Beatles (25 page)

It was at this time that Astrid got round to telling Stu that she didn’t like his greasy, Teddy Boy hairstyle. She said he would suit the sort of style that Klaus and Jurgen had. After a lot of persuading, Stu let her do a special style for him. She brushed it all down, snipped bits off and tidied it up.

Stu turned up at the Top Ten that evening, with his hair in the new style, and the others collapsed on the floor with hysterics. Halfway through, he gave up and combed his hair high. But thanks to Astrid, he tried it again the next night. He was ridiculed again, but the night after, George turned up with the same style. Then Paul had a go, though for a long time he was always changing it back to the old style as John hadn’t yet made up his mind. Pete Best ignored the whole craze. But the Beatle hairstyle had been born.

Astrid went on to influence them in other ways, such as collarless suits. She’d made one for herself which Stu had admired so she’d made one for him, despite the jokes from the rest of them. ‘What are you doing with Mum’s suit then, Stu?’

They all got a bit wilder during this second Hamburg trip, turning to pep pills (all except Pete Best) to keep them going during the all-night sessions. ‘But it never got out of control,’ says Astrid. ‘Neither did their drinking. They hardly drank at all, just now and again.’

John was still doing a little bit of shoplifting, when the urge took him. Astrid says it was great, which is the phrase Pete Shotton, John’s school friend, had used.

‘It’s the way John was,’ says Astrid. ‘Everyone feels like doing things sometimes, but of course you don’t. John would suddenly rub his hands and say, “I know, let’s go shoplifting now.” It was all fun. You couldn’t be shocked. The idea had suddenly come into his head, so he acted on it. He wouldn’t do it again for weeks. Things don’t go round in John’s head first, the way they do with Paul.’

John was still turning out his anti-religious cartoons – drawing Christ on the cross with a pair of bedroom slippers at the bottom – and getting involved in other adolescent jokes. He put on a paper dog collar once, cut himself a paper cross and preached from a window of the club in a Peter Sellers Indian accent to the crowds below.

They made their first record during this trip, though Allan Williams had made them do a demo disc on their first arrival in Hamburg. This had led nowhere, and only five copies were made. This time they were asked to do the backing for Tony Sheridan, the singer from the Top Ten. ‘When the offer came,’ says John, ‘we thought it would be easy. The Germans had such shitty records. Ours was bound to be better. We did five of our own numbers, but they didn’t like them. They preferred things like “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”.’

Bert Kaempfert, the German orchestra leader and A and R man, did the recording. On the records, backing Tony Sheridan, they were called ‘The Beat Boys’. It was thought the name Beatles was too confusing.

Only four of them were involved in this record. Pete Best was still there. He says he thought he was getting on well. He’d had a fight with Tony Sheridan, but that was all.

But Stu Sutcliffe had left. ‘We were awful to him sometimes,’ says John. ‘Especially Paul, always picking on him. I used to explain afterwards to him that we didn’t dislike him, really.’

They felt a bit guilty about how they treated Stu, but this
wasn’t the reason for him leaving. He’d decided to stay in Hamburg, marry Astrid and go back to being an art student. He enrolled at the Art College, thanks to an eminent visiting professor, Eduardo Paolozzi, the Scots-born sculptor. He even managed to get Stu a grant from the Hamburg authorities.

Stu still liked the Beatles’ music, but he felt he was better at art than on the bass guitar. Paul could obviously play it much better. It would be best for him to take over, which he did. After he left, Stu became closer friends with all of them than he’d ever been before. They all realized how meaningless their little quarrels had been.

In July 1961 the four Beatles returned to Liverpool, leaving Stu in Hamburg. He did well at the Art College. ‘He had so much energy and was so very inventive,’ says Paolozzi. ‘The feeling of potential splashed out from him. He had the right kind of sensibility and arrogance to succeed.’

The Beatles did a special welcome home show when they arrived in Liverpool with another leading group they’d known for a long time, Gerry and the Pacemakers. They played each other’s instruments or daft objects, like a paper and comb. They billed themselves as the Beatmakers, which was an in-joke all the fans appreciated.

The Beatles were still lucky to be making £10 a week each, but the Liverpool beat cult had arrived. The most obvious sign of its existence was the birth of a newspaper completely devoted to the doings of beat groups. This was
Mersey Beat
, in which Bob Wooler wrote the article about the Beatles, referred to earlier. Its first edition came out on 6 July 1961. It contained gossip about the leading groups, such as Gerry and the Pacemakers and Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, the group in which Ringo Starr was on drums. These appear to be the two main groups. The Beatles came after them in popularity, judging by the first issues. But the Beatles did provide the only bit of humour in the first edition when John was asked to knock out a bit about their history:

Mersey Beat
July 6 1961

BEING A SHORT DIVERSION ON THE DUBIOUS ORIGINS OF BEATLES

Translated from the John Lennon

Once upon a time there were three little boys called John, George and Paul, by name christened. They decided to get together because they were the getting together type. When they were together they wondered what for after all, what for? So all of a sudden they all grew guitars and formed a noise. Funnily enough, no one was interested, least of all the three little men. So-o-o-o on discovering a fourth little even littler man called Stuart Sutcliffe running about them they said, quote ‘Sonny get a bass guitar and you will be alright’ and he did – but he wasn’t alright because he couldn’t play it. So they sat on him with comfort ’til he could play. Still there was no beat, and a kindly old aged man said, quote ‘Thou hast no drums!’ We had no drums! they coffed. So a series of drums came and went and came
.

Suddenly in Scotland, touring with Johnny Gentle, the group (called the Beatles called) discovered they had not a very nice sound – because they had no amplifiers. They got some. Many people ask what are Beatles? Why Beatles? Uh, Beatles, how did the name arrive? So we will tell you. It came in a vision – a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them ‘From this day on you are Beatles with an A’. Thank you. Mister Man, they said, thanking him
.

And then a man with a beard cut off said – will you go to Germany (Hamburg) and play mighty rock for the peasants for money? And we said we would play mighty anything for money
.

But before we could go we had to grow a drummer, so we grew one in West Derby in a club called Some Casbah, and his trouble was Pete Best. We called ‘Hello, Pete, come off to Germany!’ ‘Yes!’ Zooooom. After a few months, Peter and Paul (who is called McArtrey, son of Jim McArtrey, his
father) lit a Kino (cinema) and the German police said ‘Bad Beatles, you must go home and light your English cinemas’. Zoooooom, half a group. But even before this, the Gestapo had taken my friend little George Harrison (of Speke) away because he was only twelve and too young to vote in Germany; but after two months in England he grew eighteen, and the Gestapoes said ‘you can come’. So suddenly all back in Liverpool village were many groups playing in grey suits and Jim said ‘Why have you no grey suits?’ ‘We don’t like them, Jim’ we said speaking to Jim. After playing in the clubs a bit, everyone said ‘Go to Germany!’ So we are. Zooooom. Stuart gone. Zoom zoom John (of Woolton) George (of Speke) Peter and Paul zoom zoom. All of them gone
.

Thank you club members, from John and George (what are friends)
.

The jokes, and the deliberate mistakes in John’s article, were reproduced many times in the next few years. The whole front page of the second edition of
Mersey Beat
was about their German recording contract. They used one of Astrid’s photographs, one of the five of them taken in a railway siding in Hamburg. In the caption Paul is still called ‘Paul MacArthy’. In the same issue there were some fashion notes by someone called Priscilla in which she said that ‘grey was now the colour for evening wear’. This was Cilla Black, then a typist and part-time cloakroom girl and occasional singer at the Cavern.

The Beatles were by now the main group at the Cavern, but they were still using the Casbah Club, Pete Best’s home, as their headquarters. Mrs Best had branched out as a dance promoter, though the Casbah was still her main interest. ‘Most people referred to them as “Pete Best and the Beatles”,’ so she says. Pete did take the main responsibility for their bookings, helped by his mother, and tried to organize them.

The Casbah became even more their centre when Neil Aspinall, Pete’s friend who was still living there, bought himself
an old van for £80 and started driving the Beatles round Merseyside. He got five bob from each of them for each session. ‘The evenings became a real drag. I’d drive them somewhere, come home and do a bit of studying, then go back for them. I began to think, what am I doing? I was still getting only £2 10s. a week as an accountant, yet I could get £3 for three lunch hours at the Cavern. So in the July I left work for good.’

Neil became their road manager, which he still is, though he hates the term. It was his job to pick up Pete and all their gear from the Casbah, then take them all to where they were playing.

‘They were beginning to cause riots everywhere,’ says Neil. ‘The kids would get going, then the Teds would try to wreck the place. John once got his finger broken in a fight in the bogs.’

But despite their large fan following and the fact that some weeks they were earning up to £15, out of which they now had to pay Neil, nothing was really happening. London seemed to be the only place where pop singers came from, or at least the only place where they could make their name.

Mersey Beat
was doing them proud, and selling lots of copies, and Pete Best was trying hard to organize them, but by being on the road so much they missed many bookings. They didn’t seem to care about bookings anyway, mocking any promoters who were interested in them. They’d by this time broken with Allan Williams, who had got them their first Hamburg date. He says that during their second Hamburg trip he stopped getting his commission which he should have had. They say that they’d got the Top Ten engagement on their own and didn’t think they should therefore pay him a percentage. There was a row, although they later became friends again. ‘I felt they’d let me down, after all I’d done for them. I know now what I missed. I suppose I could have held on to them, but I wasn’t really a businessman. I was just doing it for kicks.’ No other manager or agent was interested. They weren’t earning enough to attract the normal manager and anyway, they weren’t the sort of clean, neat, well-mannered blokes that managements liked.

They spent most of their time between lunch and evening sessions just walking round Liverpool, sitting in coffee bars or hanging around record shops, listening to records for nothing. They were always hard up. Danny English, who was the manager of the Old Dive, a pub (now knocked down) near the Cavern, remembers them spinning out a glass of brown ale for hours. He told them one day that it was about time they bought the barmaid a drink.

‘After a lot of discussion, they asked me what she was drinking. I said stout. They said how much was that. After more discussions they produced 4½d. each and bought her a Guinness.’

Danny English tried to get another of his customers to help them. This was George Harrison, no relation to our George Harrison, who has written a column in the
Liverpool Echo
for what seems like centuries. But he didn’t do anything. There were so many groups competing for his attention and the Beatles looked the scruffiest of them all.

They were getting more and more depressed by their lack of progress. All the parents, except Mrs Harrison and Mrs Best, were continually on at their sons once again to give up and get proper jobs.

‘I knew John would always be a bohemian,’ says Mimi. ‘But I wanted him to have some sort of job. Here he was at nearly 21 years old, having thrown away his chance at art college, touting round stupid halls for £3 a night. Where was the point in that?’

When John was coming up for 21, in September 1961, he got some money as a present from his aunt in Edinburgh and decided on the spur of the moment to go off with Paul to Paris. George and Pete Best were naturally very hurt at being left on their own. ‘We got fed up,’ says John. ‘We did have bookings, but we just broke them and went off.’

In Paris they met Jurgen Vollmer, one of their Hamburg friends. It was during this Paris visit, which was mainly spent hanging around the clubs till their money ran out, that John finally brushed his hair forward.

‘Jurgen also had bell-bottom trousers,’ says John. ‘But we thought that would be considered too queer back in Liverpool. We didn’t want to appear feminine or anything like that because our audience in Liverpool still had a lot of fellows. We were playing rock, dressed in leather, though Paul’s ballads were bringing in more and more girls.’

John had learned from Stu that Jurgen was in Paris. Even though Stu had left them to study art in Hamburg, he and John sent long letters to each other.

At first the letters were full of jokes and daft stories, the sort John had written as a child, when he did those little scrapbooks. ‘Uncle Norman has just driven up on his moustache.’ ‘P.S. Mary Queen of Scots was a Nigger.’

He passed on to Stu any good bits of news about the group’s progress, such as a Beatle fan club at last being started in Liverpool. (Rory Storm already had one). But the letters soon became full of disappointments and moans. ‘It’s all a shitty deal. Something is going to happen, but where is it?’

John started including more of his serious poems, the sort he had never shown Mimi. They usually ended in obscenity or self-consciousness. He filled up his letters to Stu with them, when he could think of nothing else.