Best of the Beatles (13 page)

Pete didn’t meet Paul, George or Ringo over the
Anthology
project. It would be difficult for them to meet Pete – it could not be like old friends meeting up because it is tied up with lost opportunities and lost fortunes. “I could ask Neil Aspinall, who is the head of the Apple Corporation and very busy, to make an appointment with them, but it would be a very false way of renewing a friendship.” Pete says wisely. “I think something will happen only if it is meant to happen. If I did meet them, I don’t think I would ask them why they kicked me out of the Beatles. That would be unfair and not something I would rake up again.”
(2014 note – so far as I know, Pete has still to meet Paul and Ringo again.)

Anthology 1
sold for £20 – and even if Pete only received 1p for each track, the album did sell 10 million, that’s over £1 million. According to press reports he stood to make £8 million. In any event, it has made him a multi-millionaire. Shortly after its success I invited Pete Best into BBC Radio Merseyside to answer questions from listeners. The first listener asked him, “Pete, how are you fixed for a loan?”

Paul McCartney was knighted in the New Year’s Honours for 1997. He is a member of the establishment and yet he has sought to maintain his links with the young. In 1997, for example, he released his symphony, ‘Standing Stone’, and also attempted to challenge Oasis with a new album. Ironically, the title of the album,
Flaming Pie
and the title of the Oasis album,
Be Here Now
, were taken from phrases by John Lennon.

I applaud all that McCartney has done for young musicians, actors and technicians by founding and building the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA), appropriately, on the ground of his old school, the Liverpool Institute. McCartney is as pleasant as someone who is
ultrafamous
and rich and in charge of a big business empire can be and he is keen to be seen that way. As psychotherapist Tony Hazzard says, “In Jungian terms, you would say that Paul McCartney is all persona. He looks after his image very carefully.”

There are occasional lapses, normally related to his possessiveness about Beatles’ memorabilia. He stopped Mal Evans’ widow from selling one of his hand-written lyrics and he refused to sign TV host Chris Evans’ star-studded TGI Friday table because he thought someone would make a great deal of money out of it one day. Although many personal details are given in McCartney’s songs, he has never referred to the sacking – or if he has, it has been so oblique, I haven’t recognised it.

Paul McCartney was Best Songwriter at the 1997
Q
Awards, beating such nominees as Paul Weller and Beck. He collected his award but left early when a special award was being given to Phil Spector. Spector had produced, or rather over-produced, the Beatles’ album
Let It Be
and McCartney had never forgiven him for the choir added to ‘The Long and Winding Road.’ According to
Q
magazine’s report, he immediately left the room, muttering “It’s a
Let It Be
thing.”

In January 1998, the
Liverpool Echo
announced a telephone poll to choose Merseyside’s greatest ever entertainers. One hundred entertainers were listed with each one allocated a personal phone line to register votes. The motley crew included Arthur Askey, Pete Best, Cilla Black, Sir Adrian Boult, Mel C of the Spice Girls, Lewis
Collins, Kenny Everett, Billy Fury, Hetty King, Billy J. Kramer, Charlie Landsborough, Freddie Starr, Frankie Vaughan, Bob Wooler and the four mop tops. I’m surprised that Red Rum wasn’t included.

The results were published in the January 23 edition. Ken Dodd was the winner, so no surprises there. Second came Gladys Ambrose, a semi-operatic singer who plays Julia Brogan in Brookside, followed by Sonia, actor Andrew Schofield and Pete Best. How can Pete Best possibly be a greater entertainer than the other Beatles? And for that matter, how can Sonia come third? The result has to be the consequences of multiple voting – Sonia comes from a large family and Pete Best has many supporters. You could argue that Pete Best was getting the sympathy vote, but surely John Lennon, who had been assassinated, deserved even more on that score. However, I’m in no position to carp as I misused my own vote. When I saw my friend, the 1950s pop singer Russ Hamilton (‘We Will Make Love’, 1957), among the nominees, I voted for him.

The rest of the Top 10 was Billy Fury at sixth, then Keith Chegwin, radio DJ Billy Butler, Rory Storm and at tenth John Lennon. Pete Best Number 5, John Lennon Number 10 and Paul McCartney’s position not even published. Strange days indeed.

So, just what has happened since 1998? First of all, I would recommend you to Hunter Davies’ hilarious book,
Behind the Scenes at the Museum of Baked Beans: My Search for Britain’s Maddest Museums
(Virgin, 2010) with its fabulous chapter on the Casbah, which is now open to the public. Sort of. According to Hunter, “I can see why Roag enjoys doing personal tours, booked in advance. It saves on staff and you can control times and numbers. And charge a lot more. Something to bear in mind when I open my museum.”

Hunter Davies describes the Hayman’s Green house as being as mysterious and forbidding as any haunted house and that, “someone appeared to have been at the drive with a pneumatic drill and left jagged slabs of concrete sticking up.” My thoughts entirely – I had often thought that if I were to break my hip, then I should quickly book a tour at Hayman’s Green and pretend to fall over on the drive. It’s compensation paradise and yet so much could be done. I went to an evening event at the Casbah and the lighting in the garden came from the headlights of Rory Best’s car. I am all for the fact that the Casbah looks as it did in the 50s – that’s absolutely fine – but everything else should be sorted out. The Bests appear to have a garage full of clutter and this could be turned into a tea room.
All the tours are conducted by Roag or Rory and there is a missed opportunity here. I suppose it would be
infra dig
if Pete were to do them himself but it would be a profitable concept as a deluxe guided tour from Pete could easily be sold at £50 a ticket, and Beatle fans would have a once-
in-a
-lifetime experience.

It’s not as if the Bests don’t appreciate the potential of the Casbah on the tourist trail: it’s just that they are a bit lethargic about it. You have put in investment and effort to make a decent return, but it is there for the asking and I’m sure Mona would have realised that.

In 2006 the DVD
Pete Best of the Beatles
was released, and it concentrated on the Casbah and Pete’s time with the Beatles. Although it covers well-trodden ground, the director Geoff Wonfor has made a very entertaining and informative film with sharply edited visuals and interviewees on top form, although, as so often happens these days, nobody tells any lengthy anecdotes. Among the interviewees are Tony Sheridan, Cynthia Lennon, Gerry Marsden, Tony Crane (Merseybeats), Johnny Gustafson (Big Three), Horst Fascher (Star-Club), photographer Astrid Kirchherr, Beatles’ road manager Neil Aspinall, a sacked Quarry Man Ken Brown and friends of the Best family. The DVD extras include Brian Poole and Mike Smith discussing the Decca sessions on New Year’s Day 1962, session drummer Andy White talking about his involvement with ‘Love Me Do’ and Pete Best’s current band working on new material. The uncritical praise for Pete is a bit overbearing and some of the case for the prosecution should have been included as, according to the film, there appears to be no reason to sack him at all. Still, what can you do when the Executive Producer is Pete Best himself? Nevertheless, this is an exceptionally good DVD. Watch it with another Beatle fan and you’ll be discussing it for hours afterwards.

In 2002, you could say that Pete Best wrote his third autobiography, this time called
The Beatles – The True Beginnings
(Spine Books, 2002) and the authors are listed as Roag Best with Pete and Rory Best. The book is testimony to the possibility that the Best’s throw nothing away as old wiring and crockery from the Casbah is lovingly reproduced.

The text of my book shows that the Bests’ house is a house of secrets but I had no idea just how much had been hidden until I read
Beatle Pete, Time Traveller
by Mallory Curley (Randy Press, 2005). This little-known book provided unique research for the hardcore Beatle fans and it was quite clear that Pete Best either withheld significant information from his autobiographies or simply didn’t know it. Mallory Curley, a pseudonym for a Harvard archivist, spent 5 years researching Pete’s background and produced a remarkable book. Or rather, what could have been a remarkable book. For some daft reason best known to himself, he has chosen to write a fictional account of what might have happened between Pete Best and his fellow Beatles. However, we are assured that the copious footnotes are as accurate as they can be.

The footnotes take up half of the 450 A4 pages and I learnt, for the first time, that Pete is not the son of the boxing promoter, Johnny Best, but rather was born Randolph Peter Scanland in Madras when his mother, Mona, was 17. I have been able to confirm this myself from the records kept in the Asian section of the British Library. Pete’s father is the marine engineer Donald Peter Scanland. I don’t know whether they were married (and nor does Curley) but he lost his life during the war. After that, Mona married the serviceman and physical fitness instructor, John Best in Bombay when Pete was 2 years old. John Best became Pete’s father and they had a son, Rory, in 1945. He then brought the family to England.

Because Mallory Curley has had the assistance of estranged relations rather than the Best family themselves, the whys and wherefores are missing, but all these family secrets could explain why Pete was so reticent during the early 1960s. He wouldn’t want to give John Lennon ammunition for mocking him.

And another mystery. The Bests moved into 8 Hayman’s Green, the former home of the West Derby Conservative Club, in 1958. The family story is that Mona Best had pawned her jewellery and put it on Never Say Die, ridden by Lester Piggott in the Derby, and won at 33-1. Great story but doesn’t it seem immensely unlikely? Certainly, I’ve never heard anything like it. Does anyone make a
one-off
bet of that magnitude and then stop? And why it put on the Derby where so many horses are competing and almost anything can happen? It is always said they don’t mind you winning in Las Vegas because they know you will soon be paying it back – with interest. No, it doesn’t sound right and then, Lester Piggott rode Never Say Die in 1954, and would the Bests really hang on to their winnings for 4 years?

I’ve no idea how they obtained this money but my guess would be that Johnny Best, who ran the boxing bouts at Liverpool Stadium, had a portfolio of fighters who could be hired for security work or perhaps even bare knuckle contests – a Liverpool version of
The Fight Club
– who knows? I certainly don’t but I do know that it would be money earned away from the Inland Revenue’s prying eyes and this could have been used to purchase the property. I don’t say it was: I just say that the family story seems unlikely.

And another fact which may be pertinent. Johnny Best Senior, who managed the Liverpool Stadium before his son, died in 1956. He lived round the corner from Hayman’s Green and had a boxing ring in his back garden. What went
on there? On the face of it, he did not leave a huge sum but who knows what was under the floorboards? It’s not for me to besmirch their reputations but there is something very odd going on here and it is not resolved in any of Pete Best’s books.

By the early 60s, Johnny and Mona Best no longer lived together and so he didn’t know the young beat musicians. A pity as there could have been some profitable exhibition bouts with Kingsize Taylor and Johnny Hutch. Kingsize overturned a whole bar in Hamburg and it took several policemen to arrest him – real Clint Eastwood stuff.

One further point before we move on: there were no high street bookmakers in the UK in 1954 so how did Mona Best place her large bet? It had to be placed at the course with someone who was prepared to accept a bet of this size (perhaps £500). Did she or Johnny Best know someone who would do this for her and, in any event, it seems highly unlikely that both a husband and a wife would think that this was a sensible thing to be doing. Surely Johnny would have tried to talk Mona out of it.

Pete Best has continued to make records and as the Pete Best Band. He recorded an album of rock ’n’ roll standards with Liverpool musicians called
Casbah Coffee Club
which was issued in 1999. The backing band is really Liverpool Express and Brian Jones of the Undertakes on saxophone and Beryl Marsden adding backing vocals. This was followed by
Haymans Green
in 2008, which marked Pete Best’s debut as a songwriter, admittedly writing with the rest of his band. As you might expect there is nothing very revealing in the songs and the album sounds like a collection of ELO outtakes.

As he has passed retirement age and has no need to work, Ringo Starr has been industrious, often playing with his All-Starr Band and a new version of ‘Boys’ was released
in 2004, recorded live at Casino Rama, Canada. Ringo’s new albums feature original material and so do not affect the Pete Best/Ringo Starr discography but, intriguingly, he writes at least one song about Liverpool on every new album: nothing about Pete Best yet.

That Pete/Ringo discography often referred to an Italian CD,
Pop Goes The Radio
, and those songs have now found their way, in better sound quality, onto the official release
On Air, Live At The BBC Volume 2
, issued in 2013.

In recent years, Roag Best’s daughter, Leanne, has become one of the UK’s most promising actresses. She has appeared in such TV productions as
Ripper Street
and
Lucan
and been on stage at the Liverpool Playhouse and the National Theatre. Even leading actors have to face rejection as they are not seen as suitable for certain roles or because somebody else has the edge on them. Hopefully, Leanne will have picked up some tips from observing Uncle Pete.

In the years 2003–2005, the Liverpool record company, Viper, released three volumes of
Unearthed Merseybeat
. Historically, these are invaluable collections of outtakes, demos, practice sessions and live recordings by Liverpool musicians. Four tracks that Gerry and the Pacemakers recorded with Lambda Records in Crosby in 1961 are included including an original song ‘Why Oh Why’ and a rocked-up version of Nat ‘King’ Cole’s ‘Pretend’. They reveal that Gerry and the Pacemakers had it all together before they had even been signed by Brian Epstein or gone to EMI.

However, the big find of recent years has been a complete set by Rory Storm and the Hurricanes from the Jive Hive in Crosby on 5 March 1960, now issued by Rockstar Records. Ringo Starr was their regular drummer at the time but the drumming on this recording is rather wayward and suggests someone was filling in or perhaps Ringo was feeling ill.
We know from Johnny Guitar’s diaries that Ringo had influenza a few days earlier. Either way, it doesn’t matter as this CD gives you a real feel of what Merseybeat was like back in 1960. Alan Caldwell as Rory Storm doesn’t stutter on stage and even performs a narration, ‘All American Boy’, complete with local references. If you want to know more about the Rory Storm band, I have put an annotated version of Johnny Guitar’s diaries on my website (
www.spencerleigh.co.uk
) where there is also a full account of my somewhat tortuous dealings with Tony Sheridan. One reviewer of
Drummed Out!
said that I had used the book to settle old scores with Sheridan. Not true: I was glad to have witnessed his erratic behaviour and I was giving you a sense of what he could be like.

Allan Williams wrote a second memoir,
The Fool on the Hill
(Barge Pole, 2003) with Lew Baxter but strangely his memories of the Beatles were less informative than in his first volume. Allan now says that he doesn’t mind missing out on the riches as he is ‘a millionaire of memories’, and if you believe that…

Some commentators have dismissed Allan Williams’ contribution to the Merseybeat scene and I can see why. By his own admission, he does have a Del Boy personality and it is easy to assume that it is all pretence. I was therefore gratified to find that his place in Merseybeat history is so firmly affirmed by Mark Lewisohn in the first volume of his biography of the Beatles,
Tune In
(2013). I’ve no idea what the single volume version is like as I haven’t even looked inside but the two volume edition (of the first volume, if you see what I mean) covers 1,700 pages and there is something intriguing on every page.

Mark’s book makes it clear, and it is backed up by documentation, that the Beatles’ first EMI session on 6 June 1962 was not an audition as they already had a
contract with the Parlophone label, which had come via EMI’s publishing arm, Ardmore and Beechwood. All the sadder then that Pete played so poorly that day.

When it comes to Pete Best’s sacking, Mark Lewisohn, in a chapter called ‘The Undesirable Member’, makes it abundantly clear that Pete had to go because they didn’t think he was good enough. There were other factors but to Mark, that is the overriding one.

Mark’s book does confirm that there was a drum kit in the McCartney household and the fact that he is not sure where it came from suggests it was a knock-off. However, it is fanciful for Mike McCartney to claim that he was a contender for the Beatles’ drum seat. According to Mark, Mike had fractured his arm at scout camp in 1957 and despite extensive physiotherapy, it had not fully healed.

Mark may well have solved the discrepancies over how Ringo came to join the Beatles. He says that Paul had recently passed his driving test and he took John with him in a borrowed car to Butlin’s holiday camp in Skegness in late July 1962. So, some 2 weeks before Pete was sacked, they knew he was interested in joining them. Then on August 14, Brian Epstein rang Butlin’s and the receptionist called Ringo over the tannoy. He confirmed that he would join the band but that he could not come straight away, hence the Beatles used Johnny Hutch for a few nights.

Around the same time as the publication of Mark Lewisohn’s book, David Bedford’s second book,
The Fab One Hundred and Four – The Evolution of the Beatles
(2013) came out. This lavish coffee-table book includes, for the first time in a Beatles book, photographs of Janice the Stripper. Perhaps she will now come forward, although she will be over seventy by now.

The Cavern DJ Bob Wooler used to describe Liverpool as Pinocchioville and say that it should be full of people
with very long noses. There was an example of that in
Drummed Out!
In the book, I quoted Alistair Taylor claiming to be Raymond Jones, that he had put the name in the order book so that he could obtain ‘My Bonnie’. Sam Leach tells a similar story: he ordered ‘My Bonnie’ but he couldn’t have given his real name to NEMS as he didn’t get on with Brian Epstein.