is no more or less interesting than any other arterial, pebble-dashed semi in any other middle-class suburb,’ observed the design critic Stephen Bayley.3 ‘Its special value comes from the vicarious, mystical contact with genius. The problem for the Trust’s architectural historians is that, since the house was pretty much denuded of its contents, there is no possibility of vicarious, mystical contact with the genius’s telly set, kitchen unit or any other artefact that might afford an insight into the inspiration that gave us such a torrent of brilliant words and music. So, they set about faking it.

‘The National Trust … prides itself on its access to expertise. It has some of the world’s leading architectural historians on its staff and they went out to buy the stuff to recreate Lennon’s home. But when scholarly expertise is focused on junk, in a magical mystery tour of some dingy Liverpudlian dealers, scholarly expertise looks silly. A crap medicine cabinet is admired for its authenticity. The lino is subject to scrutiny worthy of a Donatello relief sculpture. They can find the conical legs of the television set, but not the set itself … If you are doing the long and winding road of fakery, where do you stop? In the dreamworld of folk memory and fantasy, is the answer.’

The National Trust remains undaunted. ‘Imagine walking through the back door into the kitchen where John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi would have cooked him his tea,’ reads its awestruck introduction to Mendips. It treats the house as a religious shrine, a place of pilgrimage. ‘Join our fascinating Custodian on a trip down memory lane … John’s bedroom is a very atmospheric place in which to take a moment with your own thoughts about this incredible individual …’

Pilgrims to Mendips face rules and regulations stricter than those for the Sistine Chapel. ‘Any photography inside Mendips or duplication of audio tour material is strictly prohibited. You will be asked to deposit all handbags, cameras and recording equipment at the entrance to the house.’

It can’t be long, surely, before one of the faithful witnesses some sort of miracle at Mendips – a blind man sees, a crippled man rises up and walks, a little girl sees John’s mother Julia in a vision – leading yet more pilgrims to flock to Menlove Avenue, forming orderly queues for the chance to see the exact spot where Julia met her end.

While our minibus was decanting its passengers, many more were pouring out of a ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ coach, and behind them, four Germans were stepping out of a black cab. The gateway to 20 Forthlin Road was pullulating with visitors from all over the world, wearing Beatles T-shirts and posing for selfies. The metal sign outside announces ‘The proud family home of the McCartney family, Jim, Mary, Paul and Mike. Accessible via the National Trust.’

I started edging towards the front of the queue. I had booked way in advance and paid £31 (including guidebooks) for an official tour of both Beatles houses, and I was worried that people on unofficial tours would creep their way past the guide and elbow their way into Paul’s house in my place. Luckily, Joe the driver was standing by, monitoring the chosen few. Our little group marched self-importantly into the front garden of 20 Forthlin Road, and the gates were then satisfyingly closed on everybody else.

Our National Trust guide introduced herself as Sylvia. She conducts 12,000 people a year around Paul’s childhood home, twenty at a go, four times a day. Her voice has a hint of Hyacinth Bucket. Standing in the garden, she welcomed us to 20 Forthlin Road. This, she said, was where Paul lived for eight years: ‘very important years musically. George Harrison was an early visitor. George would bring his guitar.’

A buzz went around. Stephen Bayley’s promise of mystical contact seemed to be taking shape. ‘And then when John Lennon started to come down to the house, John would take a short cut through the golf course to get here on his bicycle, taking less than ten minutes through the golf course. And in the room behind you there –’ she gestured ‘– that’s where John and Paul sat down and began writing songs together. By the time Paul left here, it was right at the end of 1963, so the Beatles had already got hits in the charts, they were appearing on television. Paul was still coming back though, that was still his bedroom up there, right until the end of 1963. He was the last Beatle to move to London. So when the McCartneys came – sorry, are you recording?’

I froze. I had been covertly recording Sylvia on a mobile phone, but it turned out that she was talking to one of the Australians, standing closer to her. He assured her that, no, he wasn’t recording. ‘No?’ she replied, suspiciously. ‘I’m sorry, I just don’t like it,’ she muttered, before struggling to regain her thread. ‘Erm. When. Erm. The McCartneys. So. Erm. When the McCartneys came to live here, erm, these were all council houses, so that means the McCartneys didn’t own this house, it was social housing, everybody paid rent.’

Unbeknownst to Sylvia, I carried on recording, slyly holding my phone at a casual angle so as not to excite her attention. It made me feel on edge, as though I were pocketing household products within spitting distance of a store detective.

‘Over the years, you can see what’s happened. People have bought the houses, and they’ve changed the doors and windows. When the National Trust got this house, twenty-two years ago now, there were new windows at the front, but the Trust saw that a house across the street still had these original windows, so they did a deal, they got the new ones and we got the old ones back again. So now it looks exactly as it did when Paul and his family lived here.’

We all gazed dutifully at these front windows, marvelling that they now looked just like they would have looked before they looked different. Meanwhile, my phone was recording, and I was growing increasingly worried that Sylvia would notice, and denounce me.

‘OK, so if anyone wants a photograph at the front of the house, just give me your phone or your camera. Move to the end of the window so I can fit you in, bunch up a bit for me.’ Groups of visitors stood beaming in front of Paul’s old front door, or what would have been Paul’s old front door if it had been Paul’s old front door, which it wasn’t. ‘Is that everyone? Is that it?’

Sylvia warned us that we were not allowed to take photographs in the house or the back garden. ‘There’s a special reason here. You’ll see inside we’ve got Mike McCartney, Paul’s younger brother’s, copyright photographs all around the house. It’s lovely to have them. And you’ll enjoy them. But he’d take them away if people had photographs of them.’

We moved into the back garden. The National Trust blurb suggests ‘5 things to look out for at 20 Forthlin Road’. One is described as ‘The Back Drainpipe: After Paul’s mum died, his father would insist that the two boys were home in time for dinner, if not they were locked out. When this inevitably happened, Paul and Mike would run round the back of the house, climb up the drainpipe, and through the bathroom window, which they always left on the latch for such an eventuality.’ Sylvia repeated this anecdote, almost word for word, as we all stared at the drainpipe – or, to be accurate, the replica drainpipe.

‘So if when you come in you could hand me your bags and cameras, and if you’ve got a mobile phone can you switch if off and hand it in, so we don’t want to see mobile phones in your pockets.’

With that, Sylvia ushered us inside. Everyone lined up to give her their phones and cameras, as though crossing the border of a particularly nervy country. She then locked them all in a cupboard under the stairs. Disobediently, I kept my mobile phone in my pocket, and immediately regretted it. Throughout the rest of my visit I was terrified that someone would phone me, and the ringing would act as an alarm bell and I would be unmasked and shamed.

We all squeezed into the sitting room, decorated with three different types of wallpaper – ‘the McCartney family bought end-of rolls’ – none of them original. The brown armchair, chunky 1950s television and corner table were not original either, and nor were the rugs. ‘This is the room the McCartneys called the front parlour. The National Trust has recreated it with the aid of photos and family memories,’ said Sylvia. In response to a query she said that no, the piano was not original. ‘Paul still owns his father’s house, and he stays in it when he comes to Liverpool. And that’s where the original McCartney piano is. Jim used to play “The Entertainer”. Do you know that song – by Scott Joplin? If you think of Scott Joplin and “When I’m 64”, you can really tell the influence … Father Jim was a good self-taught musician. Paul followed in his father’s footsteps. After a few lessons, he said, “I’ll be just like my Dad. I’ll teach myself.” … He composed “World Without Love” here, and the very beginnings of “Michelle” were written here. And “Love Me Do” – they were sitting here when they wrote it … Paul sat here and wrote “I’ll Follow the Sun”.’ She pointed to a photo of John and Paul on the wall. ‘The song they’re finishing in this picture is “I Saw Her Standing There” … Another song they finished off was “Please Please Me”.’

Every now and then, Sylvia tried to make things personal, beginning her sentences ‘Paul told me’ – as in, ‘Paul told me, “We had some sad years but most of the time we were really happy.” Or, ‘This was their dining room. Paul told me, “We never ate in here after Mum died.”’ She added, ‘Paul told me, “A lot of people think ‘Let it Be’ is about the Virgin Mary, but it was about my mother, who would always say “Let it be.”’ I had read these stories countless times over the years,4 but it obviously afforded Sylvia satisfaction to say that she had heard them direct from Paul; and perhaps in the coming years it would satisfy us, too, to say that we had heard them from someone who had heard them from Paul.

We shuffled into the kitchen. ‘The quarry tiles have not been changed. All the Beatles have stood on those quarry tiles – though Ringo only twice, as he came late.’ We peered down at the sacred tiles beneath our feet. ‘The Trust found the original white sink in the garden with plants in it and returned it to its rightful position.’ We gazed awestruck at the kitchen sink, imagining young Paul hard at work on the dishes.

Only the tiles and the sink are original to the kitchen, but the experts from the National Trust found feasible lookalikes for the rest: the packet of Lux soap flakes, the Stork margarine, the tea can, the biscuit tin, the wireless, the clothes horse. Photographs of all these items – the domestic equivalents of tribute bands – may be purchased on the National Trust website: photos of a 1950s record player, vacuum cleaner, bread bin, washing tongs, frying pan, kettle, clothes pegs, rolling pin. And everything has been diligently catalogued, like items from the Tower of London. A photograph of a wooden spoon (Date 1960–1962, 260mm; Materials: Wood) is described as ‘Historic Services,/Food & drink preparation, Summary: Wooden spoon, kept in mixing bowl on dresser’.

Alternatively, you can buy a photo of a tea strainer or a doormat or a frying pan or a coat rack or ‘Enamel bucket with black rim and handle with wooden grip, date unknown’.

The pride of the collection is surely ‘Dustbin: Metalwork, Date 1940–1960, Summary: Metal dustbin with separate lid (plus spare lid in Coal Shed)’. If you were a battered old dustbin, circa 1940–1960, just imagine how proud you would be to end up as a key exhibit in a National Trust property, with 12,000 visitors a year admiring you for looking just like the dustbin into which the McCartney family used to throw its rubbish!

While we were still squeezed downstairs, I became so scared that my phone would ring that I surreptitiously switched it off, and began taking notes instead. ‘The lino on the floors is just right,’ Sylvia was saying, ‘so we managed to track it down, and the cupboard where I put the bags, well, that was where Paul would hang up his jacket and sometimes his leather trousers. Excuse me, you’re taking notes. Why are you taking notes?’ With a start, I realised that Sylvia was talking to me. ‘Who’s it for?’

‘Me,’ I said.

‘I’m just checking you’re not a journalist.’

‘I am. I’m writing a book.’

‘Well, I don’t like you taking notes.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, it’s just that a lot of what I say has been told to me by Mike, and it’s private information.’

‘But you’ve said you tell it to 12,000 people a year. It can’t be all that private.’

‘I’m sorry, it’s making me uncomfortable. What did you say your name was?’

And so there we were, arguing away in the McCartney front parlour on a very hot day in August. We finally came to some sort of deal that I wouldn’t write anything that Sylvia regarded as strictly private, but she kept throwing suspicious glances in my direction. I sensed my fellow visitors edging away from me, as though I had just broken wind.

Eventually we were permitted upstairs. Sylvia led us into Paul’s bedroom. On his bed sat an acoustic guitar, strung for a left-hander. Inevitably, this was not the actual guitar. A few records were also on the bed, along with a sketch pad and a copy of the New Musical Express. ‘We’ve collected all sorts of things he had in this room. For instance, the bird books – Paul was always a keen birdwatcher.’

‘This is strictly private,’ she added, looking daggers at me, ‘but Paul told me he always liked looking out over these fields, which belonged to the police training college. He liked watching the police horses in the back field.’

It was only later, browsing through the National Trust’s colour guide to 20 Forthlin Road, that I chanced upon this passage in Paul’s introduction: ‘The house looks onto a police training college, and we could sit on the roof of our shed and watch the annual police show without having to pay.’

1 John Birt, director-general of the BBC 1992–2000. In the summer of 1962 the seventeen-year-old Birt had a holiday job as a bouncer at Southport’s Cambridge Hall, where the Beatles were playing two consecutive evenings with Joe Brown and the Bruvvers headlining. After the first concert he and a friend were told to guard the door of the Beatles’ Green Room to keep out, in his words, ‘a score of emotional and tearful girls of my own age’. One of these girls turned out to be ‘the most beautiful girl in Formby. We saw her on the train to school each day. She was in a league of beauty of her own and paid no attention to any of us. No one in my circle had ever spoken to her.’ She pleaded with Birt and his friend to let her in to see Paul McCartney. ‘My friend said: “We’ll let you in to see Paul if you let us have a snog and a feel.” She immediately agreed and led us off to some backstairs [sic]. To my shame even at the time, I participated in the encounter despite her inert response. This unedifying experience was soon cut short and we led her back to the Green Room to find that the Beatles had gone. I rushed around in a guilty panic trying to locate Paul and, to my relief, found him at the bar. I retrieved the girl, and took her to Paul, who was with a crowd of admirers. He turned round, recognised me as the bouncer, realised I was there with a purpose and raised his eyebrows questioningly. I explained that I was with someone very keen to meet him and introduced Paul to the apparition at my side. He bowed graciously, and as I departed in embarrassment they were chatting politely to one another.’

2 Now the director of the Royal Collection.

3 Coincidentally, the very same Stephen Bayley who at the age of fifteen wrote the letter to John that spurred him to write ‘I am the Walrus’ (see here).

4 Most recently in the 2018 Paul McCartney Carpool Karaoke (50,000,000 views, 70,000 comments), in which Paul says, ‘I had a dream in the sixties, where my mum, who’d died, came to me in the dream and was reassuring me, saying, “It’s going to be okay, just let it be.” And I felt so great, like, it’s going to be great … So I wrote the song. But it was her positivity.’

In the New Yorker in February 2020, James Corden, who chaperoned Paul around Liverpool for his Carpool Karaoke, revealed that Paul had initially been reluctant to return to his family home.‘He said, “I haven’t been there since I left, when I was twenty. I just feel weird about it.”’

5

On 6 July 1957, Paul’s school friend Ivan Vaughan suggested they go to the church fête at Woolton, where two of his mates would be playing in a skiffle group.

Paul and Ivan looked on as a carnival procession left the church – a brass band, followed by Girl Guides and Boy Scouts and a succession of decorated floats, all led by the Rose Queen and her attendants. At the tail end came the organisers’ sole concession to modernity – a teenage skiffle group called the Quarrymen, playing on the back of an open lorry.

Once they had completed a circuit, the Quarrymen jumped off their lorry and set themselves up in a field just beyond the cemetery. Ivan and Paul paid threepence to see them. The first song they heard John sing was ‘Come Go With Me’ by the Del-Vikings. Paul looked on fascinated, not only by the chords John was playing, but by his ability to make things up as he went along: even then, he couldn’t be bothered to learn the words. Using this improvisatory method, John sang his way through ‘Maggie May’, ‘Putting on the Style’ and ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’.

Between sets John wandered over to the Scout hut, where he knew his guitar would be safe. Elsewhere, crowds were enjoying a routine by the Liverpool City Police Dogs, while youngsters queued for balloons.

Paul wandered over to the hut with Ivan. He recognised John from the bus, but had never spoken to him: Paul had just turned fifteen, while John was nearly seventeen. Even at that age, John had an intimidating air about him: ‘I wouldn’t look at him too hard in case he hit me.’ So Paul hovered shyly. The group then transferred to the church hall, where they were booked to play another set later. After a while Paul felt bold enough to ask John if he might have a go on his guitar.

Armed with the guitar, he grew bolder still. First, he asked to retune it, and then he launched into various songs, among them ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ and ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’. ‘It was uncanny,’ recalled another Quarryman, Eric Griffiths. ‘He had such confidence, he gave a performance. It was so natural.’

Ever more confident, Paul moved to the piano, and struck up a medley of Little Richard songs. John, too, was obsessed by Little Richard – when he first heard him singing ‘Long Tall Sally’, ‘It was so great I couldn’t speak.’ And now here before him, a year later, was this kid who could holler just like his idol.

‘WoooOOOOOOOOOOOO!’

‘I half thought to myself, “He’s as good as me,”’ said John, looking back on that singular moment. ‘Now, I thought, if I take him on, what will happen? It went through my head that I’d have to keep him in line if I let him join. But he was good, so he was worth having. He also looked like Elvis.’

Another band member recalled the two of them circling each other ‘like cats’. After a while Paul and Ivan drifted off home; the Quarrymen had another set to play.

Later, John asked his best friend Pete Shotton, who played washboard, what he thought of Paul. Pete said he liked him.

‘So what would you think about having Paul in the group, then?’

‘It’s OK with me.’

Two weeks later, Paul was riding his bicycle when he spotted Pete Shotton walking along. He stopped to chat.

‘By the way,’ said Pete, ‘I’ve been talking with John about it, and … we thought maybe you’d like to join the group.’

According to Pete, a minute ticked by while Paul pretended to give the matter careful thought.

‘Oh, all right,’ he replied with a shrug; and with that he cycled off home.

Everyone has a different version of this first meeting between John and Paul. No two accounts are the same. Some say they met in the hut, others in the hall; some are convinced Aunt Mimi was present, others are equally convinced she was not; of those who say she was, some think she enjoyed the concert, while others remember her tut-tutting all the way through. In 1967 Pete Shotton told the Beatles’ first biographer, Hunter Davies, that he couldn’t remember Paul making much of an impression on anyone: ‘He seemed very quiet.’ But sixteen years later, when he came to write his autobiography, his memory had changed: ‘John was immediately impressed by what he heard and saw.’

6

Back on the National Trust minibus, we were now on our way to Mendips, where John Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi. The custodian of Mendips is Colin, who is, as it happens, married to Sylvia. He used to teach English and history, and had retired to Derbyshire. But in 2003 he answered an advertisement for a guide for Mendips, and he has been there ever since.

While I was on the bus between the two houses I worried that Sylvia might have phoned Colin to warn him of trouble ahead, but he appeared unruffled as he welcomed us to the front garden of Mendips. ‘Also, welcome from Yoko Ono Lennon. It was Yoko who bought the house in 2002 and then immediately donated it to the National Trust … I hope you enjoy an insight into the formative years of John.’

He pointed to the blue plaque on the front of the house:

The National Trust Photolibrary/Alamy Stock Photo

‘You may have noticed there is no blue plaque on Paul’s home. This is because you have to be twenty years dead before they give you a plaque.

‘In your mind’s eye, remember Paul’s home. Well, this house was built in 1933. Paul’s was twenty years younger. It was rented, not owned, what they used to call “social housing” – to live here, you would have to have been working class. John’s house was in one of the most sought-after neighbourhoods. Lawyers, doctors, bankers lived here. So he was the middle-class Beatle.

‘Our researches show that its first owner was Mr Harrap, a banker, and we believe it was his family which called it “Mendips”. These are the original windows – it has never been double-glazed. In 1938 George and Mary Smith bought the house; Mary’s nephew John came to live with them in 1945. He was raised as an only child.

‘Mary Smith – better known as Aunt Mimi – was known for her withering looks,’ he continued, ‘and she would cast these withering looks on the people who lived on the council estate. She’d call them “common” because they lived in social housing. And so did my mum. And that’s because Mimi was a snob, and so was my mum! They were both SNOBS!’

I was taken aback by the note of anger he had injected into the word ‘snobs’. It’s not the sort of thing one usually hears from National Trust guides as they glide proprietorially around the stately homes of England. On the whole, they are tweedy types, well-adapted to the demands of snobbery. In fact, many of them would regard Aunt Mimi as something of a role model.

Colin informed us that Aunt Mimi did not like to get her front hall dirty, so she would direct people to the back door. Apparently there is an old Liverpool saying: ‘Go round the back and save the carpet.’

‘Paul said to me, “I arrived with a guitar on my back and forgot that John had said, ‘Paul, don’t go to the front door.”’ And, for you, too, it has to be the tradesman’s entrance …’

With that, Colin shepherded us into the spacious garden behind the house. While we were shuffling through, I happened to turn round. The Beatles, in their smart grey suits, circa 1964, were leaning over the front gate, pointing at me and grinning.

I took a closer look: they were not the actual Beatles, but replicants, possibly one of the looky-likey groups who had come to Liverpool for that week’s International Beatleweek Festival.

Author

Colin led us through the back door, and into the kitchen. Mimi herself renovated it in the 1960s, introducing a shiny new yellow formica worktop and a double-drainer sink, and her refitting was itself refitted by subsequent owners. But with its determination to turn back the clock, the National Trust scoured the country for the type of kitchen items that might just possibly have been in Aunt Mimi’s house back then: large jars of pickled onions, tins of baking powder and condensed milk, a bread bin with ‘BREAD’ on it, a wooden cutting board, PG Tips, Rinzo, Olive Green household soap, a –

‘Are you taking notes?’

I looked up. Colin had stopped his spiel and was pointing at me.

‘Are you taking notes? Because a lot of what I am talking about is private information.’

Once again I felt as if I had been caught shoplifting, and immediately turned defensive. How could it be private information if he was relaying it to 12,000 visitors a year? He said that he had already written one book about the Beatles, and was gathering material for another. He clearly wanted to ring-fence some of this information for himself. Yet so far he hadn’t said anything that I hadn’t read countless times.

‘Well,’ I said, attempting a conciliatory tone, ‘tell me when there’s something you don’t want me to mention and I won’t write it down.’

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to include anything I say from now on.’

This didn’t seem fair. I had, after all, paid my £31 (including guidebooks) to go round the homes of Paul and John, and at no point was I told that I couldn’t take notes. In the past I have taken notes on guided tours of Windsor Castle, Cliveden and Petworth House, and the guides have all looked on benignly.

By now I was bristling. Crammed into the little kitchen, everyone else started looking at the floor in embarrassment. It was ridiculous, I thundered, absolutely absurd: this was a public place, a National Trust tour, I had paid my way, the same restrictions didn’t apply to any other National Trust house I knew of, and so on and so on. Colin hit back, asking if I’d applied to head office for permission to take notes, and if not, why not, and what he was saying was private information, etc. etc. As our arguments became increasingly circular and tormented, some of the other visitors began drifting off into the next room, forcing Colin to interrupt himself in order to corral them back. ‘Could you please stay in this room until I tell you to go!’ he snapped.

Eventually he had no choice but to move on. Subversively, I placed myself at the back of the group and kept writing notes defiantly, but by now I had become so het up that they emerged as indecipherable squiggles. Meanwhile, Colin was prefacing even the most humdrum observations with phrases like ‘Strictly between ourselves’ and ‘Between you, me and the gatepost’.

He told us that Aunt Mimi had taken lodgers (stale buns!) because she needed extra money to send John through art school. ‘Considering she herself took in lodgers, it’s ironic she called other people common,’ he added, meanly. Once more, he called her a snob. Poor Aunt Mimi! I wondered how she would have felt in 1959 had she known that sixty years on, 12,000 visitors a year would be paying £25 a head (excluding guidebooks) to rootle around in her kitchen and be told that she was a snob.

It came as a relief when Colin suddenly announced that we could go upstairs unaccompanied. Free at last from his beady gaze, I poked my head around the door of the upstairs loo. Was this the actual seat that John himself had once sat on, or just a replica? I then went into his bedroom. Three magazine covers were stuck to the wall above the bed, each with Brigitte Bardot in an enticing pose.

Around the time when Mendips was first opened to the public, I watched a TV documentary about Yoko’s involvement in the project. She emerged as a controlling figure, stating exactly how she wanted everything to be. Nothing would stop her getting her own way. In one scene, she had even objected to the colour of John’s bedspread. ‘It was definitely not pink. You know what? I remember John telling me it was green.’

I remember thinking this was one of the most improbable things I had ever heard. But, anxious to butter Yoko up, the National Trust operatives had taken pains to assure her that, yes, of course they would see to it that the bedspread was changed. So it made me very happy to see that the bedspread is still as pink as pink can be. I desperately wanted to point this out to Colin, just to show that I was on the case, but I was fearful that he would have me arrested. Instead, I studied the framed letter from Yoko propped up on the bed. She wrote of how John was ‘always talking about Liverpool’, and how, whenever they visited the city, they would drive along Menlove Avenue, and he would point at the house and say, ‘Yoko, look, look. That’s it!’

She went on to say that all of John’s music and his ‘message of peace … germinated from John’s dreaming in his little bedroom at Mendips’. Characterising the young John as ‘a quiet, sensitive introvert who was always dreaming’, she said that he was ‘an incredible dreamer, John made those dreams come true – for himself and for the world’.

She ended by saying that walking into this bedroom today still gave her ‘goosebumps’, and hoping that for the National Trust visitor it will ‘make your dream come true, too’.

Every year, more pop stars pass from rebellion into heritage. In Bloomsbury, I live in a block of flats which bears a plaque saying that

ROBERT NESTA

MARLEY

1945–1981

SINGER, LYRICIST AND

RASTAFARIAN ICON

LIVED HERE

1972

Elsewhere in London there are plaques of one sort or another to, among many others, Jimi Hendrix, Tommy Steele, Dire Straits, Pink Floyd, the Small Faces, Don Arden, Spandau Ballet and the Bee Gees.

It turns out that Bob Dylan is an enthusiast for visiting sites associated with rock stars. In 2009 he visited Mendips, and was overheard saying, ‘This kitchen, it’s just like my mom’s.’ David Kinney, author of The Dylanologists, notes that Dylan has also visited Neil Young’s childhood home in Winnipeg, as well as Sun Studios in Memphis, where he took the trouble to kneel down and kiss the spot where Elvis Presley first sang ‘That’s All Right’. Apparently, as Dylan left the studios, a man chased after him and told him how much he loved him. ‘Well, son, we all have our heroes,’ he replied.

Dylan’s own hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, now offers tours of his old family synagogue, his old school, his old house and the hotel where he had his bar mitzvah. The menu of a Dylan-themed bar called Zimmy’s offers Hard Rain Hamburger, Slow Train Pizza, and Simple Twist of Sirloin.

7

Something deeper than music linked John and Paul. Their mothers had died when they were in adolescence: Paul’s when he was fourteen, John’s when he was seventeen.

When he first met John, Paul had already lost his mother, but John’s mother, Julia, was still alive. ‘His mother lived right near where I lived. I had lost my mum, that’s one thing, but for your mum to actually be living somewhere else and for you to be a teenage boy and not living with her is very sad. It’s horrible. I remember him not liking it at all.’

Paul recalled ‘a tinge of sadness’ in John at being apart from Julia. ‘She was a beautiful woman with long red hair. She was fun-loving and musical too; she taught him banjo chords, and any woman in those days who played a banjo was a special, artistic person … John and I were both in love with his mum. It knocked him for six when she died.’

It created a bond between them. Together, the two boys conspired to upend their grief, to turn the wound into a weapon. ‘Once or twice when someone said, “Is your mother gonna come?” we’d say, in a sad voice, “She died.” We actually used to put people through that. We could look at each other and know.’

There was something more peculiar that linked them, too. In 1997 Paul told his friend and biographer Barry Miles, ‘At night there was one moment when she would pass our bedroom door in underwear, which was the only time I would ever see that, and I used to get sexually aroused. I mean, it never went beyond that but I was quite proud of it, I thought, “That’s pretty good.” It’s not everyone’s mum that’s got the power to arouse.’

One afternoon John ventured into his mother’s bedroom. Julia was taking a nap in a black angora sweater, over a tight dark-green-and-yellow mottled shirt. He remembered it exactly. He lay on the bed next to her, and happened to touch one of her breasts. It was a moment he would replay over and over again in his memory for the rest of his life: ‘I was wondering if I should do anything else. It was a strange moment because at the time I had the hots, as they say, for a rather lower-class female who lived on the opposite side of the road. I always think I should have done it. Presumably, she would have allowed it.’

John’s friends remember Julia as vivacious and flirtatious. The first time Pete Shotton met her, he found himself ‘greeted with squeals of girlish laughter by a slim, attractive woman dancing through the doorway with a pair of old woollen knickers wrapped around her head’. John introduced him. ‘Oh, this is Pete, is it? John’s told me so much about you.’ Pete held out his hand, but she bypassed it. ‘Julia began stroking my hips. “Ooh, what lovely slim hips you have,” she giggled.’

Twenty-four years later, in 1979, sitting in his apartment in the Dakota Building, John recorded a cassette tape. At the start he announced, ‘Tape one in the ongoing life story of John Winston Ono Lennon.’ After rushing through a variety of topics – his grandparents’ house in Newcastle Road, Bob Dylan’s recent Christian album Long Train Coming (‘pathetic … just embarrassing’), his love of the sound of the bagpipes at the Edinburgh Military Tattoo when he was a child – he returned, once more, to that recurring memory of the afternoon he lay on his mother’s bed and touched her breast.

On The White Album,1 the song ‘Julia’ sounds less like an elegy than a love song, full of yearning for someone unobtainable:

Julia, sleeping sand, silent cloud, touch me

So I sing a song of love – Julia.

1 Officially titled The Beatles, it became popularly known as ‘The White Album’, or occasionally ‘The Double White’, but never ‘The Beatles’. For the rest of this book I will call it The White Album.

8

Julia’s shifty forty-one-year-old boyfriend Bobby Dykins – ‘a little waiter with a nervous cough and thinning margarine-coated hair’, in John’s words – had lost his driving licence, and his job. Driving drunk along Menlove Avenue at midnight, his erratic movements were clocked by a policeman, who signalled him to stop. But Dykins kept going, turning left when he should have turned right, then mounting the reservation. Asked to get out of the car, he fell to the ground and had to be helped to his feet. The policeman informed him he was under arrest, and made a note of his response: ‘You fucking fool, you can’t do this to me, I’m the press!’

Dykins was held overnight in a cell, taken to court the next morning, and then released on bail. A fortnight later, on 1 July 1958, he was disqualified from driving for a year and fined £25 – roughly three weeks’ wages – plus costs.

Dykins decided that cuts to the household budget were in order; he centred them on the seventeen-year-old John. They could, he said, no longer afford his rapacious appetite; he would have to stay with Julia’s sister Mimi. On Tuesday, 15 July, Julia popped round to Menlove Avenue to tell Mimi of these new developments.

Having sorted things out with Mimi, Julia set off for home at 9.45 p.m. Sometimes she would walk across the golf course, but on this occasion she opted for the no. 4 bus, due in a couple of minutes, a hundred yards along on the other side of the road.

As Julia was leaving, John’s friend Nigel Walley dropped by, but Mimi told him John was out.

‘Oh, Nigel, you’ve arrived just in time to escort me to the bus stop,’ said Julia. Nigel walked her to Vale Road, where they said goodbye, and he turned off. As Julia crossed Menlove Avenue, Nigel heard ‘a car skidding and a thump and I turned to see her body flying through the air’. He rushed over. ‘It wasn’t a gory mess but she must have had severe internal injuries. To my mind, she’d been killed instantly. I can still see her gingery hair fluttering in the breeze, blowing across her face.’

The impact of his mother’s death on John was immediate. ‘I know what a terrible effect it had on John,’ Nigel said, decades later. ‘He felt so lonely after it. His outlook changed completely. He hardened and his humour became more weird.’ For months, John refused to speak to him. ‘Inwardly, he was blaming me for the death. You know – “If Nige hadn’t walked her to the bus stop, or if he’d have kept her occupied another five minutes, it would never have happened.”’

9

It is June 1957. Paul is a bright grammar-school boy; he has been encouraged to take two of his GCE O-Level exams – Spanish and Latin – a year early.

His father, Jim, keeps pointing out that it’s not possible to do your homework and watch television at the same time. Paul argues that it makes no difference. His good marks at the Liverpool Institute seem to support this view. But in truth, his mind is on other things. All he wants to do is play records with his friend Ian James. The two of them go from record shop to record shop. Sometimes they play their guitars together. Revision takes a back seat.

At the end of August Paul’s GCE results come through.

(a)

He has passed Spanish, but failed Latin. This means he will not be able to go up a year, as planned. Instead he must remain in the Remove, alongside boys a year younger. Jim is upset. He thinks Paul failed Latin deliberately, because he didn’t want to go to university. Paul is also upset. When he goes back to school in September, he hates being in classes with his juniors.

Paul is now in the same year as a little boy he recognises from the bus as a fellow smoker. When he was in the year above, he never really spoke to him. But now that they are in the same year, the two grow close. The boy is called George Harrison.

From the heights of the Lower Sixth, Paul’s friend Ian James is baffled by the burgeoning friendship. To him, they have totally different personalities: ‘George always seemed a bit moody, morose, whereas Paul was light-hearted – he probably could have been a comedian if he’d wanted, he can tell a tale so well. George was nothing like that. I found it really strange that they were friends.’

Paul is impressed by George’s guitar-playing, and introduces him to John Lennon, who is seventeen and no longer at school. John doesn’t want to be seen socialising with a fourteen-year-old. He is irritated by the way Little George, as he is known, follows him ‘like a bloody kid, hanging round all the time’.

But one day, when John is on the same double-decker, Paul seizes the opportunity to get George into their new band. On the upper deck, Paul tells George to play the song ‘Raunchy’. ‘Go on, George, show him!’ Little George, as they all call him, takes his guitar out of its case and starts to play. John is impressed. ‘He’s in, you’re in, that’s it!’ The audition is over.

(b)

He has passed both Spanish and Latin. This means he goes up a year, joining the Lower Sixth with his best friend Ian James. Now and then he sees George Harrison in the school corridors, but Little George is in the year below, and anyway, they don’t have much in common. George and Paul occasionally bump into each other on the bus, but there is no reason why Paul would ever introduce him to John; so he never does.

10

On 21 May 1956, Léo Valentin, the Frenchman known as ‘Birdman’ and billed as ‘The Most Daring Man in the World’, was crouched in a plane above Liverpool Speke Airport. The author of Je suis un homme-oiseau was preparing to leap out wearing wings made from balsawood and alloy. He planned to retire after this one last leap: the £200 he was set to earn from the Liverpool Air Show would help fund his dream of owning a provincial cinema back in France.

‘To see a man fling himself into space …’ he once wrote. ‘It is a mad action. You want to turn away, but you are fascinated, watching the man who takes pleasure in taunting death.’

An estimated 100,000 spectators were gathered on the airfield below; George Harrison, aged thirteen, and Paul McCartney, just shy of his fourteenth birthday, had cycled there together.

The two boys watched as Valentin hurled himself from the back of the plane. But as he leapt, one of his wings splintered against the plane’s door frame. ‘We watched him drop and went, “Uh-oh … I don’t think that’s right,”’ recalled Paul.

Valentin spun around and around, out of control. His parachute failed to open, and then his backup parachute wrapped around him, like a shroud. This made it easier for the crowd below to see the plummeting figure.

‘We thought, “Any second now his parachute’s gonna open,” and it never did. We went, “I don’t think he’s going to survive that.” And he didn’t.’

Valentin fell to the ground in a cornfield, ‘spreadeagled like a bird’, in the words of one spectator.

In 1964, John Lennon advised the Beatles’ press officer, Derek Taylor, against eating the cheese sandwiches at Speke Airport. He had once been employed at Speke as a packer, he told him, and he used to spit in them.

In spring 2002, Speke Airport was renamed Liverpool John Lennon Airport. Along with John F. Kennedy, Leonardo da Vinci and Josef Strauss, John Lennon is one of very few people to have an airport named after them. A seven-foot-high statue of John overlooks the check-in hall, and a vast Yellow Submarine stands on a traffic island at the entrance. The airport’s motto is taken from his song ‘Imagine’: ‘Above Us Only Sky’.

11

A Party:

22 Huskisson Street, Liverpool

8 May 1960

All-night parties have become so popular among art students in Liverpool that partygoers are expected to bring not just a bottle but also an egg, for breakfast.

John and his fellow Beatles band member Stu Sutcliffe have been invited to an all-night party at 22 Huskisson Street1 by one of their art-school lecturers, Austin Davies. Stu occasionally babysits for Austin and his wife Beryl, who is an actress. John brings his girlfriend Cynthia, and his bandmates Paul and George, both seventeen, tag along, uninvited. The current name of their band is the Silver Beats, but it’s still in a process of development.

The party is composed of an odd mixture of guests: in the upstairs room, musicians from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, still in full evening dress, fresh from playing Tchaikovsky, chat with Fritz Spiegl, their principal flautist; downstairs, art students play Ray Charles’s latest single ‘What’d I Say’ over and over again on the record player.

George can’t hear enough of the song. He stands transfixed, knocking back glass after glass of wine and beer, slowly shedding his inhibitions. At one point he spots Spiegl, who has just ventured downstairs, and shouts, ‘Hey, Geraldo – got any Elvis?’

Paul is beginning to enjoy these parties. Always keen to project the right image, he has begun to favour a black turtleneck sweater and to act mysterious, like Jacques Brel. ‘It was me trying to be enigmatic, to make girls think, “Who’s that very interesting French guy over in the corner?”’ He sometimes arrives at parties with his guitar, strumming a French song, singing ‘rhurbarbe, rhubarbe’. He has composed a tune to sing along to, but for now it only has one word in French, and that just a name – ‘Michelle’.2 He can’t think of anything to rhyme with it.

The party goes on way past the next morning. Later, Beryl estimates that it lasted three days and three nights. Halfway through the first night, John and his band get carried away, and start singing loudly. Beryl thinks they make a dreadful racket. ‘They played almost for two nights. I said it was a disgusting noise. I took the children out.’ She walks them down the road to a friend’s house, and stays there herself. The next morning she returns to no. 22 to get some clothes, only to find her bedroom door locked. A partygoer tells her that her husband is in there, with a friend. ‘That night we separated. We divorced amicably. I never saw the Beatles again.’ But she harbours no grudge against the Beatles. In fact, quite the opposite. Forty-eight years later, the acclaimed novelist Dame Beryl Bainbridge talks of those early days with great affection, and picks ‘Eleanor Rigby’ as one of her Desert Island Discs.3

1 By chance, the very same house in which John’s mother Julia was living when she married Fred Lennon.

2 Five years later, when Paul and John were harvesting songs for Rubber Soul, John suddenly remembered that Paul used to sing a French song at parties. Once again, Paul struggled to think of a rhyme for ‘Michelle’. A visiting French teacher, Jan Vaughan, the wife of Paul’s old schoolmate Ivan, suggested ‘ma belle’. He then asked her to translate ‘these are words that go together well’ into French, and later sent her a cheque for her contribution. John supplied the ‘I love you, I love you, I love you’ interlude, after listening to Nina Simone’s recently released ‘I Put a Spell on You’.

3 Bainbridge’s other Desert Island Discs were characteristically eccentric, among them ‘Two Little Boys’ by Rolf Harris, ‘Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major’ by Vera Lynn and ‘Bat Out of Hell’ by Meatloaf.

12

Already well-known as a journalist and editor, and rapidly becoming a household name as a television presenter, Malcolm Muggeridge took a flight from London to Hamburg on 7 June 1961. Two months earlier, he had recorded his distaste for the medium with which he would soon be identified.

As always deeply distressed by seeing myself on television … Decided never to do it again. Something inferior, cheap, horrible about television as such: it’s a prism through which words pass, energies distorted, false. The exact converse of what is commonly believed – not a searcher out of truth and sincerity, but rather only lies and insincerity will register on it.

Having visited the offices of Stern magazine, Muggeridge went out on the town. True to character, he took relish in finding it ‘singularly joyless; Germans with stony faces wandering up and down, uniformed touts offering total nakedness, three Negresses and other attractions, including female wrestlers. Not many takers, it seemed, on a warm Tuesday evening.’

Popperfoto/Getty Images

On a whim, he dropped into the Top Ten Club on the Reeperbahn, ‘a teenage rock-and-roll joint’. A band was playing: ‘ageless children, sexes indistinguishable, tight-trousered, stamping about, only the smell of sweat intimating animality’. They turned out to be English, and from Liverpool: ‘Long-haired; weird feminine faces; bashing their instruments, and emitting nerveless sounds into microphones.’

As they came offstage, they recognised Muggeridge from the television, and started talking to him. One of them asked him if it was true he was a Communist. No, he replied; he was just in opposition. ‘He nodded understandingly,’ observed Muggeridge, ‘in opposition himself in a way.’

‘“You make money out of it?” he went on. I admitted that this was so. He, too, made money. He hoped to take back £200 to Liverpool.’

They parted on good terms. ‘In conversation rather touching in a way,’ Muggeridge recorded in his diary, ‘their faces like Renaissance carvings of saints or Blessed Virgins.’

13

Postcards from Hamburg

i

16 August 1960

George is just seventeen years old when he climbs into the cream and green Austin van owned by the band’s tubby Welsh manager, Allan Williams. He holds a tin of scones baked by his mother. Before watching her son set off, Mrs Harrison takes Williams to one side. ‘Look after him,’ she says.

None of the Beatles has ever been abroad. Jim McCartney entertains misgivings, but doesn’t feel he can stand in Paul’s way. The contract they have just signed gives them 210 deutschmarks a week, or £17.10s; the average weekly wage in Britain is £14. ‘He’s being offered as much money as I make a week. How can I tell him not to go?’

ii

The van is packed with a motley crew. George sits in the back with the other Beatles. Allan Williams is at the wheel, with his Chinese wife Beryl and Beryl’s brother Barry sitting next to him. Also on board are Williams’s business partner, ‘Lord Woodbine’, so-called in homage to his devotion to Woodbine cigarettes, and George Sterner, the second-in-command to Bruno Koschmider, the German club-owner with whom the boys have signed a contract.

iii

It’s the start of a long journey. There is a five-hour wait at Newhaven, and four hours at Hook of Holland while Williams insists that the Beatles don’t require permits and visas because they are students. They stop off in Amsterdam for a short break. John seizes the opportunity to shoplift two pieces of jewellery, several guitar strings, a couple of handkerchiefs and a harmonica. In his managerial role, Williams orders him to return them to the shops, but John refuses.

iv

As they drive through Germany, they sing songs – ‘Rock Around the Clock’, ‘Maggie May’ – but when they arrive at the Reeperbahn they are momentarily struck dumb, dazzled by so much neon, and so many open doors through which women can be glimpsed taking their clothes off. But they soon regain their natural ebullience, shouting ‘Here come the scousers!’ at the top of their voices.

v

Off the Reeperbahn runs Grosse Freiheit. The lights of the strip clubs are being switched on as they arrive, and the prostitutes are beginning to emerge. Still at the wheel, Allan Williams notes that the streets are ‘swarming with all the rag-tag and bob-tail of human existence – dope fiends, pimps, hustlers for strip clubs and clip-joints, gangsters, musicians, transvestites, plain ordinary homosexuals, dirty old men, dirty young men, women looking for women’.

vi

Nevertheless, it seems like a dream destination for a band whose achievements in their homeland have bordered on the pitiful. In the autumn they failed to qualify for the talent show TV Star Search; in the first three months of this year they had no professional engagements at all; in May they failed an audition to be Billy Fury’s backing group. So things are looking up. The people of Hamburg are bored by the lifeless efforts of their home-grown groups: Williams says Germans turn rock’n’roll into a death march. But British bands who have played in Hamburg – Dave Lee and the Staggerlees from Kent, the Shades Five from Kidderminster, the Billions from Worcestershire – have never looked back. The Germans seem to love them all, good, bad and indifferent.

vii

The Beatles are met at the Indra Club by Bruno Koschmider, an unprepossessing manager of an unprepossessing venue, cramped and clammy, with just two customers at the bar. Koschmider shows them to their lodgings. They haven’t been expecting much, but what they see confounds even their most meagre expectations. Between the five of them, they are expected to occupy two dark, dank, tiny rooms around the back of Koschmider’s grubby cinema, the Bambi Kino. There are no lightbulbs: they will have to make do with matches. The walls are concrete. The first room measures five feet by six. It is furnished with an army-surplus bunk bed and a threadbare couch.

viii

‘What the fucking hell!’ says John, more used to Aunt Mimi’s cosy interior décor. ‘Fuck me!’ chorus the others. ‘Only temporary,’ Koschmider reassures them; but he is lying.

This first bedroom is to be shared by John, Stu and George. John and Stu bag the bunk. George, being the youngest, has to make do with the couch.

The second bedroom is exactly the same size, but without a window. There is no means of telling if it is night or day. There are few blankets, and no heating.

Their rooms are a hair’s breadth from being en-suite, because the wall is paper thin, and on the other side is a toilet, also used by customers of the cinema. The smells seep through into their rooms.

They have to wash and shave with the cold water from the basin next to the public urinals. George never has a bath or a shower during either of his first two seasons in Hamburg.

ix

It’s all a far cry from Las Vegas. Understandably, their natural high spirits are deflated. Their first performance at the Indra is lacklustre. They stand still and chug their way through cover versions of popular hits, while half a dozen punters look glumly on. Koschmider is unimpressed. He hired the Beatles to provide energy; instead they just stand around looking woebegone.

‘Mach Schau, boys! Mach Schau!’ he demands. Make show! Make show! It does the trick, and becomes the catalyst for any amount of japes: from now on, the Beatles go all-out to enjoy themselves, strutting and dancing and screaming, hurling abuse at the audience and fighting among themselves.

x

They regularly play the same song for ten or twenty minutes at a time, just for the hell of it. One night, for a bet, they play a single song – ‘What’d I Say’, by Ray Charles – for over an hour. While the others rag about, Pete remains sombre, drumming as though it were a chore, a bit like washing up.

K & K Ulf Kruger OHG/Getty Images

xi

Pete is also the only one who refuses stimulants. The others are helped in their high-jinks by a smorgasbord of cheap drugs – Purple Hearts and Black Bombers and Preludin, a slimming pill with an active ingredient1 that charges up the metabolism, keeps you wide awake and ensures that you never stop talking. Stu’s German girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr is blessed with an in-house supplier: her mother. ‘They were fifty pfennigs each and my mummy used to get them for us from the chemist. You had to have a prescription for them, but my mummy knew someone at the chemist.’ In time, they toss them back like Smarties, with beer chasers. They even talk of eating ‘Prellie sandwiches’.

xii

Unsurprisingly, it is John who pops the poppermost, and to the greatest effect, yelling obscenities, rolling around on the stage, throwing food at other band members, pretending to be a hunchback, jumping on Paul’s back, hurling himself into the audience, delighting in calling them ‘fucking Krauts’ or ‘Nazis’ or ‘German spassies’.

Diplomacy has never come naturally to him. One night he takes to the stage wearing nothing but his underpants, with a loo seat around his head, marching around with a broom in his hand, chanting ‘Sieg heil! Sieg heil!’ On another, he appears in swimming trunks. Halfway through ‘Long Tall Sally’ he turns his back to the audience and pulls the trunks down, wiggling his bare bottom at the audience. Unversed in Liverpudlian manners, the Germans applaud politely.

xiii

Cynthia comes to Hamburg on a visit, and witnesses John so out of his mind on pills and alcohol that he falls about the stage in ‘hysterical convulsions’. Offstage, he can be equally feral. He urinates from a balcony onto a group of nuns in the street below. Not that the others are models of sobriety: between numbers, Paul says something rude about Stu’s beautiful girlfriend Astrid, who all the band fancy, and Stu duly punches him. Paul fights back, and before long they are grappling onstage in what Paul comes to remember as ‘a sort of death grip’. But – Mach Schau! Mach Schau! – these spectacles prove popular. They begin to be known locally as the benakked Beatles – the crazy Beatles.

xiv

Hamburg audiences prefer to pick fights with each other, rather than with the band. The waiters – hired from the Hamburg Boxing Academy, so rusty on matters of etiquette – wear heavy boots, suitable for energetic kicking, and carry spring-loaded truncheons in the backs of their trousers, discreetly hidden beneath their jackets. Clubs keep tear-gas guns behind their counters, for use when a skirmish threatens to expand into a riot. In time, the Beatles are allotted the prefectorial duty of making the nightly announcement in German of a ten o’clock curfew for the under-eighteens: ‘Es ist zweiundzwanzig Uhr. Wir mussen jetzt Ausweiskontrolle machen. Alle Jugendlichen unter achtzehn Jahren mussen dieses Lokal verlassen.’2

xv

Bruno Koschmider is no jolly, thigh-slapping Mein Host. Kosch by name, Kosch by nature: he patrols his club brandishing the knotted leg of a hardwood German chair. If a customer proves unruly, or is too noisily dissatisfied, he will be bundled into Koschmider’s office, pinned to the floor, and beaten black and blue with it.

xvi

In the early hours of the morning, Koschmider’s fellow club-owners drop by for a nightcap. They like to send trays of schnapps up to the band, to be downed – ‘Beng, beng – ja! Proost!’ – in one. They think it hilarious that this band from England is called the Beatles, which they pronounce ‘Peadles’, German slang for ‘little willies’. ‘Oh, zee Peadles! Ha ha ha!’

xvii

The band’s japes are not confined to the stage. One afternoon they dare Paul to don a Pickelhaube and goose-step up and down the Reeperbahn with a broom for a rifle, while they yell ‘Sieg heil!’ They also enjoy playing leapfrog in the street. These fun and games prove infectious: Pete Best remembers passers-by joining in, forming ‘a long trail of Germans of varying ages all leapfrogging behind us … At some intersections, friendly cops would hold up the traffic to wave us through.’

xviii

In the heart of the Reeperbahn, sex – ‘almost limitless sex’, in Pete’s words – is freely available. ‘How could we possibly invite a dame to our squalid digs alongside the cinema urinals, dark and damp as a sewer and about as attractive?’ Pete asks, decades later, and then answers his own question. ‘But we did, and not one girl ever said no.’

George Harrison loses his virginity at the Bambi Kino, while Paul, John and Pete look on. ‘They couldn’t really see anything because I was under the covers … After I’d finished they all applauded and cheered. At least they kept quiet whilst I was doing it.’

In these conditions, nothing is private. A fan from Liverpool, Sue Johnston,3 receives a letter from Paul in Hamburg. He tells her that one night John ended up with ‘a stunning, exotic-looking woman, only to discover on closer inspection that she was a he’. The other Beatles found it hilarious.

Perhaps, in years to come, Pete’s description will be the subject of a question in a GCSE mathematics paper: ‘For the nightly romp there were usually five or six girls between the four of us … We found ourselves having two or three girls a night each … the most memorable night of love in our dowdy billet was when eight birds gathered there to do the Beatles a favour. They managed to swap with all four of us – twice!’ Many of the girls are prostitutes from Herbertstrasse, happy to waive their usual fees for these boisterous young Englishmen. Pete will never forget them: ‘I still remember some of their names: Greta, Griselda, Hilde, Betsy, Ruth … The Beatles’ first groupies.’

xix

John is as avid as any of them, but, characteristically, will recall those days of sexual wonder with a mixture of disgust and disappointment.

‘I used to dream that it would be great if you could just click your fingers and they would strip off and be ready for me,’ he will tell Alistair Taylor. ‘I would spend most of my teenage years fantasising about having this kind of power over women. The weird thing is, when the fantasies came true, they were not nearly so much fun. One of my most frequent dreams was seducing two girls together, or even a mother and daughter. This happened in Hamburg a couple of times and the first time it was sensational. The second time it got to feel like I was giving a performance. The more women I had, the more that buzz would turn into a horrible feeling of rejection and revulsion.’

xx

Equally characteristically, Paul will look back on these sexual adventures largely in terms of self-advancement. ‘It was a sexual awakening for us,’ he tells Barry Miles in 1997. ‘We didn’t have much practical knowledge till we went to Hamburg. Of course, it was striptease girls and hookers … But it was all good practice, I suppose … So we came back from there reasonably initiated. It wasn’t so much that we were experts, but that we were more expert than other people who hadn’t had that opportunity.’

1 Phenmetrazine.

2 ‘It is twenty-two hours. We must now make a passport control. All youth under eighteen years must now leave this club.’

3 At that time she was going out with Norman Kuhlke, drummer with the Swinging Blue Jeans. She later worked as a tax inspector, and then for Brian Epstein, before embarking on a successful acting career. In 2000 she received a BAFTA for Best TV Comedy Actress.

14

We assemble by the Star-Club, or where the Star-Club used to be, before it was reduced to cinders in 1983. A tall black sign, like a shiny gravestone, announces ‘Star-Club’ in diagonal writing, with a picture of an electric guitar below. Beneath the guitar sits a scattering of names from long ago, each set at a jaunty angle, and in a different typeface: ‘The Liverbirds Ray Charles The Pretty Things Gene Vincent Bo Diddley Remo Four Bill Haley King Size Taylor and the Dominoes Screaming Lord Sutch Little Richard Johnny Kidd and the Pirates Gerry and the Pacemakers The Rattles The Searchers Brenda Lee The V.I.P.s The Walker Brothers Ian and the Zodiacs Jerry Lee Lewis Tony Sheridan Chubby Checker Roy Young The Lords’.

And there, in the top left-hand corner: ‘The Beatles’.

‘OK, ze bend voss 300 days in Hemburg. Ze Feb Four in Hemburg only four weeks all other time we hev Pete Best on drums, 60–61 with Stuart, Stuart left ze bend 61 goes to art school dies April 62 in Hemburg 61 Paul change vrom guitar to bass.’

Our tour guide is Peter, a wiry, chain-smoking man in his seventies, his sparse grey hair bound in a ponytail. He rattles through the events and dates at breakneck speed, as though it were a summary of a summary, something he has recited hundreds of times before. Which, of course, he has: he has been guiding the same tour four days a week since 1970.

‘Star-Club close 69, then ve hev cabaret for surteen years, in 83 everyzing burned down. One building was at ze front so they rebuild ze back one and where we hed the hall in sixties is beckyard today. Peadles play here April May then November and December 62.’

He has only been going a few minutes, but we are already finding it hard to keep up. It reminds me of a maths lesson, or perhaps a history lesson about the Wars of the Roses, a great jumble of dates and locations.

‘Top ect in April, six weeks to May voss menly Gene Wincent, but November Little Richard and December Johnny and ze Hurricanes. Peadles voss one of only four or five bends mostly supporting ze top ects.’

Every now and then he recites an anecdote, but they come unexpectedly, and are often hard to decipher.

‘In Germany ve hev Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers on “My Bonny” but in England it voss Tony Sheridan and ze Peadles so nobody know Peadles voss sem bend as Tony Sheridan!!!! See some guys, I zink who is zeez guys? I think who is deez English rockers? I sink, oh, shit, voss ze Peadles!!!!!’

We do our best to smile in the right place. Peter leads us into a dingy courtyard, full of litter, and hands around a postcard-sized black-and-white photograph of what it used to look like. It seems to have been just as dingy, but entirely different.

‘Dis is picture after ze fire. Here voss stage, here voss hall, stage left to right five metres. Voss a really goot fire!’

We pass the postcard around. Each of us gazes at it, then at the present-day scene, then at the postcard again, as if attempting to work out a puzzle. But nothing fits.

‘Here voss zree steps, vun doo zree.’

We look down, pretending to spot three steps. ‘OK, you hev your pictures here.’ One or two people take photographs of where the three steps would be, were they here, which they aren’t.

Peter walks on, and we tag along behind him. As he walks, he zips through another personal anecdote.

‘I met John 66, in leather store on Reeperbahn. Zey buy cowboy boots, leather jackets and I voz in ze store when he mek the movie How I Von dur Var, I talk to him for ten minutes.’

Someone asks what they talked about.

‘So long ago I cannot remember zet von.’

He rushes on, racing through all the bands that played in Hamburg, back in the day.

‘OK, so dur sixties was so amezin. Ve hev Jaybirds, voss complete line-up of Ten Years After. Ve hev dur Small Faces. Ten weeks later ve hev Eric Clepton and dur Cream. Ve hev bend called Mendrake Root vit Ritchie Blackmore zey become Deep Purple. Ve hed really goot bend called Ze Earth. On ze vay beck zey change name to Bleck Sabbath. Six months later ve hed Jimi Hendrix here. 6 March 1967 Hendrix play zree days here, Friday, Seturday, Sunday March 67. On ze Monday morning Jimi buy Fender Stratocaster, cost about eleven hundred. On Thursday, he play Monterey, he burn down ze new Stratocaster he buy in Hemburg. He hed not planned to burn down guitar but Ze Who kicked down zeir drums, yeah? So he thought, “Vot cen I do?”

‘Now ve go Reeperbahn district.’

We walk towards the end of the street. On the way, he talks about the sort of people who come on his Beatles tours. ‘Most English people. Most German not zo interested, maybe older people from East Germany. Ozzervise, Spain, Jepen, South Emerica. Hemburg people is not interested in Peadles. We have Peadlemania museum but after three years it closed. Now, all zey vont is Sex and Crime tours.’

He retains fond memories of the Beatlemania museum. It stretched across five floors, he says, but the exhibits consisted mainly of reproductions of the original items, rather than the items themselves. ‘Only original voss contract from Bert Kaempfert with the Peadles, ze rest voss not original. Not original guitars, not original drums. But fifth floor zey hev original signs from ze Star-Club, Indra, all ze signs from the streets. Voss really good museum but not popular enough. I talk to zo many Hemburg people hev not been zere.’

We arrive at a circular paved area, where the street joins the Reeperbahn. It is called Beatles-Platz. Aluminium silhouettes of four figures with guitars and another on drums stand at one edge of the circle, looking rather like outsize pastry-cutters.

‘Zis is ze line-up from 1960. We hev John, George, Paul, Pete and there’s Stuart on ze right-hend side. On drums is Pete Best, not Ringo.’

He looks disconsolately at the circular area. It’s draughty and lacklustre, as unglamorous as can be.

‘I don’t like zis place but is better zan nothing. We hev it about ten years. You see, it is record label.’ We look again, and I can just about make out what he is getting at: in the centre of the circle is a smaller circle, in lighter stone, which could be the label of a giant LP, and two or three metal grooves run around what would be the disc itself, with various Beatles song titles written on them. It’s all a bit makeshift.

Someone asks if Pete Best ever comes back. Of all the hundreds of names associated with the Beatles, his is the one that can still darken the atmosphere. ‘Pete Best voss in Hamburg four five times, I see him many times, zum people say Pete he’s earned nothing but, wideos, dee-wee-dees, they give him lot of money, he really heppy.’

We stare at the songs inscribed on the metal grooves, including ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. ‘In 1964 ze bend voss one veek in Paris, they record two of zeir songs in German language – “Sie Liebt Dich” und “Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand” – you cen listen on YouTube.’

We cross the Reeperbahn. A shop called Tourist Center sports a huge Union Jack as a backdrop to its window display of novelty mugs and cats, dogs and penguins with wobbly heads. I can’t spot any Beatles memorabilia, though. Apparently, this was the leather store where Peter encountered John, over half a century ago.

‘I voss in the store ven John came in 66. He voss vith ze actor Michael Crarfood and Neil Espinall.’ He brings himself up short, suddenly remembering that he has already told us about it. ‘Jimi Hendrix stayed zree days in Hemburg in small hotel, March 67. You vont to see?’

He brings out his photographs and sifts through them. One, in black and white, is of Jimi Hendrix and Chas Chandler in a German street. ‘All ze buildings are gone now. Jimi ask me, “Vare cen I find the Peadles’ places?” and we walk around. I see six concerts with Jimi in March 67. I pick him up outside ze hotel. At end, Jimi give me autograph. He vrite, “To Peter stay kool Jimi Hendrix”. Jimi gave me one of his cigarettes. It voss Kool with a K, so ze autograph says “stay kool” vith a K.’

He shows us a building where the Top 10 Club used to be, then whips through one of his hard-to-follow history lessons. ‘Zet building voss Top 10 today id is discotheque. Before Top 10 voss a hippodrome, a little bit circus, donkey or a horse walk round – that voss showbiz in the fifties! Peadles played three months first April 61 to end of June six to eight hours every day 35 deutschmarks not a lod of money.’ He points to the roof where John, George and Paul once posed for a photograph. ‘61, ze bend lived under ze roof, zey hev those rooms, one two. 61, Stuart left the bend, Paul changed vrom guitar to bass. Other bends play here – Elex Harvey, Rory Gellegher – but Top 10 Club close 88.’

There is nothing – no sign or statue or plaque – to show that this is where it once was. This makes him cross. ‘Hemburg does nothing about Top 10 Club! Nothing about Peadles!’

Also on the Reeperbahn is the police station where Paul and Pete were held overnight, accused of starting a small fire in their apartment. ‘Some say it voss con-domes on ze wall, others say it vos some sort of paper. Anyway, zey hev a fire, voss arrested, zen deported, from here ve valk to the Rock’n’Roll door, ten, fifteen minutes.’

On the way, Peter tells us again that since he first showed Jimi Hendrix round in March 1967, he has taken four tours a week, fifty weeks a year. ‘Is a lod of tours.’ Yet there is precious little to see. Nothing is as it was. Only the police station remains the same. Everywhere else is a memory of a memory, of interest only to the most dedicated Beatles archaeologist.

In 1967, when Hunter Davies first asked the Beatles about their time in Hamburg, they couldn’t even remember how many times they had been there. Since then, Beatles historians regularly attempt to reconstruct their lives there, day by day, hour by hour. But in Beatles years, it’s as distant as the Dark Ages.

At last we arrive at a vast gate off a street, with a sign in English saying ‘Keep Out’. Pete tells us he is not allowed to take us in, but if we go in by ourselves, we should take a snap of the first doorway on the right. It is where John stood for the photo that was later used on the cover of his solo Rock’n’Roll album. ‘I vish you good luck, ze first door behind the gate, not a problem for you, only for me.’ We push the gate and find a gloomy five-storey red-brick building in a poor state of repair. We obediently take pictures of the doorway, but no one really knows why.

Finally, we end up by the Indra, which is still, miraculously, ‘Musikeclub Live’, but we’re not allowed in. A plaque outside says, in German, ‘On 17 August 1960 the Beatles performed on the stage of the Indra. It was their first German engagement and the beginning of a great career.’

And so to the Kaiserkeller, with a framed poster of Rory Storm and the Hurricanes outside. ‘Von of those guys voss Ringo,’ Peter says, and we all try to spot which one. He then shows us a photograph of the seventeen-year-old George with his guitar. ‘Voss zold at Bonham auction for two hundred fifty thousand pound including tex and everyzing. Last week at Zotheby, one contrect from Brian Epstein viz ze bend, zet von sold for two hundred thirty-five thousand pound. Emezin!’

We sigh at the idea that so little could have mushroomed into so much.

‘But in 62, zey close Kaiserkeller and it voss discothèque.’

15

Their return to Liverpool after a stint of three and a half months in Hamburg was such a sorry affair that they avoided telling their families what had happened.

In brief, they had been tempted away from the Kaiserkeller by a rival club-owner. To exact revenge, the thuggish Koschmider reported George to the police for being under-age, and he was duly deported. On returning home, George felt ‘ashamed, after all the big talk’. Koschmider subsequently reported Paul and Pete on the spurious grounds of setting fire to their lodgings, and they too were deported. On 1 December 1960, they arrived back in Liverpool disillusioned and penniless. Ten days later, John followed. Stu remained with Astrid in Germany, a Beatle no more.

The Beatles’ fall from grace had been abrupt and painful. John woke Mimi in the middle of the night by throwing stones at her bedroom window. ‘He just pushed past me and said, “Pay that taxi, Mimi.” I shouted after him up the stairs, “Where’s your £100 a week, John?”’

‘Just like you, Mimi, to go on about £100 a week when you know I’m tired.’

‘And you can get rid of those boots. You’re not going out of this house in boots like that!’

Most of their equipment was stranded in Hamburg. They had nothing to show for their time away. Similar groups who had stayed in Liverpool were now several steps ahead of them. The Swinging Blue Jeans were clearly in the lead, headlining a regular ‘Swinging Blue Jeans Night’ at the Cavern in Mathew Street.

In the three months they had been away, fashions had moved on: everyone was now copying the Shadows, wearing slinky suits, playing instrumentals, performing synchronised dance routines. At first, the individual Beatles were so despondent that they didn’t even bother to get in touch with one another: George was unaware that John and Paul had returned. John retired, depressed, to his bedroom at Mendips, refusing to see anyone. While Aunt Mimi grudgingly indulged John’s self-pity, Jim McCartney refused to have Paul slouching around the house. ‘Satan makes work for idle hands,’ he said, telling him to go out and get a proper job. ‘This music thing is all right on the side, but Paul, it will never last.’ Paul worked briefly for a delivery company, then did donkeywork at Massey & Coggins, a cable-winding firm. The moment his workmates discovered he was a musician, they nicknamed him ‘Mantovani’. Being bright and personable, Paul was swiftly earmarked as management material. ‘We’ll give you an opportunity, lad,’ declared the managing director, impressed by his exam results, ‘and with your outlook on life you’ll go a long way.’

Uncharacteristically, Paul was ready to throw in the towel. After a few weeks John and George turned up at Massey & Coggins. They had been booked for a lunchtime gig at the Cavern, they said, and they wanted Paul to join them. He told them he had a steady job, and was now on £7.10s a week. ‘They are training me here. That’s pretty good. I can’t expect more.’

But they persisted, and Paul gave way, bunking off work on 9 February 1961 to play the Cavern at lunchtime. He did the same on 22 February, but it’s possible that his employers issued a warning, because when another lunchtime gig at the Cavern was mooted for the following week, he ummed and erred. ‘Either fucking turn up today or you’re not in the band any more,’ snapped John.

What to do? If he chose the Beatles, his father would be furious. If he obeyed his father, and stuck it out at Massey & Coggins, he would have to say goodbye to the Beatles, and any remaining chance of stardom. As usual, John was in no mood for compromise; his intransigence towards Paul may also have been a way of subcontracting his own Oedipal struggles: ‘I was always saying, “Face up to your dad, tell him to fuck off. He can’t hit you. He’s an old man” … But Paul would always give in. His dad told him to get a job, he dropped the group and started working on the lorries, saying, “I need a steady career.” We couldn’t believe it. I told him on the phone, “Either come or you’re out.” So he had to make a decision between me and his dad …’

What would have happened had Paul chosen to stay at Massey & Coggins?1 Looking back, he is adamant that he had been ‘hopeless’ at winding coils – ‘Everybody else used to wind fourteen a day. I’d get through one and a half, and mine were the ones that never worked’ – but it’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t have mastered the technique. And he had already been fast-tracked towards management. His subsequent career suggests that he possessed the drive, initiative and skills necessary for steering even the most troublesome company through rocky times.

Instead, he bunked off to rejoin the Beatles. A week later he received his wage packet through the post, along with his National Insurance card and his P45.

1 A decade later, when pop music grew more solemn, Massey and Coggins might have been a winning name for a group, like Loggins and Messina, Gallagher and Lyle, or Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

16

A Party:

10 Admiral Grove, Liverpool

8 July 1961

Ritchie Starkey spent his seventh birthday in a coma, having been rushed by ambulance to the Royal Liverpool Children’s Hospital. Doctors found he had a burst appendix, and was infected with peritonitis. As he was being wheeled into the operating theatre he asked the nurse for a cup of tea. ‘We’ll give you one when you come round,’ she replied sweetly. But Ritchie failed to come round for another ten weeks. Three times during that first night, doctors told his mother Elsie that they did not expect him to survive. He was to remain in hospital for a year.

Ritchie was back in the same hospital for his fourteenth birthday, in 1954. This time he was admitted with pleurisy, and then developed TB. Convalescing in a hospital in the Wirral, he was taught to knit, to make baskets and to construct a toy farm out of papier-mâché. Every fortnight a music teacher arrived at the ward with a selection of percussion instruments – tambourines, maracas, triangles, tiny drums – and the children were expected to join in, playing ‘Three Blind Mice’ and ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’. But Ritchie stubbornly refused to participate unless he could play a drum. When the teacher left, he would continue drumming on his bedside cabinet, in the absence of anything more drummable. This time he remained in hospital for two years.

But his twenty-first birthday is a much happier affair. Not only has he survived, but he has turned his percussive skills to advantage. He is now the drummer with Liverpool’s top band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, and he even drives his own Ford Zodiac. Not long ago, he assumed the name Ringo Starr; his drum solos are billed as ‘Starr Time’.

Rory Storm and the Hurricanes are playing a season at Butlin’s holiday camp at Pwllheli in Wales, but they have one day a week off, so the day after his birthday Ringo drives home for a proper party. So many friends and family have packed into 10 Admiral Grove, his mother’s tiny two-up, two-down – Ringo counts sixty-four people in all – that there is a continuous queue to get in. Guests include the Hurricanes, the Dominoes, the Big Three and the Pacemakers, as well as the young Priscilla White, who sometimes takes to the Cavern stage as ‘Swinging Cilla’, and regularly styles Elsie’s hair in return for Spam and chips.1

Ringo is showered with presents, including two rings to add to the three he already wears, and a gold identity bracelet from Elsie, engraved with ‘Ritchie’ on one side and ‘21st birthday, love Mum’ on the other. From his Auntie Nancy he receives a gold St Christopher medal. It depicts the patron saint of travellers carrying the Christ child on his shoulders across a river. Ringo hangs it around his neck, to keep him safe wherever he goes.

1 Priscilla White is soon to become Cilla Black, and, under Brian Epstein’s guidance, a big star. ‘I always reckoned that if I wasn’t going to be a singer, I’d be a hairdresser. Elsie was a real character, a surrogate mum to Pat and me and to the other Beatles, and we were forever bumping into each other there. She would cook us all delicious Spam, home-made chips and beans for tea, and she never seemed to mind how often we came round for more or how loud we played the latest records. I thought I did Elsie’s hair really well, but, some thirty years later, Ritchie’s stepdad Harry told me otherwise: “We didn’t say anything at the time,” he muttered, “but you used to make a right bloody mess of poor Elsie’s hair!”’

17

5 More Postcards from Hamburg

i

On their second stint in Hamburg the Beatles are working at a new venue, the Star Club, for a new manager, Manfred Weissleder, at new lodgings, a lovely clean flat in the Grosse Freiheit. Herr Weissleder tacks on one condition, though: ‘I always want you should enjoy yourselves in the Star Club, but if you make shit I send you home.’

Within days, George has been sick on the floor by the side of his bed. The next morning, the unshapely pool is still there, glowering back at him.

The cleaning lady refuses to clear it up, arguing, not unreasonably, that it is not part of her duties. For reasons of his own, George refuses to dispose of it. He has always had this stubborn streak.

ii

The next day, the pool remains doggedly present. The cleaning lady grumbles at the Beatles’ general squalor: the smelly socks, the empty bottles, the clothes strewn all over the place. This latest infraction takes their misdemeanours to another level. She goes straight to Herr Weissleder and voices her complaints. Herr Weissleder lends a sympathetic ear. He will take a closer look.

iii

Having examined the evidence, Herr Weissleder rules against George, charging his henchman and bouncer, Horst Fascher, with the job of forcing him to clean it up. Fascher is a former championship boxer. He has also spent time in prison for manslaughter, following a fracas with a sailor. Only the bravest of souls refuse to obey him. John has already fallen foul of him. When John called him a Nazi, Herr Fascher retaliated by marching him to the toilet and urinating over him.

But George, stubborn George, continues to put his foot down, or if not down, at least to one side. No, he says, he is definitely not going to clear it up. Why should he? It isn’t his job. For all he cares, it can just stay there. When he needs to get in or out of bed, he simply climbs over it.

iv

The dispute has reached an impasse. The cleaning lady will not clean up the pool of vomit; nor will George. Over the next few days Pete Best observes its sluggish, odoriferous progress with a morbid fascination, watching it ‘grow, and grow, mushrooming and taking on a life of its own. Cigarettes were crushed in it, bits of food fed to it, until it assumed the look of a hedgehog.’

The Beatles christen it ‘The Thing’, and treat it almost like a family pet. Before long, The Thing acquires a local reputation. Pete remembers how ‘its fame spread, and people wanted to come and see it’. He estimates it measures roughly six inches in diameter, and it keeps growing upwards, ‘like a miniature flower garden’.

As it blossoms, George harbours scary thoughts. ‘I’m frightened to sleep in case it eats me,’ he confesses.

v

One morning, Herr Fascher pays a return visit, unannounced. He takes one look at the ageing vomit before deciding that enough is enough. He returns with a shovel. ‘Don’t do it! That’s our pet!’ yell the Beatles. But their pleas fall on deaf ears. Fascher scoops it up and transports it down the stairs, through the front door and onto the Grosse Freiheit. The Beatles follow in a mock funeral procession. Fascher finds a bin on the street, and tips The Thing into it.

As for George, he feels he has won a small but significant victory. He kept his word, and refused to back down. Honour has been served.

18

It’s late August 1961. Rory Storm and the Hurricanes have come to the end of their summer season at Pwllheli. They were such a success that they have already been invited back next year.

Ringo loves to travel. The Hurricanes were promised tours on the Continent in the autumn, but somehow or other these failed to materialise. Ringo grows fidgety: now might be the time for a bold move, away from the group, away from Liverpool, away from Britain.

He has always been attracted to America, its large cars and country music and blues music and rock’n’roll and westerns. Why not live there? Inspired by Lightnin’ Hopkins, he opts for Houston, Texas. Accordingly, he walks into the American Consulate in the Cunard Building in Liverpool and picks up the immigration forms. It turns out he will need to prove that he has money and the promise of a job. Undaunted, he writes to the Houston Chamber of Commerce; in return, he receives a list of local employment agencies. After more to-ing and fro-ing he picks out a job in a factory, thinking he can switch to something else once he gets there.

He’s now all set, but what he later calls ‘the really big forms’ prove a stumbling block. The Americans want to know everything about his family, including their political affiliations. ‘Was your grandfather’s Great Dane a Commie?’ is his way of describing it. These extra forms get the better of him: he simply can’t face grappling with them, and eventually he calls it a day.

A few days later, Tony Sheridan asks him to join his backing band for a stint at the Top Ten Club in Hamburg. He doesn’t hesitate. He gives Rory Storm twenty-four hours’ notice, and sets off for Heathrow, a little nervous before boarding the aeroplane, as it’s the first time he has ever flown. But for one or two forms, he might well have been flying on a different plane, in the opposite direction.

19

Halfway through June 1962, Joe Flannery, the manager of Lee Curtis and the All Stars, drops by.

‘When are you going to join us, Pete?’ he asks.

Pete Best smiles. ‘You must be joking. Why would I want to quit the Beatles when we’re about to get our big break?’

Flannery stalls. ‘Maybe I’ve jumped the gun. It’s just a rumour going the rounds.’

‘Why would anyone start a rumour like that?’

Pete is mystified. He has no intention of leaving the Beatles, not after drumming with them these past two years.

Michael Ochs Archives/Handout

The conversation preys on his mind. What rumour? In mid-July he broaches the subject with Mr Epstein. Mr Epstein blushes and stammers. Pete cuts to the chase.

‘Look, Brian. Are there any plans to replace me in the Beatles?’

Mr Epstein brushes away his fears. ‘I’m telling you, as manager, there are no plans to replace you, Pete.’

That’s good enough for Pete. Nothing more is said. Things carry on as usual: each morning, Pete and their road manager, Neil Aspinall, set off in Neil’s van with all the Beatles’ gear, which is still kept at Pete’s mum’s huge house in Hayman’s Green. They pick up the other Beatles – John, Paul and George – along the way.

On 15 August the group plays two gigs at the Cavern, one at lunchtime, the other in the evening. ‘Pick you up tomorrow, John!’ calls Pete as he is leaving. ‘No,’ replies John. ‘I’ve got other arrangements.’

They are to be the last words ever spoken to Pete by any member of the Beatles.

Before Pete leaves the Cavern that night, Mr Epstein says he’d like to see him in his office at ten o’clock the next morning. Nothing odd about that: they often meet to discuss arrangements. Neil drives him in, and drops him off at the NEMS1 office. Mr Epstein seems uneasy, blathering away about nothing at all. He asks Pete how he thinks the group is doing. Pete says, ‘Fab,’ a word not as fashionable as it will shortly become. He senses that something is on Mr Epstein’s mind. Who can blame Epstein for his prevarication? He is still only twenty-seven years old, with a background in furniture sales.

Out of nowhere, Mr Epstein blurts out, ‘I’ve got some bad news for you. The boys and myself have decided that they don’t want you in the group any more, and that Ringo is replacing you.’

Pete finds it hard to speak. ‘Why?’

‘They don’t think you’re a good enough drummer, Pete,’ he says. Then he adds: ‘And George Martin doesn’t think you’re a good enough drummer.’ George Martin is the producer from Parlophone who auditioned the Beatles. When Pete was out of earshot, he told Brian Epstein that Pete couldn’t keep time, and that he planned on using a session drummer for the actual recording.

Pete says he thinks he’s just as good as Ringo, if not better. ‘Does Ringo know about this yet?’ Ringo is a good friend.

‘He’s joining on Sunday.’

Mr Epstein continues, briskly, with business. The phone rings. Mr Epstein picks up the receiver, and listens.

‘I’m still with him at the moment,’ he says, putting the receiver back down. He returns to their conversation. He says that while Pete is still under contract, he’ll pay him his current wage – £50 or £60 a week – and he’ll also put him in another group, and make him leader of it.

‘There are still a couple of venues left before Ringo joins,’ he adds, almost as an afterthought. ‘Will you play?’

Pete doesn’t know what to say, so he says yes. Then he leaves.

As Mr Epstein remembers it, the meeting lasted two hours. Pete thinks it lasted ten minutes.

Neil Aspinall is waiting for him downstairs. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,’ he says. ‘They’ve kicked me out!’ says Pete. Neil, who is going out with Pete’s mum, says in that case he’ll quit too. Pete talks him out of it. ‘Don’t be a fool – the Beatles are going places.’

Neil drops him home. The minute Pete closes the door, he bursts into tears. He feels like putting a stone round his neck and jumping off Pier Head. He can’t face playing another two gigs with the Beatles, and doesn’t turn up at the Riverpark Ballroom in Chester that night. ‘I had been betrayed, and sitting up there onstage with the three people who had done it would be like having salt rubbed into a very deep wound.’

Only later does he discover that the Beatles were offered a contract with Parlophone a fortnight ago. No one told him about it.

His forthright mother Mona, who helped manage the group before Brian came on the scene, and always calls them ‘Pete’s group’, immediately phones George Martin in London. The charming record producer assures her that, though he had wanted a different drummer for the recording session, it wasn’t up to him whether or not the Beatles kept Pete.

Mona berates Brian Epstein: ‘It’s jealousy, Brian, jealousy all the way, because Peter is the one who has the terrific following – he has built up the following in Liverpool for the Beatles!’ She is sure they got rid of Peter to stop him being the focus of attention, ‘with the others just props’.

Whodunnit? As so often with the Beatles, everyone has a different story. In The Beatles Anthology – which is, in Biblical terms, the Authorised Version – Paul recalls that after their audition at Abbey Road, George Martin took the other three to one side and said, ‘I’m really unhappy with the drummer. Would you consider changing him?’ ‘We said, “No! We can’t!” It was one of those terrible things you go through as kids. Can we betray him? No. But our career was on the line. Maybe they were going to cancel our contract.’

Yet George Martin always claimed to have been baffled by Pete’s sacking. He was unimpressed by his drumming, and he had certainly noticed that he was out on a limb from the other three, who all liked larking around. ‘But I never thought that Brian Epstein would let him go. He seemed to be the most saleable commodity as far as looks went. It was a surprise when later I learned that they had dropped Pete Best. The drums were important to me for a record, but they didn’t matter much otherwise. Fans don’t pay particular attention to the quality of drumming.’

But Pete Best always maintained that during his two years as a Beatle, not one of them ever complained about the quality of his drumming: ‘Right to the end we were still drinking together and seemingly the best of friends.’

As time went by, John grew increasingly outspoken on this issue, as on so many others.

‘We were pretty sick of Pete Best,’ he said in 1967. ‘He was a lousy drummer. He never improved. There was always this myth built up around him that he was great and Paul was jealous of him because he was pretty and all that crap … The only reason he was in the group in the first place was because the only way we could get to Hamburg, we had to have a drummer … we were always going to dump him when we could find a decent drummer.’

Ringo, too, showed his steel. Thirty years on, he was asked if he ever felt sorry for Pete. ‘No. Why should I? I was a better player than him. That’s how I got the job. It wasn’t on my personality. It was that I was a better drummer, and I got the phone call. I never felt sorry for him. A lot of people have made careers out of knowing the Beatles.’

As in the dénouement of an Agatha Christie, it was the least likely suspect who finally confessed. Many years later, George – quiet, thoughtful young George – came clean. Pete kept calling in sick, he said, so they used to ask Ringo to take his place, ‘and every time Ringo sat in, it seemed like “This is it.” Eventually we realised, “We should get Ringo in the band full time.” I was quite responsible for stirring things up. I conspired to get Ringo in for good. I talked to John until they came round to the idea … We weren’t very good at telling Pete he had to go. But when it comes down to it, how do you tell somebody? … Brian Epstein was the manager so it was his job, and I don’t think he could do it very well either. But that’s the way it was and the way it is.’

BEATLES CHANGE DRUMMER!

Ringo Starr (former drummer with Rory Storm & the Hurricanes) has joined the Beatles, replacing Pete Best on drums. Ringo has admired the Beatles for years and is delighted with his new arrangement. Naturally he is tremendously excited about the future.

The Beatles comment, ‘Pete left the group by mutual agreement. There were no arguments or difficulties, and this has been an entirely amicable decision.’

On Tuesday September 4th, the Beatles will fly to London to make recordings at EMI Studios. They will be recording numbers that have been specially written for the group.

Mersey Beat front page, 23 August 1962

When the news gets out, Mersey Beat receives a petition for Pete Best’s reinstatement, signed by hundreds of fans. They descend on his family’s home. Mo Best remembers her sitting room ‘bulging with fans, sighing and sobbing’. These fans also picket Mr Epstein’s offices in Whitechapel. The owner of the Cavern, Ray McFall, provides him with a bodyguard. Ringo receives a poison-pen letter.

The Beatles’ next concert at the Cavern is a rocky affair. Pete’s fans heckle them, chanting ‘Pete is Best!’ and ‘Ringo never, Pete Best forever!’ After half an hour of this, George loses his temper and snaps back. In reply, an aggrieved fan punches George, giving him a black eye. A Pete Best fan called Jenny writes a letter of complaint to George, who answers bullishly, ‘Ringo is a much better drummer, and he can smile – which is a bit more than Pete could do. It will seem different for a few weeks, but I think that the majority of our fans will soon be taking Ringo for granted … lots of love from George.’

In time, George is proved right. Fans are fickle. ‘I used to love Pete and was heartbroken when they sacked him,’ one of them, Elsa Breden, tells the Beatles’ biographer Mark Lewisohn over forty years later. ‘But it soon passed and it was as if he’d never been there. They were much better with Ringo, without a doubt. He gave them that solid backbeat – he’s a great rock’n’roll drummer – and he fitted in brilliantly.’

Just six days after Pete’s dismissal, John, Paul, George and Ringo are filmed by Granada TV at a lunchtime concert in the Cavern. Pete goes along to watch them. On the way out, Paul’s father Jim spots him and exclaims triumphantly, ‘Great, isn’t it? They’re on TV!’

‘Sorry, Mr McCartney,’ replies Pete. ‘I’m not the right person to ask.’

Over the next two years, the Beatles collectively gross £17 million.

For his part, Pete Best joins Lee Curtis and the All Stars. When Lee Curtis goes solo, they change their name to the Pete Best All-Stars. Then one of them leaves, and they become the Pete Best Four. Another leaves, and they become the Pete Best Combo. As the fame of the Beatles grows, interest in Pete fades. ‘There was little or no revenue coming in, barely enough to pay my bills, and I reached the stage where I found myself scratching around for enough money to buy a packet of cigarettes. I just couldn’t sit back and ignore the fact that I should have shared in the Beatles’ success, which I considered to be part of my heritage.’

Pete’s wife Kathy works on the biscuit counter at Woolworths. One day in 1967 he waits until she has left for work, goes up to the bedroom, locks the door, blocks any air gaps, places a pillow on the floor in front of the gas fire, and turns on the gas. He is fading away when his brother Rory arrives, smells gas, batters the door down and, screaming ‘Bloody idiot!’ saves his life.

That same year, Hunter Davies is finishing his pioneering biography of the Beatles. He often tells them tales from his travels, and they are always keen to know what old friends are up to. ‘They were mostly interested to hear what had happened, except when the subject of Pete Best came up. They seemed to cut off, as if he had never touched their lives. They showed little reaction when I said he was now slicing bread for £18 a week, though Paul did make a face. John asked a few more questions, but then forgot about it, and they all went back to the song they were recording.’

In 1969 Pete embarks on a career as a civil servant, working in an employment office. For many years his two daughters, Beba and Bonita, have no idea that their dad was once a Beatle.

He is now retired, and, aged seventy-eight, fronts the Pete Best Band. His website, www.petebest.com, promises ‘Right from the first beat, you’ll be immersed in nostalgia, listening to “the best years” of the Beatles, 1960–62.’ The website’s tagline is ‘The Man Who Put the Beat in Beatles’.

In 2019 the Sunday Times estimates Ringo Starr’s wealth at £240 million, which makes him the eighth-richest musician in the world. He is a knight of the realm, maintains homes in London, Los Angeles and Monte Carlo, and is married to Barbara Bach, a former Bond girl. Pete Best’s old drum kit can be seen in Liverpool’s The Beatles Story museum, sad and lonesome, a monument to loss; the tomb of the unknown drummer. On the audio guide, George Martin explains: ‘He was probably the best-looking, but he didn’t say much and he didn’t have the charisma the others had. More importantly, his drumming was OK but it wasn’t top-notch, in my opinion. I didn’t realise that the boys were thinking much the same thing, and so they took that as the final word, a catalyst, and poor Pete got the boot. I’ve always felt a bit guilty about that. But I guess he survived.’

1 North End Music Stores, owned at that stage by Brian Epstein’s father.

20

I arrived at Pete Best’s old house in Hayman’s Green on the evening of day four of the annual Beatles Week. The basement recreated the old Casbah Club. A very basementy basement, dank, dark and sweaty, it was bursting at the seams with men in their seventies who looked like Bernie Sanders or Bernard Manning. Most wore Beatles T-shirts. A tribute band was tuning up in an authentically sixties manner, saying ‘One-two, one-two’ over and over again, with no indication that they would ever make it to three.

The Casbah is less a shrine to the Beatles than to Pete Best. Ringo is the great unmentionable. At the entrance, photographs of the Beatles – John, Paul, George and Pete, all autographed by Pete – were on sale for £15. A newspaper cutting with the headline ‘10,000 SUPPORTING PETE BEST STREET BID’ was pinned to a red baize board. It posed an urgent question. In Liverpool, there’s a Paul McCartney Way and a John Lennon Drive. So why not a Pete Best Avenue?

Out in the garden, a tribute band from Indonesia, the Indonesian Beat Club, composed of five ‘die-hard Beatles lovers’, were playing a spirited version of ‘My Bonnie’, just like Pete and the rest of his band used to do, back in the day. Queuing for a drink, I heard someone mention a Pete Best Fan Club. It is centred around Twitter, where it boasts fifty-three followers. Tweets include ‘PETE is the BEST’, ‘I WANT PETE BEST SO BAAAAAD IT’S DRIVING ME MAD’, ‘Happiness Is Pete Best!’ and the poignant ‘MY PETE BEST GENTLY WEEEEEPSSS’.

Flyers near the entrance advertised The Magical Beatles Museum, run by Pete’s half-brother Roag, the son of Mona Best and Neil Aspinall. Its collection includes Pete’s Premier drum kit. History in the museum stops in June 1962: it is as though Ringo had never lived. Visitors are greeted by signs saying ‘PETE, JOHN, PAUL, GEORGE, STUART’. Roag bills it as ‘not just Liverpool’s most authentic Beatles museum, but the world’s most authentic Beatles museum. My oldest brother Pete Best was the original Beatles drummer with the Beatles from 1960 to 1962. He performed over 1,000 shows and recorded 27 tracks as a Beatle.’

Pete Best’s own website announces that ‘When not undertaking a variety of celebrity duties, Pete has a busy schedule touring with the Pete Best Band. The Pete Best Band captures the sound of the Beatles in their formative years – the early years for many “was” the Beatles.’

21

A Party:

Reece’s Café

9–13 Parker Street, Liverpool

23 August 1962

In July 1962 Cynthia realises she is pregnant. She suspects John will take it badly, so puts off telling him for several days. Eventually, she plucks up the courage. ‘As the news sank in he went pale and I saw the fear in his eyes. “There’s only one thing for it, Cyn,” he said. “We’ll have to get married.”’

She tells him he doesn’t have to; he insists he wants to. The next day, John tells Brian Epstein, who says he doesn’t have to go through with it. The Beatles have just signed their first recording contract, and Brian is worried the news will put the fans off. When John tells Aunt Mimi, she accuses Cynthia of wanting to trap him, and says she’ll have nothing to do with the wedding.

Recognising that John is serious, Brian takes charge, applying for the emergency licence and booking the register office for the first available date, in a fortnight’s time.

On 23 August, Brian, dapper in his pin-striped suit, picks up Cynthia from her bedsit. She is wearing a purple-and-black-checked two-piece suit over a frilly high-necked white blouse, with black shoes and a black bag. Brian takes her in a chauffeur-driven car to Mount Pleasant register office. On the way, he tells her she is looking lovely, and does his best to calm her nerves.

When they arrive, John, Paul and George are already pacing about in the waiting room, dressed in smart black suits. Cynthia thinks they all look ‘horribly nervous’. Cynthia’s brother Tony and his wife Marjorie are there too.

As the registrar begins to speak, a workman outside starts a pneumatic drill, but they struggle on. The ceremony takes a matter of minutes. They sign the register: John Winston Lennon, 21, Musician (Guitar) and Cynthia Powell, 22, Art Student (School). Now what? Brian suggests they all go to Reece’s, round the corner, for lunch. They opt for the cheaper café on the ground floor rather than the more expensive Famous Grill Room on the top floor.

The bride and groom and their five guests queue for soup, chicken and trifle. Alcohol is not available, so they all toast the happy couple with water. John has a look of pride. Cynthia is over the moon: ‘A full church wedding with all the extras couldn’t have made me happier.’

Brian presents them with a silver-plated ashtray, engraved with the message ‘Good luck JOHN & CYNTHIA. Brian, Paul & George 23 Aug 62’, as well as a shaving kit in a leather pouch embossed ‘JWL’, which John will take everywhere. The lunch – fifteen shillings a head – is on Brian, who also announces that he has a bolt-hole in Falkner Street where John and Cynthia can live for as long as they want. Cynthia is so excited that she gives him a hug. Brian looks embarrassed.

That night the Beatles have a gig in Chester, so Cynthia takes the opportunity to make the flat nice. At the gig, John appears out of sorts, losing his temper with the support act and yelling, ‘You’re doing all our fucking numbers!’ He doesn’t tell anyone that he’s just got married. Even the Beatles’ new drummer, Ringo, is kept in the dark.

22

In November 1962 a twenty-two-year-old Sheffield entrepreneur with the unusual name of Peter Stringfellow was casting around for an act for his new nightclub, the Black Cat. Though the Black Cat sounded with-it, it was just the name he gave St Aidan’s church hall on the nights he hired it.

Searching through the New Musical Express, Stringfellow spotted an advertisement for a group called the Beatles. They seemed to be just what he wanted: at the beginning of October, their song ‘Love Me Do’ had been his very first record request from a punter; he had been playing it, on and off, ever since.

There was no phone at his parents’ house, so he went to a public call box and was put through to the Beatles’ manager, a Mr Epstein, who told him that the Beatles would cost £50.

‘£50!’ replied Stringfellow. ‘Excuse me, I pay Screaming Lord Sutch £50, and nobody has heard of the Beatles!’

Epstein replied that, unlike Sutch, the Beatles had a record in the charts. Stringfellow knew that ‘Love Me Do’ was actually moving down the charts. He said he would think about it.

The next day he called Epstein back, saying he was prepared to pay £50. Epstein said the price had gone up to £65. Stringfellow felt that Epstein was as nervous as he was himself. He sensed that the Beatles were in real demand, and that their success was becoming more than Epstein could cope with. Once again, Stringfellow said he’d think about it.

True to his word, he called back two days later, and said, yes, he could manage £65. Mr Epstein replied that the price had now risen to £100. ‘The Beatles have another single coming out and this will go to the top of the charts,’ he said confidently. Stringfellow tried to haggle, but Mr Epstein said he wouldn’t take anything less than £90. They finally agreed on £85. Stringfellow was shaken. ‘I came out of the telephone in a sweat because I had never paid that amount of money to a band before.’

There was an eerie gap between ‘Love Me Do’ leaving the charts and the release of ‘Please Please Me’. The Beatles seemed to go quiet. Stringfellow began to panic. Had he just wasted all his money?

He placed an advertisement in the NME announcing that the Beatles would be playing at the Black Cat in April, and ordered tickets from the printer, each priced at four shillings. Applications came pouring in, even from Scotland, so he went back to the printers and asked them to put up the price to five shillings. By January he had sold over 1,500 tickets, way beyond the capacity of the Black Cat.

He looked around for a larger venue, hit upon the Azena Ballroom, Sheffield’s flashiest dance hall, and placed an advertisement in the NME announcing the change of venue. By 2 April he had sold two thousand tickets; on the night itself, a further thousand people turned up on the off-chance of getting in.

23

I arrived too late at the International Beatles Week in Liverpool to catch the opening act, Les Sauterelles. They formed in 1962, and according to the brochure, ‘soon became the most popular Swiss Beat Band of the sixties. In the hot summer of ’68, their single “Heavenly Club” was number one for six weeks in the Swiss Charts.’

Next up were a Beatles tribute band from Hungary called the Bits, followed by the Norwegian Beatles, ‘probably the world’s northernmost Beatles tribute band’, and then Clube Big Beatles from Brazil, who are apparently soon to open their own Cavern Club in São Paulo. Performers on the indoor stage included the Bertils from Sweden, the Fab Fourever (‘Canada’s Premiere Tribute to the Beatles’), Bestbeat from Serbia, crowned ‘one of the thirty most prominent Beatles tribute bands on the planet’ by Newsweek in 2012, and B.B. Cats, an all-female tribute band from Tokyo who specialise in playing the Beatles’ Hamburg repertoire.

There are over a thousand Beatles tribute acts in the world today. Many of them – the Tefeatles from Guatemala, Rubber Soul from Brazil, the Nowhere Boys from Colombia, Abbey Road from Spain – have now been together longer than the Beatles themselves: Britain’s Bootleg Beatles and Australia’s Beatnix have both been going for forty years.

In the evening, I joined the long and winding queue outside the Grand Central Hall to see the Fab Four from California, one of the most successful Beatles tribute bands in the world. Most of those queuing were around the age of seventy, which would have made them fifteen or so at the height of Beatlemania. The men wore baggy jeans and Beatles T-shirts; the women slacks and generous tops. One or two people were in wheelchairs. At most rock concerts, fans rush to get close to the stage, but when the doors to the Grand Central Hall opened, most people rushed upstairs, to where the seats were.

A depressing man in jeans and a knitted bonnet opened the show, moaning his way through John’s passive-aggressive ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, accompanying himself with jerky pyrotechnics on an acoustic guitar. What was I doing there, with these senior citizens togged up in their Beatles gear? With a change of clothes it might almost have been a reunion of Second World War veterans, gathered for a fly-past of Spitfires.

Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

In the 1970s, my parents used to watch a TV programme called The Good Old Days. The audience would dress up as Edwardians, the men in straw boaters, fancy blazers and walrus moustaches, the women in feather-rimmed hats and voluminous dresses with high-boned collars. They would gasp adoringly as the high-camp Master of Ceremonies, Leonard Sachs, introduced each music-hall act – tap dancer, conjuror, barbershop quartet – with a stream of elaborate words: ‘Prestidigitational!’ (‘Oooh!’), ‘Plenitudinous!’ (‘Ahh!’), ‘Sesquipidalianism!’ (‘Oooh!’), and then banged his gavel. At the curtain-call everyone would join in with a sing-song of ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’. It was what was then known as a trip down memory lane, viewers at home happy to collude in the deception that time could be reversed, and the dead revived.

Was this Beatles revival another quest for the same old thing – dreams of blue remembered hills?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

Such were my maudlin reflections as the Fab Four took to the stage. But then they started to play ‘She Loves You’, and they sounded just like the Beatles and, to my fading eyes, looked just like them too – Paul arching his eyebrows and rolling his eyes to the ceiling, George slightly dreamy and distant, Ringo rocking his head from side to side, John with his legs wide apart, as though astride a donkey. I was witnessing something closer to a wonderful conjuring trick. One half of your brain recognises that these are not the Beatles: how could they be? But the other half is happy to believe that they are. It is like watching a play: yes, of course you know that the couple onstage are actors, but on some other level you think they are Othello and Desdemona. The drama lies in the interplay of knowledge and imagination. And with the Fab Four, there is another illusion at work, equally convincing, equally transient: for as long as they play, we are all fifty years younger, gazing in wonder at the Beatles in their prime.

24

Helen Shapiro had been asked to leave her school choir because she could never resist jazzing up the harmonies.

So, aged twelve, she formed a group, Suzie and the Hula-Hoops, with her schoolmates Mark Feld,1 Stephen Gould and Susan Singer, but they disbanded soon afterwards. Helen liked to hang around the stage door of the Hackney Empire, up the road from her family home, spotting stars like Adam Faith, Billy Fury, Cliff Richard and Lord Rockingham’s Eleven. Once, she even managed to get Marty Wilde’s autograph.

Aged thirteen, she was determined to become either an air hostess or a singer. This choice was decided for her when her Uncle Harry happened to spot an advertisement for the Maurice Burman School of Modern Pop Singing, where Alma Cogan had once been a pupil.Burman himself had drummed with leading dance bands before the war, and now wrote a regular column for Melody Maker. Upon meeting little Helen, he was so excited by her deep, bluesy voice that he waived the fee. Every Saturday Helen attended his school, on the corner of Baker Street and Marylebone Road, and there she learned scales, diction, phrasing and microphone technique.

After six months Burman got in touch with his old friend, the conductor and producer Norrie Paramor. Paramor suggested Helen record a test tape at the EMI studios at Abbey Road. She sang ‘Birth of the Blues’. Paramor found it hard to believe that these powerful, poised vocals sprang from a thirteen-year-old.

EMI gave Helen a contract. Instead of a percentage, they offered her a penny per single, and sixpence for each twelve-track LP. If she was a success, the amount would rise to three farthings per track, up to a maximum of tuppence a single. ‘It all went totally over my head. The people from EMI were all clever businessmen while I was just a young girl who wanted to sing. I never was interested in the financial side of things, until it was too late.’

Helen and her parents thought she should change her name: at that time Jewish performers tended to change their names to avoid anti-Semitism. But Norrie Paramor felt that most people wouldn’t twig that Shapiro was a Jewish surname, and it sounded dashing, so they decided to stick with it.

Helen’s first single, ‘Don’t Treat Me Like a Child’, was released on 10 February 1961. It seemed to have peaked at a satisfactory number 28 in the charts, but then she appeared on the first edition of the new pop music show Thank Your Lucky Stars, and it zoomed to number 4. Helen began to be recognised in the streets.

Her next two songs, ‘You Don’t Know’ and ‘Walkin’ Back to Happiness’, both sold over a million copies, and reached number 1 in the charts. Helen was voted Best Female Act in 1961, and again the following year.

Towards the end of 1962, the promoter Arthur Howes told her about the line-up for her next British tour. ‘We’re going to put a nice package together for you. We’ve got Kenny Lynch, Danny Williams. Red Price will be backing you again. Dave Allen is compering, there’s a girls’ singing group, the Honeys, and a vocal group, the Kestrels. Then we’ve got this new group, the Beatles. I don’t know whether you’ve heard their record, “Love Me Do”?’

Helen certainly did know about the Beatles: ‘They were the funny fellows with the funny hair.’

Her tour kicked off at the Gaumont in Bradford on 2 February. The Red Price Band opened the show, then came the Honeys, the comedian (and compere) Dave Allen, and the Beatles, with Danny Williams (‘Britain’s Johnny Mathis’) closing the first half. After the interval the Red Price Band appeared again, followed by the Kestrels, Kenny Lynch, Dave Allen again, and finally, topping the bill, Helen Shapiro.

During the sound checks in Bradford, Helen was introduced to the Beatles’ bass player, Paul. ‘I made some comment about liking “Love Me Do” and he introduced me to the rest of the guys who were really happy because this was their first major concert tour. They’d performed in clubs and ballrooms in Hamburg and Liverpool but never done anything like the pop package and were eager to be onstage.’

At this point, one of them mentioned that they had written a song called ‘Misery’ for Helen, but it had been turned down on her behalf by Norrie Paramor. Helen apologised, saying she hadn’t known about it.

When the Beatles took to the stage, Helen was struck by quite how loud they were. They were used to a noisier crowd. ‘They soon cottoned on to the fact that they didn’t need to turn the sound up quite so much when people were sitting listening rather than dancing … They had a lot to learn.’

Her management encouraged Helen to travel by herself in a special limousine, to reflect her star status, but she preferred sitting in the coach with the supporting acts. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, especially while the Beatles were with us.’ Together on the coach, the Beatles would bring out their guitars, and Helen would sing a song like ‘The Locomotion’. She remembered how Paul would practise writing his autograph over and over again, and then ask her what she thought of it. On one of these coach rides John and Paul hit upon the idea of running up to the microphone together and singing ‘Whoooo!’, a routine that within a matter of weeks would be setting off explosions of ecstasy among their fans.

One night Helen let the Beatles into her changing room so they could watch themselves on television for the first time. John was surprised by the way he looked, particularly the odd, jockey-like stance he adopted onstage. They kept nudging one another and commenting. ‘Eh, look at that.’ ‘You look awful.’

David Redfern/Getty Images

As the tour progressed, the Beatles’ popularity grew and grew, while Helen’s went into decline. By chance, both the Beatles and Helen had released new singles at roughly the same time – ‘Please Please Me’ on 17 January, ‘Queen for Tonight’ on 26 January. As the weeks went by, the status of the famous headliner and the lowly support act switched places. At the beginning of February ‘Please Please Me’ was at number 33, and ‘Queen for Tonight’ was nowhere to be seen. By 6 February ‘Please Please Me’ was number 16, and ‘Queen for Tonight’ was still nowhere to be seen. On 13 February ‘Queen for Tonight’ scraped in at 42, while ‘Please Please Me’ was number 3. By 23 February ‘Please Please Me’ was number 2 and ‘Queen for Tonight’ was 33, the highest position it would ever reach: the following week it had slipped to 35. Helen was only sixteen years old, and on the skids: ‘I’d been a novelty at fourteen but I suffered from the Shirley Temple syndrome. I’d grown up. Suddenly I was beginning to look a little bit passé in spite of topping the bill.’

One day, reading a music paper on the tour coach, she saw the headline ‘Is Helen Shapiro a “Has-Been” at 16?’ ‘I felt just as if somebody had punched me in the stomach.’ In the seat behind her, John Lennon, six years her senior, noticed that she was upset.They had always had a good relationship: like many girls her age, she had a crush on him. He in turn was uncharacteristically protective of her, treating her, in Helen’s words, ‘like some kind of kid sister’.

‘What’s up, Helly?’

She showed him the offending headline. John sought to reassure her. ‘You don’t want to be bothered with that rubbish. You’re all right. You’ll be going on for years.’

But no amount of reassurance could disguise the truth. Helen Shapiro was to look back on that moment as ‘one of those milestones I would pinpoint as the beginning of change; not just for me but for a lot of solo singers. The Beatles were the beginning of a new era, a new wave of groups, the whole Merseyside thing.’

By the end of February, the Beatles had been promoted above Danny Williams on the tour, charged with closing the first half of the programme. For the first time, their music was being drowned out by screams. Helen continued to travel on the coach with the support acts, but, ever conscious of the Beatles’ burgeoning star status, Brian Epstein made them travel in their own car, away from the others. They left the tour before the end, off to head their own shows. Helen missed the Beatles: ‘Things were never quite the same afterwards.’

After the tour, she continued to record. ‘My records were getting better, yet the sales were worse. All during ’63 the whole Merseyside thing was growing and growing. London was out, along with solo artistes. The writing was on the wall for anyone who didn’t belong to a group, preferably with drums, and lead, bass and rhythm guitars.’

Her next record, ‘Woe is Me’, peaked at number 35. By October 1963, when she came to release ‘Look Who it Is’, the Beatles had become the most famous act in Britain: ‘She Loves You’ was at number 1, and well on its way to selling a million copies.

To help Helen promote her single, the producer of Ready Steady Go! suggested she be filmed singing it to the Beatles, who were headlining. It was agreed that she would sing a verse to each Beatle in turn, but as there were only three verses, one of them had to stand aside. They tossed a coin, and the loser was Paul, who went off to a neighbouring studio, where he was charged with picking the winner of a competition in which four girls mimed to ‘Let’s Jump the Broomstick’ by Brenda Lee.

Paul decided that the winner was girl number four, Melanie Coe, aged fourteen, from Stamford Hill in London.

1 Who later changed his name to Marc Bolan.

25

On previous shows, the prize had been a date with a pop star, but this time it was just the Beatles’ LP, Please Please Me. Upon hearing this, Melanie Coe’s face fell. ‘I thought I was going to have a dinner date with the Beatles, so I was terribly disappointed.’ Moreover, Paul McCartney’s firm handshake caused her false nails to come loose. ‘I don’t think I’d ever worn them before, and I wanted to have everything perfect.’ But her disappointment was assuaged when the producers, impressed by her natural exuberance, offered her a year’s stint as a background dancer, which let her rub shoulders with stars like Stevie Wonder, Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black and Freddie and the Dreamers.

Had she not been picked out by Paul McCartney, might Melanie Coe have been more content with the life of a schoolgirl? Instead she grew restless, and as time went by she started venturing into central London, against her parents’ wishes. ‘In 1964, I’d say there were three or four discos in London, so you were likely to meet the same people wherever you went.’

On one of these secret excursions she went with a friend from Hamburg to the Bag o’ Nails Club in Kingly Street, just off Carnaby Street. As in the Beatles song, she was just seventeen. Her friend had long boasted that she knew the Beatles very well, but Melanie didn’t believe her. ‘We were sitting down having a drink and in walks John Lennon with his entourage. And she waves to him and he comes over to us. “It’s you! Come join us!” And before I knew it, I’m seventeen and I’m at a table with John Lennon! That’s how it was!’

Touched by these two encounters, the first with Paul, the second with John, what young girl could have resisted the lure of adult life? Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before Melanie became pregnant. One afternoon she left a note on the kitchen table that she hoped would say more, and left home, off to live with a croupier in Bayswater.

Melanie had been away from home for a week when on 27 February 1967 she saw her picture in the Daily Mail, alongside a headline saying:

‘A-Level Girl Dumps Car and Vanishes’

On that same day, Paul McCartney also happened to be reading the Daily Mail, and his eye was caught by the same headline. The report began:

The father of 17-year-old Melanie Coe, the schoolgirl who seemed to have everything, spent yesterday searching for her in London and Brighton.

Melanie had her own car, an Austin 1100. It was left unlocked outside her home when she vanished.

She had a wardrobe full of clothes. She took only what she was wearing – a cinnamon trouser suit and black patent leather shoes.

She left her chequebook and drew no money from her account.

Melanie, who has blonde hair and is 5ft 1inch tall, was studying for her A-level examinations. She planned to go to university or drama school.

‘I cannot imagine why she should run away,’ her father told reporters. ‘She has everything here. She is very keen on clothes, but she left them all, even her fur coat.’

Without realising that Melanie was the very same girl he had picked to win a prize over three years before, Paul was inspired to write ‘She’s Leaving Home’.

‘I started to get the lyrics: she slips out and leaves a note and then the parents wake up and then … It was rather poignant,’ he recalled. ‘… and when I showed it to John, he added the Greek chorus, long sustained notes, and one of the nice things about the structure of the song is that it stays on those chords endlessly.’

John found the Greek chorus – ‘Sacrificed most of our lives’, ‘We gave her everything money could buy’ – simple to write: these were the very same complaints he had heard so often from the lips of his Aunt Mimi.

The Beatles recorded ‘She’s Leaving Home’ on the evening of 17 March 1967. By this time Melanie Coe was back home with her parents, who had managed to track her down. She first heard the song soon after it came out on the Sgt. Pepper album at the end of May. ‘I didn’t realise it was about me, but I remember thinking it could have been about me. I found the song extremely sad. It obviously struck a chord somewhere. It wasn’t until later, when I was in my twenties, that my mother said, “You know, that song was about you.”’ She had seen an interview with Paul on television and he said he’d based the song on this newspaper article. She put two and two together.

‘The most interesting thing in the song is what the father said: “We gave her everything money could buy.” And in the newspaper article, my father actually says almost those words. He doesn’t understand why I would have left home when they bought me or gave me everything. Which is true; they had bought me a car and they always bought me expensive clothes and things like that. But, as we know, that doesn’t mean that you get on well with your parents, or even love them, just because they buy you material things.’

Quite by chance, McCartney had hit another nail on the head: before starting work as a croupier, her older boyfriend had worked in the motor trade.1

1 The following year Melanie left home again, having married a Spaniard. They broke up after a year, and then she moved to California, intent on pursuing a career in acting and dancing. She enjoyed a brief romance with Burt Ward, the actor who played Batman’s young sidekick Robin in the TV series. In 1981 she returned home to look after her mother, who was dying.

26

The Beatles started 1963 playing modest gigs such as the Wolverham Welfare Association dance at the Civic Hall in Wirral (14 January) and a Baptist church youth club party at the Co-Operative Hall in Darwen (25 January). On 4 April, well into spring, they performed an afternoon concert for the boys of Stowe School in Buckinghamshire.

But their popularity was speedily growing. In March their second single, ‘Please Please Me’, had only been prevented from reaching number 1 in the UK charts by the continued popularity of Frank Ifield’s ‘Wayward Wind’ and, latterly, Cliff Richard’s ‘Summer Holiday’. But in May ‘From Me to You’ became their first single to reach number 1, and their debut album, Please Please Me, also went to number 1, where it was set to remain for the next thirty weeks.

By the end of that month, they had appeared for a second time on national television, singing ‘From Me to You’ on the children’s programme Pops and Lenny, accompanied by Lenny the Lion, the distinguished glove puppet. Furthermore, they had been given a new radio series on the BBC, Pop Go the Beatles. The corporation’s Audience Research Department estimated that 5.3 per cent of the population, or 2.8 million people, had listened to the first episode, with audience comments ranging from ‘an obnoxious noise’ to ‘really with-it’.

But fame comes with drawbacks. Paul had originally planned to celebrate his twenty-first birthday at the McCartney family home in Forthlin Road, but it soon became clear that fans might prove a hazard. So the McCartneys switched the party to his Auntie Jin’s house, across the Mersey in Huyton, where there was plenty of room for a marquee in the large back garden, and privacy was assured.

The birthday party took place on 21 June 1963. Guests included the three other Beatles, John’s wife Cynthia, Paul’s brother Mike, Mike’s two friends Roger McGough and John Gorman, John’s friend Pete Shotton, Ringo’s girlfriend Maureen, the disc jockey Bob Wooler, Gerry Marsden, Billy J. Kramer and any number of musicians. Paul was particularly delighted when the Shadows came through the door. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said to Tony Bramwell, who worked for Brian Epstein. He then thought about it for a second, before adding, ‘But we’re sort of like one of them now, aren’t we?’

‘Yeah, only bigger,’ replied Bramwell, who remembered Paul giving him a doubtful look, ‘as if I was pulling his leg’.

Paul’s new girlfriend, the seventeen-year-old actress Jane Asher, was also there. They had first met two months before. Cynthia was very taken with her: ‘She was beautiful, with auburn hair and green eyes. Also, although she had been a successful actress since she was five, she was unaffected, easy to talk to and friendly.’

Paul’s dad Jim played old-fashioned numbers on his piano, and, later, the up-and-coming band the Fourmost took to a makeshift stage. Their bass player Billy Hatton had struck the deal. ‘Paul offered to pay us the usual rate for this kind of job, but as we were going to the party anyway, we said we would do it for just one and fourpence halfpenny each.’

As the party progressed, Pete Shotton spotted John in a corner, ‘nursing a Scotch and Coke and looking glum as could be’. John seemed pleased to see Pete, and together they drifted into the garden. Over more drinks, John enjoyed pointing out the various pop stars present. ‘Cliff Richard might even show up tonight,’ he added, before going off to get yet another refill.

Pete set off to find a loo. On his return, everything had changed. ‘When I emerged from the WC … the party seemed to have been somehow transformed from a celebration to a wake. Something, obviously, had gone terribly wrong.’

Bob Wooler, the Cavern MC, was lying on the floor, with blood everywhere. Apparently he had been teasing John about his recent holiday in Spain with Brian Epstein, and John had taken his revenge. ‘A well-drunk John punched Wooler for taunting him,’ recalled Tony Barrow in his autobiography. Another of Epstein’s assistants, Peter Brown, added more detail, saying that ‘in a mad rage and obviously very drunk’, John had started ‘pummelling’ an unnamed guest; it had taken ‘three men to pull John off, but not before he managed to break three of the man’s ribs’.

Tony Bramwell remembered that ‘John saw red. He assaulted Bob, breaking his ribs and ending up with a bloody nose himself.’ Shotton took it a step further: ‘John responded by knocking Bob to the ground and repeatedly clobbering him in the face with, I believe, a shovel. The damage to Bob’s visage was so extensive that an ambulance had to be summoned to rush him to hospital.’

In her second autobiography, written forty-two years after the event (she failed to mention the incident in her first), Cynthia Lennon wrote: ‘John, who’d had plenty to drink, exploded. He leapt on Bob, and by the time he was dragged off Bob had a black eye and badly bruised ribs. I took John home as fast as I could and Brian drove Bob to hospital.’ Cynthia claimed to remember John telling her, ‘He called me a queer.’ Others, though, have suggested Wooler said something more insidious, like, ‘Come on, John. Tell us about you and Brian in Spain. We all know.’

Thirty-six years later, Rex Makin, the Epstein family’s solicitor,1 gave an account in which he deftly avoided mentioning Brian Epstein or the Spanish holiday, and suggested that Wooler had come on to John: ‘Everybody had a lot to drink and John Lennon thought or perceived that Wooler had made a pass at him, whereupon he socked him and broke his nose and gave him a black eye.’

The Beatles’ biographers also offer radically different versions of the same event. Hunter Davies, who gave Epstein and the Beatles copy approval for his authorised 1968 biography, wrote that ‘John picked a fight with a local disk [sic] jockey,’ and quoted John saying, ‘I broke his bloody ribs for him. I was pissed at the time. He called me a queer.’

Other biographers have tended to take it a stage further. ‘Without warning, John exploded,’ wrote Ray Connolly. ‘Lashing out, he began to batter Wooler’s face and body with both his fists and a stick … He went berserk, to the extent that when he was pulled off Wooler, the inoffensive and much older man had to be quickly driven to hospital by Brian, where he was treated for bruised ribs and a black eye.’

In his 1981 biography of the Beatles, Shout!, Philip Norman described the party as ‘a typical Liverpool booze-up, riotous and noisy’. He mentioned that ‘John Lennon got into a fight with another guest,’ but didn’t say who it was, or what the fight was about. Norman was more forthcoming in his 2016 biography of Paul, disagreeing with Connolly that Wooler was inoffensive, and instead describing him as ‘notoriously sharp-tongued’. In his account of the fight, Norman had John ‘raining punches viciously on Wooler’s head and body’, but offered no assessment of the injuries. However, in his 2008 biography of John, he stated that Wooler ‘suffered bruised ribs and a black eye’.

In his 2005 Beatles biography, Bob Spitz had John beating Wooler ‘viciously, with tightly closed fists. When that didn’t do enough damage, he grabbed a garden shovel that was left in the yard and whacked Bob once or twice with the handle. According to one observer, “Bob was holding his hands to his face and John was kicking all the skin off his fingers.”’ According to Spitz, Wooler was taken away in an ambulance with even more injuries: ‘a broken nose, a cracked collar bone and three broken ribs’.

Do I hear any advance on a broken nose, a cracked collarbone and three broken ribs? Inevitably, the most excessive bid was submitted by Albert Goldman, the most merciless and hyperbolic of all John’s biographers:2 ‘John doubled up his fist and smashed the little disc jockey in the nose. Then, seizing a shovel that was lying in the yard, Lennon began to beat Wooler to death. Blow after blow came smashing down on the defenseless man lying on the ground. It would have ended in murder if John had not suddenly realized: “If I hit him one more time, I’ll kill him!” Making an enormous effort of will, Lennon restrained himself. At that instant three men seized him and disarmed him. An ambulance was called for Wooler, who had suffered a broken nose, a cracked collar-bone, and three broken ribs. Lennon had broken a finger.’

All in all, no other event in the lives of the Beatles illustrates more clearly the random, subjective nature of history, a form predicated on objectivity but reliant on the shifting sands of memory.

So a table of the final tally looks like this:

No one seems to doubt, though, that the following day Wooler contacted Rex Makin, who decided to act for both parties, eventually negotiating a £200 payment to Wooler and an apology. Word soon reached the press about the incident. In charge of damage limitation, Tony Barrow got in touch with John, who was bullishly unrepentant. ‘He told me gruffly, “Wooler was well out of fucking order. He called me a bloody queer so I battered him … I wasn’t that pissed. The bastard had it coming. He teased me, I punched him. Of course I won’t apologise.”’ Barrow then dutifully ‘trimmed and toned and spun’ this unpromising material, so that the next day’s Sunday Mirror reported:

Guitarist John Lennon, 22-year-old leader of the Beatles pop group, said last night, ‘Why did I have to go and punch my best friend? … Bob is the last person in the world I would want to have a fight with. I can only hope he realises that I was too far gone to know what I was doing.’

Recuperating in hospital, Wooler received a conciliatory telegram from John: ‘REALLY SORRY, BOB. TERRIBLY SORRY TO REALIZE WHAT I HAD DONE. WHAT MORE CAN I SAY?’ As it happened, each word had been dictated by Brian Epstein.3

What exactly happened in Spain? Most people agree that when Julian was three weeks old, Brian took the unusual step of taking John on a Spanish holiday à deux. In her first autobiography (1978), Cynthia says that when John asked her if she would mind, ‘I concealed my hurt and envy and gave him my blessing.’ In her second (2005), her memories have altered; now, when John asks her if she would mind, there is no mention of hurt or envy. ‘I said, truthfully, that I wouldn’t.’

The implacable Albert Goldman, on the other hand, states that John only got round to seeing his newborn son a week after his birth, and then, ‘turning to Cynthia, informed her bluntly that he was going off on a short holiday with Brian Epstein’. In the Goldman version, far from acquiescing, ‘Cynthia was outraged by his astonishing news.’ Goldman adds that John was indifferent to Cynthia’s feelings, saying: ‘Being selfish again, aren’t you?’ He appears to have lifted this version of events from Peter Brown’s waspish memoir The Love You Make (1983), though it seems unlikely that Brown himself was privy to John and Cynthia’s discussion.

So, did they or didn’t they? The simple truth is that no one knows, but everyone thinks they know, or at least they want everyone else to think they know. Cynthia covers the matter in two sentences. Pooh-poohing the gossip, she says that after John came back from Spain, ‘He had to put up with sly digs, winks and innuendo that he was secretly gay. It infuriated him: all he’d wanted was a break with a friend, but it was turned into so much more.’

Of the Beatles’ employees, Alistair Taylor and Tony Barrow agree with Cynthia that nothing sexual occurred. Taylor claims that ‘in one of our frankest heart-to-hearts John denied it’. ‘He never wanted me like that,’ he told Taylor, adding, ‘Even completely out of my head, I couldn’t shag a bloke. And I certainly couldn’t lie there and let one shag me. Even a nice guy like Brian. To be honest, the thought of it turns me over.’ Barrow says, ‘John made it abundantly clear to me that there was no two-way traffic along this route … I don’t believe that the relationship between Brian and John became a physical one in Spain or elsewhere. I believe John’s version, which was that he teased Brian to the limit but stopped short when they came to the brink.’

On the other hand, Tony Bramwell claims John told him that he finally allowed Brian to have sex with him just ‘to get it out of the way’. But Bramwell adds that John may have been lying. ‘Those who knew John well, who had known him for years, don’t believe it for a moment.’ However, Peter Brown begs to differ, painting an unfeasibly vivid picture, as though lifted from an airport novel: ‘Drunk and sleepy from the sweet Spanish wine, Brian and John got undressed in silence. “It’s OK, Eppy,” John said, and lay down on his bed. Brian would have liked to have hugged him, but he was afraid. Instead, John lay there, tentative and still, and Brian fulfilled the fantasies he was so sure would bring him contentment, only to awake the next morning as hollow as before.’4

Pete Shotton was closer to John than the others, and less given to speculation. He writes that when John and Brian went away ‘tongues began wagging all over town’. On John’s return, Shotton teased him – ‘So you had a good time with Brian, then?’ – only for John to respond quietly, ‘Actually Pete, something did happen with him one night … Eppy just kept on and on at me. Until one night I finally just pulled me trousers down and said to him, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Brian, just stick it up me fucking arse then.” And he said to me, “Actually, John, I don’t do that kind of thing. That’s not what I like to do.” “Well,” I said, “what is it you want to do then?” And he said, “I’d really just like to touch you, John.” And so I let him toss me off … So what harm did it do, then, Pete, for fuck’s sake? No harm at all. The poor fucking bastard, he can’t help the way he is.’

So much for John’s associates. Small wonder, then, that his biographers are also divided. Epstein’s biographer Ray Coleman insists nothing sexual occurred: ‘Since the death of Epstein and Lennon, many with no access to, or observation of, both men in their lifetime have peddled the assumption that Brian and John had a sexual liaison. This is despite the lack of any evidence, despite firm declarations of John’s heterosexuality from Cynthia and many other women, and despite the statement by McCartney that he “slept in a million hotel rooms, as we all did, with John and there was never any hint that he was gay”. Coleman argues that Epstein ‘would never have risked so profoundly changing his relationship with them, individually or collectively’. He adds that ‘Epstein was not a predator,’ though there is in fact plenty of evidence to suggest that he was.5

In his biography of John, Ray Connolly judges Pete Shotton to be honest, so believes his claim that John said he had let Brian masturbate him. ‘But was John telling the truth? It was well known to those around him that he was keenly heterosexual. But he loved to shock, too. Did he invent a homosexual experience for the fun of it, or, perhaps, did he just exaggerate the incident after Brian made a pass at him? Both are possible. But, equally, as all his life he would be eager to experience anything new, was he curious about homosexuality? When Brian came on to him, did he simply want to know what it was like to be touched by another man?’

Bob Spitz is convinced ‘something happened’, but is unsure what: ‘In the privacy of their room, after an evening of drinking and sporting about, Brian initiated something that led to physical contact.’ Though Spitz peppers the relevant passage with conditionals – ‘if John participated in some sort of homosexual act, it follows that …’ ‘Curiosity may well have gotten the better of him …’ ‘He may have been experimenting …’ – he concludes on a note of certainty: ‘Away from home, in a beautiful resort with a man – certainly a father figure – who was devoted to taking care of him, John was relaxed and open enough to let it happen unconditionally.’

True to form, the relentless Goldman thinks there is no question about it: ‘He and Brian had sex.’ Quoting Shotton’s book as evidence, he argues over the details: ‘Brian told Peter Brown the real story: he had given John a blow job. Lennon couldn’t afford to acknowledge that sort of intimacy because it would stigmatise him for life.’ Yet, as we have seen, Peter Brown was in fact much more circumspect, saying only that Brian had ‘fulfilled his fantasies’.

Having already gone too far, Goldman then goes miles further, asserting, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that ‘John and Brian did not confine themselves to a single sexual experiment in Spain. They were sexually involved for the balance of Brian’s life, and their relationship was a controlling one, with John playing the cruel master and Brian the submissive slave.’

Philip Norman labels Goldman’s book, not unfairly, as both ‘malevolent’ and ‘risibly ignorant’. In his biography of Paul, Norman judges the idea of a sexual encounter between John and Brian possible but not proven, adding that ‘Years later, he told a close friend he’d had sex of some sort with Brian, “once to see what it was like, the second time to make sure I didn’t like it”.’ But in his biography of John, Norman offers a different account, this one from Yoko Ono, with whom he had conducted a series of interviews over three years: ‘Years later, John finally came clean about what had happened: not to anyone who’d been around at the time, but to the unshockable woman with whom he shared the last decade of his life. He said that one night during the trip, Brian had cast aside shyness and scruples and finally come on to him, but that he’d replied, “If you feel like that, go out and find a hustler.”’ Norman adds that ‘Afterward, he had deliberately fed Pete Shotton the myth of his brief surrender, so that everyone would believe his power over Brian to be absolute.’6

Perhaps it is best to leave the last word to Paul. ‘In an earthquake, you get many different versions of what happened by all the people that saw it,’ he observed, decades later, of the Beatles phenomenon. ‘And they’re all true.’

1 In 1967, Makin was to make all the arrangements for Epstein’s funeral. Some credit him with inventing the term ‘Beatlemania’.

2 Goldman (1927–94) wrote The Lives of John Lennon (1988), in which he portrayed John in a uniquely unflattering light, even going so far as to suggest he was a murderer. Goldman died of a heart attack in an aeroplane on the way to London, following a heated argument with flight attendants about having his seat upgraded. ‘Goldman looked like Truman Capote and sounded like Bette Davis,’ wrote his Daily Telegraph obituarist. ‘He was not a modest man: “With the counter-culture,” he declared, “I had found a great field that needed a great mind like mine to explore it.”’

3 The telegram was sold at Sotheby’s in 1984 for £550. In 1980, shortly before he died, John spoke of ‘hitting him with a big stick, and for the first time I thought, I can kill this guy. I just saw it on a screen: if I hit him once more, that’s going to be it. I really got shocked. That’s when I gave up violence, because all my life I’d been like that.’

4 The memoirs of former Beatles office staff share this strange quality of divine omniscience with the memoirs of royal housekeepers and valets.

5 Those who have claimed Epstein made passes at them include Pete Shotton, Larry Kane, Pete Best and the Liverpudlian comedian Freddie Starr (1943–2019), who was then singing with a group called the Midniters. Given to exaggeration, Starr is the only one to talk of a struggle: ‘I started punching his upper arms, which startled him, because it bloody hurt. He quickly backed off and composed himself.’

6 Yoko also told Philip Norman that ‘from chance remarks’ John made, she gathered that he had thought of having an affair with Paul, but Paul had not wanted it. ‘Around Apple, in her hearing Paul would sometimes be called John’s Princess,’ writes Norman. Yoko also told him that she had once heard a rehearsal tape with John’s voice calling out ‘Paul … Paul …’ in a strangely subservient, pleading way. ‘I knew there was something going on there,’ she remembered. ‘From his point of view, not from Paul’s. And he was so angry at Paul, I couldn’t help wondering what it was really about.’

27

The Beatles began 1963 in relative obscurity, and ended it the most famous group in the country. Within another six weeks, they were the most famous group in the world.

As we have seen, at the start of 1963 they were just another jobbing pop group. Their first single, ‘Love Me Do’, had peaked at number 17. Their first concert of 1963 was presented by the Elgin Folk Music Club at the Two Red Shoes Ballroom in Elgin, Scotland, and was attended by two hundred people. Driving in their van from Elgin to the town hall in Dingwall, they were so cold that they lay on top of one another to keep warm. ‘When the one on top got so cold that hypothermia was setting in, it would be his turn to get on the bottom,’ recalled Paul. ‘We’d warm each other up that way.’

At the time, plenty of other British acts – Adam Faith, Mark Wynter, Jet Harris, and of course Cliff Richard and the Shadows – were doing much, much better.

But when success finally came, it came as a landslide, flattening those ahead. Bands and singers who a few months before might have agreed with some reluctance to employ the Beatles as their warm-up act now found themselves in the humiliating position of opening for them. Within the space of five days in September 1963 they were presented with the Top Vocal Group of the Year award at the Savoy Hotel and headed the bill of The Great Pop Prom at the Royal Albert Hall. Meanwhile, ‘She Loves You’ was at number 1 in the charts. As they stood in their smart new suits at the top of the steps behind the Albert Hall, Paul felt the sunshine on his face. ‘We looked at each other, and we were thinking, “This is it! London! The Albert Hall!” We felt like gods! We felt like fucking gods!’

And this was just the beginning. In October, their appearance on Sunday Night at the London Palladium attracted fifteen million viewers. On 4 November they played the Royal Command Performance. Later that month their new single, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, sold a million copies in the UK before it had even been released – roughly one copy for every fifty people in the country.

By the end of 1964 they had become the most famous young men on earth. In Madame Tussauds, their wax effigies took their place alongside world leaders, mass murderers and members of the royal family. In West Bridgford, Nottinghamshire, four brainy pupils of the Becket Grammar School closed their school concert with a spirited rendition of ‘From Me to You’ in Latin.1 The students of Leeds University elected Ringo Starr their vice-president in preference to a former Lord Chief Justice. Visiting the EMI studios, Sir Malcolm Sargent, the most celebrated British conductor of the day, asked George Martin if he might effect an introduction (‘Chaps, Sir Malcolm would like to say “Hello”’).

Everyone wanted to meet them. In Hollywood, top movie stars – Edward G. Robinson, Dean Martin, Lloyd Bridges, Kirk Douglas, Shelley Winters, Jack Palance, Jack Lemmon – donated money to charity in order to queue for their autographs. In exile in France, the Duchess of Windsor sang their songs to herself. ‘Oh, the Beatles. Don’t you just love ’em?’ she said to the up-and-coming young interior designer Nicky Haslam, over on a visit. ‘“I give her all my love, that’s all I do-ooo!” Adore ’em. Do you know them? Oh, you are lucky!’

Where did this leave their rivals? For groups like Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers, it must have been hard to stomach. A year before, the Beatles had looked up to them. From the back of the hall, George would gaze at the Jaywalkers as they set up their flashing coloured lights, their flashing drum kit and their exploding cymbals, and he would think of them as ‘real big shots’. But now those days were past.

Groups that just a short time before had been on level pegging now found it impossible to keep up. The Hollies had formed in 1962, and were having hits by 1963, but by 1964 their achievements seemed minuscule beside the Beatles’. It’s not hard to spot a note of resentment in Graham Nash’s reminiscences, published half a century later:

In those days, tweaking a Beatle was like blaspheming the pope. But who the fuck cared? I was getting sick and tired of their holy status, the way they said whatever was on their minds, no matter whom it affected, right or wrong. All of London was in their thrall. And if you didn’t know Popes John or Paul, or at least drop their names in conversation, you might as well take the next train back to the provinces, over and out. Keith Richards said it best in Life: ‘The Beatles are all over the place like a fucking bag of fleas.’ They were a great band and I loved their records. Every English group owed them a huge debt, but I had no intention of kissing their asses. Besides, last I looked, the Hollies were holding down places on the same top 10 as the Beatles, so pardon me if you don’t like our fucking record but keep it to yourself, if you please.

1 ‘A Me ad Vos’.

28

At the close of 1963 the Beatles starred in their own Christmas variety show at the Astoria in Finsbury Park, playing twice a day for fifteen days. In all, a hundred thousand people bought tickets. The show’s compere was Rolf Harris, the chummy Australian entertainer whose novelty singles ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’ and ‘Sun Arise’, both produced by George Martin, had been top 10 hits. Ten years older than the Beatles, Harris belonged to an older showbusiness tradition, in which professionalism was paramount.

One night, while Harris expounded on the Aboriginal setting of ‘Sun Arise’ to a restless young audience, John began larking around with a microphone backstage. As Rolf was explaining how some tribes regarded the sun as a goddess, John’s grating voice boomed harshly over the speakers: ‘I dunno about that, Rolf.’

The audience laughed uproariously. Rolf looked around, but couldn’t see where the interruption was coming from. So he persevered, describing how, every morning, the tribes thought the sun’s skirts of light were covering the earth.

‘Well, of course, you could say that,’ John piped up. ‘But, then again, I dunno, Rolf! Maybe you’re just making it up!’

Ever the pro, Rolf put on a brave face, and emitted a laugh of forbearance. ‘But inside,’ he later admitted, ‘I was seething.’

When the show was over, he barged his way into the Beatles’ dressing room and shouted, ‘If you want to fuck up your own act, do it! But don’t fuck up mine!’

But the Beatles remained unbowed. ‘Oooh, Rolfie’s lost his rag,’ said John, and George joined in: ‘Yeah, Rolfie’s upset.’

Harris tells the story in his 2001 autobiography Can You Tell What it is Yet?, and affects good cheer. ‘They started laughing and so did I,’ he writes. ‘They had such charm that I couldn’t be angry with them. At least I’d made my point and they didn’t do it again.’

But was he really so conciliatory? In an unguarded moment in 1994, he offered a much less merry version of the event: ‘The Beatles mucked about with me. At that Christmas show, they stood off in the wings with a microphone and made silly comments during one of my songs and I came storming off the stage and shouted, “Get some bloody professionalism into you! Jesus! You don’t muck around with somebody else’s act. Don’t ever bloody do that again.” I was so angry. And after that they didn’t bloody do it again, I can tell you!’

29

Just five days separated the births of John Lennon (9 October 1940) and Cliff Richard (14 October 1940).

By the winter of 1958 Cliff had become a big star, number 2 in the charts with ‘Move It’. Meanwhile, John remained a no-hoper, scuttling around Liverpool with his Quarrymen, playing the odd village hall or private function, often for no more payment than a beer and a sandwich.

‘Is this boy too sexy for television?’ gasped the Daily Sketch after Cliff had gyrated a little too suggestively on television’s Oh Boy. The critic on the New Musical Express was even more perturbed: ‘His violent hip-swinging was revolting, hardly the performance any parent could wish her children to see.’ Before 1963 it was Cliff, not John, who was the rebel, the firebrand, the threat to civilisation. The same evening when Cliff and the Shadows were causing a stir on national television, the Quarrymen were playing skiffle standards at George Harrison’s brother Harry’s wedding reception in Upton Green.

From 1958 to 1962 Cliff had twenty songs in the top 20, including six number ones. He also starred in two films, Expresso Bongo and The Young Ones. Small wonder then that John, no stranger to envy, entertained mixed feelings towards him. When the Beatles finally squeezed into the charts with ‘Love Me Do’ in December 1962, reaching a high point of number 17, Cliff was looking down at them from number 2 with ‘Bachelor Boy’. The following month, the New Musical Express published its annual readers’ survey. In ‘Top Acts’ Cliff Richard came second to Elvis Presley, with the Beatles a lowly joint 111th. They did better in the more specialist ‘British Small Group’ category, coming eighth with 735 votes; but the Shadows came first, with 45,951 votes.

Three months later, in March 1963, the Beatles reached number 2 with ‘Please Please Me’, but they were prevented from reaching number 1 by Cliff, who was already there with ‘Summer Holiday’.

But as 1963 rolled on, the tables turned. By the end of that year the Beatles were making Cliff seem old hat. For George Melly, Cliff’s erotic twitching was now no more than ‘a bent-kneed shuffle, not so much a sexual courtship dance as a suggestion that he’d wet himself’. The Beatles were the future, and Cliff the past. Try as Cliff might, it niggled. In a rare fit of candour, he grumbled about the Beatles’ primitivism to a reporter from the Daily Mirror: ‘All they’ve done is revert to rock’n’roll. We’ve played the whole thing down, the screaming and the raving. The Beatles have stoked the whole thing up again.’

That Christmas, the Beatles occupied the number 1 and number 2 slots in the UK charts with ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ and ‘She Loves You’, while Cliff languished at number 8 with ‘Don’t Talk to Him’. By now, his fans were drifting off in search of brighter, brasher idols. In the New Year it was revealed that Cliff’s own sisters had recently formed a Dave Clark Five fan club.

For five years Cliff had struggled to crack the American market, but without success. In fact, it was Cliff’s failure that spurred Brian Epstein to plot the Beatles’ American campaign with such meticulous care. ‘Cliff went there and he died,’ John told the American journalist Michael Braun with pitiless relish as they boarded their plane to Kennedy Airport. ‘He was fourteenth on a bill with Frankie Avalon.’

Cliff was in the Canary Isles, completing his third movie, Wonderful Life, when he heard the news that the Beatles had achieved the success in America that still eluded him. Wonderful Life was released on 2 July 1964, but was overshadowed by A Hard Day’s Night, released four days later. A Hard Day’s Night broke box-office records, and was hailed by critics on both sides of the Atlantic for its freshness and originality. In contrast, Wonderful Life was called ‘a sad little picture’ by Films and Filming, while the Sunday Times described it as ‘this bloodsome bore of a film’ and ‘drivel’. The film was retitled Swingers’ Paradise for the American market, but to no avail. At the age of twenty-three, Cliff’s film career was over.

Soon after the release of both films, Melody Maker published a feature on the shifting tastes of youth. ‘I grew out of my Cliff Richard days a couple of years ago,’ said a twenty-year-old man. ‘When I look back I think how soppy I must have been. Groups now like the Beatles and the Stones have really got something and I can’t see me getting tired of them. Not until I’m old, anyway.’

From then on, John occupied such a peak of fame and fortune that he rarely bothered to glance down at Cliff Richard. On the other hand, the slightest allusion to the Beatles played havoc with Cliff’s composure. From the mid-sixties he was an ‘all-round family entertainer’, wholesome and unthreatening, performing in cabaret, in pantomime1 and on Saturday-evening television. Deep in his bones, he knew he was no longer ‘with-it’: ‘The success of the Beatles and the Stones had shelved me and the Shadows. We were now the oldsters.’ On Saturday, 6 April 1968, while John Lennon was staying with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, composing songs for The White Album, Cliff was bouncing his way through ‘Congratulations’ in the Eurovision Song Contest, dressed in a light-blue double-breasted suit with frothy white ruffles around the neck and wrists. When the final scores were totted up, it emerged that Cliff had come second to Spain’s Massiel singing ‘La La La’.

Though he was known for his pleasant, can-do persona and his Christianity, Cliff never quite managed to stifle his indignation towards the Beatles. On Sunday, 19 January 1969 he was singing hymns in an Edinburgh church and talking about his religious beliefs when he snapped, ‘The Beatles are very successful artists, and yet they are not successful in life. The Beatles do nothing but chase around the world after a dream, and they must now realise that their Maharishi just doesn’t help them at all. I think they are looking for what Christians have found.’

John Pratt/Stringer

Almost a quarter of a century later, Cliff could still be rattled by a mention of the Beatles. Interviewing him for Q magazine in 1992, Tom Hibbert2 asked if he had ever felt jealousy towards them. The vehemence of his reply suggests he had never stopped brooding.

‘There was a certain amount of jealousy. It was hurtful to be overlooked so dramatically by the media. But I still sold records by the million, so what the heck? And look at me now. The Beatles don’t exist any more, and I was going five years before the Beatles, so no one’s ever going to catch me up. I’ll always be ahead of everybody. I’ve just done my thousandth week in the chart and my nearest competitor hasn’t reached five hundred weeks in the chart, which means that if that person is to catch me up, I would have to stop recording now and they’d have to have a record in the charts every week for the next five years. It’s not possible. I’m well ahead … And another thing: when it came to rebellion, we were far more the rebellious crowd. The Beatles were accepted by royalty, they were accepted by all the high society. The Shadows and I never were. So we had one up on them.’

1 I myself greatly enjoyed Cliff Richard’s performance as Buttons in Cinderella at the London Palladium in 1966, with Terry Scott and Hugh Lloyd as the Ugly Sisters, Tudor Davies as Dandini, and Jack Douglas as Baron Hardup. The Brokers’ Men were played by the Shadows. The speciality act was a baby elephant called ‘The Adorable Tonya’. During this same period, the Beatles were recording ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’.

2 Tom Hibbert (1952–2011) wrote very funny interviews with, among many others, Robert Maxwell, Bernard Manning, Yoko Ono and Sir Jimmy Savile for Smash Hits and Q magazine. In his obituary of him in the Guardian, Mark Ellen wrote: ‘Tom was unafraid of silence. He would give his subjects the impression that, despite their obvious successes, they were still somehow shameful underachievers, and then sit back quietly with a cigarette to enjoy the panicked response.’

30

One day, it struck Ringo Starr that he would never be able to go back to being plain Ritchie Starkey.

He was with his family at his auntie’s house in Liverpool, when some of Ringo’s tea spilt into his saucer. He was shocked by what happened next.

‘Everyone’s reaction was, “He can’t have that! We have to tidy up!”’

In the old days, he would have been left to clear up his own mess. But not any more. Now they were treating him differently, as though he were a superior outsider, and not one of them. It felt, he said, ‘like an arrow in the brain’: ‘Suddenly I was “one of those”, even within my family, and it was very difficult to get used to. I’d grown up and lived with these people and now I found myself in weirdland … Once we’d become big and famous, we soon learnt that people were with us only because of the vague notoriety of being a “Beatle”. And when this happened in the family, it was quite a blow.’

There was no way back. Any complaint would serve only to reinforce their attitude. ‘I couldn’t stand up and say, “Treat me like you used to,” because that would be acting big-time.’

31

A Party:

King’s Road, London SW3

18 April 1963

‘Please Please Me’ is going down in the charts, crossing paths with ‘From Me to You’ on the way up. Meanwhile, the Beatles are appearing in a variety concert at the Royal Albert Hall, ‘Swinging Sound ’63’, along with Del Shannon, Lance Percival, Rolf Harris, Shane Fenton and the Fentones, the Springfields and George Melly.

In an interval between rehearsals, they meet Jane Asher in the Green Room. At the age of sixteen, Jane is already something of a showbiz veteran: her first starring role was Mandy in 1952, and then she starred opposite Jack Warner as the Little Girl in Hammer Horror’s The Quatermass Xperiment. Since then she has appeared in Alice in Wonderland, The Prince and the Pauper, The Adventures of Robin Hood. In the theatre, she was the youngest ever Wendy in Peter Pan. Recently she has become a household name as a regular panellist on TV’s Juke Box Jury.

Jane is attending the variety concert on behalf of the Radio Times: a reporter and a photographer are there to record her reactions. The Beatles are in awe of her, perhaps Paul most of all: ‘We had a photo taken with her and we all fancied her. We’d thought she was blonde, because we’ve only ever seen her on black-and-white telly doing Juke Box Jury, but she turned out to be a redhead. So it was: “Wow, you’re a redhead.”’

Their Royal Albert Hall concert proves to be a milestone, the first time an audience has screamed with quite such abandon. Later, fans climb on the roof of their car and block its way. The police eventually manage to clear a path, and the Beatles and their friends drive off, without really knowing where they are going. They usually end up at the Ad Lib Club, just off Leicester Square, but George, the shyest of the four, worries that hundreds of fans will already be on their way there. Accompanying them, the journalist Chris Hutchins suggests they all go to his place on the King’s Road. He then immediately regrets it, wondering how the four Beatles, Shane Fenton1 and Jane Asher will all be able to squeeze into the tiny bedsit, and where they will sit, given that there aren’t enough chairs.

The problem is solved by everyone sitting on the carpet. But then another problem presents itself: John finds a bottle of amphetamines and starts swallowing them, washing them down with the Mateus rosé provided by Hutchins. Charged up, he becomes aggressive towards Jane. For John, thwarted sexual attraction can sometimes shrivel into spite. First, he talks about their adoring fans.

John: Yeah, the group the fans love so much they want to tear us to pieces.

Jane: (laughing) Oh, John. You’re such a cynic. Admit it, you adore the attention!

John: Sure I’m a cynic. What we play is rock’n’roll under a new name. Rock music is war, hostility, conquest. We sing about love, but we mean sex, and the fans know it.

Hutchins: The fans think you’re decent, clean-living chaps.

John: It’s just an image, and it’s the wrong one. Look at the Rolling Stones. Rough as guts. We did that first and now they’ve pinched it.

Ringo: You can’t blame them for that.

Jane: The fans have to dream that one day they might marry a Beatle.

John: Yeah, but only those who haven’t reached the age of puberty. I give some girl an autograph and she wants my tie or some hair. Then she wants to have sex. Then she tells me she’s only fifteen. Jailbait. Is there any more booze?

Hutchins: (pouring the last of the wine into John’s empty glass) That’s the last of it. I wasn’t expecting company.

John: OK, there’s no more booze. Let’s talk about sex. Jane, how do girls play with themselves?

Jane: (shocked but cool) I’m not going to talk about that!

John: You’re the only girl here and I want to know. How do you jerk off?

Hutchins: There’s only one jerk here.

John: Oh fab! No booze, no birds, insults from the host … what kind of rave is this? Bleedin’ marvellous. I’m going in search of some crumpet. Call me a taxi.

Jane: (crying, comforted by George) You know, John, you can be very cruel sometimes.

John: (standing at the front door) It’s the beast in me.

Around this point, Paul ushers Jane out of the room, and away from John. They sit on a bed together, and chat about food and books. They get on to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which they were both taught at their respective schools. Off the cuff, Paul quotes from ‘The Prioress’s Tale’: ‘Ful semly hir wympul pynched was.’ Jane, a former pupil at the sophisticated Queen’s College in Harley Street, seems much more impressed by this than by Paul’s status as a pop idol, and Paul is equally impressed by her order of priorities. As the evening draws to a close, Paul volunteers to drop Jane home. Before they say goodbye, he has decided that this is the girl for him. On the doorstep of the Asher family home in Wimpole Street he asks for her phone number, and Jane happily gives it to him.

1 Born Bernard Jewry, he changed his name to Shane Fenton, and later to Alvin Stardust.

32

They became boyfriend and girlfriend, and Jane’s parents gave Paul his own little bedroom on the top floor of 57 Wimpole Street, next to Jane’s brother Peter’s room. Paul was to live there, as part of the Asher family, for the next three years, his bedroom filling up with the fruits of his extraordinary career: eventually he was to stow his gold records under his bed, and his MBE on a shelf, alongside two drawings by Jean Cocteau. It was at Wimpole Street that Paul received a letter from the Beatles’ accountant in 1965 informing him that, at the age of twenty-three, he had become a millionaire.

The Ashers were a remarkable family in every way: remarkably accomplished, remarkably civilised, remarkably welcoming. At the age of eight, Peter Asher had appeared opposite Claudette Colbert and Jack Hawkins in the film The Planter’s Wife, and at ten, opposite Cecil Parker and Donald Wolfit in Isn’t Life Wonderful. Jane’s younger sister Claire had acted in the BBC’s long-running radio soap opera Mrs Dale’s Diary. Their mother Margaret was a professor at the Guildhall: back in 1948 she had tutored George Martin in the oboe.

Just like Paul fifteen years later, Martin had relished his visits to the Asher home, with all its comfort and erudition. Despite his upper-class persona (the legacy of wartime service with the RAF, during which ‘we were taught important military details like how to hold a knife and fork correctly’) he had been brought up in a three-room flat in Drayton Park with no kitchen, no bathroom and a toilet shared with three other families. Coming from such an impoverished background, he had been tantalised by the glimpse of a more agreeable life offered by the Ashers of Wimpole Street. And now, Paul, in his turn, was to be tantalised. Everything seemed touched by culture. In the hall of no. 57 hung an engraved portrait of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a distant relative of Margaret Asher; the glass-fronted bookcase in the dining room contained a rare 1926 first edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, brought into the family by Margaret’s father, the Hon. Edward Granville Eliot, who had been Lawrence of Arabia’s solicitor.

Jane’s father, Dr Richard Asher, was a pioneering endocrinologist who in 1951 had named and identified Munchausen’s Syndrome, the mental disorder that drives individuals to fabricate symptoms of illness. He was also a skilled and witty writer: an article by him in the Lancet in February 1951 begins: ‘Here is described a common syndrome which most doctors have seen, but about which little has been written. Like the famous Baron von Munchausen, the persons affected have always travelled widely; and their stories, like those attributed to him, are both dramatic and untruthful. Accordingly, the syndrome is respectfully dedicated to the Baron, and named after him.’ Inevitably, the title ‘Munchausen’s Syndrome’ was criticised by the po-faced for being inappropriately light-hearted.

Dr Asher’s articles in the British Medical Journal remain a joy to read – funny, alert, aphoristic, self-deprecatory, sparklingly clear – and they indicate the breadth of education Paul would have received in his conversations with him. In ‘The Dangers of Going to Bed’, Asher argues against the medical consensus that staying in bed was the surest route to recovery: ‘Look at a patient lying long in bed. What a pathetic picture he makes! The blood clotting in his veins, the lime draining from his bones, the scybala stacking up in his colon, the flesh rotting from his seat, the urine leaking from his distended bladder, and the spirit evaporating from his soul.’ He then undercuts himself by saying, ‘I have painted a gloomy and unfair picture: it is not as bad as all that.’ Later in the same article, he speculated as to the reasons why confinement caught on: ‘Too often a sister puts all her patients back to bed as a housewife puts all her plates back in the plate-rack – to make a generally tidy appearance.’

Another of his articles in the BMJ, carrying the incendiary title ‘Why are Medical Journals so Dull?’, argues against stodginess and obscurity in favour of lucidity and precision: ‘A poor title dulls the clinical appetite, whereas a good title whets it. I have called this article “Why are Medical Journals so Dull?”. I do not claim this title is specially good, but it is better than “A Study of the Negativistic Psychomotor Reactions induced by Perusal of Verbalized Clinical Material”.’

It’s easy to see how Paul would have revelled in such cheery cut-and-thrust. The whole Asher family involved themselves in discussions around the table, alive with erudition and curiosity and fun. ‘They would do things that I’d never seen before, like at dinner there would be word games,’ Paul told Barry Miles. ‘Now, I’m bright enough, but mine is an intuitive brightness. I could just about keep up with that, and I could always say, “I don’t know that word.”’ He remembered an argument over dinner between Dr Asher and his son Peter, Paul’s contemporary, over when the tomato was first introduced to England. This was not the sort of topic they discussed in Forthlin Road. Throughout his years with the Ashers, Paul was treated not as a pop star, but as one of the family: ‘It was very good for me, because in their eyes I wasn’t just the Beatle.’ The atmosphere at Wimpole Street also appealed to his competitive spirit: ‘I often felt the guys were sort of partying, whereas I was learning a lot; learning an awful lot.’ In her music room in the basement, Margaret Asher taught Paul how to play the recorder – he plays it on ‘Fool on the Hill’ – though her attempts to teach him how to read music were soon abandoned.

His intellectual curiosity was stimulated. ‘I don’t want to sound like Jonathan Miller going on, but I’m trying to cram everything in, all the things I’ve missed,’ he told the journalist Maureen Cleave in 1966. ‘People are saying things and painting things that are great, and I must know what people are doing … I vaguely mind people knowing anything I don’t know.’ He read Jung and Huxley, watched plays by Alfred Jarry and Harold Pinter and listened to avant-garde composers like Stockhausen and Luciano Berio.

Sometimes Jane would take Paul to stay with family friends out of town. ‘This was another rather upper-class thing: going for the weekend to the country … It was the first time I’d seen people leaving a book by your bedside for you to read. I was quite impressed by their choice of books. It was the assumption that you were reasonably intelligent that I liked. They didn’t talk down.’

John Downing/Stringer

Inevitably, Beatles fans would linger outside the house, ready to pounce. While Paul was away filming Help!, Jane’s father set himself the task of plotting an escape route for him. He climbed out of a back window and scaled his way along to the house next door, then tapped on a window to explain Paul’s peculiar problem to the occupier of the neighbouring flat. On Paul’s return to London, Dr Asher was thus able to present him with a secret route through to New Cavendish Street. ‘I used to go out of the window of my garret bedroom, onto a little parapet. You had to be pretty careful, it wasn’t that wide, it was only a foot or so, so you had to have something of a head for heights. You’d go along to the right, which was to the next house in Wimpole Street, number 56, and there was a colonel living there, an old ex-army gentleman. He had this little top-floor flat, and he was very charming. “Uh! Coming through, Colonel!” “Oh, oh, OK, hush-hush and all that!” and he’d see me into the lift and I’d go right downstairs to the basement of that house. There was a young couple living down there and they’d see me out through the kitchen and into the garage.’

If I could be any Beatle, at any time, I would be Paul in his Wimpole Street years, living with Jane, cosseted by her family, blessed by luck, happy with life, alive to culture, adored by the world, and with wonderful songs flowing, as if by magic, from my brain and out through the piano: ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, ‘I’m Looking Through You’, ‘The Things We Said Today’, ‘And I Love Her’, ‘We Can Work it Out’, ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, ‘Yesterday’.

But nothing lasts. On Christmas Day 1967, Paul and Jane announced their engagement; seven months later, in reply to a chance question from the TV chat-show host Simon Dee, Jane announced that it was all over: ‘I haven’t broken it off, but it is broken off, finished. I know it sounds corny, but we still see each other and love each other, but it hasn’t worked out. Perhaps we’ll be childhood sweethearts and meet again when we’re about seventy.’

Over fifty years on, they both remain discreet about the break-up, speaking about it in nothing but the most general terms, leaving others to speculate. Some suggest Jane caught Paul in bed with an American woman called Francie Schwartz.1 While Jane was away acting, Paul and Francie had been together in his new house in St John’s Wood. ‘There were fans waiting at the gate as usual and they tried to warn Paul that Jane was approaching. But Paul thought they were joking,’ recalled Alistair Taylor. According to Taylor, Jane broke up with Paul, rather than vice-versa, and refused to take him back. Though Paul, a master of self-possession, has said ‘I don’t remember the break-up as traumatic really,’ and ‘I got cold feet,’ elsewhere he has admitted, ‘It was shattering to be without her.’ Others remember the shock he suffered. Taylor, who thought Jane ‘the most adorable woman you could expect to meet’, recalled Paul being ‘absolutely devastated … he went completely off the rails. “I had everything and I threw it away,” he would say.’ His hairdresser, Leslie Cavendish, noted that ‘he seemed heartbroken to me. He’d stopped shaving his beard, hardly ever left the house and began taking more drugs.’

One or two of their acquaintances claim to have seen it coming. Marianne Faithfull never felt they were a natural fit: ‘I always thought Jane and Paul were very tense. I do remember very clearly an evening at Cavendish Avenue where she wanted the window shut and he wanted the window open. That really was like a Joe Orton play. It was fucking great. I sat there all night watching Jane get up and close it, and Paul open it, and … nothing was said. And quite soon after they split up, which of course I could have told anyone they would.’ But she fails to offer a reason why Jane would have wanted the window open. Might it have been to release the fumes of marijuana that were the necessary accompaniment to any visit by Mick and Marianne?

1 Who later wrote a kiss-and-tell book called Body Count.

33

Before going onstage at the Majestic Ballroom, Newcastle upon Tyne, John and Paul seized the time to write a song.

On 26 June 1963 the two of them were sharing a twin-bedded room at the Royal Turk’s Head Hotel.1 Paul reached for his cigarettes. ‘We must have had a few hours before the show, so we said, “Oh, great! Let’s have a ciggy and write a song!”’

The lyrics of their previous singles – ‘Love Me Do’, ‘Please Please Me’, ‘From Me to You’, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ – all revolved around a single person, but Paul now resolved to do something different.

‘It was Paul’s idea,’ recalled John. ‘Instead of singing “I love you”, we’d have a third party.’ This signalled the way their different approaches to songwriting were to develop: Paul’s towards a third-person narrative, rather like a miniature short story, and John’s more autobiographical.

You think you’ve lost your love

Well I saw her yesterday-ay

One young man is talking to another about a girl who may or may not have left him. The two men are, consciously or unconsciously, versions of the two composers – Paul optimistic, self-confident, never short of advice, and John, primed to cause hurt – ‘she said you hurt her so’ – while in retreat from his own sense of guilt. Like so many subsequent Lennon/McCartney songs, its energy comes from this intermingling of the dark and the sunny.

The Beatles had the next day free, so John and Paul went back to Liverpool. This gave them the chance to complete their new song in Forthlin Road, while Paul’s dad Jim sat in the next room, smoking and watching television.

At this stage John and Paul were both magpies, lifting whatever took their fancy from other people’s songs: the ‘woo woo’ came from the Isley Brothers’ ‘Twist and Shout’. John, in particular, was fond of these whoops and hollers, noises below or beyond words: when he heard Elvis Presley singing ‘All Shook Up’, his first thought was that he had never heard ‘uh huh’, ‘oh yeah’ and ‘yeah, yeah’ all in the same song before.

After a while, the two of them burst into the living room. ‘Dad, listen to this. What do you think?’ Then they sang him their new song: ‘She Loves You’.

‘That’s very nice, son,’ said Jim, one of the old school. ‘But there’s enough of these Americanisms around. Couldn’t you sing, “She loves you, yes, yes, yes”?’ John and Paul failed to take this advice seriously. ‘We collapsed in a heap and said, “No, Dad, you don’t quite get it.”’

Four days later, the Beatles went to the EMI studios in Abbey Road to record their new song. They arrived early, in order to pose for a new set of pictures in the alleyway behind the studio. By now, wherever they went they were attracting fans. One thing led to another: the fans who were already waiting outside telephoned their friends to tip them off, and those friends told more friends, and so forth. Before long, this mass of girls somehow managed to break through the front door and to rush around the building in search of their idols. ‘It’s a bloody madhouse out there,’ said Neil Aspinall as he entered the studio.

Meanwhile, placing the song sheets on the music stands, the EMI recording engineer Norman Smith2 glanced at the lyrics. ‘I thought, “I’ll just have a quick look. ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah; She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah; She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.’” I thought, “Oh my God, what a lyric. This is going to be one that I do not like.”’

George Martin, calm as ever, ran John and Paul through their new song, with George Harrison joining in on the choruses. ‘I thought it was great, but was intrigued by the final chord, an odd sort of major sixth, with George doing the sixth and John and Paul the third and fifths, like a Glenn Miller arrangement. They were saying, “It’s a great chord! Nobody’s ever heard it before!” Of course, that wasn’t quite true.’

In fact, much of John and Paul’s early inventiveness as songwriters sprang from a kind of blissful ignorance. Neither could read music, or had ever had formal lessons. This meant they tended to come across chords by chance. Their early songs reflect the innocent wonder with which they chanced upon the source of all music, as if for the very first time.

With the marauding fans dispersed from the building, the recording session could begin. It occurred to recording engineer Geoff Emerick that the excitement generated by the invading fans helped to spark a new level of energy and invention in the band’s playing, not least from Ringo and George. Hearing the song performed, Norman Smith, having been sceptical, immediately got the point of it: ‘When they started to sing it – bang, wow, terrific. I was up at the mixer jogging around.’

Emerick, too, was enthralled: ‘There was a level of intensity in that performance that I had not heard before and have rarely heard since. I still judge that single to be one of the most exciting performances of the Beatles’ entire career.’

‘She Loves You’ was released on 23 August 1963. Within a month it had sold three quarters of a million copies in Britain, making it the fastest-selling record ever. It was to remain in the top three for eighteen weeks, and in the charts for thirty-one weeks. For many, fans and foes alike, it remains the quintessential Beatles song. The words to which Jim McCartney had objected – Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! – have become emblematic of the Beatles phenomenon: either callow and inarticulate, or fresh and liberating, depending on your outlook. In Europe, the Beatles were commonly referred to as ‘the Yeah-Yeahs’.

For conservatives who preferred the world to stay the same, ‘She Loves You’ acted as an alarm call; for Marxists, it symbolised Western decadence. ‘Is it truly the case that we have to copy all the dirt that comes from the West?’ asked the East German leader Walter Ulbricht in a speech to his party. ‘I think, Comrades, with the monotony of the yeah yeah yeah or whatever it is called we should make a stop.’

For once, America was slow to pick up on a new trend. Released in the States on 16 September, ‘She Loves You’ sold barely a thousand copies in its first few weeks, and failed to hit the charts. At the cutting-edge Café Wha? in Greenwich Village, the hard-boiled folk singer Steve De Naut first heard it in October. His then girlfriend, Vicky Tiel, remembers him marching into her apartment and – ‘Listen to this, baby’ – placing it on the record player. ‘Steve and I started to make love. At the point where it changes beats, he stopped in the middle of having sex. “Listen to this!” he said. The music went down to another beat. He said, “Nobody fucking does that! That’s no! And the ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’? That’s fucking no! Nobody does that!”’

Vicky couldn’t understand what Steve was getting at. ‘It’s a new type of music,’ he explained. ‘I’ve never heard anything like it. And it’s fantastic.’ He then added, more despondently: ‘I’m finished. It’s over. It’s over for all of us.’

1 Later renamed the Rainbow.

2 While working at EMI, Norman Smith (1923–2008) produced Pink Floyd’s ‘See Emily Play’, as well as their first four albums. He later became briefly famous as the gravelly-voiced Hurricane Smith, whose single ‘Don’t Let it Die’ reached number 2 in the charts in 1971.

34

John Lennon and Ringo Starr were born in 1940, when the words blitz, paratroops, call-up and quisling came into being, as well as the verb to scramble in its new meaning of ‘to make a speedy take-off’.

Other neologisms of 1940 heralded a bold new unstuffy age of American goods and trends: beefburger, crew-cut, holiday camp, mobile home, nylons, telly, super-duper, youth club. Many were born of inventions: jeep, plutonium, radar. Some, like telly, were chummy abbreviations for recent inventions now so widespread that they felt like old friends. Others, like extra-sensory perception, emerged from a closer study of what had always been there, or – viewed from another angle – what had always been not there.

The following year, 1941, the term welfare state was coined, as were disc jockey, boogie, cheesed-off, Terylene, sunbathe, straight, in its meaning of ‘conformist’, and knockers meaning breasts. It was also in this year – the year between the births of John and Paul – that the word teenager made its first appearance.

Paul McCartney was born in 1942, when spaceman, office block, napalm and sixty-four-dollar question first appeared, along with the abbreviations PR and preggers. George, the youngest Beatle, was born in 1943, when bobby socks, disposable, paper towel, pizzeria, double glazing and falsies were coined. Squarebashing also made its debut that year, and, perhaps as a sort of cosmic counterbalance, so did group therapy and free expression. In England, Barnes Wallis invented the bouncing bomb, and in Switzerland, Dr Albert Hofmann combined Lysergic Acid with Diethylamine to create Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, later to become known as LSD.

Most people date the origin of the Beatles to 1957, when the fifteen-year-old Paul introduced himself to the sixteen-year-old John. Many of that year’s new words and expressions were centred around youth: Frisbee, skiffle, sexpot, scooter, pop art, bonkers, backlash, Hell’s Angel, flick knife, diminished responsibility, consenting adult, role model, angry young man. A long-playing record began to be known as an album. In the USA, female traffic wardens were nicknamed meter maids. The adjective fab, an abbreviation of fabulous, was first heard that year, though it wasn’t to become widespread until 1963, more often than not preceding the number four.

It was also in 1963 that another word associated with the Fab Four came into being. On 5 October 1963 a young concert promoter called Andi Lothian was in Glasgow’s Carnegie Hall when onto the stage came the young group he had booked. For him, the audience reaction called to mind the relief of Mafeking: ‘absolute pandemonium. Girls fainting, screaming, wet seats. The whole hall went into some kind of state, almost like collective hypnotism.’ Amidst the mayhem, a startled reporter from Radio Scotland yelled, ‘For God’s sake, Andi, what’s happening?’ From out of nowhere, a new word popped into his head. ‘Don’t worry,’ he yelled back, ‘It’s only … Beatlemania!’

Fox Photos/Stringer

35

Towards the end of 1963, the sanity of the younger generation was being called into question. ‘Many young people these days complain that adults tend to condemn them,’ wrote one irate newspaper reader. ‘But when one sees the disgusting behaviour now occurring up and down the country under the name of “Beatlemania” it is impossible not to draw certain conclusions.’

A columnist in York’s Evening Press echoed this sentiment: ‘Ask any teenager in York and they could name the four Beatles. Now ask those same teenagers for the names of a few other well-known personalities. The Secretary General of the United Nations, for example, or even our own Prime Minister. The answers, in many cases, will not slip so easily off the tongue. Such is fame. Such is our sense of values in the modern world.’ That same columnist, the aptly-named John Blunt, decried ‘the howling, screaming, bustling, shoving, fighting mobs which collect whenever they make an appearance’.

Throughout the Beatles’ tour of the UK, reporters struggled to describe the sound of thousands of adolescents screaming at the top of their voices. ‘I have not attended the mass torture or execution of 5000 assorted farmyard animals,’ wrote the Newcastle Journal’s reporter Rodney Pybus. ‘But I imagine the noise they would make would be very similar to that which forced my fingertips deep into my ears.’ Other newspapers roped in tame psychologists to dig deeper in the hope of uncovering the source of this mayhem. ‘This is not really hysteria. Hysteria is pathological. It is a disease,’ concluded Professor John Cohen, the head of the Psychology Department at Manchester University. To the central question – why do the girls scream? – he drew a blank: ‘You might as well ask a flock of geese why they fly and flap their wings.’ At the Beatles’ concert in the Southend Odeon on 9 December, a policeman armed with a noise meter recorded the screaming at 110 decibels, the equal of a sustained artillery barrage.

The American journalist Michael Braun accompanied the Beatles to the Cambridge Regal on 26 November. At that same venue the previous March the group had supported ‘America’s Exciting’ Chris Montez and ‘America’s Fabulous’ Tommy Roe. But now it was they who were being supported by others. Fans had been queuing in the streets outside the Regal since 10.30 a.m. By 6 p.m. the line was already half a mile long. Hours before the show, the Beatles had met the police at an agreed spot a mile away, to be smuggled into the theatre in the back of a police van.

When I was a child, whenever we went to the cinema in Dorking, or the pantomime in Leatherhead, ‘God Save the Queen’ would be played before and after each show. As if by magic, the audience would rise from their seats and stand to attention until the patriotic strains were finally exhausted. When the National Anthem was played at the start of the Beatles’ Cambridge show, Michael Braun witnessed not a hint of rebellion. But then again, there were plenty of unscream-at-able support acts to get through before the Beatles were due on, among them Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers, the Vernon Girls and the Brook Brothers. But the second the Beatles were announced the audience burst into high-pitched screams that continued right up to the strumming of the final chord of ‘Twist and Shout’. ‘Some girls are now waving handkerchiefs,’ wrote Braun. ‘Others are sitting in a foetal position: back arched, legs folded under, and hands alternately punching their thighs and covering their ears. Most of the boys just keep their hands over their ears.’

Braun watched a girl in an aisle seat crying every time the lights went up and down. At the end, after ‘Twist and Shout’, she stood on her seat screaming and crying until the National Anthem began to play over the house speakers. At that moment, in common with all the other girls, she stopped screaming and stood stock-still. But the second it drew to a close – Gar-aar-ard Say-aay-aayve the Quee-eee-eeen! – they all started screaming again.1

This peculiar pattern was repeated throughout the Beatles’ tour of Britain. Stewards at these shows tended to be middle-aged and hard-done-by, temperamentally ill-suited to extracting enjoyment from youthful exuberance. At the show in Leicester’s De Montfort Hall on 1 December, police and stewards were supplied with cotton wool to protect their ears. The fifty-nine-year-old Ray Millward complained that he had been kicked and punched by a delirious female fan: ‘We used to get a lot of hysteria with Cliff Richard, but this beats everything. I had a shoe and an umbrella thrown at me. One girl fought like a wildcat. I had to force her arm behind her back to get her to sit down. She was scratching, kicking and screaming.’ Jelly babies – which, in an offhand moment, the Beatles had said they enjoyed – were now being hurled at them from every corner, even though the group had publicly protested that they would prefer it if they weren’t. Misunderstanding them, some girls started throwing full boxes of chocolates instead. Autograph books, a doll and a giant panda were also hurled. Despite this pandemonium, the fans still stood stock-still for the National Anthem, a godsend from the Beatles’ point of view, as it gave them plenty of time to make a speedy getaway through the stage door to their waiting Austin Princess. Meanwhile their fans remained inside, rooted to the spot out of respect for Her Majesty.

That November, as the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon arrived at the Prince of Wales theatre for the Royal Command Performance, they were greeted by crowds chanting ‘We Want the Beatles!’ At that moment, it must have dawned on them that, like so many other long-established groups that year, they too had just been downgraded to a support act.

Taking his seat in the audience, Brian Epstein was nervous. Could he trust John to behave? The day before, John had worked out a cheeky joke for introducing their final song, ‘Twist and Shout’: ‘For our last number, I’d like to ask your help. Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands. And the rest of you, if you’d just rattle your jewellery.’ It was already slightly edgy, but in the dress rehearsal John had made it a good deal edgier by saying ‘rattle your fucking jewellery’. To Epstein’s relief, when the big moment came John omitted the expletive, and even added a chummy thumbs-up to show it was only a joke. In their black ties and evening dresses, the audience burst into laughter and applause.

After the show, the Beatles were presented to the Queen Mother. Or – given society’s new priorities – was it the Queen Mother who was presented to the Beatles? She had, she said, very much enjoyed herself. And where would they be performing next? Slough, came the answer. ‘Oh, that’s near us,’ she replied.

The next day’s newspapers were full of the Beatles. Devoting an editorial to their triumph, the working-class Daily Mirror welcomed the revolution:

Fact is that Beatle People are everywhere. From Wapping to Windsor. Aged seven to seventy. And it’s plain to see why these four cheeky, energetic lads from Liverpool go down so big.

They’re young, new. They’re high-spirited, cheerful. What a change from the self-pitying moaners, crooning their lovelorn tunes from the tortured shallows of lukewarm hearts.

The Beatles are whacky. They wear their hair like a mop – but it’s WASHED, it’s super clean. So is their fresh young act. They don’t have to rely on off-colour jokes about homos for their fun …

Youngsters like the Beatles are doing a good turn for show business – and the rest of us – with their new sounds, new looks.

Good luck Beatles!

On perpetual guard against the new and unseemly, the Daily Telegraph condemned the delirium. ‘This hysteria presumably fills heads and hearts otherwise empty,’ argued the author of an anonymous editorial. ‘Is there not something a bit frightening in whole masses of young people, all apparently so suggestible, so volatile and rudderless? What material here for a maniac’s shaping! Hitler would have disapproved, but he could have seen what in other circumstances might be made of it.’

On their return to Leicester a year later, in October 1964, the Beatles attempted to execute their usual trick, rushing offstage and into their car while the National Anthem was playing. But in that brief period, the mores of society had changed: this time, a group of sixty or seventy fans failed to stand to attention, preferring to run out of the theatre and swarm around the Beatles in their car, hammering on the roof and windows. Discombobulated, the driver lost his nerve and careered into another car, but still the fans hammered away, forcing the Beatles to wait for the police to come and free them.

1 While writing this book, I have had nights when I have been kept awake as this or that Beatles song played over and over again in my brain. When it has been some particularly repetitive song – ‘Yellow Submarine’, say, or ‘All Together Now’ – I found that singing an opposing ‘God Save the Queen’ in some other part of my head proved the only way to drown it out. The trouble with this method, though, is that you are left with a song even more annoying than those it has replaced.

36

The sudden arrival of the Beatles came as a shock to many in the old guard of showbusiness.

Marlene Dietrich, star of The Blue Angel (1930) and Blonde Venus (1932), was sixty-one years old when she agreed to appear in the 1963 Royal Variety Performance. Her international stature seemed to guarantee her the role of star of the evening.

In July 1963 the impresario Bernard Delfont was asked by his sixteen-year-old daughter Susan to book the Beatles for the show. Delfont was nonplussed: ‘I had never heard of them … when I asked what they did, she said they were somehow – well, you know – different.’

Soon afterwards, he heard that someone in his organisation had booked them for a Sunday performance at the Princess Theatre, Torquay. He immediately phoned the theatre manager.

‘How’s business?’ I asked the manager.

‘We’ve sold out,’ he said. ‘There are fans sleeping on the street, waiting for returns.’

That was good enough for me. I made the booking.

By November, the Beatles’ fame had eclipsed Dietrich’s. As the big day drew closer, Delfont noticed how much this upset Dietrich, who felt that all the kudos should be hers. ‘I anticipated a clash of temperament, but I should have known that Miss Dietrich would not stoop to a vulgar brawl,’ he recalled. ‘Instead, she fought back with all the subtle ruthlessness of Lady Macbeth.’

During rehearsals, Delfont’s sister Rita noticed Dietrich behaving ‘petulantly and selfishly’, hogging more than her fair share of the time available. When she had finished, all the photographers swept down to the front of the stalls. ‘Not now, darling!’ she ordered. ‘Come back in an hour when I’ve got my make-up on!’ It had simply not occurred to her that they were there for the Beatles.

The cameras flashed away as the Beatles rehearsed for their allotted period. ‘By the time Marlene returned, now resplendent in a sequined gown and wearing full make-up, there wasn’t a photographer in sight,’ recalled Rita Delfont.

The photographers returned for photocalls just before the show. Once again, the Beatles were the centre of attention, but each time they struck a new pose Dietrich would miraculously appear, elbowing her way into the frame. ‘The boys, who were still a little unsure of themselves, accepted the intrusion as a compliment. Not so the production team, who recognised scene-stealing when they saw it.’

George Freston/Stringer

Nevertheless, she made quite an impression on Ringo: ‘I remember staring at her legs, which were great, as she slouched against a chair. I’m a leg-man. “Look at those pins!”’

Dietrich herself finally warmed to the group. ‘They are so SEXY!’ she remarked to Brian Epstein after the curtain went down. ‘It was a joy to be with them. I adore these Beatles. They have the girls so frantic for them. They must have quite a time!’

Four years later, the Beatles repaid the compliment by placing Marlene Dietrich among the chosen few on the cover of Sgt. Pepper.

37

In the basement of the Ashers’ house in Wimpole Street was a little room where Margaret Asher would teach her pupils how to play the oboe. It contained a sofa, an upright piano and a music stand. When Margaret wasn’t in need of the room she let Paul use it to write his pop songs.

One day in mid-October 1963 John dropped by. The two of them went down to the little room in the basement and sat together on Mrs Asher’s piano stool. Brian Epstein had told them that their next, most important task was to compose a song to crack the elusive American market. Up to now, their hit singles in Britain – ‘From Me to You’, ‘She Loves You’, ‘Please Please Me’ – had all flopped over there.

Doodling about, they came up with the line ‘Oh, you-ou-ou got that something’. Paul hit a chord to accompany it. ‘That’s it!’ said John. ‘Do that again!’

After an hour or so, Paul went upstairs and put his head around the door of Peter Asher’s bedroom. ‘Do you want to come and hear something we’ve just written?’ he asked. Peter accompanied him back downstairs, and together Paul and John played him their new song, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’.

‘What do you think?’ asked Paul.

‘Oh, my God! Can you play that again?’ said Peter. As he listened to it for a second time, he thought: ‘Am I losing my mind, or is this the greatest song I ever heard in my life?’

A day or two later, John and Paul took ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ along to the Abbey Road studios. They were speedy workers: in the same session they recorded ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, its B-side, ‘This Boy’, their first Christmas message for their fan club, and half of ‘You Really Got a Hold on Me’. As if this were not enough, Paul left halfway through to go out to lunch with a girl who had won first prize in a ‘Why I Like the Beatles’ essay competition.

These were busy days. Over the next three weeks they packed in an appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars, a tour of Scandinavia, the Royal Command Performance (‘rattle yer jewellery’), concerts in Cheltenham, Sheffield, Slough, Leeds and Northampton, and a trip to Dublin.

On 9 November they were driven in their Austin Princess to East Ham, where the crowds outside the Granada cinema were so wild that even the Beatles’ food had its own police escort.

Before they went onstage, George Martin put his head round the door and called for silence.

‘Listen, everybody, I’ve got something important to tell you all. I have just heard the news from EMI that the advance sales of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” have topped a million.’

Everyone cheered. ‘Yeah, great,’ said John, never slow to spot the cloud blocking a silver lining. ‘But that means it’ll only be at number 1 for about a week.’

‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ was released in Britain on 29 November 1963, little more than six weeks after John and Paul had composed it in an hour in Margaret Asher’s basement room. Two weeks later it reached number 1, knocking ‘She Loves You’ down to number 2. Contrary to John’s prediction, it was to remain at number 1 for another four weeks, and was in the charts until the end of April, by which time their follow-up single, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, had already topped the charts for three weeks.1

‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ was not released in America for another month, and then only after a notably random chain of events. A Washington disc jockey had been given a British copy by an air hostess, and played it over and over again on his show, prompting top-forty stations in Chicago and St Louis to follow suit. At this point, Capitol Records recognised its potential, and released it as a single on Boxing Day 1963. Within a week it had reached number 43 in the US charts; it seemed likely to climb higher.

1 ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ surrendered its number 1 slot to another Lennon/McCartney composition, ‘World Without Love’, sung by Peter Asher and his friend Gordon Waller, jointly known as Peter and Gordon.

38

At three in the morning on 17 January 1964, the Beatles were in their palatial suite at the George V Hotel in Paris, having just played the first of a series of concerts at the Olympia Theatre. As they sat around in their pyjamas and dressing gowns, Brian Epstein came in, clutching a telegram.

‘Boys,’ he said, ‘you’re number 1 in America!’ For once, even John was thrilled. Their road manager, Mal Evans, witnessed their elation. To him they were ‘just a bunch of kids, jumping up and down with sheer delight’.

Lefebvre André/Getty Images

Ringo was cock-a-hoop: ‘We couldn’t believe it. We all started acting like people from Texas, hollering and shouting Ya-hoo.’ Paul climbed onto Mal’s shoulders and demanded a piggyback ride. There to cover their tour, the photographer Harry Benson suggested they stage a celebratory pillow-fight. ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,’ said John. A second later he picked up a pillow and whacked Paul on the back of the head, and then all four of them leapt onto the vast Empire bed and started walloping one another with pillows. In their pyjamas and dressing gowns, they continued their merry japes, picking Ringo up and – ‘One, two, three, four!’ – throwing him into the air. Would they ever again be so deliriously happy?

39

It had all happened so fast. Exactly a year before, on 17 January 1963, they had been playing the Cavern and the Majestic Ballroom, Birkenhead. A year before that, on 1 January 1962, they had been turned down by Dick Rowe of Decca Records, on the grounds that ‘groups of guitars are on their way out’.

And now they had cracked America. In the first three days of its US release, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ sold a quarter of a million copies. It went on to sell five million.

The poet Allen Ginsberg was in the Dom, a ‘hip hangout’ in New York’s East Village, when he first heard the song: ‘I heard that high, yodelling alto sound of the OOOH that went right through my skull, and I realised it was going to go through the skull of Western civilisation.’ To the amazement of his fellow intellectuals, the portly Ginsberg got up and danced around.

When Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys heard it, ‘I flipped. It was like a shock went through my system.’ The current Beach Boys single, ‘Be True to Your School’, had the chorus:

Be true to your school now

Just like you would to your girl or guy

Be true to your school now

And let your colors fly.

In that instant, Wilson realised that the Beatles had rendered him antique. He was two days younger than Paul, but now felt like an old-timer: ‘I immediately knew that everything had changed.’

For the past six months the Beach Boys had been the most popular group in America. But from now on they would be obliged to live in the shadow of the Beatles. To make matters worse, the Beatles were signed to Capitol, the same label as the Beach Boys. The very same executives who had been giving the Beach Boys all their attention now couldn’t stop talking about the Fab Four. ‘The Beach Boys had been it for two years, but now people thought the Beatles were the future. And loyalties ran thin at Capitol,’ recalled their promoter, Fred Vail.

The following April they recorded ‘Don’t Back Down’. Unlike their other songs, it had an air of doom about it: ‘The girls dig the way the guys get all wiped out … When a twenty-footer sneaks up like a ton of lead’. It was to be the Beach Boys’ very last surfing song.

In Freehold, New Jersey, a fourteen-year-old boy was sitting in the front seat of his mother’s car when the song came on the radio. He felt time stop, and his hair standing on end. ‘Some strange and voodoolike effect’ took hold of him, ‘the radio burning brighter before my eyes as it strained to contain the sound’. They reached home, but he didn’t go in. Instead, he ran straight to the bowling alley on Main Street, rushed to the phone booth and called his girlfriend Jan.

‘Have you heard the Beatles?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, they’re cool,’ she replied. He then rushed to Newbury’s, a store with a minimal record section. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ wasn’t in stock, so instead he bought a single called ‘My Bonnie’, apparently by ‘The Beatles with Tony Sheridan and Guests’. ‘It was a rip-off. The Beatles backing some singer I’d never heard of … I bought it. And listened to it. It wasn’t great but it was as close as I could get.’

He instantly set his heart on a guitar displayed in the window of the West Auto store on Main Street. When the summer came, his Aunt Dora paid him to paint her house, and he bought the guitar with the money he earned: ‘That summer, time moved slowly.’ He lived for every release by the Beatles. ‘I searched the newsstands for every magazine with a photo I hadn’t seen and I dreamed … dreamed … dreamed … that it was me … I didn’t want to meet the Beatles. I wanted to be the Beatles.’

Over half a century on, Bruce Springsteen still believes that hearing ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ that day in his mother’s car changed the course of his life.

In Chicago, the ten-year-old Ruby Wax was standing in a record shop when the B-side of ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ came blasting out.

‘Over the speakers the Beatles were singing “Well, she was just seventeen”, and all of my organs lit up into red alert. This was the most exciting sound I had ever heard – it was a Big Moment. No one man since then has ever switched the “on” button like they did.’

Over the next few weeks, Ruby plastered her bedroom wall with Beatles posters, which she then ritually licked. She collected Beatles magazines, pens, records, sunglasses, clocks, socks and stickers. ‘I would turn up the sound of my Beatles records to eardrum-shattering levels and weep and moan and scream out my love.’ She would even call the telephone operator in Liverpool just to hear her say ‘Hello’ in a Scouse accent. ‘Then I’d become so overwhelmed I’d have to hang up.’

Serving a ten-year sentence in McNeil Island Corrections Center, Washington State, the petty criminal Charlie Manson kept hearing ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ playing on the radios circulating among the inmates.

According to his biographer, Manson was impressed by the music, but far more impressed by the adulation the Beatles were receiving: ‘Charlie always yearned for attention; now he decided that fame was what he really wanted. If these four Beatles could have it, why couldn’t he? … Charlie started telling anyone willing to listen and also those who weren’t that he was going to be bigger than the Beatles.’

From that point on, Manson spent his time in McNeil hunched over a guitar. Whenever his mother Kathleen came visiting he would tell her, with an almost manic insistence, that one day soon he too would be famous.

40

In January 1964 the Ronettes came to London to headline their first British tour, supported by a local group, the Rolling Stones.

On their first night a party was thrown for them by the Radio Luxembourg disc jockey Tony Hall at his home in Green Street, Mayfair, just down the road from where George and Ringo were living.

John, George and Ringo were already there when the Ronettes came in. The Ronettes were aware of the fame of the Beatles – since their arrival they had heard of little else – but had still not heard their music. For their part, the three Beatles were mustard-keen on the Ronettes, with their lusty, yearning voices and shapely bodies.

As the Ronettes entered, John, George and Ringo made a beeline for them, and showered them with praise. ‘You’ve got the greatest voice,’ George told Ronnie Bennett, the lead singer. ‘We loved it the first time we heard you.’ Generally thrifty with his compliments, John was similarly effusive. ‘Fuckin’ great,’ he said.

‘They kept telling us how much they loved our long black hair, and how our whole look blew them away,’ remembered Ronnie. ‘And we weren’t exactly having a bad time ourselves.’

They all started dancing to records by the Ronettes – ‘Be My Baby’, ‘Baby, I Love You’, ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’. Over the course of the evening the three girls enjoyed teaching the Beatles the latest dance moves from America: the Pony, the Jerk, the Nitty-Gritty. Usually a reluctant dancer, John proved eager for tuition from Ronnie. ‘Every time we’d start to dance, John would come over and say, “I don’t know if I’ve got this one yet, Ronnie. I may need some extra instruction.” It didn’t take me long to figure out that he liked me.’

At the same time, George was making it clear that he was similarly taken with Ronnie’s elder sister, Estelle. ‘We were young and in a foreign country, so we decided to forget our boyfriends back home and have some fun,’ recalled Ronnie, whose highly-strung boyfriend, the record producer Phil Spector, was safely back in America.

As the night wore on, George and Estelle disappeared from the dance floor, and Ronnie agreed to let John take her on a tour of the house. She was impressed: ‘There were antique vases and fine art in every room.’ Upstairs, John began trying all the door handles. It dawned on Ronnie that he was after a hidey-hole. ‘John finally found one door open, so we walked in, but it was so dark we didn’t even notice that George and Estelle were already in there, sitting on the bed. “Oops! Sorry guys!” I said.’ They eventually found an empty room. Together they sat on a window seat, gazing out over a view of ‘this fairy-tale land of lights and towers that seemed to go on forever’ as the mood became more intimate.

‘What’s all this like for you?’ asked Ronnie.

‘Well, there’s a draught, and this window seat is killing my bum.’

‘That’s not what I meant. I mean being famous.’

‘Oh, I see. Serious stuff. I’ll need a smoke for this, then.’

They talked about fame. John remembered sitting in cafés with the other Beatles, fantasising about the future. ‘We’d sit there with our jam butties and tea, saying, “When we get our record contract, everything’s going to change. We’ll have limousines and chauffeurs, and we’ll never have to eat another jam butty as long as we live!” Then we got our record contract, and you know what’s ’appened?’

‘Nothing really changed?’

‘Nope. Turns out we were right – everything did change. We got our limousines and our drivers, and now we’ve gone right off jam butties. If I even think of them I want to heave up.’

All this talk made Ronnie wonder whether John was ‘one of these heavy brain people, just like Phil’. She could also tell that John liked her ‘for more than just my voice. When he leaned over and started kissing me, I have to admit he made me forget about Phil for a few seconds.’

Professionally, Ronnie had often sung about kissing – ‘I’ll make you happy, baby, just wait and see. For every kiss you give me, I’ll give you three’ – but so far she had taken things no further. ‘I know it might seem hard to believe now, but I hadn’t done much more than kiss a guy on the lips until then, and that included Phil. Romance was everything, and sex was still a mystery. But the way things were going on that window seat, it didn’t look like it was going to stay that way for long.’ As they kissed, John started ‘moving his hands around in places I didn’t even know I had’. He then put them around her waist, and tried to edge her towards the king-sized bed, but at that moment Ronnie’s thoughts turned to Phil, and she suddenly dug her feet into the rug, causing John to topple over onto the floor. ‘Do you think we could go back down to the party?’ she asked.

Gilles Petard/Getty Images

Estelle and Ronnie embarked on a series of double dates with George and John. Ronnie was intrigued by how starstruck the two Beatles were, always wanting to know more about American singers and musicians: ‘Tell us about the Temptations! … What’s Ben E. King really like?’

One night, George and John collected Estelle and Ronnie from the lobby of the Strand Palace Hotel. Caught off-guard, John made the mistake of asking their mother, who was accompanying the girls, if she would like to come too. Her enthusiastic response came as a bitter disappointment. ‘Dinner? Oh, that sounds fun. Let me get my purse.’

The evening proved awkward, not least for Ronnie. ‘How can you say anything with your mother sitting around? And the worst part was that she didn’t say a word the whole time. She just kept staring at us through the whole meal.’

Decades later, her mother confessed to Ronnie that she didn’t care for the way ‘these big grown men were really liking my little girls … I thought, “Well, what kind of a life am I going to have now?”’ It was, she thought, ‘the most hurtingest night of my life’.

Towards the end of the month, Phil Spector arrived in town. Ronnie knew his presence would spell the end of their fun: he was bound to refuse to go clubbing, and would certainly never let her go out without him. Phil never said anything, but Ronnie sensed that he didn’t like the way she had been spending so much time with the Beatles: Phil could be tricky that way.1 At the same time, on their UK tour Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones had fallen in love with Ronnie: ‘Keith used to say, “Oh, we would have great babies because you have that black, thick hair and I have black, thick hair.”’

On 5 February Tony Hall threw another party at his Green Street flat, this time for the Beatles, who were set to embark on their first US tour. ‘It was a very sweet evening,’ recalls one person there that night, ‘because the Beatles, as big as they were at that time, had no idea what was about to hit them when they went to America, so they were very apprehensive.’ Everyone danced along to Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Heat Wave’, and Ronnie joined in the singing at the top of her voice.

‘Ronnie was the bird everyone wanted to shag’ remembered Tony Calder, a music PR. ‘Everybody was salivating over this incredible little thing.’ Meanwhile, he saw Phil Spector ‘getting very wound up about the attention everybody was paying to Ronnie. You could feel the sexual tension, every guy in the place looking at her. Because she was exotic. And she was American!’

Phil’s jealousy rocketed still further when he heard from Ronnie’s mother that John had invited the Ronettes to fly to America with the Beatles. Ronnie hadn’t had the nerve to tell Phil about their generous offer, so she had asked her mother to broach the topic.

‘You know, Phil, it might be good publicity if the girls went back on the jet with the Beatles.’

‘No, I’ve already bought their tickets.’

The Ronettes flew back to New York the next day, without the Beatles. Phil told Ronnie he would make his own way back.

1 And how! In 1968, soon after their marriage, he gave her a car for her twenty-fifth birthday, but insisted she drive it only when accompanied by him – or if he was unavailable, by a life-sized inflatable plastic replica of him, with its knees bent in a permanent sitting position. ‘Now nobody will fuck with you when you’re driving alone,’ he explained triumphantly. Year upon year, Phil’s jealousy increased. He trapped Ronnie in their house, surrounding it with barbed wire and guard dogs, and confiscating her shoes to prevent her from running away. Furthermore, he threatened to have her murdered if ever she tried to escape. ‘I’m completely prepared for that day,’ he told her mother. ‘I’ve already got her coffin. It’s solid gold. And it’s got a glass top, so I can keep my eye on her after she’s dead.’

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