Beatles (22 page)

‘Paul was telling me the other day,’ says John, ‘that he and I used to have rows about who was the leader. I can’t remember them. It had stopped mattering by then. I wasn’t so determined to be the leader at all costs. If I did argue, it was just out of pride.

‘All the arguments were just trivial, mainly because we were fucked and irritable with working so hard. We were just kids. George threw some food at me once on stage. We usually ate on stage as we were on so long. The row with George was just over something stupid. I said I would smash his face in for him. We had a shouting match on stage, but that was all. I never did anything.’

They were in the main very friendly with each other and also very friendly with Rory Storm and his group, who were alternating with them at the Kaiserkeller.

They already knew Rory’s group very well. He was much better known at the time in Liverpool than they were. Rory had been offered the Hamburg trip before them. Because he turned it down, as he had another engagement, they’d got it instead. Apart from Rory, there were other Liverpool groups doing better than the Beatles in those days, like Cas and the Casanovas. The Beatles, at the time they left Liverpool for Hamburg, were probably about third or fourth in the hierarchy of Liverpool beat groups.

‘We all knew Rory,’ says George. ‘He was the big star of Liverpool, very flash and wild on stage.’ George knew the group well because at one stage, before he joined the Beatles, he was thinking of joining them. ‘I’d met Rory because I was once trying to knock off his little sister.’

The drummer with Rory Storm’s group spent a lot of his sitting-out time watching the Beatles and requesting songs from them.

‘I didn’t like the look of Rory’s drummer myself,’ says George. ‘He looked the nasty one, with his little grey streak of hair. But the nasty one turned out to be Ringo, the nicest of them all.’

Pete says that he remembered Ringo from the days he had played in the Casbah with Rory Storm, but the others didn’t know him. It was a long time before they got to know him really well, but that was their first meeting with Ringo Starr.

Apart from this friendship with Ringo and the rest of Rory’s group, they made no other friends. They hardly left the club and made no attempt to make any friends amongst the Germans. ‘They were all half-witted,’ says John.

They made even less of an attempt to get to know any British people who came into the club. ‘When we could smell Senior Service in the audience,’ says John, ‘we knew there would be trouble before the night was out. After a few drinks, they’d start shouting, “Up Liverpool” or “Up Pompey”. Gangs of fucking British servicemen, trying to stir things up. Before the night was over they’d all be lying there half dead, after they’d tried to pick a fight with the waiters over the bill, or just over nothing. The waiters would get their flick knives out or their truncheons. And that would be it. I’ve never seen such killers.’

It’s not really surprising that they made so few German friends in Hamburg. The majority of respectable Hamburgers rarely go anywhere near the St Pauli district, least of all the Reeperbahn.

But Klaus Voormann and Astrid Kirchherr did. Quite by chance they came across the Beatles. They became fans, the first intellectual fans they’d ever had. They saw qualities in the Beatles that no one had ever seen before.

Klaus was born in Berlin, the son of an eminent doctor. He arrived in Hamburg in 1956 to study at the Art School. He was training to be a commercial artist, but he also took up photography as a special subject, which is how he met Astrid, who became his girlfriend.

Astrid comes from a good solid middle-class Hamburg family. She was specializing in photography. By 1960 they’d both left Art School. Klaus was working for local magazines – Hamburg is a big press centre – doing advertising posters. Astrid was working as an assistant to a photographer.

They’d been going out for about two years and Klaus had moved into a flat on the top of Astrid’s house. One evening they had a slight row. Klaus decided to go off to the cinema on his own.

‘I came out and was walking around. I was in the Grosse Freiheit when I heard a lot of noise coming from a basement. I went down to see what was going on. I’d never been in a club like it before.

‘It was a very rough scene down there. There were some real tough rockers, all in leather. But I was knocked out by the group on stage and the noise they were making. So very carefully I sat down to listen.’

The club was the Kaiserkeller, but it wasn’t the Beatles on stage. It was Rory Storm’s group, with Ringo on drums. Without realizing it Klaus had sat down beside the other resident group. ‘I was staring at them because they looked so funny. They wore check jackets, black and white check. The most ridiculous-looking of all – Stu as I discovered later – had his hair piled really high and was wearing long pointed shoes and sunglasses. Not really sunglasses, just those sun things you clip over ordinary glasses.

‘They went on stage and I realized that they were the other group. They did “Sweet Little Sixteen” with John singing it. They knocked me out even more than Rory did. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

‘I wanted to speak to them, to get near them, but I didn’t know how to. I was scared with all the rockers. I was embarrassed and felt out of it. But I stayed there all night. I couldn’t get over how they played together so well, so powerful and so funny. And all the time they were jumping around. I gathered they kept it up for eight hours as well.’

He got home in the early hours of the morning and told Astrid where he’d been. She was rather disgusted with him, spending an evening at a club in St Pauli. He told her how marvellous this group was. She wasn’t interested. She refused to come back with him the next night. So he went alone.

This time he thought of a way of introducing himself to them, of getting to know them, or at least saying hello. He took with him a pop record cover he had designed for a single called ‘Walk Don’t Run’. He’d done one or two covers, as a commercial artist,
although most of his work had been for magazines. He thought the Beatles would be interested to see it.

He sat around for a long time, trying to get nearer and nearer. When the Beatles at last sat down for their rest turn, he approached John, who seemed to be the leader. In very halting, schoolboy English, Klaus showed him the record.

It made little effect on John. ‘I just remember this bloke shoving a cover in my hand, I didn’t know why,’ says John. John muttered something about Stu being the artist, and he’d better show the cover to him. Klaus started to move towards Stu but something happened and he couldn’t get to him. So he had to sit down again, feeling more scared and embarrassed. Instead he just listened to the music all night through again.

The next night, his third visit, Klaus did at last persuade Astrid, against her better wishes, to come with him, along with another friend, Jurgen Vollmer.

‘I was frightened when I arrived,’ says Astrid. ‘But I soon forgot all that, when I saw these five people. I can’t explain how I felt. Something got me. I just couldn’t believe it.

‘I had always been fascinated in a way by Teddy Boys. I’d liked the look of them, in photographs and films. Suddenly there were five of them in front of me, with their hair all high and long sidies. I just sat there open-mouthed and couldn’t move.

‘The atmosphere around was pretty frightening. They were just the typical Reeperbahn crowd. Broken noses, Teddy Boys, that sort of thing. Schlagers, we would call them in German. Punchers, real toughs.’

More and more of their student friends started to come, when Klaus and Astrid began to rave about the Beatles. They took over their own tables and part of the cellar. The students, with their smoother styles, their more mod clothes, soon began to affect and then dictate the atmosphere of the Kaiserkeller.

The rockers were still there, although not so predominant. ‘It became our scene,’ says Klaus. ‘There was no rivalry between us and the rockers. In fact I became friends with a few, though I’d never known any of them before, and never would have done.

‘There were funny little rocker girls I’d never come across before. When they danced they were like little mushrooms. They had short flared skirts with stiffened petticoats to make them stick out.’

The Beatles began to spend most of their spare time sitting talking and drinking with Klaus, Astrid and their friends. They couldn’t speak German, but some of the Germans could understand a little English.

‘We were suddenly getting a lot of arty types,’ says George. ‘Existentialists, the lot.’ ‘They were great,’ says Paul. ‘A change from the usual Germans. They were knocked out by Stu, doing his James Dean bit.’ ‘“Exis”, that’s what I called them,’ says John. ‘They were the first Germans I ever wanted to talk to.’

‘I couldn’t understand John’s accent,’ says Klaus. ‘But George used to speak very slowly to us and we could understand him. He looked so funny. His big ears stuck out, with his hair being short at the back and piled so high on top.’

After about a week of going there every night, Astrid at last got the courage to ask if she could take their pictures. ‘We were getting on so well with them that I felt more protected. I realized that the Reeperbahn rockers all loved them, adored them. They would have killed for them.’ She managed to blurt out a couple of words, indicating that she wanted to take their photographs. ‘They were made up. I could tell, though John made a few funny remarks. He was always saying terrible things about Krauts in front of people. Not to me. But I felt he wasn’t really like that anyway.’

But she wasn’t really interested in John’s reaction. She wanted to get to know Stu. ‘I’d fallen in love with him at first sight. It’s true. It wasn’t slushy romance and all that. I just had.’

They all made a date to meet in the Reeperbahn next day. She took them to a fairground nearby and photographed them, then she invited them home with her for tea. Pete Best refused. ‘Not because I was being antisocial but simply because I had skins to buy for my drums which I’d broken the night before.’ But the four others went with her. She gave them tea
and they were delighted. It was the first German home they’d been into.

The room Astrid gave them tea in was very dark and mysterious. After the first impression of darkness, all you could see were two colours, black and white. Everything, the walls, furniture and carpets, was either black or white. She had trees growing up the walls and across the ceiling and around the room. The window was obscured and the only light came from candles. There was a black cloth hanging down one wall. One of them drew it aside to see what was behind and found himself looking into a mirror. ‘It was my Jean Cocteau phase,’ says Astrid.

The tea was a little more prosaic – ham sandwiches. ‘Heh, look at these,’ said George. ‘Ham sarnies! I didn’t know the Germans had ham sarnies.’ Which shows how much George had seen of German life, stuck for twelve hours at a time at the Kaiserkeller. Then she drove them in her car back to the club for their night’s work.

Astrid began to bring her camera along all the time and took many photographs of them. They were the first professional photographs taken of them and, for many years to come, by far the most artistic. By clever lighting she managed to take them half in the shadows. This gimmick of a half shadow face, although not original, was used and copied by other photographers for a long time to come. Astrid was the first to see their photogenic potential, a factor which was later invaluable.

She took them out and around other parts of Hamburg to photograph them, lining them up once in the docks, then at a disused railway siding to get unusual photographs. It takes good quality printing and paper to get the best out of Astrid’s photographs, to see how excellent they are, but even on cheap newsprint they look dramatic and unusual. ‘They were great,’ says Paul. ‘Nobody could take our picture as well as Astrid.’

She was trying all the time, in those early sessions, to get talking to Stu, trying to say to him she would like to take his photograph on his own. But she couldn’t make him understand. He spoke no German. She spoke no English. So she got Klaus to
start teaching her English. ‘He nearly went out of his mind trying to explain things to me. I just couldn’t learn.’

They all came for a meal at her place practically every night after that first tea and she and Stu slowly made more and more progress. Then Stu started to come on his own at other times and they would sit together on her black bed, talking to each other with the help of a German-English dictionary.

‘After Stu, I liked John and George. Then I liked Pete Best. I liked him very much, but he was so very very shy. He could be funny, but I didn’t have much contact with him. Even in those days one tended to forget him. He was on his own really.

‘Paul, I found hard to get close to. He was always friendly. He was by far the most popular with the fans. He always did the talking and announcing and the autograph bit. Most fans looked upon him as the leader. John of course was the leader. He was by far and away the strongest. I don’t mean physically, but as a personality.

‘Stu was the most intelligent one. I think they all agreed on that. John did.

‘George, we never thought about George’s intelligence one way and another when we were talking about them. We knew he wasn’t stupid, but he was just such a young lovely boy. He was so sweet and open about everything, like admiring the ham sarnies. He had a great following. Jurgen used to have a notice which said “I Love George”. He was one of the first to do that sort of thing.

‘I got on like a house on fire with George. He’d never met anyone like me before and he showed it, so openly and sweetly. After all, he was only 17. There was me, the sort of intelligent girl he’d never come across before, with my own car, working as a photographer, and wearing leather jackets. It was natural he would be very interested in me. I never fancied him or anything like that. It wasn’t that sort of thing. I was five years older, so it didn’t matter being open. We got on great.’

In November 1960, only two months after their first meeting, Stu and Astrid got engaged. They put their money together
and went out and bought the rings – one for each of them, in the German fashion. Then they drove in her car along the Elbe. ‘From when we first started being able to communicate with each other we intended to get married.’