Shake It Up, Baby!: The Rise of Beatlemania and the Mayhem of 1963

By Ken McNab

A vivid, captivating account of the Beatles’s musical transformation throughout the pivotal year of 1963, as the world became caught up in the maelstrom of Beatlemania and its far-reaching cultural impact.

The Beatles broke up more than half a century ago, yet millions around the globe are still drawn to the legacy of four lads from Liverpool. From the carefree innocence of "A Hard Day's Night" to the experimental psychedelia of "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,” their message of love, peace, and hope still resonates.

In Shake It Up, Baby! we go back to the start—to 1963, when they went from playing in small clubs in the remote Scottish Highlands to four number one singles, two number one albums, three national tours, and being besieged by thousands of fans at gigs all over Britain.

Ken McNab tells the story through gripping, exclusive eye-witness accounts from those who were there: the Beatlemaniacs, the journalists, broadcasters, and television producers who were scrambling to make sense of it all—and the other bands who could only watch in awe as the Beatles went from bottom of the bill to headline act to the biggest band on the planet, forever transforming musical history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Release date: May 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9781639366590

Ken McNab

Ken McNab is a journalist with the Scottish Daily Mail and the author of And in the End: The Last Days of The Beatles. Ken lives in Scotland.

Book preview

Cover: Shake It Up, Baby!: The Rise of Beatlemania and the Mayhem of 1963, by Ken McNab. “From one generation to the next, The Beatles will remain the most important rock band of all time.” —Dave Grohl.Shake It Up, Baby!: The Rise of Beatlemania and the Mayhem of 1963, by Ken McNab. Pegasus Books. New York | London.

For the other half of the sky – this one’s for Jennifer and Christopher

JANUARY

1963

PA Images/Alamy Stock Photo

Fever and fervour: in the early weeks of 1963, the first shoots of Beatlemania were taking root in dance halls across the country. By the end of the year, it was at fever-pitch.

Touch down. Turbine engines fall silent. The British European Airways plane from Hamburg had taxied to a standstill in its landing slot at London Airport. Outside, everything was alabaster white. The runways were carpeted in thick snow, icicles hung from the roof of the main terminal and the midday mercury had dipped well below freezing point. It was 1 January 1963, and from Land’s End to John O’ Groats, Britain was entombed in its worst winter since records began, an extraordinary polar plunge that would last three long, depressing months.

The passengers began to disembark. They were the familiar mix of formally attired business types, homecoming students and families heading for celebratory New Year reunions. Few took any notice of the four slightly scruffy young men – bleary-eyed and hungover – who made their way down the central aisle. Some gave them a wide berth, those sharp-edged Liverpool accents reason enough to avoid awkward eye contact – as if the uncouth Scouse dialect, with its whiff of distant Irish émigré, somehow carried with it a sense of aggression. Nothing marked them out, except perhaps a cocky camaraderie, a kind of curious rat-pack aesthetic.

Making their way through the arrivals lounge, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were just four nameless faces in the crowd. Yet, in ten months, almost to the day, they would arrive at the same airport to be met by the cacophony of thousands of overwrought fans repeatedly screaming four words: WE WANT THE BEATLES. WE WANT THE BEATLES. WE WANT THE BEATLES.

Five days after those ear-splitting scenes, they would give two iconic performances – first at the London Palladium and, three weeks later, before British royalty, where insouciance and irreverent risk would bring its own unparalleled reward.

WE WANT THE BEATLES. WE WANT THE BEATLES. WE WANT THE BEATLES.

Their concerts had by then transformed into scenes of unbridled hysteria, with entire towns brought to a standstill and hormonal teenage girls especially working themselves into an emotional frenzy from the first note to the last. They were, by some measure, the four most outlandishly famous people in the country.

WE WANT THE BEATLES. WE WANT THE BEATLES. WE WANT THE BEATLES.

By the end of this rollercoaster year, they would be feted as the biggest pop phenomenon since Elvis Presley, the songs of Lennon and McCartney incongruously bracketed alongside the genius of Gustav Mahler and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Nineteen sixty-three – the year when everything changed. The year when the world began its gradual transition from slate-grey mono to glorious Technicolor. The year when the sixties really began its vertiginous ascent in the face of rapid British empirical decline – a colonial red stain that still covered huge swathes of the world – and young people emerged as the vanguard in the new age of consumerism. The year when MI5’s uber-patriot James Bond flew the Union flag in From Russia with Love. And the year when a dynamic young American president was held up as a beacon of hope for a world still quaking in the nuclear shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis only for his life force to be snuffed out by an assassin’s bullets.

But in the here and now of this first day of the year, The Beatles were turning the page of their own lives. Exactly 365 days ago, they had flunked an audition in London for Decca Records before EMI had offered them a possible foothold in the industry of human happiness.

The night before, Hogmanay, they had said their final drunken farewells to Hamburg’s Star-Club, the dank, sweaty former cinema at Grosse Freiheit 39 in the city’s notorious St Pauli quarter, home to pimps, transvestites and hookers in what Harrison described as ‘the naughtiest city in the world’. This was where three of them – John, Paul and George – had made their bones as a live band, finessing covers of their favourite R&B and Motown groups, writing their own songs, improvising, winning over hecklers, gorging themselves on Preludins to stay awake and learning how to mach schau to juiced-up sailors often for eight lunatic hours a night, and in the process becoming a band of brothers. Gig-hardened beyond their callow years – Lennon and Starr were twenty-two, McCartney was twenty and Harrison a mere nineteen – they were already veterans with the experience of 900 live shows and 10,000 hours of musical graft on their gun belts.

Given that it was New Year’s Eve, naturally it had been a rambunctious affair. Bum notes flew like empty beer bottles. Anyone could stagger on stage and sing with the band. And fellow Liverpudlian Ted ‘Kingsize’ Taylor, whose own group, The Dominoes, were also on the bill, surreptitiously recorded much of the chaotic performance on a primitive Grundig reel-to-reel tape machine with a single mic placed in front of the stage. It was the final act in an old contract loyally honoured by Beatles manager Brian Epstein, in line with his family mantra ‘a good deal is a fair deal’.

Their first single, ‘Love Me Do’ – penned by Lennon and McCartney – had plateaued at number seventeen in the British charts in the same week they had said their final Auf Wiedersehen to Germany. However, the chart placing only strengthened an unequivocal conviction in Epstein and the band that sunnier uplands lay ahead. Hamburg felt like the past, and the future was already being written at speed. In just ten days’ time, EMI would release ‘Please Please Me’, the band’s second single on which high hopes rested.

‘If we’d had our way, we’d have copped out of the [Hamburg] engagement because we didn’t feel we owed them fuck all,’ Lennon later said. ‘We’d outlived the Hamburg stage and wanted to pack that up. We hated going back to Hamburg these last two times.’

Uppermost in their minds was the gruelling January touring schedule Epstein had already mapped out. It would see them criss-cross the UK, travelling north to the remote Scottish Highlands and south to London and the Home Counties over twenty-two gigs, playing anywhere from local dance halls to ballrooms and, of course, Liverpool’s Cavern, the airless basement club that was a wellspring for the restless dreams of youth.

Often it meant double-headers in one day and praying they could get there on time. But no one was complaining. This was the ticket they’d bought. ‘It was pretty frenetic when I look back on it,’ McCartney said. ‘There were the usual grumps but the fantastic thing was there were four of us, so we dragged each other along.’

That pace would only intensify the following month when they were due to embark on their first UK tour. Near bottom in the pecking order on a rudimentary package tour put together by Britain’s leading promoter Arthur Howes, and headed by teenage chart star Helen Shapiro, it was nevertheless validation of the resolute faith they all had in Epstein, the careful shepherd of brittle egos, to push them inexorably forward.

Fan engagement was everything in the eyes of Epstein, who had spent the last day of 1962 filling up his new diary with a raft of TV and radio appearances for the band, including the highly prized coup of an appearance on the popular BBC radio show Saturday Club on 26 January, as well as overseeing contracts for tours that would send them on the road for much of the next twelve delirious months, sharing the bill with established British chart stars like Shapiro, American singers like Chris Montez and Tommy Roe and, further down the tracks, notionally someone of the stellar stature of Duane Eddy or Roy Orbison. While The Beatles were hitting the road in January, Epstein was hitting the phones, fortified by belief in his group who, he insisted to anyone within earshot, would be ‘as big as Elvis’.

He was determined to avoid the mistakes of ‘Love Me Do’, which had to scrounge for airplay on graveyard shows on Radio Luxembourg. During 1963, The Beatles would rack up nearly 290 live appearances, careening all over Britain between stage, TV studio and BBC radio session like four adrenaline-fuelled pinballs. And shoehorned in between all this activity was, of course, the pressing need to write and record new songs at EMI studios on Abbey Road, in the heart of the leafy London suburb of St John’s Wood, under the critical and inventive gaze of their producer, George Martin. Over the next twelve months, they would release four hit singles and two juggernaut albums that forever altered the direction of British pop music.

These were thrilling days, when dogged ambition ran on parallel lines with single-minded self-belief. And there was no time to lose on their way to reaching ‘the toppermost of the poppermost’, the ethereal northern star that kept those hopes alive in the darkest moments of earlier pain and rejection. Just twenty-four hours after jetting in from Hamburg, they were back at an airport check-in to board a plane to Edinburgh for a whistle-stop five-day tour of Highland outposts that included Keith, Elgin, Dingwall, Aberdeen’s Beach Ballroom and the Stirlingshire farmers’ town of Bridge of Allan. More accustomed to hosting trad jazz bands and toe-tapping Scottish country dance groups, these venues were as far from rock’n’roll glamour as you could get. But the promised appearance of a band generating early radio buzz and with an actual record in the charts sparked a frisson of excitement among those youngsters keenly attuned to the latest fad: beat music.

The itinerary – at £42 a night – had been agreed in November after Epstein brokered a deal with Albert Bonici, owner of the Two Red Shoes Ballroom and a middle-aged second-generation Italian-Scot whose incisive entrepreneurial instincts closely aligned with a recognition that pop music’s tectonic plates were shifting fast. The two men had quickly struck up a respectful and business-like rapport. Epstein understood the need to fill up The Beatles’ diary with gigs. And Bonici, a man who had the instincts of a Mississippi gambler, was savvy enough to believe there was a pot of gold lying even then at the end of a Beatle rainbow.

His belief was vindicated when he heard first-hand about the impact they’d had on fans at the Beach Ballroom. ‘I was a jazz man and didn’t really listen to pop groups much,’ he told the website Scotbeat. ‘I travelled to Aberdeen station and was picked up by my associate Gordon Hardie. We went as usual to Chivas restaurant in Union Street, only this time we were surrounded by waitresses clamouring: Who are these Beatles? The group had apparently visited the restaurant earlier in the day and made a great impression on the girls.’

Bonici had already insisted on a clause in his contract with Epstein that gave him first dibs on any future shows north of the border. It was made in the spirit of having nothing to lose, with Scotland being regarded as a musical hinterland for most English touring groups. ‘London was very unsophisticated about Scotland,’ Bonici recalled. ‘They looked upon it as a unit, like Liverpool. So when we inserted a clause in the contracts requiring all groups who wished to return to Scotland to do so under our auspices, no one took any notice. They simply signed [it].’

Moira Loveland, who worked in the Two Red Shoes office, was keenly aware of Bonici’s modus operandi. ‘Albert was always very quick to catch on to something he thought would be the next big thing. He was always ready to take a chance on young talent. When we first heard he had booked a band called The Beatles, no one blinked an eye. The name meant nothing. Even though Love Me Do was on the radio, it wasn’t something that meant a great deal to folk in the office. As far as we were concerned they were just another band. It was a bit unusual that they were from England but Albert often went out on a limb. He often took a chance on groups and for the most part it paid off.’

But neither Bonici nor Epstein could have predicted the icy blast, the result of a deep Scandinavian anti-cyclone, that had enveloped the entire country. In the first week of the New Year, more than 95,000 miles of highway were out of service, eight-foot drifts blocked the main road from London to Portsmouth and the sea froze over for a mile off the beaches at Herne Bay, a seaside town on the north coast of Kent in the south-east of England.

Conditions were no better further north. On 2 January, the plane carrying The Beatles from London to Edinburgh was diverted to Aberdeen as a result of heavy snowfall in Scotland’s capital city. Within minutes of landing, they were told the gig earmarked for that night fifty miles away at Keith’s Longmore Hall had already been scrapped. It was an inauspicious start. And it meant disappointment for other groups on the bill keen to rub shoulders with a group whose debut record had hit the Top Twenty.

John Stewart of The Copycats said: ‘We were really looking forward to hearing them. We had heard Love Me Do on the radio and they sounded fantastic. We were only about sixteen at the time so it was a big deal for us and very disappointing when the show was called off.’

After learning of the cancellation, Lennon decided on the spur of the moment to fly back to Liverpool to spend the night with his pregnant wife Cynthia, who he’d married in a shotgun wedding the previous August. She was living under virtual house arrest with John’s disapproving and wrathful aunt Mimi at Mendips, his childhood home in Menlove Avenue, Woolton. The other three, meanwhile, were left to wait in the airport lounge for the arrival of ‘roadie’ Neil Aspinall, who had driven up with their equipment from Liverpool in his battered second-hand Commer van to meet them in Edinburgh, only for a glance at the arrival boards to tell him a long detour north was now required. He was then forced to undertake a precarious drive through blinding snow on icy roads to meet up with McCartney, Harrison and Starr in Aberdeen, before embarking on another seventy-mile journey even further north to the cathedral town of Elgin.

It was here, on 3 January 1963, in the Two Red Shoes, that The Beatles took their next important steps on the non-stop touring carousel. The club was a magnet for jazz bands, attracting such luminaries as clarinetist Acker Bilk and trumpet player Kenny Ball, both of whom had played at Liverpool’s Cavern. But The Beatles’ booking signalled a breakout moment for Bonici. Billed as ‘The Love Me Do Boys’, their appearance – Lennon, flying back from Liverpool, only just making it in time – generated more heat than light.

For all Bonici’s promotional know-how, according to eyewitnesses the club was less than half full, mainly as a result of the weather. Some were curious, others simply glad to get out of the house after the Hogmanay celebrations. Among them was Ralph McKay, an eighteen-year-old university student home for the holidays. ‘We were just looking for somewhere to go and have a few pints and listen to music. So we thought we would go and check them out. The initial impression was just the volume they made. Compared to what we had been listening to at the Two Red Shoes, this was like a wall of noise. Alex Sutherland was a jazz band with a brass section, that kind of stuff. Then these guys came on and it seemed like extreme volume in a fairly small dance hall. Three guitars and a set of drums played at maximum volume. It was a shock to the system in a way.

‘The general reaction was that people didn’t know what to make of this; it was so different to what we were used to hearing. What is going on here, who the heck are these guys? Things took a while to reach the northeast of Scotland in those days. What might have gone down big time in Liverpool was a long way from Elgin.

‘They certainly had a handle on their music and on the set they were performing. They were sure of themselves. It wasn’t a case of four rookies looking at each other and wondering what to do next. They played covers like Buddy Holly songs, but it wasn’t as if they replicated the same sound – they had their own twist on it. But if you were asking me if I saw anything particularly special that night, I would have to say no. There was nothing to suggest they were on the cusp of greatness.’

Curiously, for years to come the little venue remained fixed in the mind of Ringo Starr. ‘Elgin was one of the strangest gigs we did. We were in an L-shaped room – and we were playing at the wrong end. I have this vision of the audience all wearing wellies. The bar was on one side and we were on the other and you could tell which side was doing the business.’ However, the drummer’s account was later gently disputed by John Ruggeri, Bonici’s nephew, who reckons Ringo’s memory was perhaps fogged by time. ‘The hall was not L-shaped but had a slightly longer wall on one side,’ said Ruggeri. ‘But you could still see the stage from all areas, although you would not have been able to see the whole stage if you were standing in the far left-hand corner facing the stage. And I don’t think anyone was wearing wellies.’

The tour’s low point arguably came on 4 January – days before ‘Please Please Me’ went from printing plant to record shops – at Dingwall Town Hall, where fewer than twenty people paid to see The Beatles while less than a mile away, local band The Mellotones were pulling up trees before a crowd of some 1,200. The next night at Bridge of Allan saw the newcomers pelted with coins by unruly locals hell-bent on chasing those unwanted ‘southerners’ out of town. ‘We didn’t mind that much,’ remarked McCartney. ‘We just went round the stage at the end and picked up all the money.’

Meanwhile, back in their hometown, the Liverpool Echo published a gushing review of ‘Please Please Me’ by its influential music columnist, who hid his identity behind the pseudonym Disker. Few people knew that Disker was in fact Tony Barrow, a Liverpool-born record-sleeve writer who had already been lured away from his job at Decca to work for Brian Epstein at NEMS (North End Music Stores: then part of the Epstein family business, later a huge showbiz agency) as The Beatles’ press officer. It was, of course, a clandestine conflict of interest.

Seen through the prism of seven decades, it seems incredible that, days before the release of the single that would set in motion The Beatles’ big bang, they remained on pop music’s outer margins, attracting a minuscule audience. They received a warmer welcome at the Scottish Television studios in Glasgow, where they appeared on the children’s magazine programme Round-Up to mime along to ‘Please Please Me’ ahead of its release on 11 January. It is curious that they mimed the song, despite having all their concert equipment in the back of Neil’s van, the amps still warm from the previous night’s show in Aberdeen. But the programme’s sound recordist Len Southam revealed it was too difficult in those more primitive times to mix live music in the studio. He also recalled getting an early insight into the band’s youthful chutzpah. ‘I was in the control booth. The Beatles were in the green room waiting to come on,’ he said. ‘A call came up over the intercom from the green room to the control booth. One of The Beatles asked if they could be paid extra as their van was having mechanical trouble. They were worried about whether it would make it back to Liverpool. I passed the request on to higher authorities. The answer came back down: Sorry you’ll get your pay, but no extra.’

The show, which went out around teatime, was co-hosted by Morag Hood and Paul Young, who later carved out a highly successful career as a TV and film actor. ‘I remember they had great personalities,’ Young said. ‘They were always carrying on, being slightly cheeky. But there was something about them that was different. Please Please Me sounded fantastic even though they were miming. Paul did a lot of the talking but it was clear to me at least that John was the leader. He just had an air of authority about him. I got on very well with them. Personally, I thought they were very impressive. And you just had that feeling they were going places.’

Back in Liverpool, meanwhile, Epstein was summoning up all his promotional vigour ahead of the second single’s release. He had already forged several important industry alliances since persuading EMI to take a chance on The Beatles. Most important of all was George Martin, whose cool authority and debonair demeanour camouflaged his true working-class roots as the son of a carpenter and a housewife. Then there was Dick James, the pop crooner-turned-music publisher who shared Epstein’s vision for The Beatles and already saw in the songs of Lennon and McCartney pop music’s Next Big Thing. Equally important was Howes, the promoter who specialised in placing artists of the calibre of Cliff Richard & The Shadows in halls across Britain and the man Epstein had cajoled into seeing his boys and convincing him to add them to the bill for a UK package tour getting underway in February.

‘I got a call from someone saying he was Brian Epstein and was ringing from Liverpool,’ Howes later recalled. ‘He said he had a great group and was there anything I could fit them into?’ Howes remembered them as ‘another group with a funny name’, but he booked them anyway. ‘I had nothing to lose,’ he said of having handed The Beatles a one-off audition in December at a gig in Peterborough, headlined by Coventry-born Australian country yodeller Frank Ifield. ‘I wasn’t overly impressed but I thought they had something and I thought it would take them six months if they were going to amount to anything. I liked them as people and I saw Brian as a great businessman. I was very impressed by him.’

Epstein’s intimate inner circle also included his right-hand man Peter Brown, roadie Neil Aspinall, Tony Bramwell (a school friend of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison) and, of course, Tony Barrow, who had been persuaded to leave Decca by Epstein’s typically grandiose offer to double his current salary. Barrow’s recruitment would turn out to be an astute move. The job description was simple: get The Beatles as much positive press coverage as possible. Barrow knew the value of flooding local newspapers and radio DJs with review copies of newly released singles to try to generate publicity. Every paper in the country was on his mailing list. ‘I knew the power of the Liverpool Echo locally, and thought that other provincial papers probably had a similar influence. A lot of London-based PR people were dismissive of the regional press, but I always thought they were very important. I took the view that where press releases, photos and review copies were concerned, you were better off sending out too many than too few.

‘I also arranged for The Beatles to do a lot of telephone interviews. In those early months they’d sit in my office for four or five hours at a time, talking to provincial journalists. Again, it was something I’d picked up from my work with the Echo. Very few of the top recording stars of the time would bother to speak to me, but when they did I really appreciated it. Even at the height of Beatlemania we attempted to make The Beatles more accessible than many other big names were.’

At this time, rock’n’roll had long surrendered its grasp on the British pop charts. The airwaves were dominated by granular boy-next-door acts like sanitised Elvis clone Cliff Richard, Frank Ifield, Mark Wynter and young female performers such as Shapiro, Susan Maughan and Little Eva. Presley remained a powerful voice but one that national service had shorn of its initial rebellious and libidinous artifice. Instead, the land that gave us Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Little Richard now offered up candy-voiced crooners in the shape of Bobby Darin, Perry Como and Frankie Avalon.

The Shadows, with their perfectly choreographed dance steps, were unthreatening. Acker Bilk, riding the wave created by the astonishing success of ‘Stranger On The Shore’, remained the leading light for jazz alongside the likes of Kenny Ball and George Melly, a Liverpool-born performer who combined his love of jazz and the blues with an anarchic devotion to surrealism. British pop music was looking to a new frontier – and The Beatles were as curious as anyone to discover what the new fad would be. No one, with the exception of their manager, believed it would emerge from the shores of the Mersey. Yet Epstein’s convictions were sound – and The Beatles were on point to deliver.

Released on 11 January – the same day as a lunchtime gig at the Cavern, with Lennon proudly getting in a sales plug from the stage – ‘Please Please Me’ was a song bursting with kinetic energy, its bluesy harmonica and pitch-perfect harmonies underpinning a driving tempo. Written entirely by Lennon in his bedroom at Mimi’s home in Liverpool, and originally imagined by its author as a Roy Orbison-style doo-wop ballad, the track infused pop music with its biggest charge since Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ blasted out of radios in 1956.

‘The reason Please Please Me took off,’ said Lennon years later, ‘was simply that we didn’t sound like anybody else. We didn’t sound like the black musicians we all loved because we weren’t black and also because we were brought up on a different kind of music and atmosphere.’

‘Please Please Me’, however, was also arguably the most controversial song ever released by a British pop group up to that point. Closer examination of Lennon’s frantic and lascivious lyrics reveal the song’s irrefutable subject matter: stumbling, fumbling, impetuous adolescent sex. These were not chaste insinuations. But very few at the time held the lyrics up to the light, even though the meaning was hiding in plain sight. Especially not those reviewers who, on hearing the song for the first time via advance copies, were catching on to the freshness and vitality of The Beatles’ appeal. Almost all the early reviews for the single were positive.

Disc said: ‘It isn’t easy to please a Merseysider, yet the one that’s satisfying their taste is The Beatles’ single Please Please Me. This unmistakably R&B-flavoured number caused great excitement whenever The Beatles played it to their Liverpool audiences. One can’t help but wonder if the nation’s reaction will be as enthusiastic as that of the Merseyside public.’ Adopting the same caveat-laden tone, New Record Mirror stated: ‘It’s a high-pitched number with plenty of guts and a good tune, vocalising and some offbeat sounds. There just happen to be some sounds on this that other groups can’t reproduce.’ Keith Fordyce, co-host of ATV’s Thank Your Lucky Stars and a respected Radio Luxembourg DJ, also chipped in with an influential verdict. Writing in the New Musical Express, he noted that ‘Please Please Me’ had all the qualities to become record of the year. ‘It’s full of beat, vigour and vitality and what’s more, it’s different. I can’t think of any other group currently recording in this style.’

Everything seemed to be travelling in the same direction. Amid all this backslapping, however, Barrow had zeroed in on a potential complication with the songwriting credit for ‘Please Please Me’ and the flipside ‘Ask Me Why’, which were both listed as McCartney-Lennon tracks. As Barrow understood it from Epstein, it should’ve been the other way round, the composers’ names following natural alphabetical order, although nothing appeared to have been firmly set in stone. ‘When I saw the credit listed as McCartney-Lennon, I thought someone had boobed,’ he said. After raising the issue with Epstein and Dick James, Barrow knew a conversation was required to head off any potential conflict. However, the subsequent discussion over the compositional hierarchy had implications that would cascade down through the decades.

McCartney recalled: ‘We had a meeting with Brian. I arrived late and John and Brian had been talking. Brian said: We were thinking we ought to call the songs Lennon-McCartney. I said that’s okay but what about McCartney-Lennon? If I wrote it, what about that? It sounds good, too. They said, okay, what we’ll do is we’ll alternate Lennon and McCartney. Well, that didn’t happen and I didn’t mind.’ He would later revise that apparent acquiescence by insisting that Lennon and McCartney ‘didn’t sound better to me’.

The unfortunate truth was McCartney had simply been blindsided by Lennon’s seniority and internal group politics. Lennon, aware of Epstein’s homosexuality, had apparently used his influence as leader of the band and the object of Brian’s barely concealed desires to ensure he pulled all the strings. McCartney admitted as much when he later remarked: ‘John had the stronger personality and I think he fixed things with Brian before I got there. That was John’s way. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that; I wasn’t quite as skilful. He was one and a half years older than me and at that age it meant a little more worldliness.’

Neither man, however, knew that Epstein had already broached the songwriting subject with James, who warned that alternating the credits would only cause dissension between Lennon and McCartney and confuse fans and journalists, who could easily exploit the ambiguity. Epstein placed considerable stock in James’s advice, especially after the avuncular publisher had secured The Beatles a slot on the country’s biggest TV pop show. Broadcast on ITV every Saturday night between 5.30 and 6.30 p.m. and presented by Brian Matthew, Thank Your Lucky Stars was the go-to platform for bands and singers showcasing their latest singles.

At their first meeting the previous November, James had impressed Epstein by making the call to the show’s producer, Philip Jones, to get The Beatles on the roster, their first nationwide TV appearance. That they were bottom of a seven-act bill which included Acker Bilk, Petula Clark and teen heartthrob Mark Wynter mattered not one bit. The show had been a staple of Saturday night TV since it first aired in April 1961 and relied on a conveyor belt of mainly jazz acts. Its most popular segment was ‘Spin-A-Disc’ where a panel of (usually) teenagers delivered their verdict on that week’s single releases. Most famous was Janice Nicholls, whose distinctive Black Country accent helped establish the catchphrase ‘Oil give it foive’.

The show, which had them miming to ‘Please Please Me’, was taped on Sunday 13 January at the Alpha TV Studios in Birmingham, the same night as rival channel the BBC broadcast Madhouse on Castle Street, a play whose cast included a young and unknown American folk singer called Bob Dylan. Dylan, making his first trip outside the States, played the minor part of Bobby the Hobo and sang ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ over the end credits. It would be another twenty months before these two future behemoths of music culture would meet.

Unquestionably, Thank Your Lucky Stars was a game-changer for The Beatles, and for a country mired in a nationwide malaise underscored by French president Charles de Gaulle’s humiliating rejection of the UK’s application to the European Common Market, recurring workers’ strikes and the death this month of Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell. In the bars and tearooms of Westminster, meanwhile, bipartisan and incendiary conversation buzzed with the names Profumo, Keeler and Ivanov, while on the international stage the recent Cuban Missile Crisis was still embedded in the nation’s minds. The Cold War was at its most frigid and people pined for light amid the constant shade. And for teens especially, that relief came in the form of The Beatles’ debut on Britain’s primetime pop show.

Audience numbers for Thank Your Lucky Stars topped 4 million most weeks, mind-boggling figures that ensured the group were introduced for the first time to a sizeable chunk of the UK’s teenage population during peak-time viewing. Even though the group were forced to mime, the show still presented the kind of exposure money couldn’t buy and was another sign that Epstein’s unyielding belief in his boys was already reaping encouraging dividends. But their impact was far from just musical.

Those tuning in at home – and millions were housebound due to the big freeze – were unprepared for what they saw. Filling the screen were four young men – boys to some – dressed in conservative mole-coloured suits but with what for the time seemed outlandishly long hair. Two of them – McCartney and Harrison – were singing on the left as you looked at the screen, while Lennon, his legs bowed slightly, had his own mic. Behind them sat the hangdog drummer Ringo Starr, his body bobbing and weaving to the pulsating beat he was holding down.

Yet the sound they made left young viewers transfixed, a vibrant harmonic explosion that, to many, was the modern-day equivalent of the trumpets sounding outside Jericho. Harmonies! Gorgeous three-part vocals, followed by a dramatic crescendo of guitar chords. And that finish – five sharp, emphatically executed chords wrapped up in a sustained burst of drumbeats – left the whole thing vibrating with reflexive energy. A bomb had gone off. British rock’n’roll had arrived.

Producer Philip Jones, upholding his earlier promise to Dick James, later admitted to being dumbfounded when he first clapped eyes on them the moment they arrived at the studios. ‘We had no idea how to present them,’ he recalled. Instantly, he went into a huddle with set designers but no one had any concrete ideas on what to do. ‘In the end we just gave up. We decided to put each one of them inside a big metal heart. It was obvious that the song – not our set – would be the thing that sold them.’ Before the cameras were switched on, producers exhorted fans to go wild in the aisles, but it quickly became evident that there was no need for orchestrated pandemonium. The reaction to The Beatles was off the charts and bordered on some kind of rapture.

Brian Matthew would later look back on that first show as a watershed moment for the group as they took their first proper steps on the showbiz ladder. He told BBC producer Kevin Howlett years later: ‘The BBC certainly didn’t put out anything like the amount of pop music it does now with Radio 1. So for kids and pop fans, there was that one highlight in the week, every Saturday morning. So that made it special, made it important. It had an audience, which by today’s measurements, because of the proliferation of choice, is unthinkable. It was sometimes as much as 25, 35 million people. Obviously [this included] a preponderance of young people, so it was a very powerful market indeed.’

Watching engrossed in the wings that night was an eighteen-year-old hipster whose salesman’s audacity had already seen him land a job as an ad hoc PR to singer Mark Wynter, whose cover of ‘Venus In Blue Jeans’ had earned him some chart success. But Andrew Loog Oldham’s future changed in the two minutes he saw The Beatles mime to ‘Please Please Me’.

‘I was just totally mesmerised by them,’ he remarked of his sliding-doors moment. ‘For me it was a pop epiphany. They weren’t that different in appearance from other bands – they were all wearing suits and ties. But they exuded an attitude that was blunt and honest. For me the sound was familiar but it wasn’t like they were copying the American R&B groups we loved. They took it to another level and injected the Pentecostal joy back into rock’n’roll. The noise they made was the noise of the future. Even though I hadn’t seen the world, I heard the whole world screaming. I didn’t see it – I heard and I felt it.’

As The Beatles left the stage, he buttonholed John Lennon and asked who handled them. Lennon simply pointed him in the direction of the suave figure with the aristocratic demeanour wearing an expensive overcoat and polka dot Paisley scarf. Making his pitch, Loog Oldham tried to hustle Epstein into believing he was the right man to push the band’s name in the right places in London, the most happening city in the world.

‘Brian was definitely a man obsessed, a man on a mission – and I wanted in,’ remarked Loog Oldham. ‘We took each other’s measure and passed the tests. Brian complained that The Beatles’ record label, Parlophone, was not really helping him promote the group and perhaps, yes, maybe they did need somebody pounding the pavements for them in London. He pronounced the word London like a man getting rid of phlegm. The London music business had not been very kind to Eppy and his boys. And Brian must be remembered as the man who persevered against all odds, valiantly soldiering over multi-rejection until he got his lads the record deal that changed the musical century. In 1963 London was a long way from Liverpool, and the sixties’ pendulum was not yet swinging. It was a world in which long-distance phone calls were almost a vulgarity, save for the occasion of reporting a death in the family or, on happier occasions, to announce a birth. Brian liked my chops and agreed to a fiver per week. And so I went about heralding the birth of The Beatles.’

Loog Oldham had also unwittingly identified another factor in The Beatles’ visual appeal, a working-class aesthetic that chimed perfectly with a new Elizabethan society torn between optimism and decline, permissiveness and intolerance. The times were indeed a-changing for a country where nine out of ten people had never been on a plane, one in three relied on an outdoor toilet and had no access to hot running water, central heating was a luxury and millions still bathed once a week in a tin tub in front of a coal fire.

Nowhere was this dystopian grimness more evident than ‘oop north’, among the citizens of Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle – anywhere, in fact, that wasn’t London or south of Bristol’s Wash. But thanks to cinematic box-office hits like Billy Liar and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, and TV programmes such as Coronation Street, to exude working-class values was by now to radiate a certain cool. The Beatles, despite the Dougie Millings tailored suits and Epstein-driven mannered stage formalities, were a gift to Britain’s youth during this paradigm shift in culture.

The eminent British historian Marcus Collins says of the transition: ‘The Beatles entered a British intellectual world so elitist and circumscribed within a London–Oxford–Cambridge axis that embracing popular culture, the provinces and lower classes was an act of dissidence exhibited by angry young men.’

Beatle characteristics in the January radio and TV appearances that followed were defined early: Lennon’s dry wit, McCartney’s boyish charm, Harrison’s demureness and Starr coming across as ‘lovingly thick’ (in the words of George Melly). They moulded together as four sides of one square. Which would all point to the arrival in January of The Beatles on a bigger stage, which owed much to serendipity and blind luck.

The reaction to ‘Please Please Me’ – and the Lennon-McCartney penned B-side ‘Ask Me Why’ – created a riptide in British pop. Overnight, everyone wanted a piece of this exciting new band from Liverpool that had struck a chord with the nation’s youth. Before their debut on Thank Your Lucky Stars, Epstein and Barrow had almost to prostitute themselves to secure Beatles coverage in publications such as the NME or Melody Maker. Now offers for concerts, TV shows and radio appearances poured into Epstein’s offices in the city’s Whitechapel district. Promoters clamoured to book them, offering dizzying figures for one-off shows. Brian called in the Epstein family lawyer Rex Makin for advice on how to handle the deluge. Makin’s suggestion was simple: double the asking price – even triple it.

Among those beating a path to Epstein’s door was a young man with the kind of go-getting zeal that so easily impressed. Sean O’Mahoney published a magazine for Australian entrepreneur Robert Stigwood called Pop Weekly, one of the few outlets to put its weight behind ‘Love Me Do’. O’Mahoney recognised beat music as the new wave and had been blown away by ‘Please Please Me’. Consequently, he was in the throes of setting up his own magazine, Beat Monthly, which would focus on groups like The Beatles, who he guaranteed to Epstein would be on the cover of the first issue.

Like so many others, O’Mahoney was trying to cultivate a relationship with a man he believed was destined for greatness. He sensed ‘Please Please Me’ was a quantum leap forward from the understandable amateurism of ‘Love Me Do’. ‘It grabbed my attention right from the opening bars,’ he said. ‘When it ended I played it again just to make sure. Yes, it was good – very good. I rang Brian as soon as I could in January, told him the release was great and that I would be featuring The Beatles in every issue of my new magazine. Brian was always very friendly when I spoke to him – probably because I was the first person on a national music magazine to ring him about The Beatles.’

Meanwhile, Albert Bonici and his assistant Andi Lothian were anxious to bring The Beatles back to Scotland while they were still hot. They travelled south to discuss arrangements. Bonici knew the original deal was watertight… except for one caveat. Lothian said: ‘After studying the contract, Epstein did agree that Albert had the right to promote The Beatles concerts in Scotland. He sat us down and said: You wouldn’t be here unless you know what I know… The Beatles are going to be enormous. Yes, you can have them back in Scotland, but the news I have for you is that you won’t get them for £30 a night, you won’t get them for £40 a night and you won’t get them for £50 a night. He said: You can have them for £500 a night and I need to know before you leave the office.

‘Albert and I were thunderstruck. Brian left the office for a few minutes to allow us to talk it over. And we just said we’ve got to do it, they are going to be huge, so we agreed to book The Beatles for £500 a night, a sum that was completely outrageous and unheard of at that time for any group. It sounds mad now and it sounded mad then but it was still a fantastic piece of business.’

They weren’t the only promoters to find Epstein playing hardball. Another was Sheffield promoter Peter Stringfellow – later immortalised as Britain’s king of clubs thanks to his eponymous venue in London, which became a magnet for the rich and famous – who thought he had a deal in place to bring them to the Yorkshire city’s Mojo club. But the reception that had greeted the release of ‘Please Please Me’ had, insisted Epstein, altered the terms of engagement. Instead of £65, Stringfellow would now have to fork out £90, although he haggled the band’s manager down to £85.

Even local authorities baulked when they received invoices for Beatles gigs – the fee for their 24 January gig at the Mold Assembly Hall in Wales being a case in point. David Sandison, who covered the show for local paper the Wrexham Leader, said: ‘I was with the boys for about two hours and when the time came for them to do their act, I went ahead to take a look at the crowd. The minute Paul and John came out of the door to the stage, the place was filled with screams as hundreds of girls clamoured forward. The screams were carried on through the hour they were on stage. Then exhausted, The Beatles signed autographs for the fans. The Beatles’ fee for that night was £50, a sum that raised a few eyebrows in Mold Urban District Council chambers. The normal fee paid to pop groups was £10.’ Still, it was a sign of Epstein’s insistence that his boys were about to become the motherlode of British pop.

The next day, Sandison breathlessly related the scenes he had witnessed to his