Beatles (23 page)

Stu was 19, not much older really than George, but much more developed and mature in his thoughts. He was as passionately interested in art as he’d always been, unlike John who had left it all behind, but he was also as passionate about the group. One night he had a fight on stage with Paul. Despite being much smaller and weaker than Paul, Stu’s anger was so intense that it gave him extra strength. ‘He could become really hysterical when he was angry,’ says Astrid. The fight was something to do with Astrid, something Paul had said about her, but no one remembers the details.

The relationship between Paul and Stu, the petty jealousies and rows, is not too difficult to explain. In a way, they were both competing for John’s attention. Paul had had it for a couple of years, until Stu came along. Stu was obviously very talented, more mature, more in touch. Even Michael McCartney, Paul’s younger brother, remembers how in Liverpool Paul had been a bit jealous of Stu.

The relationship between five Teds from Liverpool and a group of intellectual Hamburg students is harder to explain. They were highly fashionable in their clothes as well as in their thoughts. Klaus and Jurgen had their hair brushed forward in the French style as it was then called. But the Beatles had a rough, natural, undisciplined vitality which they were attracted to.

The exis had nicknames for them all – John was the Sidie Man, George the Beautiful One and Paul the Baby One. The name Beatles, in German, had had everyone amused from the minute they arrived. ‘The Peedles’, was how they pronounced it. This in German is also a small-boy vulgarity, meaning cock or John Thomas.

The Beatles now had two devoted sets of followers, the rockers and the exis. Their original six-week contract was extended
several times by popular demand. Christmas was approaching and they’d been in Hamburg nearly five months. They were scheming to get into an even bigger and better club, the Top Ten. Once they realized they were a success in the Kaiserkeller, they wanted to branch out into a bigger club.

They asked the manager of the Top Ten, Peter Eckhorn, for an audition. ‘I liked them and offered them a contract.’ Then George was told that he would have to leave the country.

‘At all clubs,’ says George, ‘they used to read out a notice every night saying that all people under 18 had to leave. Someone eventually realized I was only 17, without a work permit or a resident permit. So I had to leave. I had to go home on my own. I felt terrible.’

Astrid and Stu drove him to the station, got him his ticket and a place on the train. ‘He was just standing there,’ says Astrid. ‘Little George, all lost. I gave him a big bag of sweets and some apples. He threw his arms round me and Stu, which was the sort of demonstrative thing they never did.’

The other four had moved to the Top Ten but had done only one night when more trouble struck them.

‘Paul and I were clearing out of the Bambi,’ says Pete Best. ‘John and Stu had already moved their things into the Top Ten. We were getting a light on to see what we were doing and we must have started a fire. It wasn’t much, but the police threw us in jail for three hours and then said we were to be deported as well.’ Which left John and Stu.

‘John appeared a day or so later at my house,’ says Astrid. ‘He said he was going home as well because his work permit had been taken away. He said he’d sold some of his clothes to buy his ticket.’

‘It was terrible,’ says John. ‘Setting off home on my own. I had my amp on my back, scared stiff I was going to get it pinched. I hadn’t paid for it. I was convinced I’d never find England.’

Eventually Stu was told that he too would have to leave. The real reasons for all their deportations, apart from George obviously
being under age, were never really clear. Perhaps there was a bit of inter-club rivalry.

Stu was the only one who came home in any style. He flew back to Liverpool. He’d had a touch of tonsillitis. Astrid didn’t want him to get worse on a long journey by land and sea, so she’d given him his air fare.

The others dragged themselves back to Liverpool under their own steam. What had been the greatest experience of their careers so far had ended in pathos and squalor.

They got home, in ones and twos, broke and in tatters, dejected and dispirited. They didn’t see each other or make any contact for some time. They even wondered if the Beatles would ever get going again.

John arrived back home from Hamburg in the middle of the night. He had to throw stones up at Mimi’s bedroom window so that she would get up and let him in.

‘He had these awful cowboy boots on, up to his knees they were, all gold and silver. He just pushed past me and said, “Pay that taxi, Mimi.” I shouted after him up the stairs, “Where’s your £100 a week, John?”’

‘Just like you, Mimi,’ shouted John, ‘to go on about £100 a week when you know I’m tired.’

‘And you can get rid of those boots. You’re not going out of this house in boots like that.’

John went to bed and stayed at home for over a week, not because of the awful boots but because there didn’t seem much alternative. Cyn was naturally pleased to see him. He’d written to her all the time he was away. ‘The sexiest letters this side of Henry Miller,’ says John. ‘Forty pages long some of them. You haven’t destroyed them, have you?’

George, who had got home first, didn’t know for some time that the others had eventually followed him. ‘I felt ashamed, after all the big talk when we set off for Hamburg. My dad gave
me a lift to town one night and I had to borrow ten bob off him.’

Paul was also hanging around at home and soon had his father to contend with. Jim hadn’t wanted him to leave school and go to Hamburg in the first place. He said Paul should now get a job and not just mess around doing nothing.

‘Satan finds things for idle hands,’ so Jim told Paul, with great originality, several times a day. Paul, never a rebel on principle and always willing to please, eventually gave in.

‘I went down to the Labour Exchange. That seemed to be the scene. They fixed me up with a job as second man on a lorry. I’d been on the Post Office the Christmas before from school, so I thought I’d try something different.

‘The firm was called Speedy Prompt Delivery – SPD. They did deliveries round the docks way. I got the early bus down to the docks and bought the
Daily Mirror
, trying to be a real working lad, though I was really just a college pudding.

‘I used to sit on the back of the lorry and helped to carry parcels. I was so buggered sometimes. I fell asleep on the lorry when we went to places like Chester. I was with them about two weeks and felt very worldly, having a job and a few quid in me pocket. But I got laid off. The Christmas period was over and there wasn’t so much work.

‘Dad started moaning again, the usual stuff about the group being all very well but I’d never make a living at it. I half agreed with him, but there was always somebody who said we were promising, some fans liked us and made us feel good.

‘I got another job at Massey and Coggins, winding electrical coils. I had to wear a donkey jacket for that. A fellow called me Mantovani, with me long hair. I had to stand astride this winch and wind the coils. I was always breaking it. I did about one and a half coils in a day, some of the others could do eight, even 14. I wasn’t much good.

‘The tea breaks were great, though, with jam butties and all the lads playing football in a sort of prison exercise yard.

‘I’d actually gone, now it’s all coming back to me, for a job
brushing up the yard, which I thought would be all right. When the bloke noticed I had a few GCEs, he became suspicious, as if I might have a criminal record as well. Then he decided I was OK and gave me a better job, which was winding the coils. He said if I stuck in I’d be all right. I imagined myself as working my way up, being an executive one of these days, if I tried hard.

‘I was getting £7 a week for winding coils and making the tea. The group had got going again but I didn’t know if I wanted to go back full-time. I stayed on at work, just going over the wall for lunchtime sessions or being off sick. But I left in the end. I was there about two months all together. I quite enjoyed being a working man. I met this bloke Albert and had some good chats with him.’

‘I’ll say this for Paul,’ says his father Jim. ‘He was always a tryer. He wasn’t really interested in either job. It was just to oblige me.’

They’d come back from Hamburg in early December 1960. In all they were probably not more than two or three weeks without a date. With a bit of luck, they might have started club work straight away, which would have brightened up their pathetic arrival home. While they’d been away, Allan Williams had decided to build a large beat club on the lines of the Hamburg ones. He’d by now sent so many groups over there, including Gerry and the Pacemakers, that he thought there should be somewhere for them back in Liverpool. Just before the Beatles arrived home, he opened a new Liverpool club called the Top Ten, after the Hamburg one, and put in a manager called Bob Wooler. But six days after it opened, it was burned down. What would have been an ideal place for the Beatles disappeared before they’d even seen it.

Their first post-Hamburg date turned out to be back at the Casbah, Pete Best’s mother’s club. They got a great welcome there, especially from Pete’s friend, Neil Aspinall.

Neil had been a friend of Pete’s for a couple of years. He was actually living at the Casbah, at least he’d left home and taken a room in Mrs Best’s house. He hadn’t gone to school with Pete
but had been at the Institute, starting in the same form as Paul. He’d known George as well. They’d both been in trouble for smoking. But he hadn’t been affected by the skiffle craze, though he’d supported the local groups. With a gang of his classmates, he’d gone along to cheer the Beatles (or Moondogs) at the Empire in the early audition for the Carroll Levis Show.

Neil had left the Institute with eight O levels and was training to be an accountant. He was getting £2 10s. a week, plus luncheon vouchers, and seemed all set for a professional career. Most of his nights at first were taken up with correspondence courses. ‘I hated taking abuse from some fellow 300 miles away. It was like sending it off to the moon, just to get shit on.’ When he started hanging around the Casbah, his courses began to slip, especially when he moved in and lived there full-time.

‘Pete had written to me all the time he was in Hamburg,’ says Neil. ‘He said it was going great and they’d been asked to stay on another month, then another month, and another.

‘Derry and the Seniors had come back from Hamburg first. Pete had sent them round to his mother’s and she’d given them an evening at the Casbah. They were very much improved. They said wait till we hear the Beatles.

‘When I heard that the Beatles were definitely coming home I wrote out lots of posters saying “Return of the Fabulous Beatles” – I put them up on walls and doors all over the place. I’d never seen them as a group with Pete as a member. I didn’t know how they’d changed in Hamburg. They might have been awful.’

But despite Neil’s enthusiasm, it wasn’t possible to put the Beatles on at the Casbah right away. Nobody seemed to know what the others were doing, or even if they were all back. ‘I didn’t know for a week after John came back that he had had to leave Hamburg as well,’ says Pete Best. ‘We didn’t know for weeks what had happened to Stu, till well into January.’

But their first post-Hamburg booking was at the Casbah and they did very well.

‘They were great,’ says Neil. ‘They had improved enormously. They began to get other jobs and a big following.
Frank Garner, the fellow on the door at the Casbah, started to drive them round in his van. I saw a lot of them from then on as the Casbah was the base for their amps and tackle. Rory Storm also came back from Hamburg and played at the Casbah. It was a big scene.’

But their most important engagement after Hamburg took place on 27 December 1960, at Litherland Town Hall. If it is possible to say that any date was the watershed, this was it. All their development, all their new sounds and new songs, suddenly hit Liverpool that night. Their Casbah fans turned up at Litherland and helped the evening’s success. From then on, as far as having a devoted fanatical following was concerned, they never looked back.

They owe that engagement to Bob Wooler, who was about to become DJ at Litherland Town Hall. He’d worked as a clerk for British Railways until the skiffle era began. He wasn’t involved in it himself, being by then almost 30, but he was fascinated by its development. ‘It was amazing to see teenagers making their own music for the first time and becoming entertainers themselves.’

The idea of a Liverpool Top Ten club had collapsed, which would have been a big chance for him as well as the Beatles. ‘They were really sorry for themselves. I knew their capabilities, but they were really down at the time. George was very bitter about the way his Hamburg trip had ended.’

He managed to get them the Litherland Town Hall date. This is a big hall which was used regularly twice a week for teenage dances. It was the biggest hall they’d played in up to then. Their loud, stomping, pounding Hamburg music caused literally a riot, the first they’d ever caused. They also got £6 for the night, again the best they’d had.

‘The kids went mad,’ says Pete Best. ‘Afterwards we found they’d been chalking on our van, the first time it had happened.’

They were billed for that evening as ‘The Beatles, Direct from Hamburg’. A lot of the kids who rioted that night, and for many other nights, thought they must be German. When they
signed autograph books and were heard to speak they all said with surprise, ‘You speak good English.’

‘We probably looked German as well,’ says George. ‘We looked very different from all the other groups, with our leather trousers and cowboy boots. We looked funny and we played differently. We went down a bomb.’

‘It was that evening,’ says John, ‘that we really came out of our shell and let go. We discovered we were quite famous. This was when we began to think for the first time that we were good. Up to Hamburg we’d thought we were OK, but not good enough.’