Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion (15 page)

Paul said, “What the bloody hell are you talking about, Richie?” He looked to be three sheets, which surprised me, because I didn’t know zombies could get pissed.

I said, “In a battle, I know what you’re gonna do three steps before you do it. I know where you’re gonna move before you do.”

George said, “How do you take a test for that?”

I said, “Dunno, really. You just do.”

Then John guzzled half a pint in one swallow and said, “How’d you like to test us, Ringo, m’lad?”

JOHN LENNON:
I guess you could call it an initiation. The thought of an initiation was ridiculous, but it had to be done.

Back when I wanted to kill and reanimate Stuart Sutcliffe, Paul would tell me time and again, “We need
somebody
in our group who has blood coursing through his veins.” I didn’t agree with him at the time, but I’d come around to his way of thinking. He convinced me that not everybody in the world could get behind an all-shuffler band.

Also, we couldn’t have somebody in the drum chair who couldn’t handle himself, so we had to make sure.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
That night, around three in the morning, we all met up at Calderstones Park. It was empty, which was just how we wanted it.

GEORGE HARRISON:
John and Paul wouldn’t let me participate. John’s reason was the same as it always was: “You’re too young.” So I watched.

RINGO STARR:
There’s no such thing as a Ninja uniform. Everybody thinks it’s that all-black deal with the hood and the mask, but the truth is, that comes from Kabuki. Modern Ninjas will wear anything from a white karate suit to a pair of blue jeans. Just for the fun of it, my first teacher,
, sometimes wore a double-breasted suit to class. But that night, just for the fun of it, I wore my all-black deal.

JOHN LENNON:
Ringo is the least scary-looking person you’ll ever meet. He’s always smiling and cheerful and utterly nonthreatening. That is, until he puts on that Ninja suit. All of a sudden, Mr. Starkey transforms into a cat you don’t want to mess with.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
I’d seen John have hundreds of punch-ups—hell, I’d fought him at least two dozen times myself—but I’d never seen him as nervous as he was when Ringo appeared out of nowhere.

GEORGE HARRISON:
I wish I could’ve videotaped the battle. The whole thing took about three minutes, and it happened so fast that I missed all of the details. It’d be nice to go back and watch it frame by frame.

JOHN LENNON:
It was two against one, but it may as well have been two against fifty, because Ringo used the trees as his defenders. He’d hide behind one, then when we’d spot him, he’d be behind another before we even had a chance to touch him. And then when he jumped up into the branches of this big oak tree and started leaping from one tree to another like Tarzan without a vine, forget it. We’d never seen that sort of skill, and we had no fookin’ chance.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
While Ringo was whizzing about from tree to tree, I said to John, “We have to separate, y’know. We have to spread out. And we have to anticipate. Forget this zombie shite—it’s time to start thinking like a Ninja.”

John said, “What do you mean, ‘think like a Ninja’? How in Jesus’ name do you think like a Ninja?”

I said, “No clue. Let’s just get this little cunt. I haven’t stayed up this late since our last gig at the Kaiserkeller, and I’m knackered.”

RINGO STARR:
They never laid a finger on me, and I never laid a finger on them.
made his philosophy very clear to me: never hurt a being—zombie or otherwise—in anger or jest, only in defense.

Nonetheless, before we called it a night, while I was hiding at the top of the tallest tree in Calderstones, I zipped a shuriken at each of them and cut off their pants at the waist.

GEORGE HARRISON:
That was—and still is—the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. There’s Lennon and McCartney, in full attack mode, going nuts trying to find this little Ninja, and then
zzzzzip,
there’s Lennon and McCartney, standing in the middle of the park with their trousers and briefs around their ankles and their plonkers flapping about for the world to see.

At that point, I yelled out, “Oi, Johnny, who’s too young to fight now?”

JOHN LENNON:
So I’m standing there with my pants on the ground, with my member shriveling up in the cold morning air. I looked over at Paul and said, “Well, I guess we’ve got ourselves a new drummer.”

R
od Argent may not be a Ninja, but he is nonetheless a true warrior, a gent who’s been making music professionally since 1959, and when I spoke with him in August 2002, he showed no sign of slowing down.

Back during the British Invasion’s halcyon years, Argent tasted a small dose of international success—not nearly as healthy a dose as fellow Invasioneers like the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and the Who, but he did okay for himself and his quintet. Some would say his band was just as interesting as any of the aforementioned units, and some might question why they never reached such dizzying heights, but as all rock fans know, it’s a crapshoot. Bad bands sometimes go platinum, and great bands sometimes never even get a record deal.

Rod isn’t bitter—as noted, he’s a warrior, content to fight the good fight and take life one gig at a time—but there’s one topic that gets his dander up big-time, that topic being the zombification of the Beatles.

You see, Rod Argent is the cofounder of the Zombies.

ROD ARGENT:
Everybody thinks we called ourselves the Zombies so we could ride the Beatles’ coattails, but for your information, we were the Zombies well before we ever heard of the Beatles. We’d been around since ’59, and since we were from St. Albans, those Liverpool brats wanted bugger-all to do with us, and that was fine. They had their thing, and we had ours. Still, there probably wouldn’t have been any problems between us if it wasn’t for that sodding article by sodding Bill Harry in sodding
Mersey Beat
.

Bill Harry was one of Lennon’s school chums from that pretentious art school, and he started up an entire paper to follow the English music scene … such as it was. It was all very pro-Beatles, and he all but ignored every other up-and-coming band outside of Liverpool.

I remember that sodding article word for word.

T
he article of which Argent speaks was published in a September 1962 issue of Mersey Beat. Harry printed a limited number, so limited I couldn’t find a copy or find anybody who had a copy or find anybody who knew anybody who had a copy. So we’ll have to take Argent’s word for it. Rod’s recount of the article reflects MB’s typically breathless writing style, so Rod’s memory is probably solid.

FAKE ZOMBIES VS. REAL ZOMBIES!!!
The Beatles Go to Battle

The Beatles, our beloved boys from Liverpool, are in the midst of the biggest controversy of their young career. It just so happens that a band from St. Albans has named themselves the Zombies, and, as anybody who has ever heard or seen them will tell you,
they are not zombies
!!! They are regular blokes who do not sound like the Beatles or look like the Beatles, and it is our belief that the Zombies christened themselves the Zombies to capitalize on the inevitable success of Liverpool’s favorite rockers.

Not a single Zombie would comment. However, John Lennon told
Mersey Beat
, “If I ever run into one of those fake Zombies, I’m going to hurt him, and hurt him bad. Believe me, they’ll know what it’s like to deal with a
real
Zombie!”

JOHN LENNON:
I never said that. I didn’t want to hurt Argent. Besides, if I did, I certainly wouldn’t have announced it in the press … and you can thank Ringo for that. From the minute he joined the band, Ringo spent a lot of time preaching to us about the element of surprise.

ROD ARGENT:
That entire article was patently bullshit. The worst part of it was that Bill sodding Harry never tried to reach any of us; I’ll wager he didn’t even know any of our names.

We were still struggling along when the Beatles started playing regularly at the Cavern Club. My bandmate Colin Blunstone and I would check them out every once in a while. The guys played the hell out of their instruments, and their vocal harmonies were mind-blowing, so we couldn’t deny their greatness, but from our perspective, it looked like they were using their zombie powers to build a base. In other words, they were either
scaring
people into liking them or
hypnotizing
people into liking them. That being the case, we felt they were giving zombies a bad name, thus they were giving the Zombies a bad name.

We’d go play venues like the Playhouse in Manchester or the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton or the Palais Ballroom in Alder-shot, places that the Beatles had wreaked havoc upon at some point in the past couple of years, and the cats at these clubs would be frightened of us, because they thought we were honest-to-sod-ding-God zombies. Can you blame them? Imagine you’re working at a place where one of the guys in the zombie band that’d played there the week before gets mad at the soundman, but then murders the doorman. (That never made much sense to me, by the way; if you’re pissed at the soundman, kill the sodding soundman.) From then on, whenever you heard the word
zombies
, you’d probably want to pack it in. Until we proved to the world that we didn’t
have the ability or desire to mangle our audience, getting work was a bitch.

I got some measure of revenge, but that wouldn’t come for another six sodding years.

A
s alluded to earlier, the list of those who have been thought of as the Fifth Beatle is endless: Aspinall and Epstein top the heap, of course, but journalist and eventual press officer Derek Taylor, New York–based radio jock Murray the K, roadie Mal Evans, and even boxer Muhammad Ali are among the many who have had the spurious title bestowed upon them. But none were as integral to the Fab Four’s story as the real Fifth Beatle, George Martin.