The Beatles: Off the Record

By Keith Badman

The Beatles Off The Record is the most comprehensive oral history of The Beatles ever published - an 'as it happened' story of the greatest pop group of them all.

Featuring a wealth of quotes from the Sixties by John, Paul, George and Ringo themselves and a host of others who were close to the group during the heady days of Beatlemania and beyond, including their families, fellow musicians, Brian Epstein, George Martin and dozens more.

As Hunter Davis, The Beatles official biographer, states in his foreword; ...compared with some of The Beatles' later selective and polished or faulty and fading memories, this is much nearer the truth. Well, as it appeared to be, at the time...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omnibus Press
• Release date: Dec 9, 2009
• ISBN: 9780857120458

Keith Badman

KEITH BADMAN is the author of several pop culture books, including The Beach Boys, Beatles Off the Record and Good Times and Bad Times: The Definitive Diary of the Rolling Stones 1960–1969.

Book preview

John Lennon My mother played banjo and I remember my granddad playing it when I was very young. She often played it if there was ever one around but there was never one around, because we sold it, because of the hard times. I used to borrow a guitar at first. I couldn’t play, but a pal of mine had one and it fascinated me. I then convinced my mother to buy me a ‘guaranteed not to split’ guitar for ten pounds that we sent away for from one of those mail order firms. I suppose it was a bit crummy when you think about it, but I played it all the time and I got a lot of practice. She taught me banjo chords. If you look at the early photos of the group you can see me playing funny chords. It’s a joke in the family, ‘A guitar’s all right John, but it can’t earn you money.’ (August 1963)

My auntie said, ‘Ah, this is all very well, but you’ll never earn a living by it. Finish your education, get your GCEs and then you can play your banjo. You need something to fall back on.’

"When I was 15, my ambition was to write Alice In Wonderland, and to be bigger than Elvis. In our family, the radio was hardly ever on, so I got to ‘pop’ later, not like Paul and George, who had been groomed in pop music coming over the radio all the time. We never had it in the house and I only heard it at other people’s homes. This fellow I knew, called Don Beatty, showed me the name Elvis Presley who was in the charts in the New Musical Express and said he was great. It was ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, and I thought it sounded a bit phoney, you know, ‘Heart-Break Hotel’. But then, when I heard it, it was the end for me! I think I heard it on Radio Luxembourg."

I was obviously very musical from a very early age and I often just wonder why nobody in my family never done anything about it, may be ‘cos nobody could afford it. After a while we formed The Quarry Men with some lads named Eric Griffiths, Pete Shotton, my best mate at school, and myself. We also had a lad named Gary who is now an architect, and somebody else named Ivan. Ivan went to the same school as Paul and he brought him along one day when we were playing at a garden fete. (August 1963)

When Paul and I started writing stuff, we did it in A because we thought that was the key Buddy Holly did all his songs in. Holly was a big thing then, an inspiration, sort of.

Paul and I hit it off right away. I was just a little bit worried because my old mates were going and new people, like Paul and George were joining, but we soon got used to each other. I think I went a bit wild when I was 14. I was just drifting. I wouldn’t study at school, and when I was put in for nine GCEs, I was a hopeless failure. My whole school life was a case of ‘I couldn’t care less!’ It was just a joke as far as I was concerned. Art was the only thing I could do, and my headmaster told me that if I didn’t go to art school, I might as well give up life! I wasn’t really keen. I thought it would be a crowd of old men, but I should make the effort to try and make something of myself. I stayed for five years doing commercial art. Frankly I found it always as bad as maths and science, and I loathed these! (August 1963)

Paul McCartney "I didn’t start in a very spectacular way. On a Sunday I remember I used to listen to The Billy Cotton Band Show on the radio, and everything really, except classical, which we used to turn off. When you are about 11, you start to think about what’s going to happen to you. I’ve often thought that I’d never end up in an ordinary job. My plan was to go on playing the clubs until I reached 25, a ripe old age, and then go to John’s art college, and hang on there for a couple of years." (August 1963)

I have been painting since I was twelve. In fact, I won a prize at school, it was a big action thing. I’d get these big six-foot rolls of paper and kneel down on the floor and blow paint all over them. But after an hour of that, you’d get all dizzy and funny, and you’d feel, ‘Yeah man! I’m going high, baby.’ (1964)

I never remember wanting to be anything. I never had any ambitions like driving a train. I suppose one of the things that formed my character was never being under the thumb of authority. My mum died when I was 14, and my dad was the big influence. He was a great believer in moderation. ‘Never overdo it,’ he’d say. ‘Have a drink, but don’t be an alcoholic. Have a cigarette, but don’t be a cancer case.’

My Dad was a pianist by ear and then a trumpeter until his teeth gave out. He was a good pianist, you know, but he would never teach me, because he felt that you should learn properly. It was a bit of a drag, because I never did end up learning properly. I suppose he did teach me, by ear, because a lot of people have said that I do chords a lot like he used to do. I’m sure I picked it up over the years.

I got my first guitar when I was 15, and I just used to fool around with it, more or less. As time went by though, I got more interested. I used to be influenced by Elvis, Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins, in the old days. I love them. I can’t really sing like them, but I like them. Dad used to play the piano and he would teach us things like harmony, and that learning helped me write my first song, called ‘I Lost My Little Girl’, when I was 14. It had just three chords, G, G7 and C. I just used to make them up.

I was still 15 when I met John at a village fete in Woolton in Liverpool. He was playing with a couple of fellows and I asked if I could join him. That’s how it started really. We used to sag off school together and we’d go back to my house when there was no one in during the afternoon. We’d smoke Twinings Tea in a pipe. It didn’t taste too bad actually. We’d sit around, smoking, and have a little bash on the piano. We’d write mostly Buddy Holly type songs, because they used to have the least chords. We wrote about 100 songs then, before ‘Love Me Do’ was published. Songs called ‘Too Bad About Sorrows’ and ‘Just Fun.’

I suppose we went from strength to strength. We always knew that we were that little bit special. We had worked with other bands, but we were slightly more ‘studenty’ than the average bands around at the time. So, we had that little edge. We were a little bit more arty. John had been to art college, and George and I had gone to this Grammar school. I kind of liked poetry and I think it kind of gave us an edge somehow. Ringo was simply the best drummer in Liverpool. He also had native wit. He didn’t know when he was being funny. The three of us went to Grammar school, but Ringo didn’t. He said he only went to school for three days because of this bad operation he had when he was a kid. Ringo had peritonitis. His stomach has a lot of scars on it. His parents were told that he died at age three, so with Ringo everything’s a bonus.

I had two jobs, once I was in coil-winding and the second job I was in, I was a second man on a lorry.

George Harrison At school I was a very bad pupil, in fact, I was one of the worst pupils they ever had in the school. At the time I was more into having a good time. The only thing I liked at school was art. I realise now that was because the teacher was a nice fellow and he would come round and say, ‘Why don’t you do it this way, or that way.’ The others would just shout at you and give you a belt in the gob! Which did not help. I’d met Paul while I was at school and we both had this interest in guitars. When I first wanted a guitar, my mother bought me this very cheap guitar worth £3 10s. She didn’t mind that I used to stay up until two in the morning polishing my guitar and trying to learn how to play.

The first thing I can remember hearing was ‘Meatball’ and I don’t know who did it. I was so knocked out. Then next, I remember people like Kay Starr, Ruby Murray, Frankie Laine, Johnny Ray and all that thing that was going on in the late Forties and early Fifties, and the first thing that grasped me was ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ by Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and those things. That led to my time in the band. One of the greatest people to impress me was Buddy Holly. He sang, wrote his own tunes and he was a guitar player, and he was very good as a guitar player. So, I thought about learning a guitar. My first guitar cost me £2 10 shillings when I was fourteen. I got a manual and it showed me all the wrong chords! I thought, ‘Stupid buggars, they’ve given me a manual which doesn’t show me all the notes.’ But, with Buddy Holly, his guitar playing opened up a new world. Buddy Holly was sensational and a little bit of that rubbed off. The first route that meant anything, musically speaking, was riding down a road, on my bike, hearing ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ coming out of someone’s house.

Paul actually had a trumpet first. I remember he always used to be playing ‘When The Saints Come Marching In’, on and on, always ‘The Saints’. Paul realised that he wasn’t going to be able to sing and play the trumpet at the same time, so he traded it in and got a guitar. In those days though, they didn’t cater for left-handed guitarists, so he had to buy an ordinary one and then play the chords back to front. It was a scream, really, because, instead of strumming the strings down, he had to scratch them up from the bottom.

I stopped going to church when I was 13, may be 12, when I realised it was about what Harry Jones’s Sunday suit looked like. My dad used to play guitar in the merchant navy, just for his own amusement. I have a brother who was in a choir once. I started playing guitar when I was 14, actually Lonnie Donegan was my great hero then. I suppose it was hearing Lonnie that made me want to play guitar.

I didn’t realise, until recently, that John and I both went to the same primary school, Dovedale Road. At one time, I used to have a group of my own called The Rebels, or some such name. I remember when Paul and I used to play guitar and John would just sing without any instrument. We were on a Buddy Holly kick in those days, with numbers like ‘Think It Over’ and ‘It’s So Easy’. We did the Carrol Levis discoveries show in Manchester once, and Billy Fury was at the first audition. I think we were Johnny & The Moondogs at that particular time. You were judged by the audience applause, you know, but we had to catch a train home before the end. We never did find out if we’d won, but Billy passed his audition I know that. (1964/1987)

When I left school, I was an apprentice electrician for about four months. I remember asking my big brother would you pack in work and have a go at music if you were me, and he said, ‘Well, you might as well, you never know what might happen, and if you don’t, you are not going to lose anything by it.’ The others, John was at art college and Paul was doing an extra year at school, so at the end of the four months we were all out of school and then we got the opportunity to go to Scotland and then on to Hamburg and then, after that, I forgot about the nine-to-five job. (1964)

Ringo Starr I took my first photograph when I was five months old. Apart from taking it, I also ate it! Which was most selfish of me, because there was a nasty gap in my mother’s album of album snaps for ages afterwards. It wasn’t filled until dad got around to taking a picture of me trying to ride a neighbour’s pet poodle. (1964)

When I was about 14, I was in hospital and, to keep us happy, they had a ward band and a teacher used to come along and she put up a big board with all yellow dots and red dots. When she pointed to red dots, yellow dots or green dots, the triangles or drums would play. It was a funny little band, and I would never play unless she gave me a drum. So I used to fight for the drums. That was when I was first interested in drums and then I used to bang on the locker beside my bed. I’d always liked the idea of drumming, and when I heard any music I used to tap on things. When I came home from hospital, I used to put little bits of wires on top of biscuit tins and bash them with bits of firewood. (1964)

When I was 18, for Christmas, my mum and dad got me my first drum kit which cost 30 bob and had a huge one-sided bass drum which used to drive the neighbours all mad. It was a sort of mixture of different parts, mostly about 25 years old, but I was really proud. Every time I got behind it, it used to hide me, what with me being little and the drum being a fantastic size. I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me it was ten feet across! I eventually had three drum lessons once I got interested. I went to this little man who was in this house and he played drums and he told me to get a manuscript. He wrote it all down and I never went back after that, because I couldn’t be bothered. It was too routine for me, parradiddles and all that. (1964)

I wanted a bike and I swapped it for a steering cart and my mother would say, ‘I paid a lot of money for that bike and some kid made that steering cart in his back yard.’ I kept wanting things until I got them. I was never hungry and I was never cold. I’m the only child. People say I must have been spoilt, but I wasn’t. My mother went out to work and she was the only one getting any money, so that was the reason I never asked for big things. I only asked for little things.

I was on the dole when I was 20. There wasn’t anything for me to stick around for, so a mate and I decided we’d emigrate to Houston in Texas, because Lightin’ Hopkins lived there, and we all liked his stuff. We even went as far as getting the emigration forms to fill in. But, we took one look at the things they wanted to know, and packed in the whole idea. Questions like, ‘Was your grandfather’s uncle’s best friend a dog?’ And all that. We just laughed and packed it in.

1957

Saturday, 6 July

At St Peter’s Church, Woolton in Liverpool, 15-year-old Paul McCartney meets John Lennon at the Woolton Village Fete …

Pete Shotton, guitarist with John’s group, The Quarry Men We did a gig in Woolton for the annual village fete, which included the crowning of the Rose Queen, where they’d pick a pretty girl and dress her up. There was also a fun fair going on and, in the evening, over the road in the village hall, they’d have a dance and we were the magnificent entertainment. A friend of ours, Ivan Vaughan, had brought a friend along who, we were told, could play the guitar. So, we got down off the stage and Ivan introduced us. ‘This is Paul McCartney,’ he said. Paul was this chubby faced kid and we all grunted at each other for a bit, in an awkward silence.

Rod Davis, the banjo player with The Quarry Men John’s meeting with Paul wasn’t until the evening, in the Church hall kitchen, when another school friend, Ivan Vaughan, brought Paul along.

Paul We had a friend in common, Ivan Vaughan, who went to school with George and I, and he used to be in one of those little skiffle groups that John was in. He was known as ‘Jive With Ive, The Ace On The Bass’, and he used to play on one of those tea-chest basses, you know, a bit of string on a broom handle that was attached to a tea-chest. He said to me, ‘You should come along to this thing. This group’s playing and my mate John’s in it.’ This was the Woolton Village Fete. So, I went along and I saw this group on a little stage and the singer, who was John, just looked like he had something. The group did their first thing and they had their first break, and they were due to do the evening thing, so the break was the opportunity for the group to get drunk, really.

Len Garry, the bassist with The Quarry Men We were sitting round a table having coffee when Ivan and Paul came in. McCartney was wearing a white jacket and black drainpipes. There was a bit of a stony atmosphere at first and I think Ivan had told John about Paul being a great guitarist, so he felt a bit threatened.

Pete Shotton Both John and Paul acted almost stand-offish. John was notoriously wary of strangers anyway, and held back, standing his ground. But Paul impressed me with his cool reserve. Shy he wasn’t! The awkward silence was broken when he got out his guitar and began to play.

Paul John had a few beers and I finally said ‘Hello’ to him. We were backstage and John was leaning over me with this beery breath. One of them leant me their guitar and I had to turn it round because I’m left-handed, but because I had a mate who was right-handed, I had learnt to play upside down, so that was a little bit impressive. But I also knew the words to this song that they all loved and didn’t know the words, and that was enough to get me in. It was called ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ by Eddie Cochran.

John I had a group. I was the singer and the leader. I met Paul and I made the decision whether to have him in the group. Was it better to have a guy who was better than the people I had in, obviously, or not? To make the group stronger or let me be stronger? That decision was to let Paul in and make the group stronger.

Pete Shotton Once Paul had gone, John asked me what I thought of him and I said, ‘I like him.’ John then asked me what I thought about Paul joining the group. I said, ‘It’s OK with me, that’s if you want him in and he wants to join.’

Friday, 18 October

Paul makes his live concert début with The Quarry Men at the New Clubmoor Hall in Norris Green, Liverpool …

Paul I went into The Quarry Men as the lead guitarist really, because I wasn’t bad on guitar. When I wasn’t onstage I was even better, but when I got up on stage, my fingers all went stiff. I had a big solo, on the song ‘Guitar Boogie’, and when it came to my bit … I blew it! I just blew it! I couldn’t play at all and I got terribly embarrassed. My fingers found themselves underneath the strings instead of on top of them. So I vowed that first night that that was the end of my career as the lead guitarist. I goofed on that one terribly and so, from then on, I was on rhythm guitar.

1958

Thursday, 6 February

A 14-year-old George meets The Quarry Men for the first time during their concert at Wilson Hall, in Garston, Liverpool …

George I had been invited to see them play several times by Paul, but for some reason, I had never got round to it. I remember being very impressed by John’s big, thick, sideboards and Teddy Boy clothes. He was a terribly sarcastic bugger from day one, but I never backed down from him. He never intimidated me. Whenever he had a go at me, I just gave him a little bit of his own, right back.

Following the concert, John accompanies Paul and George on a part of their bus journey home …

Paul George was far ahead of us as a guitarist, but that isn’t saying very much, because we were raw beginners ourselves. He slipped quietly into one of the seats on the almost empty bus we were on, took out his guitar, and went right into ‘Raunchy’. Some days later, I asked John, ‘Well, what do you think about George?’ He gave it a second or two, and then he replied, ‘Yeah, man, he’d be great,’ and that was it. George was in.

George John, Paul and I would go skiffling in each other’s houses, and there was Cliff Richard who was really big. We would go and see him, and all these American stars who would come over, and I would lie in bed at night and I’d lie there and I just knew that something good was going to happen. When we used to feel particularly silly, in a funny mood, John used to say, ‘Where are we going, fellows?’ in that dopey American thing and we’d reply, ‘To the top, Johnny.’ And he’d say, ‘Where’s the top?’ And we’d say, ‘To the toppermost of the poppermost, Johnny.’ But, we had done sod all, we hadn’t done anything!

John "I couldn’t be bothered with him (George) when he first came around. He used to follow me around like a bloody kid, hanging around all the time. I couldn’t be bothered. He was a kid who played guitar and he was a friend of Paul’s which made it all easier. It took me years to come around to him, to start considering him as an equal or anything …

… He was like a disciple of mine when we started. I was already an art student when Paul and George were still in grammar school. There is a vast difference between being in High School and being in college, and I was already in college and already had sexual relationships, already drank and did a lot things like that.

George We found out that John didn’t have a proper guitar. He just had a weird old thing that he used to pluck out a few banjo chords that his mother had taught him. Anyway, he started learning to play on Paul’s guitar which, by this time, had been converted for a left-handed player, and that left John with a problem. Just like Paul, he had to learn to playback-to-front chords, beating his fingers up and over instead of down. Naturally, we made a terrible old sound in those days. We really did. (July 1964)

Wednesday, 15 July

In Liverpool, John’s mother Julia dies at a bus stop in Menlove Avenue, after being struck by a Standard Vanguard being driven by the off-duty policeman Eric Clague. She had been visiting Aunt Mimi Smith …

Mimi I always went out with her to the bus stop, but this night she left early, at twenty to ten. She went out on her own and a minute later there was a terrible screeching.

Eric Clague Mrs Lennon just ran straight out in front of me. I just couldn’t avoid her. I was not speeding. I swear it. It was just one of those terrible things that happen.

John We were sitting waiting for her to come home. Twitchy (Julia’s new man friend, John Dykins) and me was wondering why she was so late. The copper came to the door to tell us. It was just like it’s supposed to be, you know, the way it is in the films, asking if I was her son and all that. Then he told us, and we both went white. It was the worst thing that could happen to me. We’d caught up so much in just a few years. We could, at last, communicate. We got on. She was great. I thought, ‘Fuck! Fuck it! Fuck it! That’s really fucked everything. I’ve no responsibility to anyone now!’

Paul John was devastated. He loved his mum more than anything, but at that age, you’re not allowed to be devastated, particularly not teenage boys. You just shrug it off. I know he had private tears. It’s not that either of us were remotely hard-hearted about it, it shattered us, but we knew that you had to get on with your life. We were like wounded animals and, just by looking at each other, we knew the pain that we were feeling, but we weren’t going to break down and cry because you just didn’t do that kind of thing.

AUGUST

Paul and George hitchhike their way around Britain …

Paul Once, we decided to visit the West Country and spent a few glorious days going all over the place. By night, we slept on the beach, but by the time we had gone up to South Wales, the weather had got bad and we needed some shelter, so we asked the police if we could sleep in their cells.

George But, no dice! However, they gave us permission to kip in the stand of a football ground. What a night! (December 1962)

DECEMBER

Following a Christmas dance, John begins dating Cynthia Powell, a fellow student at the Liverpool Art College …

John She was a right Hoylake runt! Dead snobby. My mate, Jeff Mohammed, and me used to poke fun at her and mock her. We had a class dance and I was pissed and I asked her to dance. Jeff had been having me on, saying, ‘Cynthia likes you, you know.’ As we danced, I asked her to come to a party the next day.

Aunt Mimi Smith Cynthia was such a nice girl. When she and John were at Art College, she would come to my house and say, ‘Oh, Mimi. What am I going to do about John?’ She would just sit there until he came back home. Cynthia really pursued him. He would walk up the road and back until she got tired of waiting and went home. I think he was afraid of her actually.

Cynthia I was frightened of John. He was so rough. He wouldn’t give in. He just fought all the time.

John When George was a kid, he used to follow me and my first girlfriend Cynthia. We would come out of the art school together and he’d be hovering around … Cyn and I would be going to a coffee shop or a movie and George would follow us down the street two hundred yards behind. Cyn would say, ‘Who is that guy? What does he want?’ And I’d say, ‘He just wants to hang out. Should we take him with us?’ She’d say, ‘Oh, OK, let’s take him to the bloody movies.’ So we’d allow him to come to the movies with us. That’s the sort of relationship it was. (September 1980)

1959

Saturday, 29 August

At the opening night of The Casbah Club, situated at 8 Hayman’s Green, in West Derby, Liverpool, John, Paul and George perform publicly for the first time. It is also their first meeting with Pete Best …

Pete The Casbah was my mother Mona’s club. I first met them when they came down with George. I had met him before because he used to play in this club called Lowlands. We needed a group to open on the Saturday. Ken (Brown – a 19-year-old guitarist who played with George in the Les Stewart Quartet, along with a chap called Skinner) said that the group had broken up, but George said, ‘I know a couple of guys who say they’ve played in a band before. If they’re interested in coming down, would you let them open?’ Mum said, ‘Yes, let me see them.’ Well, the two guys turned out to be John and Paul, but there was no drummer. They’rehearsed for two-and-a-half hours and mum liked them very much. They signed on under the name The Quarry Men and played the club for several hours.

Ken Brown "George and I spent hours practising in the Lowlands Club in Hayman’s Green, but the most we ever earned was £2 for a wedding! We would probably have gone on playing at clubs but for George’s girlfriend, Ruth Morrison. George had never really been keen on girls. He was still only sixteen and at the Liverpool Institute with Paul McCartney. George suddenly seemed to go head over heels for Ruth, a lovely girl with long auburn hair who later moved to Birmingham to become a nurse. She was the first girlfriend George had and they went everywhere together.

"One evening, George, Ruth and myself were in the Lowlands drinking coffee, moaning about the fact that we had nowhere regular to play. As we spoke, Ruth just sat quietly, twiddling a spoon. Then suddenly, she said, ‘Why don’t you ask Mrs Best?’ George asked, ‘Who’s that?’ and Ruth went on to explain that this woman at 8 Hayman’s Green was planning to open a coffee bar club. ‘OK,’ George said, ‘but you can go and see her.’

"Mona Best lived in this Victorian house and wanted to convert it into a club called The Casbah. I offered to help and for five months worked on the conversion with two pals, often staying until past midnight. Mrs Best promised that the Les Stewart Quartet, our group, could play at the club’s opening night. On the Saturday we were due to open, I went round to Les Stewart’s house and George was sitting in the lounge, his Hofner guitar lying across his lap, idly picking at the strings. The atmosphere seemed a little tense. ‘What’s up?’ I asked. George said nothing and looked down at his guitar. So I turned to Les and he said to me, ‘You’ve been missing practice.’ ‘I know,’ I replied, ‘but only so we can have somewhere to play. I’ve spent hours doing up The Casbah.’ ‘Have you been getting paid for it?’ Les asked. ‘No,’ I insisted, ‘I haven’t.’ ‘Well,’ Les continued, ‘I’m not going to play there.’ So then I turned to George. ‘Look,’ I said to him, ‘the club opens tonight. We’ve spent months waiting for this and you’re not backing out too, are you?’ I asked. George thought for a moment and said, ‘I’ll come with you.’ So we left Les at his house.

"As we were walking down the road, I turned to George and said, ‘We can’t let Mrs Best down, so let’s try and get another group together ourselves. Do you know anyone?’ George replied, ‘There’s two mates I sometimes play with out at Speke.’ ‘OK, let’s ask them,’ I said, as George went off on the bus. He joined me two hours later at The Casbah with his two mates, who were called John Lennon and Paul McCartney. This was the first time I had met them. Paul was still at school and had a schoolboyish hair cut. But John was a bit of a beatnik, with his hair hanging over his collar, dressed in a check shirt and old jeans. I told them they would be paid fifteen bob a night. They seemed glad about it as most of the bands just played for the experience. So that night, The Beatles were born and The Casbah opened up after all. We went down great, particularly when Paul sang ‘Long Tall Sally’. Our most popular numbers were John and Paul’s vocals. I was the rhythm guitarist. John’s pet solo was ‘Three Cool Cats’, which he used to growl into the mike.

"John was always very quiet. He was a lonely youngster, seldom talking about his family, may be because his father had deserted him in childhood, and a police car had killed his mother. John seemed in need of affection, and depended on Cynthia, the girl he later married. Cyn, a lovely girl, with long, blonde hair, used to travel nearly thirty miles a night from her home in Hoylake just to watch John play. She used to sit at the side of the stage, dressed usually in skirts and sweaters, never saying much. She seemed very shy. Whenever we had a break for coffee and a sandwich, John would sit on the edge of the stage and talk quietly to her. Sometimes, when he was singing, he would turn to her and give her a little grin. George and Paul thought this was a bit daft, you know, a couple going potty over each other like that. Paul was never really bothered about girls, though they all went mad over him, especially when he sang ballads like ‘Around The World’.

Apart from Ruth, George wasn’t too bothered about girls either. Although he was not really in love with her, she was with him. One night, I went round the back of The Casbah for some fresh air and I found Ruth sitting on a bench sobbing. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. ‘It’s George,’ she replied. ‘He won’t go to the pictures with me. He just doesn’t seem to bother any more.’ So I went back inside and told George, who was sitting down having coffee in the interval. But he just shrugged his shoulders, and we just started playing again without him going out to see Ruth. I guess that was the end of them, really. They still saw each other, but it was never quite the same after that.

Saturday, 10 October

Following another gig at The Casbah, Ken Brown leaves The Quarry Men …

Ken Brown Just as we were due to start a Saturday session, I felt a crippling pain in my leg. I could barely stand, but insisted on doing something, so Mrs Best asked me to take the money at the door and, for the first time, John, Paul and George played without me. Later that night, and just as everyone was going home, Paul came down the steps and said to me, ‘Hey Ken. What’s all this?’ ‘What?’ I asked him. ‘Mrs Best say’s she’s paying you, even though you didn’t play with us tonight,’ Paul said. Of course, I didn’t agree, so Paul shouted, ‘All right! That’s it then,’ and they stormed off, shouting that they would never play The Casbah again.

JANUARY

Making use of £60, acquired from winning an art competition, John’s art school friend Stuart Sutcliffe buys a Hofner President bass guitar and joins The Quarry Men …

George Stu had no idea how to play it. We all showed him what we could, but he really picked it up just by coming round with us and playing on stage.

Paul None of us wanted to be the bass player. It wasn’t the No.1 job. We all wanted to be up front. In our minds, it was the fat guy in the group who nearly always played the bass, and he always stood at the back. None of us wanted that. We wanted to be up front singing, looking good, to pull the birds.

Saturday, 23 April

John and Paul hitchhike to Caversham in Reading, Berkshire, to stay with Paul’s older cousin, Beth Robbins, who, together with her husband Mike, runs the Fox & Hounds pub in the town.

John It was no joke getting lifts with two guitars, two amplifiers, and our cases. We had to hide that little lot in the bushes until the cars had stopped.

During the evening, billed as The Nurk Twins, John and Paul sit on a couple of high stools with their acoustic guitars and open their set with the Butlin’s holiday camp favourite ‘The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise’, before returning to their usual repertoire.

Tuesday, 10 May

Alan Williams invites the impresario Larry Parnes and the pop-idol Billy Fury to The Wyvern Social Club in Liverpool, where they can watch the (recently named) Silver Beatles and various other Merseyside groups audition for the role of Fury’s new backing group …

Larry Parnes The first time that I had ever heard of the name Beatles was when a man called Allan Williams wrote to me and telephoned me suggesting that I came up to Liverpool to see what he reckoned to be the new Liverpool sound. Of course, I was always interested in new ideas for something for the future. At the same time, I was desperately looking for a backing group for Billy Fury. The Silver Beatles weren’t a bit smart. They just wore jeans, black sweaters and tennis shoes. I thought the boys in front were great. The lead guitar and bass were just so-so. But it was the drummer, I told them, who I thought was wrong.

Williams was a Liverpool club owner and had now become the part-time manager of The Quarry Men and, on May 5, had secured the services of Tommy Moore on drums. By this time, the group is also briefly known as The Beatals.

Friday, 20 May

The Silver Beatles begin a 9-day tour of Scotland …

Paul At school, I had an A-level in English and five O-levels and I was on the brink of going on to teacher’s training college when I made a slight mistake. I should have been getting ready for the exam, but I couldn’t. I was on a tour in Scotland with Johnny Gentle. It was ridiculous.

They back the Liverpudlian singer Johnny Gentle …

Gentle "At first I wondered what on earth Larry Parnes had sent me. They arrived in jeans and sweaters and were the roughest bunch of lads I had seen in my life. John and Stu were both at Art College and they looked it. Their hair fell over their collars, and Stu sported a beard. George was serving an apprenticeship and looked neat, as did Paul, who was still studying for his A-levels. John told me, rather excitedly, ‘This is our big break. We’ve been waiting for this.’

"Every night, we were booked for different dance halls in Scotland though we always stayed in Inverness. Some of the girls we played to didn’t like The Beatles much, and complained to the promoter that they were no good. At the end of the first week, he wanted to sack them and use another group instead. John, naturally, was quite down-hearted about this. He said to me, ‘We thought this was really going to be our big break.’ They all seemed so upset that I felt really sorry for them. We had a workout in the hotel bar at Inverness, trying out all the numbers again and again until they got the right sound.

That night, after we finished another show, a girl came up to the boys and asked them for their autographs. John just couldn’t believe it. George told me that it was the first time that anyone had ever asked them for their autographs. ‘This is great,’ John said. ‘This is the life. Marvellous! Do you think we should chuck everything up and turn full time,’ John asked. He was still talking about it when we were driving off to the next show, when suddenly we crashed into a car on a crossroads at Banff. All our equipment jerked forward, and the boys tumbled over each other into the front seats. Our van was almost a write off, and the police had me for careless driving. This cost me £5. The last time I saw The Beatles was at Dundee station when they were catching the train back to Liverpool.

Larry Parnes "We used to pay the groups £15 by post on a Thursday so they would get it on Friday or the very latest on Saturday. I always remember the second week that The Silver Beatles were working for me, and I was sitting in my office on a Monday morning at about 11 o’clock and a phone call came through, reverse charge. ‘Who’s on the line?’ I asked my secretary. ‘John Lennon,’ I was told. ‘Oh well,’ I replied, ‘you had better put him on to see what he wants.’

"John comes on a phone and says, ‘Larry, where’s the bloody money?’ ‘What money’, I asked. ‘We are broke, we are skint!’ John replies. I replied, ‘But you haven’t even worked the week out yet John, in fact you haven’t even started the week.’ John says, ‘Larry, you said if we get a short week we could have a sub.’ So I said, ‘You can have a sub, how much do you want?’ ‘Well’, John replies, ‘about five pounds each.’ ‘Oh all right,’ I replied, ‘we’ll send you up five pounds each.’ It was funny this, because both weeks he worked for us, he would either come on the phone on the Monday or the Tuesday or the Wednesday.

He was the spokesman, and he would always say the same thing, ‘Where is the bloody money?’"

JUNE

Allan Williams approaches The Silver Beatles with a view to taking up a residence at Bruno Koschmider’s club in Hamburg, Germany …

Williams "‘We would love to do it’, they tell me, ‘but we haven’t got a drummer.’ The drummer who they had, Tommy Moore, had packed it in. I had just got them booked into the Grosvenor Ballroom in Wallasey when one night the phone rang and it was Stuart Sutcliffe. He said, ‘Look Allan, Tommy Moore hasn’t turned up, we’re still stuck in the Jacaranda.’ So I whizzed down to where they were and we went round to Tommy’s house. We knocked on the door and Tommy’s wife was in the bedroom. She looked out of the window and shouted, ‘What do you want?’ I asked, ‘Where’s Tommy? He was supposed to be playing!’ ‘Well’, she replies, ‘you can go and piss off, because he’s not playing any more with you. We’ve had enough and he’s got a job in the Garston Bottle Works on the night shift as fork-lift truck driver.’

So we drove to Garston Bottle Works and out came poor Tommy in his overalls and we asked him, ‘What are you doing?’ and he replied, ‘It’s the missus, she won’t have it.’ So I said, ‘OK, all right, we’ll have to do without a drummer. Now, The Beatles sometimes played in a club in Hayman’s Green, which was owned by a Mrs Best, and she had a son, called Pete, who was a drummer and he sometimes sat in with The Beatles when they played there. So they said, ‘Alan, we’ve got a drummer.’ So we’ve got a drummer now.

Friday, 12 August

Paul puts a phone call through to Pete Best, at his home in Liverpool, requesting him to join the group …

Ken Brown, who had now formed The Blackjacks with Pete I was sitting in the kitchen with Mrs Best and Pete, having a cup of tea, when the boys arrived, all excited, and asked to have a private word with Pete. He then went outside with them. I sat there and was not very bothered. After all, Pete and I had built up a good group of our own. Then, Mrs Best came in and said, ‘John, Paul, George and Stu have asked Pete to go to Hamburg with them as their drummer. She told me that they had been offered this season at The Indra and said it was too good an opportunity for Pete to miss. I agreed. They left for Germany the following morning.

John We had all sorts of drummers all the time, because people who owned drum kits were few and far between. It was an expensive item. They were usually idiots. Then we got Pete Best because we needed a drummer to go to Hamburg the next day. Allan Williams took us over in a van. We went through Holland and we did a bit of shoplifting there.

Paul I got into trouble for not taking my exams at school and, naturally, I was invited to pay my headmaster an awkward visit. Instead, I vanished and wrote a letter from Hamburg, saying, ‘I have resigned from school.’ I wrote, ‘Dear Sir, I’ve got a great job in Germany, and I’m earning £15 a week!’

Wednesday, 17 August (until Monday 3 October)

The Beatles, on a wage of £16 a week, take up residency at The Indra Club, Grosse Freiheit in West Germany, a venue owned by Bruno Koschmider …

Paul The very first club we played in Hamburg was The Indra, which was German for India. The first night we played, I think there were two people there. But it was there where we started learning our showbiz skills. The club was in a tourist area. When people stopped by the door, the first thing they would look at was the price of the beer, you know, to see if they wanted to come in and have a cheap drink and hear this band. As soon as we saw them at the door, we would change the number, do a better song as a way of enticing them in. Our role in life was to make people buy more beer. The more beer they bought, the more likelihood of our pay going up.

George I was seventeen when we first went to Hamburg and were given a job in the Reeperbahn, which was the naughtiest part of Hamburg. They booked us for eight hours a night.

John "We had to play all the tunes for hours and hours on end. That’s why every song lasted twenty minutes and had twenty solos in it. The Germans like heavy rock, you know, so we had to really keep rocking all the time, and that’s how we got stomping. It was all four in the bar, because the drummer, Pete Best, could only do four in the bar on his bass drum. So, everything we did was just boom, boom, boom, boom, like that.

"It was still rather thrilling when you went on stage. It was just a little nightclub, but, at the same time, it was still a bit frightening, because it wasn’t a dance hall, and all these people were sitting down, expecting something. They would want us to ‘Mak show’. Whenever there was any pressure points, I had to get us out of it. They (the other Beatles) always said, ‘Well, okay John. You’re the leader.’ Whenever nothing was going on, they’d say, ‘Uh-ho. No leader. Fuck it!’ But, if anything happened, it was like, ‘Okay, you’re the leader, you get up and do a show.’ So I had to get up, and I played fucking Gene Vincent for three weeks!

The second night they said, ‘The first night you were terrible, you have to make a show, Mak Show.’ So, I’d put my guitar down and I did Gene Vincent all night, you know, banging and lying on the floor, and throwing the mike around, and pretending that I had a bad leg. That was some experience, so the Germans kept saying, ‘Mak show. Mak show.’ The police closed the first club down because we were too loud.

Paul "When we went to Hamburg for the first time, we missed out on the start of The Shadows thing, you know. At that time, everyone had to have a polished stage and foot movements, and all that. Before we went to play in Hamburg, I’d bought myself a Rosetti Solid Seven electric guitar from a store in Liverpool. It was a terrible guitar! It was really just a good-looking piece of wood. It had a nice paint job, but it was a disastrous, cheap guitar. It fell apart when I got to Hamburg, because of the sweat and the damp and continually getting knocked around, falling over and stuff. So, in Hamburg, with my guitar bust, I turned to the piano.

We stayed in a cinema (the Bambi-Filmkunsttheatre). The man who promoted us had a cinema and the room where we slept was next door to the toilets. People would come in and say to us, ‘Excuse me. Do you mind if we shave?’ There would be people peeing and stuff. I think it gave us a good grounding. But we knew that it couldn’t get any worse than that hole! (August 1963/July/August 1995/December 1999)

John When we arrived in Hamburg, we were put in this sort of pigsty, like a toilet. In a cinema, it was, a rundown sort of fleapit. We were living in a toilet, like right next to the ladies’ toilet. We’d wake up in the morning and the films would be on, and there would be old German fraus pissing next door. That was where we washed. That was our bathroom. So it was a bit of a shock in a way. (September 1971)

Pete Best We used to have nicknames for things, like ‘exis’, which we gave to the people who were a little bit different from the Hamburg Frau. People like Astrid Kirchherr, Jurgen Volmer and Klaus Voorman. They were a little more ‘arty’ in their approach to things. We even had ‘the thing’, which George started by puking over the side of his bed one night after we had been on a real bender. It was a nickname we gave to the pile of puke, which just grew and grew and changed into a hairy monster. We fed it cigarette butts, Preludin, you name it.

Tuesday, 4 October

Due to complaints that the strict ‘everyone under 18 must be out of the club by 10pm’ rule was not being observed, the police close The Indra and The Beatles are forced to move to Bruno Koschmider’s other Hamburg club, The Kaiserkeller …

John This place was larger and, where they danced, there was more dance space. Howey Casey was playing at the club, and they were competent. They were really a together group. Then, they moved us in with Rory Storm, which included Ringo, and they were professionals. They had been going for years. They had been to Butlins and God knows what. They’really knew how to put on a show, so we had to compete with them two.

Bruno Koschmider Rory Storm And The Hurricanes were more popular than The Beatles so The Beatles tried everything to impress the audience, even calling them ‘Nazi Swines’. They tried everything to be different, but most people didn’t understand this at the time. They just didn’t understand what The Beatles were saying to them. The club’s manager used to write down everything they said during their performance in a big black book and he told me the next day what they had been doing.

During their stint at The Kaiserkeller, The Beatles meet, for the first time, the 21-year-old German photographer Astrid Kirchherr …

Astrid "The stage was about as big as a sofa. There they were, the five of them, John, Paul, George, Pete and Stuart, all crowded on it with all their equipment. The first time I saw them, the club was packed and I was with a friend of mine, Klaus Voorman. I couldn’t take my eyes off these wildly exciting boys. I’d never heard anything like them before.

Stuart was wearing dark glasses and I could see that he was looking at me all the time. At first, there was nothing special between us, but later, we wanted to be with each other all the time. He was different than the rest in a way. He was more gentle and quiet and seemed to think a lot more.

John Anybody who has got anything to say, Paul hates, like Stuart Sutcliffe. Paul hated him. They ended up fighting on stage. Paul was saying something about Stu’s girl (Astrid) and he was jealous, because she was a great girl, and Stu hit him on stage. Stu wasn’t a violent guy at all.

Cynthia Lennon Paul and Stu were beginning to get on each other’s nerves and were constantly bickering at each other. Paul picked on Stu for his lack of talent and the fact that he wore sunglasses, in fact anything he could think of that would niggle Stu. Stuart, being a very sensitive and peace-loving soul, restrained himself, but there were the odd occasions when it almost came to fisticuffs.

Paul We had our arguments, but we weren’t archenemies. I only remember two incidents with Stu when I was seen, publicly, not to like him. The rest of the time, we were reasonable mates. One of the times, I picked on him on tour once, and then, the other time, we got into a fight in Hamburg. It was a silly fight, it was just one of those where you stay locked for about an hour. We weren’t doing anything, I couldn’t let his hands go, it was crazy. We were really flushed alter it, you know.

Paul on Stu’s Hofner bass If a string went, we’d take it out of the piano, and it worked great. We’d take an A string out of the piano, find an A and then just get the pliers out when the fellow wasn’t looking.

George The club we was in, The Indra, was shut down by the police, so they moved us into another club where there was another band who were also booked to play eight hours a night. So, instead of giving us four hours each, we started at two in the afternoon and we did an hour, and they did an hour, and we played right through till the following morning. By the second week of doing that, round about the sixth set, we started to flag a bit. But the boss of the club, who was a bit of a gangster, who had all his gangster pals with him, wanted us to jump up and down and do ‘What’d I Say.’

John Paul would be doing ‘What’d I Say’ for an hour and a half and we’d all be drunk. All these gangsters would come in, you know, like the local Mafia, and they’d send a crate of champagne onstage. It was fake champagne and we had to drink it or they’d kill us, you know. They’d say, ‘Drink it, then do What’d I Say.’ So then, they’d get us pissed, and we’d have to do this show for them, whatever time of night they came in. If they came in at five in the morning and we had been playing seven hours, they’d give us a crate of champagne and we were supposed to carry on. Then we’d get pills off the waiters to keep us awake and to stop us from being drunk as well.

George They started slipping us these pills called Preludin, which were women’s slimming pills and when we would take them, we’d start frothing at the mouth, leap up and down, and sing ‘What’d I Say’, without any problem.

Pete Best We had ‘Prellies’, which was short for Preludin, an amphetamine, which kept most of the rock musicians going for many hours. It was something that was available. If you needed it, you took it.

John I used to be so pissed. I’d be lying on the stage floor, behind the piano, drunk, while the rest of the group was playing. I’d just be on stage fast asleep. We always ate on stage too, because we never had time to eat. It was a real scene. We went off to Hamburg for a season which lasted for four-and-a-half months, playing seven hours a night, seven days a week. We learnt to live and work together, discovered how to adapt to what the public wanted and developed our own particular style. And it was our own. We had neither the time nor the wish to listen to others. We developed along the lines that we felt suited us best and, as it became obvious that the public liked us, we became more confident and more polished. (September 1971/August 1963)

Monday, 21 November

George is finally deported from Germany because the police had found out that he was under 18 …

George "It was funny really. We had been there for about three months and I was 17 and I was up on the bandstand, playing night after night, and at 10 o’clock one evening, they had this thing where you had to show your little pass, you know, your ID, to say who you are. Well, when they came in, they’d stop everything, turn on all the lights in the club, stop the music, and somebody would come on the stage, get the microphone, and say, ‘Mineaheer herren stynstastig mein merren’, which, more or less, means, ‘All right. The games up. If you’re 18, you’re OK. If you’re not 18, get out,’ and then everybody goes if they’re not 18. Then they would go round the tables and they’d check everybody who’s got the ID, and if you were still pretending that you’re over 18, they’d kick you out.

After about 20 minutes of that, the lights would go back down, the music comes on again, the beer comes out again and the music will start playing again. I took German in school and I didn’t learn much, but when I started hearing these words, I always thought, ‘They’re kicking these people out, so what about me?’ Anyway, it took them three months to find out that I was only seventeen. I had no work permits or anything, so they deported me. Whatever money we had cost us just to live, you know, to buy food. I had just enough money to get a train from Hamburg to a ferry in Holland, then back to England and a train ride back to Liverpool.

Tuesday, 29 November

As The Beatles move from their sleeping quarters at the Bambi-Filmkunsttheatre to new quarters, provided by Peter Eckhorn, the owner of The Top Ten Club, Paul and Pete accidentally set their old room on fire. Because the accommodation had no light, they had lit a condom in order to help them see what they were packing. No damage is done to the room, but Koschmider has them arrested and thrown