Beatles (35 page)

But Arthur Howes liked the look of the Beatles. He put them on at another theatre near Peterborough. Again they were a failure. All the same, Arthur Howes put them under contract. This didn’t mean much, but it committed the Beatles to him, if he wanted them. ‘I still liked them as people and I saw Brian as a great businessman. I was very impressed by him.’

In January 1963, when they’d at last got a record out, he took up his contract with them and decided to give them a spot on his Helen Shapiro tour. When they set off, in February 1963, their second record was out, but there were few signs that it would get to number one. They were just another group, filling the bill. ‘They took six months to happen, as far as I was
concerned. My concern is strictly box office. If they don’t work, there’s no income. There’s no romance for a promoter. Just hard work.’

‘Touring was a relief,’ says John, ‘just to get out of Liverpool and break new ground. We were beginning to feel stale and cramped.

‘We were always getting the pack-ups. We’d get tired of one stage and be deciding to pack up, when another stage would come along. We’d outlived the Hamburg stage and wanted to pack that up. We hated going back to Hamburg those last two times. We’d had all that scene.’

‘It was a big thrill,’ says Ringo, ‘going with Helen Shapiro and playing in real theatres. We’d done the Empire once in Liverpool, when Brian put on a show, just to get us on somewhere. We were third on the bill. Some Cockney manager of one of the so-called stars had a hassle with us. He didn’t want us to be on the show at all.

‘But touring properly round theatres was great. We didn’t know anything about things like make-up, because we’d never done proper stage shows. It was a long time before we had a go at that. I think it was watching Frank Ifield. His eyes looked amazing. We thought we’d try it ourselves. We pranced on like Red Indians, covered in the stuff.’

They caused no sensation at the beginning of the Helen Shapiro tour. It wasn’t till later, when their second record became top, that they started getting a big reaction.

‘Helen was the star,’ says Ringo. ‘She had the telly in her dressing room and we didn’t have one. We had to ask her if we could watch hers. We weren’t getting packed houses, but we were on the boards, man.’

John remembers there was a bit of screaming in Glasgow. He says they always screarned there. They liked rock and roll, long after everyone else had progressed to liking the Shadows. ‘We always got screams in Scotland. I suppose they haven’t got much else to do up there.’ The Beatles were still basically a rock
and roll group. ‘Twist and Shout’, which they started putting into their act at this stage, was perhaps the most out-and-out rock and roll style they ever sang.

Although he was on the boards, Ringo, for a long time, was still a bit worried about fitting in with the others. ‘When we got to hotels I wondered who I’d be with. They all knew each other so well. What usually happened was that John shared with George and I shared with Paul. It was always OK, of course.’

John has general memories of touring, but he can’t remember things like the names of towns or places from any tour they ever did. ‘We never knew where we were. It was all the same.’

Ringo’s only specific memory of that first Helen Shapiro tour was being thrown out of a ball. ‘It was in Carlisle, I think. There was a ball on in the hotel we were staying in and we thought we’d look in. It was full of soft people, all stoned out of their heads. They chucked us out because we were so scruffy, which we were.’

When ‘Please Please Me’ got to number one, they became better known to the pop fans. Towards the end, they were getting as much applause as Helen Shapiro, the star of the show,

After the tour, with a number one behind them, Arthur Howes immediately sent them on another one. This started in March 1963. The stars of this show were Chris Montez and Tommy Roe. The Beatles were third on the bill.

Their reception on this tour increased all the time. They were now becoming well known in the pop world. Their appearance on
Thank Your Lucky Stars
helped their record. They were asked to write songs for other people. They did one for Helen Shapiro.

Cliff Richard’s new song, ‘Summer Holiday’, soon toppled ‘Please Please Me’ from the top. But Gerry and the Pacemakers, with the song the Beatles had turned down, ‘How Do You Do It’, soon became number one. By March 1963, the Liverpool Sound was a phrase people in the pop business had started to use.

The success of ‘Please Please Me’ led, in April 1963, to their first LP, which had the same name. It included both sides of their first two records, plus ‘Twist and Shout’, ‘A Taste of Honey’ and others. This album remained in the LP charts for six months.

In April 1963 they brought out their third single, ‘From Me To You’. This reached number one, like ‘Please Please Me’, and was awarded a silver disc.

Brian was still signing up other Liverpool artists. He took over Billy Kramer, put a J in the middle of his name and gave him a new backing group, the Dakotas from Manchester. John and Paul wrote a song for him, ‘Do You Want To Know a Secret’. It became number one.

Already, even as early as April 1963, when their third record, ‘From Me To You’, came out, people were comparing their records and saying they’d gone off. Disc jockey Keith Fordyce wrote that the ‘singing and harmonizing are good and there’s plenty of sparkle. The lyric is commercial, but I don’t rate the tune as being anything as good as on the last two discs by this group’.

John and Paul had composed this song while on a coach during the Helen Shapiro tour. They were writing simple and uncomplicated lyrics, as they’d always done, using easy audience-identifying words like ‘me’ and ‘you’ in the titles.

They were signed up for another national tour in May, this time with Roy Orbison. This was the only British tour Arthur Howes didn’t do. He didn’t have a tour going out at the time, but Brian thought they should keep touring and cash in on their record fame.

Before they went off, they had a short holiday in Tenerife in the Canary Isles. This was at the holiday home of Klaus’s father, their Hamburg friend, who they still kept in contact with. Paul was nearly killed on this holiday, when he swam out too far and got swept out to sea.

Whenever they could, during these tours or in any breaks, they all went home to Liverpool. ‘We went around boasting,’
says Ringo. ‘Professional group, you know. Most groups were still going out to ordinary jobs.’

John felt slightly embarrassed and somehow self-conscious being back in Liverpool, despite their success.

‘We couldn’t say it, but we didn’t really like going back to Liverpool. Being local heroes made us nervous. When we did shows there they were always full of people we knew. We felt embarrassed in our suits and being very clean. We were worried that friends might think we’d sold out. Which we had, in a way.’

During their third tour, with Roy Orbison in May 1963, they started causing riots, though not the sort that made many national papers, who were still ignoring them. This was their first tour as the stars of the show and they were beginning to have everywhere the sort of reaction they’d had in the Cavern in Liverpool.

Although Brian had made them more show business and polished, so John thought anyway, they were still larking around on stage, singing corny songs if anything went wrong and making funny introductions. ‘And now for a song by that Red Hot Gospel-singing Mama, Victor Silvester.’ In any interview they managed to get with the pop music writers, they were much the same. Maureen Cleave had said in her
Evening Standard
piece that it was like living it up with four Marx Brothers.

It was on this tour with Roy Orbison that a black market started in tickets, Jelly babies were thrown at them on stage – after George had been foolish enough to say he liked them – and they were mobbed in the theatre, at their hotel and everywhere they went.

Roy Orbison got equal billing with the Beatles, but he was the second-to-last act on the bill, with the Beatles following him, as the main stars of the show.

‘It was terrible following him,’ says Ringo. ‘He’d slay them and they’d scream for more. In Glasgow we were all backstage, listening to the tremendous applause he was getting. He was just standing there singing, not moving or anything. As it got near
our turn, we would hide behind the curtain whispering to each other – guess who’s next folks, it’s your favourite rave. But once we got on the stage, it was always OK.’

It wasn’t OK for Neil Aspinall, their road manager, once the touring days began. It hadn’t been so bad in Liverpool, round and round the same old places. But now it was a new road, a new hotel, a new theatre and new problems every day.

‘There was always trouble with the mikes on every tour,’ says John. ‘No theatre ever got it how we liked it. Even rehearsing in the afternoon first and telling them how we wanted it, it still wouldn’t be right. They’d either be in the wrong position or not loud enough. They would just set it up as they would for amateur talent night. Perhaps we had a chip about them not taking our music seriously. It drove us mad. Brian would sit up in the control room and we’d shout at him. He’d signal back that that was all they could do.’

They used to shout most of all at Neil. It was one of his jobs to get them and their gear everywhere at the right time and help set it up. As the fans started mobbing, endangering them physically as well as trying to steal bits of equipment, it became more and more impossible for Neil to do everything.

‘In five weeks of touring I lost three stones in weight. No one will believe it, but it was true. I went down from eleven stone to eight stone. I just didn’t eat or sleep for five weeks. There was no time.’

So Malcolm Evans, the bouncer from the Cavern, was taken on. He joined Neil as road manager and continued throughout their touring days. They are both still with them today, as their closest companions and friends.

Neil is thin, highly intelligent, quietly efficient but with very strong opinions and by no means a yes-man. He looks a bit like George. Mal is big and hefty, open-hearted, good-natured and easy-going. Neil gave up a career in accountancy to join the Beatles. Mal’s job was less imposing, but he was completely settled into it.

Mal had been working for eleven years as a telecommunications engineer when the Beatles came along and changed his life. He was 27, married with one child, paying the mortgage on a terrace house in Allerton Road, Liverpool, the proud owner of his first car and on a good salary of £15 a week. He had absolute security, paid holidays and a pension when he retired. He looked obviously set for life.

One day in 1962 he came out of work at the Post Office and decided not to walk around the Pier Head, which is where he usually went for a walk in his lunch hours. ‘I saw this little street called Mathew Street that I’d never noticed before. I walked down it and came to this club, the Cavern Club. I’d never been inside a club before. I heard this music coming, real rock it sounded, a bit like Elvis. So I paid me shilling and went in.’ He went in so often after that it was suggested if he became a bouncer, guarding the door, he could get in for nothing.

He’d been bouncing part-time for about three months, when, in the summer of 1963, Brian asked him to give up the Post Office and be their second road manager. Mal’s job, during all the years of touring, was to drive the van containing the equipment to the next theatre, set it up and test it in time for them coming on. Afterwards, he packed it all up safely and looked after it till the next stop. Neil looked after the Beatles personally.

During his first week with the Beatles, Mal estimates he was sacked six times. ‘I’d never seen a drum kit close up before. I didn’t understand any of it. Neil helped me the first couple of days, but the first day I was on my own was terrible. It was a huge stage and my mind went a blank. I didn’t know where to put anything. I asked a drummer from another group to help me. I didn’t realize each drummer likes his cymbals at a special height. He did them his own way, but they were useless for Ringo.

‘The worst of all was at the Finsbury Empire in London, when I lost John’s guitar. It was one he’d had for years as well.
It just disappeared. Where’s my Jumbo, he said. I didn’t know. It’s still a mystery today. I fairly got it that day.

‘It was great meeting all the people I’d seen on TV. I was really star-struck. I still am. I soon realized, of course, that people were being nice to me, trying to get to know me, just to use me to get to the Beatles. I soon got to spot them a mile off.’

‘It was OK for him,’ says Neil. ‘Going out in front, getting the instruments ready. Dead popular he was. As they cheered and shouted at him, he talked to them and made jokes. He didn’t have to physically fight them off, once it started.’

‘My ideas about the fellows soon changed,’ says Mal. ‘Up to then, they’d been four beautiful people. I’d looked upon them as gods. I soon found out they were just ordinary blokes, not made of platinum. I got some bellyaching and I couldn’t answer back. I just had to put up with it.’

The worst part of all touring, they both say, was the dressing room before a show. It would be jammed with reporters, police and theatre staff, while outside, fans were trying to break in. ‘I had to look after all that,’ says Neil, ‘until we got a press man ourselves. And I was supposed to get food.

‘When things got too much, if someone was going on a bit, John or one of them would shout “Cripples, Neil.” This meant get rid of somebody. It originally had just meant cripples, but it came to mean anyone who was in the way.

‘We always got masses of cripples, even from the first tours. They would be in the dressing room when we arrived at the theatre. The management would let them, thinking we’d love to see them, as we were supposed to be such lovely blokes. It was terrible. You couldn’t move for them. What could you do? They wouldn’t be able to move themselves so Mal or I usually had to carry them out. Mal got a claw stuck round his neck one night.

‘As the Beatles’ following got bigger, we got more and more. The image of the Beatles was so good and nice, for some reason. They thought we’d
want
to see them, or we’d be disappointed.’