Paul McCartney (20 page)

On 31 December, they set off for London separately, Brian by train, the Beatles in Neil Aspinall’s van. Unfortunately, Neil lost his way and a journey that should have lasted only about four hours took more than ten. Having finally reached central London, they got caught up in its traditionally rowdy New Year’s Eve celebrations around the Trafalgar Square fountains. At one point, a man approached them, offering something called ‘pot’ which he suggested they should ‘smoke’ together in the back of Neil’s van. The Liverpool lads turned and fled.

As a result, they were all viciously hung-over when they met up with Brian the next morning at Decca’s studios in Broadhurst Gardens, St John’s Wood–Paul’s first glimpse of the leafy north London enclave he would one day call home. They were kept waiting a long time in reception, to Brian’s blushing annoyance, then were informed that their amps weren’t good enough to record, so they’d have to use the studio’s own. They had just one hour to demo 15 songs, chosen (by Brian) from their huge repertoire of R&B and pop cover versions and standards, plus three Lennon–McCartney originals.

The Beatles’ Decca audition has gone down in history as a disastrously below-par performance that gave no real idea of who or what they were. In fact, despite the hangovers and haste, it was a showcase of enormous versatility and charm, ranging from Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’, delivered with all John’s bitter brio, to Paul’s heartfelt ‘Till There Was You’ and George’s surprisingly sweet version of Bobby Vee’s ‘Take Good Care Of My Baby’; from the semi-comic ‘Sheik Of Araby’ and ‘Three Cool Cats’ to a quickstep version of Harry Warren’s ‘September In The Rain’, sung by Paul as if there wasn’t a rock ‘n’ roll bone in his body. The Lennon-McCartney songs were John’s ‘Hello Little Girl’ and Paul’s ‘Like Dreamers Do’ and ‘Love of the Loved’.

In the end, versatility proved to be their undoing; the Decca people could see no way of marketing such an unfocused bunch of musical eccentrics in the simplistic British pop scene of 1962. That they hailed from so distant and inaccessible a part of the country also helped tip the balance against them. So the Beatles were turned down and a north London butcher named Brian Poole and his band, the Tremeloes, were signed instead.

The Liverpool bands who competed with each other so ferociously onstage were privately the best of friends who liked nothing better than to meet up and drink together after a long night at the Cavern or the Iron Door. Their favourite rendezvous–offering entertainment as good as any city nightspot–was the home of the Hurricanes’ flamboyant front man, Rory Storm.

Rory carried his ‘Mr Showmanship’ tag into everyday life, having changed his name by deed poll from Alan Caldwell and even renamed his family’s house in Broadgreen Road ‘Stormsville’. His mother, Vi, was his most ardent fan and welcomed his musician friends to Stormsville at any hour of the night, providing non-stop food and hot drinks, plus a mixture of straight talking and zany humour that could put even John Lennon into the shade.

Often present at these sitting-room soirées would be Rory’s younger sister Iris, a bubbly 17-year-old who’d had a childhood romance with George Harrison. Iris had kept up the family tradition of unconventionality by running away, joining a circus and becoming a trapeze artiste: she now worked as a dancer in pantomimes and summer variety shows, specialising in the French cancan.

‘Paul and John used to love my parents,’ she recalls. ‘My dad was the most totally good man I’ve ever known. Each week, he used to open his pay packet, take only what he needed to feed and clothe us, then give the rest to charity. He’d usually have gone to bed when the Beatles arrived; they called him “the Crusher” because he had these nightmares that made him shout out and roll around the bed. And they called my mum “Violent Vi”, I suppose because they could never best her in an argument.’

Iris had known Paul for years as a friend of Rory’s but one night at a Beatles gig she noticed him looking at her in a different way. ‘It was at the Operation Big Beat show at New Brighton Tower, when they were on with [black American singer] Davy Jones. The Twist had just come in and I demonstrated it with the Beatles backing me.

‘People have always thought Paul wrote “I Saw Her Standing There” about me because I was “just seventeen” when he asked me out. But in the two years we were together, he always used to say he couldn’t write a song about me, because the only thing that rhymed with “Iris” was “virus”.’

It turned into another ‘going steady’ arrangement, fitted in between Beatles gigs and Iris’s commitments as a dancer. ‘We’d go to the cinema every Tuesday: Paul would pay one week, I’d pay the next. Or we’d go to the Empire if a big name was on–always sitting in the cheap seats. Paul liked what I thought were quite square entertainers, like Joe “Mr Piano” Henderson. He knew all of Joe’s numbers and sang along with them, which I found a bit embarrassing.’

Even with the feisty Iris, he remained something of a couture control-freak. ‘Because of being in show business, I was used to glamming myself up. But Paul only liked me to dress very plainly… dark skirts and jumpers, my hair in a bun. Later on, I laughed when I read that he’d turned into such a vegetarian. When we were going out, his favourite meal used to be lamb chops, chips and peas.’

Iris had always been a regular at the Cavern, cheering on both her brother’s band and the Beatles. But that changed when Brian Epstein came along. Brian feared the Beatles’ female fans would desert them if they were known to have wives or even girlfriends. ‘He asked Rory to ask me not to go down the Cavern any more,’ Iris recalls, ‘in case anyone found out we were dating.’

Paul by now had a car of his own, bought with the aid of a loan from his father. The model he chose was typically aspirational: one of the new Ford Classics in a colour named Goodwood Green, after Britain’s poshest motor racing circuit, and advertised as ‘suitable for the golf-club car park’.

‘Wherever we went, he always had to be the centre of attention,’ Iris says. ‘John used to love to imitate Quasimodo or what he called “Spassies” [spastics] and Paul had picked it up from him. One night we’d gone to this coffee bar in Birkenhead called The Cubic Club because everything was cube-shaped–the tables, the seats. Paul’s showing-off got on my nerves so much that I picked up the sugar-bowl–the sugar was the one thing there not in cubes–and emptied it over his head.

‘We were always having rows and breaking up. And whenever we did, George would be round the next day, asking me to go out with him again.’

Much of their time together was spent in the sitting-room at ‘Stormsville’, listening to the wild cries of Iris’s dad having his spectacular nightmares in bed upstairs. ‘My dad used to sleepwalk as well. One night he came downstairs in his pyjamas fast asleep and ran out into the street, saying he was looking for his car. Paul went after him and talked him back indoors and up to bed again.

‘After the Beatles had been out on a gig, Paul used to like my mum to comb his legs. He’s quite hairy, and having his legs combed seemed to relax him. He’d say “Oo, Vi, give me legs a comb” and roll up his trouser-leg, and Mum would get a comb and do it.

‘She loved him but she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind about the way he used his good looks and charm to get away with things–like always smoking other people’s cigarettes instead of buying his own. I remember her saying to him once, “You’ve got no heart, Paul.”’

Through her dancing, Iris moved in higher show business circles than young men who strummed guitars in Liverpool cellars. While going out with Paul, she also saw a lot of Frank Ifield, an Australian singer/yodeller whose ‘I Remember You’ topped the UK singles charts for seven weeks in early 1962. The friendship was purely platonic, though Ifield clearly wished it could be more.

‘When Frank came to Liverpool to appear at the Empire, Paul told me he’d got tickets–and for a change, we weren’t in the cheap seats but the front row. When Frank came onstage, he could see the two of us sitting there, cuddled up together and holding hands. He didn’t give any sign of having seen us, but I knew the next song he sang was aimed directly at Paul. It was Jim Reeves’s “He’ll Have to Go”.

‘I was in two worlds at the same time. After the show, I’d be having drinks at the Lord Nelson [pub] with Frank and the Shadows and the other stars on the bill. Then I’d go outside and find Paul waiting for me, and we’d get fish and chips on the way home.

‘When the week was over, I saw Frank off on the train from Lime Street station. Then I turned round and saw Paul coming along the platform, doing his Quasimodo act.’

‘Just think–Little Richard’s got on my shirt! I can’t believe it!’

He was often to be found at Lime Street station during that early spring of 1962, if not always in the same jokey mood. With John, George and Pete, he’d meet Brian Epstein off the train from London; they’d go to a nearby coffee bar named the Punch and Judy and Brian would give them the usual depressing news. Armed with the Decca audition tape–which, since he’d paid for it, could now be termed a demo–Brian visited one London record company after another, pitching an act which, he said, was potentially ‘bigger than Elvis’. The record company men smiled at that, smiled even more patronisingly at the idea of such a thing coming out of Liverpool. ‘You’ve got a good business, Mr Epstein,’ said one, meaning his family’s NEMS electrical stores. ‘Why not stick to it?’

At the same time, smoothing out his boys’ rough edges was proving a laborious process. In April, they were booked for a two-week return visit to Hamburg–the first of three that year–to appear at the Reeperbahn’s brand-new Star-Club. ‘Don’t be raping on the Reeperbahn,’ Iris Caldwell’s irrepressible mum admonished Paul when he called at ‘Stormsville’ to say adieu.

Under the band’s new management, there were no more punishing trans-European journeys by road or rail. John, Paul and Pete flew out from Manchester on 11 April, leaving George, who had flu, to follow later with Brian. At Hamburg airport, the first-comers were met by Astrid and Klaus Voormann, who told them Stu Sutcliffe had died from a brain haemorrhage the previous day. His mother, Millie, was also en route from Liverpool to identify the body.

Stu’s death was a devastating blow to John (who always regarded the premature demise of those he loved as a personal betrayal). Paul, for his part, suffered pangs of extreme guilt, remembering the friction there had often been between Stu and himself in their battle for John’s attention. But in truth he had nothing to reproach himself for; the pity was that he and Stu, with their common passion for art, never became the friends they should have been.

Stu’s fatal haemorrhage was attributed to ‘trauma to the brain’, generally believed to date back to a year earlier, when he still played bass with the Beatles and they would often be targeted by the disgruntled boyfriends of their female fans. After a gig at Lathom Hall, Stu had been alone backstage when he was set on by a gang of toughs, knocked to the ground and kicked in the head. John came to his rescue, fighting off the attackers with such reckless ferocity that he broke the little finger of his right hand.

Forty years after the event, however, Stu’s younger sister, Pauline, published a different theory, allegedly based on what he’d told her and his mother shortly before his death. This was that during the Beatles’ second stint in Hamburg, Paul, John and Stu had been out walking and John had attacked Stu without provocation or warning, knocking him down, then kicking him in the head with savagery enough to cause trauma to the brain and then some. John had immediately fled the scene, leaving Paul to pick up Stu–by now bleeding from the face and one ear–and help him back to the Beatles’ dorm above the Top Ten club. As a result, John had always believed himself responsible for Stu’s death and been haunted by guilt and remorse until his own dying day.

Yet no plausible explanation was forthcoming of why John, however unhinged by drink or pills, should have brutalised someone he loved, admired–and protected–as much as he did Stu. And had Paul truly been the sole eyewitness to such an incident, it would presumably have stayed seared on his memory for ever. ‘It’s possible Stu and John had a fight in a drunken moment,’ he says now. ‘But I don’t remember anything that stands out.’

The Star-Club’s manager, Horst Fascher, was one of St Pauli’s most renowned tough guys, a former featherweight boxing champion who’d done time for accidentally killing a sailor in a street brawl. Fascher loved rock ‘n’ roll and adored the Beatles; consequently, they’d always been immune to any harm from the Reeperbahn’s criminal community, both the gangsters and protection racketeers at its top and the muggers and pickpockets at its bottom.

Apart from a team of extra-brutal waiter/bouncers known as ‘Hoddel’s gang’, Fascher’s main innovation at the Star-Club was bringing over American rock ‘n’ roll legends whose careers had shrunk to almost nothing in their homeland. The first of those with whom the Beatles overlapped was their greatest hero after Elvis–Gene Vincent.

At close quarters, however, their hero turned into a bit of a nuisance: a borderline psychopath who always carried a loaded gun (‘Not much point in carryin’ it if it ain’t loaded,’ as he explained) and liked to show off the unarmed combat techniques he’d learned in the US Marines. He was particularly keen to use Paul to demonstrate how he could put someone ‘out’ simply by touching a couple of pressure-points. ‘C’mon… it’ll only last for a coupla’ minutes,’ wheedled the same sacred voice that had sung ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’. But Paul would have none of it, and got less and less polite about saying so.

At the Star-Club, the Beatles also shared the bill–and, often, the stage–with Roy Young, a high-octane singer/pianist, dubbed ‘England’s Little Richard’, whom they’d once watched on the BBC’s first all-rock ‘n’ roll television show, Drumbeat. ‘I’d arrived to play at the Top Ten club a few months earlier, just as they were leaving after the trouble with Bruno Koschmider,’ Young recalls. ‘When I got out of my car outside the Top Ten, they ran over and lifted me bodily into the air.’

Paul loved Young’s piano-playing and suggested Brian should offer him a permanent place in the Beatles. But he had already signed a three-year contract with the Star-Club’s owner, Manfred Weissleder.