GERMANY CALLING!
Spencer Leigh goes to Hamburg and researches the links between the city and the Beatles.
This is a chapter from Twist And Shout - Merseybeat, The Cavern, The Star-Club and the Beatles (Nirvana Books, 2004), which can be ordered through the Books page. I’ve reprinted the chapter as it is. I don’t know anyone else who does it, but I like the idea of numbering the direct quotes and then writing about the speakers at the back of the book, but I realise that the chapter might be a little confusing out of context. In other words, buy the book!
4. Germany Calling
I. St. Pauli – Sex And Drugs And Rock And Roll
II. Schlager You Than Me
III. The Indra and the Kaiserkeller
IV. 27 December 1960
“We forgave the Germans and then we were friends.”
(Bob Dylan, ‘With God On Our Side’, 1964)
I. St. Pauli – Sex And Drugs And Rock And Roll
“I had expected Hamburg to be grimmer – a sort of German Liverpool,” writes Bill Bryson in his travel book, Neither Here Nor There (1991), but he is pleasantly surprised. I expected Hamburg to be a German Liverpool too when I went in 2001, but that would be a compliment in my eyes. I expected this because the Liverpool groups had fitted so snugly into the city, and many musicians spent several years there.
Situated on the Elbe River in northern Germany, Hamburg is Germany’s second city and largest port, now a container port but still with an enormous volume of trade. The director of the Museum of Hamburg History, Dr Ortwin Pelc (146) told me, “The people in Hamburg feel separate from Germany and also from Saxony or Bavaria. They won’t say, ‘We are German, we are Bavarians.’ The Hamburgers say, ‘We are from Hamburg.’ That is not just in the twentieth century. It has been that way for hundreds of years.” Sounds familiar? Already you sense the pride that links the people of Hamburg and Liverpool.
There is a tendency for Scousers to claim that Liverpool people invented everything and in my short time in Hamburg, I noticed a similar tendency. Several people told me that the word ‘hamburger’ came from Hamburg, though why anyone should want to claim that beats me. It appears that the Americans saw the German immigrants frying steaks and discovered they were very tasty: hence, hamburgers were born. I’m not convinced. Frying meat involves no great thought and surely several communities were doing it at the same time. Maybe ‘big fries’ comes from the Grosse Freiheit.
Dr Ortwin Pelc (147) senses that Hamburgers are not like other Germans: “Maybe it is a different humour but there are a lot of parallels between England and northern Germany We have some people working here from Vienna and Austria: they don’t understand our humour and we say, ‘Well, there is a kind of English humour here.’ We have very close connections to London. We have a ferry from here to Harwich. We have an English theatre here and we have British clubs here.”
Hamburg espouses freedom, and all manner of behaviour is tolerated in its St. Pauli area. There are elegant department stores and beautiful town houses elsewhere, but St. Pauli is a working-class district down by the docks. The thoroughfare is Die Reeperbahn, which means ‘Rope-making Street’ and provides another link to the ships, and the Star-Club was in Die Grosse Freiheit, which means The Great Freedom. Some centuries ago, the Reeperbahn was divided from the rest of the city by a wall, and the prostitutes, gypsies and beggars would live there. On the whole, St. Pauli is a cosmopolitan area, created for the needs of sailors (and we all know what sailors want), and hence, there is nothing especially German about it.
Photographer Günter Zint (148): “The Grosse Freiheit goes back 400 years. Hamburg was Protestant and there you could be of any religious persuasion. You could attend a Catholic church, and we had six churches in St. Pauli in the seventeenth century. If you had a profession and you were not in a union, you could go to Grosse Freiheit and work as a shoemaker, for example. It was just outside Hamburg, so everything that was new or funny or anti-establishment was there.”
R&B musician, Henry Heggen (149): “The Reeperbahn is where they let it all hang out. They made the ropes for the ships and then they established the dives, so it became the place to get drunk and be with a woman. The equivalent would be Las Vegas where prostitution is legal, but it doesn’t have the tradition the Reeperbahn has. It is 100 yards to the harbour so over the centuries sailors have been going there for a good time.”
Dr Ortwin Pelc (150): “The history of the Reeperbahn has so much to do with sex because it is the second biggest harbour in Europe. When the sailors came here in the Fifties and Sixties, they stayed in St. Pauli with the music, the sex shops and the sex shows. The authorities in Hamburg would like St. Pauli to have a better image and you have got a theatre which is staging Cats at the moment. If you are in St. Pauli at night, you will meet people that you would prefer not to meet. The harbour isn’t so important for the sailors. The ships are only here for two or three hours and the sailors do not have time to go to the Reeperbahn. The clubs are more for tourists and the people in northern Germany. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a lot of people came from East Germany to look at the Reeperbahn.”
Oh yes, there is culture in St. Pauli. When I was walking round the Reeperbahn, I came across a museum – a museum devoted to erotica. The entrance looked supremely unerotic. What, I wondered, was in it? Inflatable dolls from the 30s, sex aids from the 19th century? If you didn’t get a hard-on, could you ask for your money back?
It was seven at night and 10 girls propositioned me within a hour – if I had said yes to them all, I would have been worn out. A blonde with pigtails put my hand on her breasts to assure me that they were real. I didn’t doubt it but I wondered about the rest of her as she wore a red miniskirt and fishnet stockings, which appears de rigueur for a Hamburg prossie, or indeed anywhere else for that matter. Still, I liked the idea of a free sample from a good-looking girl, but who would want to shag someone who had already been shagged six times that day? Not to mention the possibility of theft or Aids: the best time to steal your wallet must be when your trousers are round your ankles. Most of the prostitutes were good-looking: you’d have to be to compete for the business, I suppose, but a couple did look as though they had been around at the time of the Beatles. Perhaps I should have asked for an interview.
There appear to be no regulations regarding what sex shops can show in their windows and all manners of dildos and condoms are on open display. One shop’s centrepiece was a gigantic, erect penis. Who on earth buys the inflatable dolls, especially the ones with three orifices: would the purchaser ever admit it and wouldn’t you feel like Benny Hill as you cuddled it? I found the answer at the Tate Gallery at the Albert Dock in 2004. One artist had two sex dolls on display and I asked if he had made them himself or had simply purchased them. He bought them at a German airport, I was told, and it is an example of Found Art. I think I will become a Found Artist.
I should add that these dolls can have other uses. When Phil Spector was married to Ronnie from the Ronettes, he was concerned about her driving alone around Los Angeles, so he installed an inflatable doll in the front seat. This is taken as a sign of his madness but it might indicate his consideration. Of course, it would be far better to have darkened windows or to tell her to lock the doors, but there you are. Surely an inflatable doll in the front seat would only dissuade short-sighted muggers.
I walked past the sex shows, scores of them, some of them offering nude photographs of artists who would definitely not be appearing there – Demi Moore and Madonna, for example – but at least you might be intrigued as to what was inside. Others had such unappetizing pictures out front that you would have to be desperate to go in and even then, you might prefer to take a chance on Demi Moore. When the Liverpool groups appeared in St. Pauli, did they put photographs of Elvis Presley outside the clubs?
In Liverpool, such posters would have been riddled with comments, but there is surprisingly little graffiti in St. Pauli. I didn’t feel intimidated when I was walking around. I didn’t come across any beggars, nor anyone selling the German equivalent of The Big Issue. Walking round St. Pauli at night is less menacing than walking in the centre of Liverpool. You do have to be wary of cyclists in Hamburg though: cycles are everywhere and very often they are being ridden on the pavements.
200 years ago sailors would come to Liverpool and find the prostitutes on Lime Street (Maggie May means Maggie will) and the aptly-named Paradise Street. They are still there, though the prostitutes have moved to Liverpool 8. As well as being accosted by prostitutes on the Reeperbahn, there is a whole street of them about 100 yards away in the Herbertstrasse. Walls have been built at each end of the street to hide it from public view. You walk through the entrance and there are terraced houses on either side.
Gerry Marsden (151): “John was at the Kaiserkeller while we were at the Top Ten. They would finish at 2am like us, and we would have a drink together. John was my best pal as you know, and he said, ‘Let’s go down the Herbertstrasse.’ This was a street of terraced houses: the windows were like shop windows and sitting behind the windows were young ladies who couldn’t afford many clothes. John said, ‘Let’s go in.’ I said, ‘No.’ So we knocked three times on one of the doors and this German geezer said, ‘Ya vol, vot?’ I said, ‘Can we come in please?’, and he said, ‘80 Deutschemarks’ which was a lot of money. John had about 20 and so did I, and I said, ‘Is 40 any good?’ He shouted at me, something to do with sex and travel, and we offed. John said, ‘Let’s go in next week’, and so next week, same house, knock, knock, knock, same big man. I said, ‘Here’s the money’, and he said, ‘Danke schoen.’ He said, ‘Back in a moment’, and he came back three minutes later with the biggest woman I have ever seen. She looked like a brick shithouse. I looked at John and he looked at me, and we jumped up and ran out of the door. I said, ‘What a waste of money, John: 80 Deutschemarks and we got nothing for it.’ He said, ‘I did. I got the shock of me bloody life.’ God bless him. We were kids and we enjoyed it.”
Lee Curtis (152): “You didn’t have to be anybody special to go there, and the Herbertstrasse was available to anybody over 18. It had gates on the end, a little maze that you could walk through, and, because the wall was ten foot high, you couldn’t look in from outside. Otherwise, it could be a cobbled street in England. They were little terraced houses, about 14 on either side, and sitting in the windows were almost any woman of any style or design that you could ever want - young girls, old girls, thin girls, fat girls, the schoolteacher, the secretary, the office type, in leather, in lace, in underwear, in suzzies and some of the most beautiful women in the world - in every window was a different type of woman. If you were interested you would tap on the window and they would open it. When you had done a deal, the window closed, the curtain was pulled across, the door opened and in you go. When you went in, you always had to buy champagne, the extras came first. There would be the waitress to serve the drinks. It was fascinating to go round the back. There was a passageway as the houses were all attached and the madams were looking after the needs of the girls.”
Ian Edwards (153) from Ian and the Zodiacs: “The girls of the night in the Herbertstrasse would see us if we walked down there and say ‘Ah, die Beatles.’ It didn’t matter who it was, if you had long hair, you were a Beatle. You couldn’t take a lady down there. I walked down there with my wife, to show her what it was like, and she was insulted something terrible. All it said outside was ‘No servicemen and no under 18s.’ There was nothing about ladies.”
“I have sat in those houses,” says Lee Curtis (154): What, I say, offering yourself for sale? “No, I have been backstage in those houses. The girls became great friends of the bands, they loved the musicians and they would come into the Star-Club in their free time. They would invite us for drinks. The girls around the Star-Club would spoil you bloody rotten. They bought you everything - meals, drinks - if you didn’t have it, you got it. If you didn’t have a woman, they gave you one. They tried to make you happy.” Very happy, it would seem.
In the middle of an all-purpose store, Aladdin’s Cave, I came across a gangster’s paradise selling guns, knives and handcuffs, opposite the kiddie’s videos as it happens. I hung round for a few minutes looking at postcards but hoping I might witness some exciting purchase: just how did thugs choose their knives, but nothing happened. Isn’t there a danger that a customer may say, “Yes, I’ll take this gun. Don’t bother to wrap it and, by the way, hand over your takings as well.” The store was very close to the police station – the very police station in which Paul McCartney and Pete Best were charged with burning down the Bambo Kini. I should think the policemen are kept busy.
Günter Zint (155): “My wife has grown up in St Pauli and it is more dangerous to walk in other parts of town at night because in St. Pauli, it is business and they do not want to scare away the customers. If somebody is talking shit to her, she says, ‘Okay, it costs 1,000 marks’ and he runs off. (Laughs) She feels safe here but the problem is the traffic. It is such a crowded place. We have 60,000 people living on four square kilometres. It is so expensive to live or work here. In the end, I was only making enough money to pay the rent and so we moved away. When we want to go to St. Pauli, we jump on the train and we are here in 15 minutes.”
Maybe the Hamburg authorities prefer the less salubrious night life being concentrated in one area. In 2002, legislation was passed that made prostitution a business like any other. Prostitutes pay taxes and are entitled to social benefits like any other worker. Presumably they can claim any surgical enhancements against tax. I was told that the unemployment rate was high in Hamburg, but I don’t know whether sex workers were included in the statistics. Music writer Bernd Matheja (156): “Today the Reeperbahn is just a place for tourists. There are more music clubs and restaurants than in the Sixties and not so many sex clubs. It is the only place in Germany that looks like that, even today. Neither Berlin nor Cologne has a red mile like the Reeperbahn. The authorities have raids from time to time, but they have never wanted to close it down because they make money out of it. Many people live in the smaller streets off the Reeperbahn, and school-children walk along there in the morning.”
II. Schlager You Than Me
In the mid-Thirties, bunkers were being added to the houses in Hamburg as if the authorities and the residents were expecting something to happen. Dr Ortwin Pelc (157): “The Nazis prepared for war from 1935 and that was exclusive to Hamburg. They had training for bombardments in the town because Hamburg is in northern Germany: it is not far from England and they expected some retaliation. They built battleships in Hamburg because of its big harbour. It should have been obvious to anyone that Germany was preparing for war.”
Sadly, it wasn’t obvious until it was too late. Hamburg was one of the last German cities to be convinced by Hitler’s rhetoric and it suffered badly in the bombing raids.
Intriguingly, there was a movement against Hitler, centred on music. Ulf Krüger (158), who is doing so much to promote the links between the Beatles and Hamburg: “Even in World War II, you had Die Swing Jugend, the Swing Youth, the young boys who loved swing music and mostly listened in private because it wasn’t allowed in public. Some of them were prepared to go the concentration camp for their love of it. Their idol was Glenn Miller.”
This seemed amazing. You could be put in a concentration mp for simply liking Glenn Miller. Could this possibly be true? TV presenter and music authority, Kuno Dreysse (159): “Don’t take this too far: it was simply that Glenn Miller was the music of the enemy. It was not allowed. Today you have the internet and you can’t stop any message getting through but in those days it was forbidden. You couldn’t sing German schlagers on the streets of Britain, so it’s the same thing.” One German bandleader, Hans Carstoe, took a chance as he took the American tune, ‘Joseph, Joseph, Won’t You Name The Day?’ and had a very successful record under a German title.
And everyone sang ‘Lili Marleen’. While I was in Hamburg, I bought a CD featuring 20 different versions of ‘Lili Marleen’ including Lale Anderson and Marlene Dietrich as expected, but also Eric Burdon and the New Vaudeville Band. Old-time music expert Clive Garner (160): “It was originally recorded in 1939 by Lale Andersen who was a Danish born artist. It didn’t become popular until 1941 when the Germans invaded Yugoslavia. Wherever the Germans went they set up a broadcasting station, specifically for broadcasting music to their troops. The radio station in Belgrade didn’t have a large stock of suitable songs. They got a lot of fairly recent, older records from a shop in Vienna, and en route to Belgrade, a lot of these 78rpm records were broken, thanks to the poor state of the roads. One of the ones which survived was ‘Lili Marleen’, and the station was forced to play it over and over again. It became popular with their troops. Our soldiers, also tuning in to music from the German stations, heard it and it became popular on both sides of the lines. One of the most popular versions was by Marlene Dietrich, but many Germans regarded her as a traitor because she had become an American citizen. Years later, a lot of Germans objected when she was used to publicise the German airline, Lufthansa.” In Berlin, I found a superb Film Museum with a special section devoted to her: nobody else was there. Nearby is Marlene-Dietrich-Platz.
When the British beat groups visited Hamburg in the Sixties, they had grown up with a background of war films and humour about the Germans. Photographer Astrid Kirchherr (161): “We had this big guilt we carried around because of what our parents did in the war, and meeting English people was very special for us. They thought we were the krauts with big legs and eating sauerkraut all the time. It was unusual for teenagers from different countries to meet then and they would joke, ‘We won’ and we got used to that.”
Lee Curtis (162): “I don’t think that the war was a taboo subject but I rarely heard it mentioned. They wanted to forget it. They were genuinely ashamed of the things their parents had done, but most of it was done in fear. That young lad in The Sound Of Music offers a great insight into it: he joins the Hitler Youth Movement and he is frightened. He becomes a total stranger to his family and nobody trusts him. You had to do your duty and if your duty was to shoot someone, then so be it.”
In the 1950s, there were jazz clubs in Hamburg. Chris Barber (163): “We went to Germany and we found that a tune that we had recorded in Denmark in 1954 called ‘Ice Cream’ had taken the young generation by storm. We were the most popular thing since sliced bread in Germany - in Hamburg and Berlin in particular.” Indeed, the fans used to call Hamburg ‘Freie Und Barber Stadt’ instead of ‘Freie Und Hansestadt’.
By 1960, the Wall had divided Berlin. Hamburg, with a total population of around 1.7m, was the second biggest city in German and it became the most important centre for music. Several record companies had their head offices in Hamburg and made their recordings here. Schlager was the term for the popular music of the day but the term goes back further than that. Bernd Matheja (164): “Schlager is an Austrian term found in a magazine around 1862 and it means ‘It’s nice, it’s great, it’s a hit.’ We had Freddy Quinn, Peter Kraus, Ted Herold and Peter Alexander and they were performing lightweight material but very successfully. A lot of songs were written for them by German composers, but most of the time they sang cover versions.”
The German lyrics for the UK and US hits came from the same writers. Bernd Matheja (165): “It was a group of 10 to 15 people, nearly all men, all born in the 1920s, who wrote the German lyrics. It was a closed circle and they wouldn’t let anybody in. They translated everything. They often changed the meaning of the song completely. They were not always interested in using the original text and if it didn’t fit, they would do something else. Dave Coleman was an Englishman who worked with Casey Jones and the Governors, and when he left, he worked as a schlager singer. He did a song in German called ‘Alaska Quinn’ and it was Bob Dylan’s ‘The Mighty Quinn’. The German song is about a park you can walk to and there is somebody running round clad like an Eskimo. If Bob Dylan had heard a re-translation, I think he would have killed him.”
Considering their wild lifestyle in Hamburg, I am surprised that John and Paul never allude to it in any of their songs – you’d have thought that it would have led to a succession of songs. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find many songs about Hamburg. Lale Andersen sang ‘Unter Der Roten (Under The Red Lantern At St Pauli)’, which is about a soldier bidding his girlfriend goodbye and the red light is not emphasised. The German actor, Hans Albers, had some success in the Thirties with ‘Auf Der Reeperbahn (On The Reeperbahn At Half Past Midnight)’, which was performed by many other artists. Freddy Quinn, who was marketed as ‘the singing sailor’, recorded a schlager single in 1962, ‘Homesick For St. Pauli’, a curious reversal as most sailors would be visiting St. Pauli.
Ulf Krüger (166): “I can appreciate why schlager was popular. That generation had lost the war and they wanted tunes that looked forward to better times. Going to Italy for your holidays was, for example, better times - sitting in the sun, having a nice drink, swimming and so on. There are a lot of German songs about Italy, supplying people with dreams.”
Frank Dostal (167) from the Rattles and the man who wrote 'Yes Sir I Can Boogie': “Schlager did not have anything to with reality: it was all, how about you and me getting together in Hawaii. The songs were about the mountains, the beauty of nature and going very far away. It was all so corny and we would never have dreamt of singing it when we were in the Rattles.”
Although James Last and his Orchestra play schlager to this day, generally it is made by singers with a small group. An example of reverse schlager, if you like, would be Elvis Presley singing in German in ‘Wooden Heart’. Tommy Kent (168): “I am a schlager singer, yes. You sing for all the people, for families, and it is light music, middle of the road. My name is Guntram Kuhbeck but in 1959 the record company said that it was not a good name for a singer. Bert Kaempfert said, ‘I think Tommy is good for you, you look like a Tommy. Take these singles and go to your hotel and pick one to sing.’ There were about 100 records and I went through them and found ‘Susie Darlin’’ by Robin Luke. We tried it the next day and it was a big success. Bert Kaempfert was not famous at the time but he made ‘Susie Darlin’’ with me and it sold a million. I was selling in Germany, Switzerland and Luxembourg and I was a big star in Austria. I was No. l there for six weeks with ‘Alle Nachte (All Night)’. Bert became a big name producer and I was a star. My next song was Elvis Presley’s ‘I Need Your Love Tonight’. It was a big success in Germany but not as big as ‘Susie Darlin’’. Then ‘Personality’ and both of them sold 250,000. I made about ten records with Bert Kaempfert but I could never repeat the success of ‘Susie Darlin’’. The sales went down to 100,000 and then when they were only 30,000, the record company said, ‘That’s enough.’ (Laughs)”
Bernd Matheja (169): “You have to learn English in school. I was nine years old when I started English and then later on French. I always listened to English records and I always wanted to understand what they were singing and so, yes, I tried and tried and practised. The young people did not like schlager: they wanted the English and American beat and rock’n’roll. They did not know the words so they were interested in learning English. German lyrics for English songs are never satisfactory because the words are longer in German. Look at a book. If a chapter in the English original is four pages, it will be five in the German translation. It is always longer.”
Kuno Dreysse (170): “English is the language for popular music, it doesn’t matter which period it is - you can go back to the 20s, to the swing era or the blues and you will find English is the language. I am a German but I don’t like German singing as much as English singing. I used to be in a band in the Sixties as well and we would sing in English. We loved singing harmonies like the Hollies.”
This chapter is going to look at the significance of Hamburg. Is Bill Harry (171) right when he says: “Hamburg’s importance has been exaggerated by nearly every author. Liverpool is far more important. When the Beatles went over to Hamburg, there was the Indra, the Kaiserkeller and then the Top Ten. It wasn’t until 1962 that the Star-Club opened. There were only two venues open at the same time. In Liverpool you had every kind of venue, town halls, village halls, swimming baths, ice rinks, cellar clubs, and it was a thriving scene with 400 groups. In Hamburg, you didn’t have anything. We had watch committees so Liverpool was dead on Sundays. Strip clubs were not allowed and there was no drinking after ten o’clock. The groups loved Hamburg because booze was available 24 hours a day and it was completely uninhibited. This is why they have so many stories about Hamburg, but the music scene was virtually nothing.”
Kuno Dreysse (172): “I am not so big-headed as to call the Liverpool sound the Hamburg sound but all the Liverpool bands came here to work hard and find their style. The Beatles changed when they came to Hamburg, but what really happened? They got older. If you are 16, 17 or 18 years old, every year is a long time. They came with their guitars and they had to work every night. The Beatles played eight hours a night seven days a week. If you have some talent, then you must get better. If not, then you have to finish your musical career. The Beatles were good and they found themselves in the red light district where they could get drugs, where they could get girls, where they could get anything they wanted, so what did they do? They took their chance and they become world stars.”
III. The Indra and the Kaiserkeller
Welcome to an incredible cast of characters. The owners and managers of the Hamburg beat clubs had wonderfully onomatopoeic names – Bruno Koschmider, Manfred Weissleder, Horst Fascher. You’re scared before you’ve even met them.
In 1950 Bruno Koschmider, who was born in 1926, had opened a strip club, The Indra, at Grosse Freiheit 64. It was a small club, much smaller than the Cavern, with a bar and with tables around a raised stage. The stage was higher than usual at two feet so that the patrons could get a better view of the strippers.
In October 1959 Koschmider opened the much larger Kaiserkeller, literally ‘King Cellar’, at Grosse Freiheit 36. This was a cabaret club so the stage was only 18 inches high. The club could take 700 patrons and it was designed for sailors as the décor was nautical and the seats were like rowing boats. The bouncers were led by another guy with a splendid name, Willy Limper, although it was presumably the victims who were the limpers.
One of Allan Williams’s ventures was to open Liverpool’s first strip club. Attention from the police meant that the club did not last long, but it was a start and Allan thought he would see how things were properly (or improperly) done in Hamburg. It was a seaport too and, more to the point, the St. Pauli area had a notorious reputation. While there, Allan Williams thought he would sell the Liverpool groups to Bruno Koschmider. Allan Williams (173): “Koschmider was a horror, he was a gay, deformed homosexual and a trapeze artist who had broken his leg in a fall which left him with a permanent limp. The first time I encountered him was when I went over with Lord Woodbine to discuss the possibilities of getting work for Liverpool groups. I went to the Kaiserkeller because I heard rock’n’roll music being played by an awful German band and, in the interval, everybody danced to Cliff Richard’s records. One of the waiters took me in to meet Herr Koschmider and while I was doing my sales pitch for Liverpool groups, somebody shouted, ‘There’s a fight,’ and I could see this feller on the marble floor. Herr Koschmider gets a truncheon out and beats the feller to a pulp. That’s the type of personality he had.”
Allan Williams convinced Koschmider of the merits of British music, but Koschmider signed a London band led by Tony Sheridan from Norwich. Sheridan, a fine but maverick performer, had had some success in the UK appearing on the ATV show, Oh Boy!, but his manager, Larry Parnes, found him unreliable. He went to Hamburg with his group, the Jets. Tony Sheridan (174): “There was nothing when we got there. The aftermath of Adolf Hitler was a big void and there was no German musical scene to speak of. We shocked everybody with our music and they couldn’t believe it. Lots of people flocked in to see us and it was wonderful.”
Being in an uninhibited area like St. Pauli suited Sheridan fine, but, with little thought to the consequences, he transferred to a new club, the Top Ten, which was opened by Peter Eckhorn at Reeperbahn 136, in July 1960. This was a large cabaret club that could take 1,000 patrons. Eckhorn was only 21, but he was supported by his gangland family and as his minders were tougher than Koschmider’s, he did not fear retaliation. Instead, Koschmider came to London to find more British acts.
Meanwhile, Allan Williams had arranged some auditions in Liverpool for backing musicians for Larry Parnes’ acts, musicians who would be more reliable than Sheridan. As a result, the Beatles did a short tour in Scotland with Johnny Gentle, and Cass and the Cassanovas with Duffy Power. Derry and the Seniors were expected to back Dickie Pride (another splendid name and chosen by Larry Parnes and Russ Conway – say no more!) on a summer season in Blackpool, but it fell through. Howie Casey (175) of Derry and the Seniors: “Larry Parnes was looking for cheap Liverpool bands to back his stars. We got the gig to back Dickie Pride, but it was cancelled at the last minute. Allan Williams said he would drive us to London and we could perform at the Two I’s coffee-bar instead. We followed an instrumental band and Derry went into his wild thing. Bruno Koschmider was in the audience and he told Allan he was looking for a band for the Kaiserkeller to replace Tony Sheridan, who had gone to the Top Ten.”
There is a possibility, although he would never admit it, that Allan Williams never went to Hamburg until he went with the Beatles in August 1960. Brian Casser of Cass and the Cassanovas might have set up the contacts with Bruno Koschmider, but, not having his own telephone, he was using the one at the Jacaranda. Allan Williams may have known of this and taken over. Unfortunately, for reasons unconnected with beat music, Brian Casser has had nothing to do with the scene for years and has been keeping the lowest of low profiles. In other words, I haven’t a clue where he is. A great pity as it would be intriguing to interview him about this aspect of the Hamburg story.
Derry and the Seniors had a horrendous train journey to Hamburg. Neither Williams nor Koschmider provided work permits, but they managed to bluff their way into the country. Howie Casey (176) remembers it vividly: “In the doorway of the Kaiserkeller was a huge notice painted in all sorts of colours. It had ‘The Seniors’ in big letters and underneath ‘mit der Neger Sänger Derry.’ We were looking at it, thinking it was great, when Derry pipes up from the back. ‘Hey, la,’ he says, ‘what’s all this about a Nigger singer?’ I knew Neger meant Negro in German, so I assured him that they weren’t having a go. Bruno Koschmider showed us round. It was a huge club, bigger than anything we’d seen in Liverpool, beautiful décor and a big stage. We asked about our accommodation and were shown two little rooms which contained only two single beds, a couch and a few chairs. There was no bedding and we used coats for blankets. I found a huge Union Jack to cover myself with and so I used to lie in state every night. We were paid £16 a week each, which wasn’t bad as my dad was only earning that much. We had to feed ourselves and clean ourselves, although we didn’t worry too much about that, but our clothes had to be clean. Drinks and cigarettes are important and we spent money on girls to show off. Before the end of each week we were totally broke and were living on scraps, and, of course, there were doctors’ bills for certain illnesses.”
Derry and the Seniors enjoyed Hamburg’s night life. Howie Casey (177): “Rory Storm was taking over from us at the Kaiserkeller. We wanted to stay and Derry got a job with a German dixieland band, would you believe. The American navy was coming to Hamburg on a goodwill visit, a huge aircraft carrier and a few battleships, so someone made contact with the really tatty Casanova Bar on the Reeperbahn. This was a strip joint with little booths where people did dodgy things to one another. We played background music and the strippers would have particular songs to strip to. Every one of them wanted ‘It’s Now Or Never’. We would play quietly in the background, and there was a stage with a chair that the strippers stood on to get on it. The Americans would be giving them drinks, and they would be pissed sometimes and go arse over tit. They were charged exorbitant prices, but once the fleet left port, we were out of work again. I had two saxes with me and one was an expensive baritone sax that I had bought on hire purchase when I was in the army. A pawnshop on the Reeperbahn asked me to play it to prove it was mine and I sold it for the equivalent of £17. It was worth £400 so some lucky German got a cheap baritone. I kick myself for that.”
Koschmider was having such success at the Kaiserkeller that he decided to have beat music at his other club at the dark end of the Grosse Freiheit, the Indra. Allan Williams was asked to send over more groups, but most musicians had day jobs. Not the Beatles however. There was a drawback – they lacked a permanent drummer – so Pete Best (178) was invited to join. “My mother took a phone call from Paul McCartney. He said that they’d had an offer to go to Germany and needed a drummer. George Harrison had seen me play and knew that I had a drum kit. He thought I might be interested in joining. I went down to Allan Williams’ house and auditioned. Two days later, I was a Beatle.”
Geoff Hogarth (179): “The Iron Door was a drinking club then and the customers wanted us to be open on Sunday afternoons. I said okay but we would try something different. I thought about the cha cha cha but Harry Ormshire booked Johnny and the Moondogs. They didn’t sound bad but they weren’t musically adept. They said to Harry, ‘Don’t introduce us as the Moondogs: we are the Silver Beatles now’ and they had sprayed some silver on their clothes. Stu Sutcliffe had a floppy cowboy hat and I asked him about some more bookings. He said, ‘There’s no point. We’re going to Hamburg on Thursday.’ I didn’t care for John Lennon, who was definitely the leader. He would be giving me abuse but that’s the way he was. He didn’t change when he was famous.”
The long hours on stage gave the Beatles the opportunity to experiment. They developed a raucous style and made a big impact. They had never met a musician like Tony Sheridan (180): “If you play ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ 2,000 times, you have got to find ways to do it differently and this is when innovation happens - you put in sevenths, and ninths and elevenths. That is what Hamburg can do for you - you become something else, but I believe that the only way to be is spontaneous. All those guys who plan their shows are not being creative. Of course, I had bad nights, but there were nights when I turned myself on and turned everybody else on.”
Allan Williams (181): “It was not Liverpool that made the Beatles, but Hamburg. Bob Wooler used to say to me, ‘Okay, smart arse, if it did that for the Beatles, why didn’t it do it for Gerry and the Pacemakers and Howie Casey and Rory Storm and all the other groups?’, but they were established acts before they went. The Beatles were a bum group before they went. They only had done a few gigs in Liverpool and they hadn’t got their act together, and that is where they learnt the trade. Howie Casey sent me a letter when I told him I was sending the Beatles over. He said, ‘Allan, you’ve got a good thing going over here. If you send that bum group, the Beatles, you’re going to louse it up.’ I had enough confidence in the Beatles to know that they were good enough, and history has proved me right. They went for three months which was extended for another two, so they were out of Liverpool for five months, working outrageous hours seven nights a week. That would either make or break a group and it made the Beatles.”
Howie Casey (182): “I knew all the other bands at the Larry Parnes auditions - Cass and the Cassanovas, Rory Storm and so on. I had never seen the Beatles before and they borrowed Johnny Hutch and he was one of the great drummers of the time. He sat in with them, but I wasn’t impressed and I wasn’t the only one. When I was at the Kaiserkeller, Allan Williams sent me a letter saying he was going to send over the Beatles to play in the Indra, which was a little bar up the road. I wrote back immediately to say, ‘Don’t send the Beatles, you will ruin the scene. Send Rory Storm instead.’ The Beatles arrived and we went to see them on their opening night as they started earlier than us and they finished earlier at 11. They kicked off and my jaw went to the floor. There was such a difference from what I had seen at the auditions and we were buddies from that point on. They were jealous that we were playing in this huge club and it was a proper rock club too and they would come down and jam. We had some great nights.”
Beatles chronicler Hans Olof Gottfridsson (183): “It was a tough job. You can see from their letters home that they constantly had problems with their voices. The standard for performing for so long was set by the Jets. They were told to play three hours and have a break but they wanted to play for one hour and have a break. The Jets were professional musicians who were used to performing. The Beatles had just left school. It must have been murder for them.”
The German youths were impressed, notably Herbert Hildebrand (184), who was to form the Rattles: “In 1960 the Beatles appeared at the Indra and we were street boys from the red light area, so we became close friends and we showed them around and we asked them to get us records by Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. They encouraged us to perform and when we appeared at the Star-Club it was a big success.”
Jurgen Vollmer (185) was an art student, who took that famous photograph of John Lennon in a St. Pauli doorway: “It wasn’t so much the Beatles: it was the whole atmosphere in that district. It was a very rough and tough area where only rockers went. I had just finished art school and types like us wouldn’t go to those places. When we went, we were so fascinated by the atmosphere of it and by the Beatles who were rockers themselves. They looked like the audience with their leather jackets and their hair, the pompadour, Elvis-style, and their ducktails. They attracted us because they were so menacing-looking, and they were something that we hadn't seen before. It was the look that inspired me: John’s cool, arrogant, above-it-all rocker look. He isn’t that way, but he projected that image. Marlon Brando in The Wild One, a popular movie at that time, had that image, and John perfected that image, but he wasn’t at all like he looked. The rockers were provoked very easily and for someone with my arty look, it was dangerous. Other friends of mine who had the same look were beaten up on different occasions, but for some reason I escaped that.”
Ulf Krüger (186): “When the Beatles arrived here, they wore their little jackets, drainpipe trousers and winklepickers and then came the influence of Astrid Kirchherr and her gang, who wore black leather. It’s cool. Astrid wore leather first and then Klaus Voormann wore a leather suit that Astrid had specially made for him. The Beatles couldn’t afford a thing like that so they bought cheaper stuff on the Reeperbahn.”
Astrid Kirchherr (187): “Our philosophy then, and remember we were only little kids, was wearing black clothes and going around looking moody. We knew of Sartre and we were inspired by all the French singers and writers as that was the closest we could get. England was far away and America was out of the question. We dressed like the French existentialists. We wanted to be different and we wanted to look cool, although we didn’t use that word then.”
Hans Olof Gottfridsson (188): “Paul made more in Hamburg than his father did or his teachers at school and they bought new clothes and new instruments, but when you’re a teenager, money tends to roll away fast. They got 35DM a week and this was more than an average German worker. They earned more in Hamburg than they did in England and they played every night in Hamburg, something they did not do in Britain. Before they went to Hamburg, they were looking for jobs. They had some gigs at the Grosvenor Ballroom, but they had problems getting work. Going to Hamburg was a big break for them.”
Derry and the Seniors were replaced by Rory Storm and the Hurricanes at the Kaiserkeller. Johnny Guitar (189) recalled, “Allan Williams sent us out and Bruno Koschmider booked the Beatles into the Kaiserkeller with us. It was a twelve-hour stretch split between two groups. Each group did an hour and a half on, an hour and a half off. When they give you a contract in Germany, you’ve got to stick to it. If you deviate in any way, they take away your work permit. If Koschmider says that a five-piece group is to appear on stage, then a five-piece group must appear. It doesn’t matter that one might be a singer and doesn’t sing all night. Koschmider would rush up and say, ‘Where is the fifth man?’ The singer might have gone to the toilet but he’d tell us to get him back.”
The residents complained of noise at the Indra and even though Koschmider shut it early, the authorities told him it must revert to being a strip club! He decided to present Rory Storm and the Hurricanes with the Beatles every night at the Kaiserkeller. Johnny Guitar (190) remembered some collusion between the Hurricanes and the Beatles. “Germans like you to mach schau, which means ‘stamp your feet and clap’. The rickety stage was very dangerous, so we came to an arrangement with the Beatles that we’d wreck it. First, they’d go on and stamp their feet and then we’d go on and jump up and down. Koschmider would say, ‘Very good, boys, you mach good schau.’ Little did he realise that this was a deliberate effort to destroy the stage. The club was packed one Saturday night when Rory got on top of the piano for ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ and the whole stage collapsed. The orange boxes supporting the planks couldn’t take the strain. Koschmider went berserk and dismissed Rory for breach of contract. Rory was wandering about Hamburg like a waif because he had no money. At that time, the Beatles were sleeping in a room by the side entrance to a cinema and we were living in the luxury of the seaman’s mission down by the docks.”
Günter Zint (191): “Bruno Koschmider did not like to spend much money and the stage was very old. The microphone stands and the drums sometimes fell off the stage because it was so rotten. One night they said, ‘Now we make such hard music and we stamp with our feet on the stage and we will break it.’ They did that, and that, I think, was the night that the beat was born.”
Brian Griffiths (192): “One Saturday morning at about eight o’clock we were sitting in a bar after we’d been paid at the Kaiserkellar. A guy came by with a wheelbarrow and dumped a pile of old clothes in the street. We were pretty high so Lennon, myself and Derry Wilkie dressed up and went jigging around the streets. The Germans thought we were weird with the rock’n’roll and now they thought we were crazy.”
There was trouble after the Beatles had jammed with Tony Sheridan at the Top Ten. When Peter Eckhorn asked them to leave Koschmider and join him, Koschmider was furious. Allan Williams (193): “When the Beatles decided that they were not going to play for Koschmider and go to a competitor, he turned nasty and tried to get them into jail. He said that they had set fire to the cinema and that they didn’t have permits but fortunately for me, he was supposed to get the permits. That’s how we got into Germany the second time. The contract said that they could not perform within 70 miles of Hamburg within six months, and because he didn’t give me my commission, didn’t put the lads in decent accommodation and never got them work permits, the German Embassy gave me the work permits. It was harder to get them into Germany the second time because they had been deported the first.”
Well, it sounds as though the embassies were kept busy. Howie Casey (194): “Allan Williams and Bruno Koschmider hadn’t got us work permits. Allan said, ‘Just tell them you’re tourists’ and when Peter Eckhorn offered us work at the Top Ten, he told us to go to the Embassy and get them. They took our passports off us and we were repatriated. We had the shame of being skint and dishevelled, dirty and tired and getting this piece of paper in place of passports. We had no money for food and we were treated like scum on the way back. When we did get back to Liverpool, we were seen as returning heroes. It sorted the group out - the ones who said, ‘Bugger that, I’m not doing that again’ and the ones who wanted to be musicians and would keep on being ripped off.”
Still, even if the Beatles had not been allowed back, there were plenty of other groups to choose from. They were now prepared to give up their day jobs. Allan Williams (195): “The first group that went over was Howie Casey’s and when they came back and told everybody what Hamburg was like, they all wanted to go over there. I was the kingpin, ‘Get us over to Hamburg, Allan.’ Gerry Marsden kept calling me in the Jacaranda and asking me if Hamburg had been fixed up.”
IV. 27 December 1960
The Beatles returned early from Hamburg in December 1960, but it should not have been a problem. Allan Williams had opened his own Top Ten club in Liverpool. He had asked Bob Wooler, a railway employee, to give up his job and become the full-time manager and organiser. Allan Williams (196): “The first group who played at my Top Ten club was Howie Casey and the Seniors and they blew the place apart. The only snag was that it was in a tough area known as the Four Squares and the locals said it was their club. I didn’t want that, and I don’t know how it would have developed, whether they would have grown weary of it. The premises were fantastic. It was like a barn with big thick wooden beams and we had to write notices, ‘Please mind your head’.”
Bob Wooler (197): “It was in 1960 that I decided to go pro. I would say to my fellow clerks on the railway, ‘This is not my station in life’, and so on, and they would say, ‘Wooler’s gone off the rails.’ All very funny, but they couldn’t believe I would pack in my job for the precarious business of disc-jockeying. I was given a job at the Top Ten club in the roughest area in Liverpool. Allan Williams, who launched the club in Soho Street, took the name from a similar establishment in Hamburg. It lasted five days and then someone got careless with the Bryant and May’s. At one Beatles Convention, I said it was a torching job and I glared at Allan. He said, ‘What are you looking at me for?’ I was to learn about incinerations as that was not the only place in Liverpool to go up in smoke.” Indeed not, I was in a pub with a Merseybeat group a few years back and one of them said to me, “That’s Tommy the Torch. He’s done more damage to Liverpool than Adolf Hitler.” However, in this instance, although the insurance company was suspicious and took Allan Williams to court, the allegation was not proved.
Allan Williams (198): “I had absolutely no reason to burn down the club and it loused up my plans. I had even selected Bob Wooler as the right person to run it. I had persuaded him to give up his day job, and five days later the poor feller was out of work. History would have been altered if the Top Ten had not caught fire. That would have been my Cavern club. The Cavern was only doing jazz at the time and there wasn’t a venue in the centre doing rock’n’roll. Still, I opened the Blue Angel and that was a luxurious night club.” Strangely perhaps, I find myself agreeing with Allan Williams. He had no reason to burn down the place.
Bob Wooler (199): “Allan was preoccupied with the demise of his Top Ten club and the opening of his new club, the Blue Angel, which wasn’t for beat music. The Beatles would have played the Top Ten on their return but, in the event, they had come back early with no work on offer. Allan said to me, ‘You get them work. Try Brian Kelly. He has a string of dance halls and you have some connections with him.’ The Beatles asked me about bookings and they didn’t want to play Allan’s coffee-bar, the Jacaranda. I agreed with them - it was a former coal cellar and had no stage, no lights and no microphones. It was totally unsuitable for showcasing a group. It was also very small, and I doubt if you could get 50 people in there. On the other hand, Litherland Town Hall, Lathom Hall, Aintree Institute and Hambleton Hall had stages and there could be some impact in sweeping the curtains open and saying, ‘Here they are, the Beatles.’ Presentation is very important.”
A turning point in the Beatles’ career was an appearance at Litherland Town Hall, on 27 December 1960. Bob Wooler (200) continues: “You can write your entry for Who’s Who and Paul McCartney has written, ‘Made first important appearance as the Beatles at Litherland Town Hall near Liverpool in December 1960.’ Mona Best had given them some work at the Casbah but she couldn’t sustain them with a residency and I am pleased to say that I got them onto Brian Kelly’s circuit. The first booking was on 27 December 1960 when they were added to the bill of a BeeKay (Brian Kelly) dance. Brian Kelly nearly collapsed when I asked for £8 because he was a tight-wad, but most of the promoters were. He offered me £4 and we compromised on £6, which is a £1 a man, five Beatles, and £1 for the driver. I didn’t take my 10 per cent.”
Tony Bramwell (201): “George Harrison worked as a butcher’s delivery boy in Hunts Cross on Saturday. He delivered our meat and he used to borrow our records as I had two older brothers who had a fair collection of rock’n’roll. Gerry Marsden went out with Pauline, who lived about four houses away and to get into the dances, I would carry Gerry’s guitar for him. I got on the 81 bus one day to go to Litherland Town Hall and I saw George Harrison with his guitar. He said, ‘We’re playing Litherland Town Hall’ and I said, ‘Can I carry your guitar so I can get in for free?’ He said, ‘Sure’ and when I got there and saw ‘Direct from Hamburg – The Beatles’, I said, ‘You’re not from Hamburg’ and he said, ‘Of course not. It’s a cock-up in the adverts.’ I carried George’s guitar around until Neil Aspinall got his van. When I saw them, I recognised John because he was a teddy boy – he had set fire to the roof of our local hall once and I kept away from him. I found that the Beatles were playing the stuff that I had lent to George.”
Bob Wooler (202): “They were billed as ‘Direct From Hamburg’ but too much has been made of this. There wasn’t any deceit in trying to present them as a German group, although I did mention they’d been playing in Hamburg when I announced them. It was an amazing night. When I did hear the Beatles, I was fab-ergasted. Other groups were playing what was in the charts - they felt reassured that way. The Beatles liked obscure R&B stuff. They were only on stage for 30 minutes, but they put everything into their performance and rocked the joint.”
Although there was by now a healthy beat scene on Merseyside, most groups had a matching-tie-and-handkerchief approach and played versions of the pop hits of the day. Opening the show was Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes. John Kennedy (203) sang with them. “We used to open and close those shows. We’d do our spot and then go to the pub for a few pints. We never got to the pub that night. We’d just reached the door when the Beatles started off and that was it. We stayed there all night and watched them. They were brilliant. There was something raw and animal about them.”
Another Domino, Bobby Thomson (204), also remembers that night. “The place went bananas. I’ve never seen a reaction like it. You could see that they were going to be big and I wanted them to be big. It was a funny feeling for blokes to want that. You can understand hero worship from girls, but the blokes felt the same. Everybody loved them.”
Joe Fagin (205): “My first sight of the Beatles when they came back from Germany amazed me. Prior to going, they were just another band but now they had a totally different drive, much tighter guitar licks and a format that really worked. Both John and Paul were wonderful singers and I had the impression that Paul was the biggest influence on the band at the time. They were much better without Stuart Sutcliffe because he didn’t contribute anything musically.”
Dave Forshaw (206): “I couldn’t believe how loud they were and that they wore leather jackets and jeans. Most venues on Merseyside would not allow jeans as they were seen as cheap working man’s gear. In most places, you had to wear a tie. Everybody looked at them, everybody listened to them. We couldn’t believe that they had so much confidence. I loved what they were doing and in spite of what Bob Wooler says, I had no trouble in getting into their dressing-room and booking them for three dates. It was £6.10s. (£6.50) for the first night and then £7.10s (£7.50) if they were all right. Lennon did the most talking and he was the one who would answer back.”
Tony Sanders (207) played drums for Billy Kramer and the Coasters. He saw the Beatles a few days later. “A friend of mine told me about this fabulous group at Litherland Town Hall. He said, ‘They’re all German. They wear cowboy boots and they stomp on the stage.’ A week later, we were coming off stage at Aintree Institute and saw these guys coming on next. Lennon wore a leather jacket and McCartney had a jacket that looked as though he’d been sleeping in it for months, but when they kicked off, it was unbelievable. They were all smoking cigarettes and that tickled us because it went right against convention. They were so cheeky with it. Instead of trying to look good, they didn’t give a damn. They played ‘Wooden Heart’ with Pete Best on bass drum and hi-hat. He was only using one hand and he was smoking with the other. We thought this was tremendous. We were all smoking the next time we went on stage, but it didn’t go with our short haircuts and clean boy-next-door image.’
Sam Leach (208): “I had seen the Beatles as the Silver Beatles before they went to Hamburg and I didn’t think they were very good. I was coaxed into seeing them after they came back at Hambleton Hall. There was a lot of fighting and I was going to go but then I heard Bob Wooler say, ‘It’s the Beatles’ and they played ‘The William Tell Overture’. I thought, ‘Why are they wasting classical music on this lot?’ I could not believe what I was seeing – I was hooked immediately. John did ‘Slow Down’, Paul ‘The Hippy Hippy Shake’, George ‘I’m Henry The Eighth I Am’, Stu ‘Wooden Heart’ and Pete ‘Matchbox’. I followed them into the dressing room and told them that they would be as big as Elvis. John said, ‘We’ve got a nutter here, Paul’ and Paul said, ‘Yes, but a nutter with bookings.’ I booked them for 12 gigs at £10 a time which was top money at the time.” The record used to introduce the Beatles was ‘Piltdown Rides Again’ by the Piltdown Men.
Peter Cook (209) of the Top Spots: “In the early days, I played with the Beatles virtually every week at the Grosvenor Ballroom in Wallasey. Paul was on rhythm then and he used to have a Lucky 7 guitar. They were a very very average band and I used to think that we were far better. Paul did have a brilliant voice for singing ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’, but they were nothing special. They went away to Germany and then there was a buzz going round, ‘Have you heard the Beatles?’, and I pooh-poohed it. We then played Lathom Hall and the Beatles were on and I was with my arms folded on the dance floor, thinking, ‘Let's see how good you are’, and the curtains opened and they started off with ‘Lucille’ and they were so tight and so good that every hair on my neck stood up. It was a completely new sound and I had never heard anything like it. I know now that they had the drums miked up, they had a mike in the bass drum, so I know what the secret was. I was in awe of them.”
Harry Prytherch (210): “Anybody who has played at Blair Hall will remember that the stage was on a slope. I had some string which I tied to my bass drum pedal and then tied to my drum seat so my weight would stop the drum from sliding. The first time we saw the Beatles was at Blair Hall and the curtains opened and this awful mighty sound came out. Pete Best hit his bass drum eight to the bar and really hammered it, and the first time he did that, the bass drum started sliding and I could see he was going to be in trouble. I ran backstage and I took the string off mine. He was hanging onto his bass drum with one hand and playing it with a stick in the other and between us we wrapped the string around his bass drum pedal and around his seat and every time he played at Blair Hall, he took a piece of string with him.”
Alan Stratton (211): “The Beatles were the first band to have harmonies and they would change the lead vocalists - John would sing one, then Paul and then George. It was interesting to watch as a lot of the bands only had one singer. They also had that deep throbbing bass with Pete Best. The exciting thing for me with the Beatles was watching Pete Best set up his drums. They knew exactly what they were doing. They would speak to the audience a lot, and if they snapped a string as Paul did once, he would smile and continue playing: he wouldn’t go off and change his string.”
Not everyone was convinced that the Beatles were a change for the better. Don Andrew (212) of the Remo Four nursed doubts: “We were shocked that they had such an attraction and commanded such a following when they looked dirty and made such a horrible deafening row. We were intent on making our guitars sound as nice as possible and Colin Manley changed his strings religiously. He got the real Fender sound out of his guitar and they came along with big amplifiers and a big throbbing noise.”
Colin Manley (213) recalled, “We were flabbergasted at what we saw, but I wasn’t impressed musically. They improved when they went down to four with Paul on bass, but it was a long time before I could appreciate what they were doing.”
Sam Leach (214): “George was playing ‘Moonglow’ and it was romantic with the lights down. I saw that Stu’s jack was on the floor and he was bashing away but nothing was coming out. I stuck the jack in and a sound like ten cats being run over by a lorry came out. Paul leapt across and yanked out the plug. He said, ‘You’re a fool, Leachy, don’t you know he can’t play?’”
Lewis Collins (215): “My favourite memory of the Cavern is of steam coming off the ceiling and watching the original Beatles. The sound used to vibrate off the walls and they all wore leather gear. To this day I have in my possession Paul McCartney’s leather jacket from the original Beatles. I’m very proud of it. I suppose some mad American might want to buy it.” So now we know where it is. Portions of Paul’s leather jacket have been offered for sale for years and if they were all genuine, he would have been the size of the Incredible Hulk or Kingsize Taylor.
Every group realised that things would never be the same again. Johnny Sandon (216) was the lead singer with the Searchers. “We thought we were near the top of the heap and we were pretty popular around Liverpool. Gerry and the Pacemakers were the leading group and Johnny Sandon and the Searchers weren’t far behind. We were doing a show at St. John’s Hall in Bootle and we’d heard about this group called the Beatles who’d come back from Germany. We were copying Cliff Richard and the Shadows and they were doing something new altogether. As soon as they started playing, I knew it was the beginning of the end for us.”
John McNally (217), also of the Searchers, recalled, “This was the first time I heard a drummer playing fours on a bass drum. It was a wall of sound and these were the days before you had your big PAs. They did rock’n’roll stuff just like the Americans, but with more rawness to it and in a Liverpool accent. There was no way we could follow them effectively with our tinny sound.”
These groups had not yet been over to Germany and so they had no understanding of what had caused this transformation.
