Beatles (29 page)

Although they privately laughed at all the people who didn’t want to know them, carefully sent them up, or even openly sent them up, they were still very hurt by all the prejudice against them.

‘All we ever got in those days,’ says Paul, ‘was, “Where are you from? Liverpool? You’ll never do anything from there. Too
far away. You’ll have to be in London before you can do it. Nobody’s ever done it from Liverpool.” That’s all we ever heard, for years.’

But Brian was going the right way about making them acceptable to the London sort of mind. ‘But I didn’t
change
them. I just projected what was there. What was there was this presence. On stage they had this undefinable feeling. But it was being spoiled by smoking and eating and talking to the front few rows.’

Brian had naturally been to see the Beatles’ parents, when he decided to become their manager. They were impressed by his manners and obvious wealth, unlike all the previous friends their sons had had.

Only Mimi, John’s aunt, seems to have been at all hesitant, though Brian should have impressed her most of all, except that she wasn’t impressed by anything to do with beat groups.

‘I had misgivings when I first heard of Brian Epstein. Not against him personally. But he was so well off. It seemed just a novelty to him and it didn’t really matter whether they sank or swam. He wasn’t depending on it, the way they were.

‘I found Brian very charming. I always did. But this was the worry I had when he came along. I thought, that’ll be it. He’ll have finished with them in two months and gone on to something else. While John and the others won’t even have got started.’

Almost from the beginning, Brian Epstein started using his record contacts, exerting any pressures he could as the owner of the self-styled ‘finest record store in the North’. And almost from the beginning it began to work. Decca said they were interested.

His contacts with Decca had always been the best, though of course they were solely on the retail side. But by getting his credentials passed from department to department, he managed to land a promise that an A and R man – artists and repertoire manager – would come up to Liverpool to see what all the boasting was about.

Mike Smith of Decca duly appeared towards the end of December 1961. Success at his first go. Brian was ecstatic. ‘What an occasion it was! An A and R manager at the Cavern.’

Mike Smith was very impressed. He liked the sound of the Beatles and promised to arrange for them to come down to London and have an audition at Decca studios. This sort of audition, just to hear their sound and see how they would react to taping, doesn’t mean all that much. But it did to Brian Epstein, to the Beatles and to Liverpool.

The audition was arranged for 1 January 1962. Brian went down to London by train for the appointment. The Beatles – John,
Paul, George and Pete Best – were taken down by their road manager, Neil Aspinall, on New Year’s Eve.

‘I hired a bigger van specially. I’d never been anywhere near London before. It took ten hours and we got lost in the snow somewhere near Wolverhampton.

‘We got to London about ten o’clock at night and found our hotel, the Royal, off Russell Square. Then we went for a drink. We tried to get a meal in some place in the Charing Cross Road. We all went in, a right gang of scruffs we were, and sat down. It said six bob for soup and we said, you’re kidding. The bloke said we’d have to go. So we had to.

‘We went to Trafalgar Square and saw all the New Year’s Eve drunks falling in the fountain. Then we met two blokes in Shaftesbury Avenue who were stoned, though we didn’t know it. They had some pot, but I’d never seen that either. We were too green. When they heard we had a van they asked if they could smoke it there. We said, no, no, no! We were dead scared.’

Brian was first at Decca Studios next morning, bang on time. ‘The Decca people were late and I was pretty annoyed. Not because we were anxious to tape our songs, but because we felt we were being treated as people who didn’t matter.’

At last they were told it was their turn. They got out their old, battered amplifiers and were immediately told to put them away. ‘They didn’t want our tackle,’ says Neil. ‘We had to use theirs. We needn’t have dragged our amps all the way from Liverpool.’

They got going and George sang, in a very clipped voice, ‘The Sheik of Araby’. Paul sang rather nervously, ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’. They didn’t try any of their own compositions, although they had scores they could have done. Brian advised them to stick to standards.

‘They were pretty frightened,’ says Neil. ‘Paul couldn’t sing one song. He was too nervous and his voice started cracking up. They were all worried about the red light. I asked if it could be put off, but we were told people might come in if it was off. You what? we said. We didn’t know what all that meant.’

They finished doing the tapes about two o’clock and everyone seemed very pleased.

‘Mike Smith said the tapes were terrific,’ says Pete Best. ‘We thought we were in. Brian took us all out for dinner that night at some place in Swiss Cottage. He ordered wine, but it never turned up for some reason.’

The weeks passed and nothing happened. They continued playing their local dates on Merseyside, but all the time expecting Decca to whisk them off to the big time. Then in March, after a lot of pestering, Brian heard from Dick Rowe, Mike Smith’s boss at Decca, that they had decided not to record the Beatles. ‘He told me they didn’t like the sound. Groups of guitars were on the way out. I told him I was completely confident that these boys were going to be bigger than Elvis Presley.’

It was suggested to him that as he had a good record business in Liverpool he should stick to it. It was also hinted that there were other ways of having a record made – for a payment of £100, for example, he could hire a studio and an A and R man. He contemplated this for a day or so. But he was still being treated in such an offhand manner, so he thought, that he decided it was a complete waste of money.

‘I think Decca expected us to be all polished,’ says John. ‘We were just doing a demo. They should have seen our potential.’ After that began a long and dispiriting trail round all the other major recording companies. In turn, Pye, Columbia, HMV and EMI turned them down. Other smaller companies also said no.

‘I was the last to hear about being turned down by Decca,’ says Pete Best. ‘John, Paul and George heard long before me. They just let it slip out one day, that they’d known for weeks. Why didn’t you tell me? They said they didn’t want to dishearten me.’

The others veered between being disheartened and an illogical optimism that something would turn up in the end.

‘We did have a few little fights with Brian,’ says John. ‘We used to say he was doing nothing and we were doing all the
work. We were just saying it, really. We knew how hard he was working. It was Us against Them.’

‘We used to wait for Brian at Lime Street to hear his news,’ says Paul. ‘He’d ring us up and we’d think perhaps he’d have something for us. He’d come off the train with his briefcase full of papers and we’d go for a coffee in the Punch and Judy and hear how Pye or Philips or whoever it was had turned us down.’

‘But we still used to send up the idea of getting to the top,’ says George. ‘When things were a real drag and nothing happening, we used to go through this routine: John would shout, “Where are we going, fellas?” We’d shout back, “To the Top, Johnny!” Then he would shout, “What Top?” “To the Topper-most of the Poppermost, Johnny!”’

Alistair Taylor, Brian’s assistant at NEMS, says that Brian was often near to tears with the trail round the record companies. ‘He was bringing all the pressures he could, but there are always 10,000 groups, bringing all the pressures they can. He was getting nowhere.’

In December 1961,
Mersey Beat
announced a popularity poll. John and Paul still have copies of that issue lying around their homes, all with the entry forms cut out. They filled in dozens in assumed names, all putting the Beatles first and Gerry and the Pacemakers last. They were genuinely worried Gerry would win. All the groups were voting for themselves, of course, so any cheating cancelled itself out. In the event, the Beatles were out-and-out winners.

Brian made the most of the award. For a performance on 24 March 1962, they were billed in big capitals as ‘MERSEY BEAT POLL WINNERS! POLYDOR RECORDING ARTISTS! PRIOR TO EUROPEAN TOUR!’ The actual concert was held at Barnston Women’s Institute, which is rather small beer, after such a build-up.

The ‘European Tour’, which they were billed as being prior to, was, of course, their third visit to Hamburg. This took place just a week later in April 1962.

They arrived at Hamburg by plane. This was the very first time they’d travelled by plane. ‘Brian made us do it,’ says Pete Best. ‘We were all dead chuffed.’

They were to play this time at the Star Club, the biggest Hamburg club of its type. ‘It even had proper curtains on stage,’ says George. Astrid, in mourning for Stu, didn’t come to their concerts at first, but the Beatles went out of their way to go and get her, give her presents and cheer her up. She says that any slight feelings she might have had that they could be cruel disappeared for ever. ‘I’d never realized they could be so kind.’

Meanwhile, back in Britain, Brian was working on a last attempt to get someone interested in the Beatles. He decided he would spend one further outlay of money.

He’d been taking tapes to all the record companies, some of them the ones they’d originally made at the Decca audition back in January. He decided it would be more impressive and much handier for carrying round and letting people hear if he had the tapes made into a record.

His father by this time was becoming more and more annoyed at all the time he was wasting on the Beatles. ‘I told my father I wanted to take my tapes to London for an all-out, all-or-failure attack. He agreed, providing it was only for a day or two.’

Brian made for the HMV record centre in Oxford Street. This is just a normal retail shop, though very large and part of the vast EMI empire. Brian talked to a contact there and asked him how he could get his tapes turned into a disc.

‘The technician who recorded the tape told me it wasn’t at all bad. He said he’d have a word with a music publisher upstairs, Syd Coleman. Coleman was very excited and said he’d like to publish them and that he would speak to a friend of his at Parlophone, George Martin.’

An appointment was made to meet George Martin next day at EMI. Parlophone are part of EMI, the parent company, which had already turned the Beatles down.

‘George Martin listened to the record and said he liked Paul’s voice and George’s guitar playing. Those were the two
things he particularly said. John was singing “Hello Little Girl” which he liked very much and Paul sang “Till There Was You”.’

George Martin discussed it all with Brian very slowly and calmly and at last said it was very ‘interesting’. Yes, and he thought they were interesting enough to give them an audition.

This was May 1962. The Beatles were still in Hamburg. Brian rushed out of EMI and sent them cables with the good news.

‘We were all still in bed,’ says Pete Best. ‘Whoever was first up always went for the post. George was first up this day and got the telegram: ‘Congratulations Boys. EMI request recording session. Please rehearse new material.’

‘We felt terrific. John and Paul started composing straight away. Brian came out to see us and negotiated a new contract – £85 a week each I think we got then. He thought “Love Me Do” would be a good one for the recording session.’

Klaus says he was disappointed by Brian Epstein when he arrived in Hamburg. ‘I didn’t like the look of him. He was very shy, not at all powerful, the way I had expected. I was a bit depressed. I had this idea in my head of the manager they were bound to get. He would be the top man in the business, absolutely dynamic, not a shy novice.’

But the Beatles were very pleased with themselves. Klaus remembers their delight at the EMI news, how they went off to show their contracts to the Polydor people, who’d only made them the backing group, not the stars.

‘I went to the seaside one day with Paul and George and George was discussing money. He said he felt he was going to make a lot of it. He was going to buy a house and a swimming pool, then he’d buy a bus for his father, as he was a bus driver.’

They came back from Hamburg at the beginning of June 1962. On 6 June, they did their audition before George Martin at the EMI studios in St John’s Wood.

Brian, efficient as ever, had sent on in advance to George Martin a neatly typed out list, on his specially crested notepaper, of the suggested numbers they would like to play for Mr Martin, if of course Mr Martin agreed. The list included some original
compositions – ‘Love Me Do’, ‘PS I Love You’, ‘Ask Me Why’, and ‘Hello Little Girl’. But the main suggestions were standard songs like ‘Besame Mucho’.

George Martin listened carefully to everything and said very nice. He liked them. It was nice to see the boys in person at last, having heard so much about them from Brian. Very nice. He’d let them know.

That was it. They weren’t deflated, or anything as bad as that. But they’d expected a more definite reaction. They travelled back to Liverpool the next day and went into the usual circuit of one-night stands around Liverpool which Brian had fixed up while they’d been in Hamburg. Their first date was a Welcome Home night at the Cavern on the Saturday, 9 June, and then on the Monday a BBC radio show in Manchester which Brian had managed to fix. After that, they were fully booked up as far ahead as July with odd bookings until the end of September.

These bookings included the Cavern, plus the Casbah, New Brighton Tower, the Northwich Memorial Hall, Majestic Ballroom, Birkenhead, Plaza Ballroom, St Helens, Hulme Hall Golf Club, and the Automatic Telephone Company’s Royal Iris River Cruise.

Brian as usual sent each of them typed memos with full details of all their dates. He included reminder notes, usually in capital letters, on how they should deport themselves: