Beatles (21 page)

‘I think, basically. Dad was quite pleased,’ says Michael, ‘though he said he wasn’t at the time.’

‘I knew they were well liked at what they were doing,’ says Jim. ‘It was their first big engagement and they were determined to go. Paul was just 18. He’d just had four weeks of his school holidays. He went on a student passport. I gave him a pep talk, you know, about being a good lad. What else could I do?

‘I was worried all the time that he wouldn’t get enough to eat in Germany. He did send postcards, saying “I’m eating plenty. We had this, that and the other this evening.” That satisfied me, I suppose.’

Jim was slightly satisfied when just after Paul had gone, the results of the GCE A levels came through. Paul had failed Art but passed in English, though by that time even Jim realized it didn’t matter any more.

But John’s Aunt Mimi put up more of a fight. She had discouraged Paul and George that time from coming to her house and John from playing his guitar at home. She’d also tried to ban John from playing in a group. Since the Quarrymen had begun, almost five years previously, John had had to lie to her most of the time about what he was doing. She knew he was still messing around writing silly songs and that, but she didn’t know the extent of his interest.

She really thought he was sticking in at the Art College, till one day someone told her how he was spending his lunch hours – playing in a group. She decided to go and investigate for herself, to see just what depth of depravity John had sunk to.

The lunchtime she decided to investigate turned out to be one of the days they were playing at the Cavern. They weren’t the resident group, as it was still basically a jazz club, but they were getting more dates as people at the Cavern became interested in them.

‘I’d never heard of this awful place, the Cavern,’ says Mimi. ‘It took a long time to find. I just had to follow the crowds in the end, I went down some steps with them all and there was this chap, Ray McFall, taking money. “I want John Lennon!”

‘I pushed on in, but the noise was deafening. It had this low ceiling which made it worse. The girls were jammed together, with their arms down by their sides. Try as I might, I just couldn’t get near the stage. If I could, I would have pulled him off it. In the end, I just went and sat in one of the dressing rooms. Dressing room! Just a scruffy little cubicle. When he came off, with the girls still screaming, he couldn’t see me at first. He’s
blind without his glasses. Then he put them on and saw me, “What are you doing, Mimi?” “Very nice, John,” I said, “this is very nice.”’

Mimi made sure he went back to college that afternoon. She went on at him all the time to stick in at his studies, not this silly playing, so that he could get some proper qualifications. But she couldn’t stop him from playing.

‘What do you mean?’ John used to say. ‘I’m not a working man and never will be. No matter what you do or say, I’ll never end up with a nine-to-five job.’

Then Hamburg came up. This was going to mean a proper severance from Mimi, for a long time in a foreign country. Mimi remembers John trying to get her as excited as he was. ‘“Mimi, isn’t it marvellous,” he told her. “I’m going to get £100 a week, isn’t that marvellous!”’

A slight exaggeration on the money, but still marvellous, for five teenage lads. John, of course, jumped at the chance of having a good excuse to leave the college. He’d survived three years, just. Arthur Ballard, the lecturer who had most to do with him, saved him from being expelled several times. John had failed all exams and was leaving without any qualifications, though he half thought to himself that they might take him back if Hamburg failed. He was also leaving Cyn.

‘The group had started to get its own fans,’ says Cynthia, ‘I knew they had lots of girls hanging round them, but I never worried or got jealous. I seemed so much older than all the girls. I felt very secure.

‘But I was much more worried about Hamburg. That seemed so far away and for such a long time. I knew the Liverpool girls, but I didn’t know anything about the situation in Hamburg. Anything could happen to them in Hamburg.’

Hamburg is Germany’s Liverpool. It’s a large northern port. The inhabitants are rough and tough but underneath they can be soft and sentimental. The climate is wet and windy. They have the same sort of nasal accents, easily recognizable in each country. They even have the same latitude, 53 degrees north.

But Hamburg is twice the size of Liverpool and traditionally a much wickeder city. Hamburg crime and Hamburg sex life are known throughout Europe. The Reeperbahn, the main street in Hamburg’s Soho, must have more strip clubs than any other street in the world.

When the Beatles arrived there in 1960, with George sweet 17 and never been kissed, well hardly, wicked Hamburg was at its wickedest. Hamburg, being a free port, had become a centre for FLN gunrunning during the Algerian crisis. This had brought in foreign gangsters and money. When the Berlin wall went up, in August 1960, a lot of East German crooks and illegal immigrants headed for Hamburg rather than Berlin. The gang warfare which ensued centred round the clubs. Waiters were hired for their strength, rather than their waiting, to be ready to fight off the gangs from the next club.

Allan Williams brought the five Beatles himself to Hamburg. He drove them in a minivan, via Harwich and the Hook of Holland. The only thing John remembers about the journey is that he stopped off in Holland to do some shoplifting.

They were all very pleased with the attempts at stage dress – their very first; after all, they were now professionals – that they were bringing with them. It consisted of little velvet jackets which Paul had got the man next door to him to make for them. They were intending to wear them with their usual Teddy Boy rig-out, tight black jeans, white shirt with black ribbon tie and winkle-pickers. They all still of course had their high, greased-back Tony Curtis hairstyle.

‘Bruno Koschmeider met us when we arrived,’ says Pete Best. ‘He took us round to the Kaiserkeller where we expected we’d be playing. We met Howie Casey, from the Liverpool group, who were already there.

‘We liked the look of the place. We said when do we move in? He said we didn’t. Then we were taken round to this other club, the Indra, that was much smaller. It was 11.30 at night and there were just two people in the place.

‘We were shown our dressing room which turned out to be the gents’ toilet. We expected we’d be living in an hotel, but instead we were taken round to this cinema, the Bambi, where he showed us our sleeping quarters. It was like the black hole of Calcutta. But being young and foolish, we didn’t complain. We just went straight to sleep.’

Allan Williams, who stayed on for a few weeks after he’d taken them, says that some members of the Seniors group were annoyed to see the Beatles. ‘I was told I was spoiling the scene, bringing over such a crummy group.’

The Indra, where the Beatles started playing next evening, was named after the German for India. It had a large elephant sign hung across the street, the Grosse Freiheit, as its symbol. But inside it was small and poky. None of them liked it, least of all sleeping in the Bambi cinema.

‘We would go to bed late,’ says John, ‘and be wakened up next day by the sound of the cinema show. We’d try to get into the ladies’ first, which was cleanest of the cinema’s lavatories, but fat old German women would push past us.

‘At first, we got a pretty cool reception. Then the manager
said we should “Mak Show”, like the group down the road were doing. So we tried. We were a bit scared by it all at first, being in the middle of the tough club land. But we felt cocky, being from Liverpool, at least believing the myth about Liverpool producing cocky people.

‘The first Mak Show I did was to jump around in one number like Gene Vincent. Every number lasted 20 minutes, just to spin it out. We all did mak showing all the time from then.

‘We only once ever tried a German number, playing to the crowd. Paul learned “Wooden Heart”, which was very popular.

‘We got better and got more confidence. We couldn’t help it, with all the experience, playing all night long. It was handy them being foreign. We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over.

‘In Liverpool we’d only ever done one-hour sessions and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing. We played very loud, bang, bang all the time. The Germans loved it.’

‘Once the news got about that we were making a show,’ says Pete, ‘the club started packing them in. We played seven nights a week. At first we played almost non-stop till 12:30, when it closed, but as we got better the crowds stayed till two most mornings.

‘We saw lots of fights. Real big ones, with people swinging from lights and jumping off tables, just like in film fights.’

They all used to beat on the stage with their feet, when they weren’t jumping in the air, to add to the noise and increase the beat. Pete Best didn’t fit exactly into their ways at the beginning, so they all had to pound out the rhythm as well. But Pete soon improved, as they all did.

The ‘Making Show’, as the Germans called it, was the vital thing. Although they were a rock group, they’d been pretty quiet in Liverpool. Now they were actively encouraged to let themselves go and make as much show on stage as possible, which of course was easy for John. He made a show all the time, jumping
in ecstasy or rolling on the floor, much to the delight of the local rockers they were soon getting as their fans. Stories about John are still told in Hamburg, a lot of them improving with age.

‘It was hard work,’ says Pete, ‘but we were just five fellows having a good time. We did daft things all the time. John had a pair of Long John underpants, as it was getting very cold with winter drawing on. George bet him ten marks that he wouldn’t go out, wearing them and nothing else. He went out in the street, just in his Long Johns, with sun specs on and read the
Daily Express
for five minutes. We watched him, killing ourselves laughing.’

But after two months, the Indra was closed. There had been complaints from neighbours about noise. The Beatles then moved to the Kaiserkeller. The stage at the Kaiserkeller was very old, more or less planks on orange boxes. They decided to go through it so they’d have to have a new one. They did go through it in the end, by jumping around and making show, but they never got a new one. They just played on the open floor.

‘I drank a lot,’ says Pete Best. ‘You couldn’t help it. They’d be sending us drinks up all the time so we naturally drank too much. We had a lot of girls. We soon realized they were easy to get. Girls are girls, fellers are fellers. Everything improved 100 per cent. We’d been meek and mild musicians at first, now we became a powerhouse.’

The Kaiserkeller was making them work even harder than ever. The group which had been there in the first place had now gone back to Liverpool and been replaced by another Liverpool group, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. They were officially booked to play six hours a night. As there were now two groups in the same club, they did alternate hours through the night. But their time off was too short to do anything or go anywhere, so they were in effect playing for a period of twelve hours at a time.

‘Your voice began to hurt with the pain of singing,’ says John. ‘We learned from the Germans that you could stay awake by eating slimming pills, so we did that.’ The pills at first were pretty harmless, but they moved on to other ones, like Black
Bombers and Purple Hearts, though they never appear to have been dependent on them or to have taken them to excess. But it was the beginning of an interest in and a liking for drugs, however minor. All of them tried them at some time, except Pete Best who had no wish to be connected in any way with drugs.

They never let the pills get out of control because they were genuinely taking them to keep awake, not for kicks. They wanted to keep awake because they were loving everything, playing the sort of stuff they wanted to, to wild Hamburg teenagers, for as long as they wanted. They didn’t mind the long hours at all.

The times they did get fed up, usually with the living accommodation, were very few. If they hadn’t been so far from home, of course, and in a foreign country, they might have packed up many times and gone home to Liverpool. But they couldn’t, stuck away in Hamburg. They were also spending all the money as quickly as they got it.

It’s surprising their health didn’t suffer more. They never ate properly and hardly slept. ‘What with playing, drinking and birds, how could we find time to sleep?’ says John.

George and Paul knew a little bit of German. Pete knew most of all as he had passed German at O level. John and Stu spoke no German and weren’t interested in learning. ‘We just used to shout in English at the Germans,’ says John. ‘Call them Nazis and tell them to fuck off.’ The audience just cheered even more.

The audiences were entranced by them, devoted to them, and the Beatles became less scared of the club, the waiters and the fights. They saw the waiters taking money out of the pockets of drunks and as they were hard up, John decided one night to try it himself.

‘We chose a British sailor to roll. I thought I could chat him up in English, kid him on we could get him some birds. We got him drinking and drinking and he kept on asking, where’s the girls? We kept chatting him up, trying to find out where he kept his money. We just hit him twice in the end, then gave up. We never made it. We didn’t want to hurt him.’

The Beatles had lots of little arguments amongst themselves, but nothing serious. It was mainly Stu and Pete, the relatively new boys, being picked on by the rest. Stu took it to heart, but Pete didn’t seem to notice. It all passed over his head. He can’t remember being involved in any rows or anyone criticizing him or mocking him, though the others do.

But Stu and Pete were proving popular with the audience, though not as much as Paul, who was always the most popular everywhere. Stu wore his sunglasses on stage and looked very defiant. Pete never smiled or jumped around, the way John did, but simply looked sullen and menacing. Both of them were looked upon as James Dean figures by the audience, moody and magnificent. The others, particularly John, were the wild extrovert ones.