MUSIC: Twist And Shout by The Isley Brothers
# Shake it up baby now
# Shake it up baby
# Twist and shout
# Come on baby now
# Come on baby
# Come on and work it on out
# Woo Shake it shake it baby
# Shake it up baby
# Shake it shake it baby
# Shake it up baby
# Shake it shake it woo
# Shake it shake it baby
# Prr, shake it baby
# Shake it shake it baby. #
How highly would you rate your own music?
We're not very good musicians, you know, and we'd never claim
to be very good musicians.
We're adequate, but not very good.
What's the reason, do you think,
for the tremendous popularity?
Is it because people admire your talent or...?
Well, I don't know - maybe they admire adequate music.
LAUGHTER
MUSIC: Money (That's What I Want) by The Beatles
# The best things in life are free
# But you can keep them for the birds and the bees
# Now give me money That's what I want... #
People tend to think they met and then they were famous,
but of course, there were five years of hard work.
Their early performances in Liverpool were quite raw, really.
A lot of the gigs, they weren't even paid for.
they were just given drinks and things.
They were regarded as a nothing group.
The Beatles were about third in the running in Liverpool.
These other bands like Howie Casey, and Rory Storm And The Hurricanes
were really big.
In Liverpool in '60 and '61, no-one had really discovered us.
You know, the likes of the Rolling Stones and...
Gerry And The Pacemakers would knock us into a cocked hat.
You know, they were the big stars and we were just like, you know,
the lads on the ladder.
John Lennon said, "Do you know what, Joe?
"If I don't make it with this band," he said,
"I'm going to get a ship and go up that river
"and I'll skip that ship in New York."
They were just like average lads that you might meet
down the football club or something, you know?
Paul wanted to be a window dresser.
He said, "Don't you tell me what I want to be, Joe.
"I want to be a window dresser," he said.
"Window dressing fascinates me."
Liverpool's always been a hotbed of music but never
had the recognition for it.
You know, jazz, steel bands, you name it, skiffle,
it's all emanated there.
Liverpool was a pretty bleak place.
Bleak and lonely.
The black buildings, you know, and the soot...
Very melancholy, in a way.
It was kind of biblical bleak.
I mean, the storms and the light shafts cutting through,
and the sea hitting up against that sea wall.
Yeah, it was pretty grim up North.
The place was absolutely filthy.
All these wonderful buildings that we see today
were nearly all black.
We had a lot of smoke coming from ships all over the place.
You could go put a nice white shirt on in Liverpool and you'd come home
and it'd have to be washed because there would be black smut.
Towards the end of the Second World War,
Liverpool was virtually flattened, I mean, there wasn't much left of it.
If you stood by the Victoria Monument
and looked around in an arc,
almost everything was flattened.
How they missed the Victoria Monument,
God only knows!
Used to play in these fields.
George would be six, maybe seven.
We found lots of unexploded stuff.
Grenades or incendiary whatevers.
But we thought it would be fun to blow it up cos it was just
there not doing anything.
So, he dug a hole and put these incendiaries into it
and lit a fuse and ran away and it just went...
sss...kaboom!
And just made a little hole.
I was born on the 9th of October 1940, when I believe the Nasties
were still booming us, led by Madolf Heatlum,
who only had one.
Anyway, they didn't get me!
Lennon, particularly, was a kind of street urchin.
He persuaded himself that he was.
He wasn't, of course, he was far more sophisticated
and intelligent than that.
If you go to Menlove Avenue, where John Lennon spent his childhood,
you will see it's an absolutely lovely area.
A long, long way away from a working-class hero, really.
A beautiful neighbourhood with a garden front and back,
a park opposite...
I mean, John probably was the...
the most privileged of the lot.
Menlove Avenue is a very nice road. Living with his Auntie Mimi.
She was a cross between a headmistress and a librarian.
In other words, intimidating. She was.
Well, I didn't want him wasting his time playing a guitar.
What was I going to do if I had a boy of 21 thrown back
on my hands qualified for nothing?
Did you get sent round the back door? Yeah. No, I...
"John's round the back, Len." "OK." I always got in the front door, that's my claim to fame.
Well, you probably dressed properly! Well, I probably had a shirt and tie
on and a suit, cos I was working...
I looked like a scruff.
She'd let the cats in through the front door!
But us, ruffians, "Round the back."
John was like a naughty brother who you had to... You kept thinking,
"Oh, God, what's he going to do next?" You know.
He said, "I'm not going to do as you tell me,"
but he always did!
I don't think many parents liked him, they used to refer to him as "That Lennon".
He was a bit of a handful.
HE SIGHS
At the local youth club,
I think he was blamed for burning it - setting fire to it.
Maybe he did, maybe he didn't but...
The rest of them came from sort of council premises or terraced
streets, you know, where there were outside loos
and you had to have a bath in a tin tub.
Paul McCartney lived on an estate about a mile away.
Yeah, we used to rehearse in Paul's house but I only remember his dad
coming in and taking Mike out and saying,
"Come on, leave them to it," you know.
He was very strict with Paul and Mike.
He sort of kept them in during the week,
they were allowed out at the weekends
cos he was left as a lone father to bring them up.
Paul was law-abiding and studious,
did his homework on time.
I didn't meet his mum, apart from the fact I think
she was the midwife who delivered me.
George came from the Wavertree area.
It was one of those small terraced houses.
I don't know where they fitted them all in - there was, like,
mother and father, George, three brothers, two brothers,
and everybody's all squeezed into this little council house.
It was, the family was crowded together but it was a quite,
sort of, warm and nice atmosphere.
The people, at those times, were really good neighbours.
His dad worked on the buses, so if he ever saw you waiting for a bus,
he'd just pick you up and let you get home free.
And George also was our butcher's delivery boy.
He used to stop at my house and my mum would make him some beans
on toast and a cup of tea, and we'd listen to records.
People say he was the quiet Beatle, and he was in one way, cos he let
the other two do all the talking, cos they did, you know.
But he wasn't quiet, you know?
He was very thoughtful, George.
Paul and George used to get on the bus and go to school together,
and George started carrying his guitar to school and singing
in the back of the bus.
Before rock and roll and before that sort of mid '50s,
late-'50s period, it was dull.
It was grey.
It was monochrome in music, in films, in everything.
There were no, sort of, British heroes.
People in the earlier '50s, dressed like their dads.
The first sports jacket that I bought was something similar
to what my father had, because you wanted to look like him.
The idea that you could dress the way you want only happened
because of the late '50s, the start of freedom for people,
and particularly students.
We wanted our own music, our own clothes, our own style.
It started to be a bit Technicolor and brighter, you know?
We were so elevated in our lifestyle
and our enjoyment, especially as teenagers.
We started getting money. You couldn't fail to be in work.
The wages weren't fantastic but we could go on a holiday,
you could buy clothes, buy LPs.
In the 1950s,
it was very difficult to get American rhythm and blues records.
Liverpool rock and roll fans were very lucky
because they had the services of the Cunard Yanks.
That was the name given to the men who worked on the boats that went
back and forth between Liverpool and New York.
They brought back the records either as gifts for people back
here or it came back as ballast.
My elder brother was in the Merchant Navy.
He was bringing all these great records home.
Not the rock and roll stuff, earlier than that,
Eddy Arnold, Johnny Cash, Billy Edd Wheeler, all these people like that.
They would hear about these sometimes not very well-known
rock stars like The Coasters or The Drifters, the doo-wop boys,
which hadn't yet established themselves.
They'd come out of a very stagnant,
post-1950s idea of pop music.
In America, you got the start of soul, you got the start
of Motown, there's a lot happening underneath the surface,
and those are the records that The Beatles play.
It all really started off in the mid '50s when rock and roll
and skiffle arrived pretty much at the same time.
Ken Colyer goes over to New Orleans,
he jumps ship, he's working with the Merchant Navy,
and when he's there, he hears all this music, which is called
spasm music, which is basically people playing in,
you know, houses with tin pans
and with, you know, washboards.
When he comes back and he's working with Chris Barber,
he tells him about this form of music that he's heard
about and they say, "What's it called?" He says, "It's called spasm music."
And everyone says, "You can't call it spasm music, that's really rude."
And somebody, and it may well have been Lonnie Donegan,
or maybe Chris Barber, somebody comes up with
the name skiffle.
Teenagers form these groups with cheap acoustic guitars.
You had a tea chest, a broom handle attached to it,
somebody else would have a washboard, and they would rub
something up and down on that.
Very primitive.
I had a skiffle group on the street corner with all the lads,
they all had guitars.
Skiffle gave us the confidence to get on stage with the bare
minimum of talent.
We needed three chords, we needed a guitar,
no amplifiers, no PA system, and you could at least pretend
to be entertainers.
The origin of The Beatles was a group called The Quarrymen,
which John had formed at Quarry Bank school.
Somebody suggested getting a band together,
a group together, so John and Eric decided to learn guitar.
They went to some guy in Hunt's Cross
and they realised they were going to take a year to learn to read dots, so...
It was too complicated. ..they gave up.
So, they went to John's mum, Julia, and she taught them banjo chords.
Banjo chords, yeah.
Most people think of only John, Paul, George and Ringo,
but if you looked right through the different line-ups
of The Beatles, starting with The Quarrymen,
you'll find about 25, 26 people in there.
Well, I joined the group because I wanted to sing,
I wanted to be a singer.
I didn't particularly want to play a tea chest bass but John says,
"Well, Bill Smith doesn't turn up for rehearsals,
"do you want to come in on the tea chest?"
That was 1955.
So, The Quarrymen, which John Lennon formed,
was very much a makeshift group.
If somebody just said, you know, "We're having a party,
"do you want to come and perform?" We were there, weren't we?
Probably the competition. We wanted a bit of competition.
No, we wanted to stand up and impress the girls,
nothing to do with competition!
That's what it was all about!
"That girl's looking at me.
"Let's play louder, that girl's looking at me!"
The Quarrymen weren't very good, as far as I remember.
And then Paul McCartney joins.
So, we went to this village fete and we were both there together
and I'd got to know John through Ivan.
And normally, you know, you'd be talking to people
in conversations, saying, "What's your hobbies?"
"Oh, I like doing this. I like cycling," or "I like swimming," or...
And I would say to people, "I like songwriting,
"I've written a couple of songs."
And everyone would go, "Oh, yeah." And ignore it.
But John went, "Oh, yeah, so have I."
So that was like, "Oh.
"What, you've written a couple of songs?"
"Yeah."
"Well, show me yours and I'll show you mine, baby!"
John and Paul complemented each other
because they were quite different.
John was the out-and-out rocker.
He thought rock and roll was rebellion.
Paul was brought up on Broadway musicals.
He loved Fred Astaire, you know, he liked Peggy Lee records
and things like that.
Paul did sort of smarten us up, didn't he?
Paul decided he was going to buy a white jacket and wear that.
So John thought, "Well, I'm not standing in shirt sleeves
"if Paul's wearing a white jacket."
So John had to go and get a white jacket.
So, we're in white shirts with black ties.
John was not going to be outdone or outshone by Paul.
Once Paul McCartney got in the band,
they knew they wanted to do Twenty Flight Rock,
Eddie Cochran's song, for example.
They knew they wanted to do rock and roll and that skiffle
was starting to sound a bit old hat.
They knew what they wanted and they'd been turned on
by the American music of the time.
The whole thing about rock and roll, about when it came out,
was told wrongly.
It was told by the tabloids as being this outrageous thing
where teenagers went mad and were uncontrolled.
It was all bollocks, it wasn't like that.
I mean, Bill Haley was the first rock and roll star but he really was
a bit like a company bank manager, wasn't he?
Despite the fact that it was the big rage and he got an incredible
reception, there was a slight disappointment in that it wasn't
the kind of romantic thing that you wanted out of rock and roll.
That came with Elvis.
MUSIC: Baby, Let's Play House by Elvis Presley
# You may have a pink Cadillac
# But don't you be nobody's fool
# Now baby come back
# Come back baby I wanna play house with you
# Come back to me little girl So we can play some house... #
They all heard Elvis and thought, "This is different,
"this is what we are."
Elvis Presley, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent,
Buddy Holly and Little Richard, those were the names
that The Beatles were really influenced by.
# Oh, baby
# Having me some fun tonight
# Well, long tall Sally She built for speed
# She got everything that Uncle John need, oh, baby
# Having me some fun tonight... #
On the 20th of March 1958, Buddy Holly and The Crickets
are playing the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool.
So many of the people who later played in Mersey beat groups went
along to the Philharmonic Hall and they saw Buddy Holly
with a Fender Stratocaster guitar.
Nobody in Britain had seen a Fender Stratocaster guitar,
and so they came out thinking, "We want to go electric."
Manchester was regarded as the capital of the North.
It had Granada television, the BBC studios, and everything.
Nothing can happen unless it was done in Manchester.
Liverpool was like a backwater.
The Cavern itself banned rock and roll,
you weren't allowed to play it. It was a jazz venue.
Skiffle was regarded as a form of jazz, and it was a jazz club,
so that was acceptable.
Rock and roll was taboo.
John, Paul and Eric and myself were improving quite a bit.
We were going on to much more rock and roll kind of music.
And John wanted to play All Shook Up and all these rock and roll
numbers, so we were mixing it on the set list.
Alan Sytner, who was running The Cavern,
he didn't want any rock and roll
at The Cavern, he didn't want John Lennon doing Elvis songs.
Sure enough, halfway through the song, a note was passed up,
"Can you cut out the rock, or else!"
We just kept on playing.
Nige Walley, who was acting as our, sort of, manager,
he got us the gigs, and they used to stand at the back
and, you know, judge reactions.
So, the more rock and roll stuff we did, the emptier this centre area
became as people just got up and were disappearing.
By the time we got offstage, the centre thing was empty and John
was quite devastated, so...
Went into the little side room and John said, "I can't believe that."
He said, "We ended up that nobody was listening to us."
And Pete and Nige burst in and Pete said, "That was fantastic,
"one of the best gigs you've ever done."
And John said, "But they all left."
And Pete looked at him in puzzlement and said, "No,
"no," he said, "everybody was jiving."
He said, "Those central aisles, everyone was up dancing.
John was almost myopic
and couldn't really see the audience
and so he used to pick a spot in the middle distance
and just look at that spot and go like that.
It used to get him into a lot of trouble because he used to squint
at people and somebody would want to smack him in the face,
so it caused a lot of fights, that.
The early gigs were quite nerve-racking, you know.
As The Beatles, we had people throwing pennies at us and stuff,
Teds, you know, big teddy boys, "Get off!"
Chucking stuff at us. You know, "Oh! Oh, dear."
All the jazz crowd booed them and threw coins at them
and they were fined, Ray McFall fined them.
But they picked the coins up from the floor and there was more
money than they were getting paid for the gig.
We picked the money up and said, "Thank you."
They soon stopped throwing it.
And when George joined, it just carried on as The Quarrymen
doing, pretty much, rock and roll music.
George was...
..the talented one.
Nobody ever realises what a good guitarist George was.
I mean, John was a hopeless guitarist.
George started off at 100mph and, before you knew it,
he was into... I just lost...
You lost him, you lost it! I couldn't keep the beat,
it was just a disaster. You let him carry on.
Just let him carry on. You're the drummer.
And it didn't help because Nige was standing down the front
of the stage. He shouted out, "Col's lost the beat!"
People didn't realise how big the musical scene
was because they were all in their own areas.
I mean, you'd have in the Dingle area people like Billy Fury
and Billy Hatton of The Fourmost and Gerry Marsden,
Gerry And The Pacemakers.
I began to make notes and I thought, "This is absolutely incredible."
The Iron Door came, then St Luke's, Blair Hall, Holyoake,
Litherland Town Hall, the Aintree Institute...
All those venues were suddenly up and running.
I wrote to The Daily Mail and newspapers,
saying, "What's happening in Liverpool is unique.
"It's like New Orleans at the turn of the century
"but with rock and roll instead of jazz."
But of course, nobody took any notice, so that's why I created
the newspaper Mersey Beat to promote the groups.
Len disappeared...
Well... Disappeared? I was ill.
Well, you were ill, and then, in 1958, we went to a recording studio
in Kensington and we recorded two songs.
One was Buddy Holly's That'll Be The Day
and, on the other side, one that Paul had written
called In Spite Of All The Danger, and paid for it, I mean,
it wasn't, you know, nobody had hired us to do it,
it was a small recording studio where you could go and pay a small fee.
Suddenly, we were walking round with a record that we could actually
take home and play.
One of The Quarrymen,
I think it was, they were recording
as in those days, took that record,
and The Beatles never saw it again
and then Paul had to buy it back at a hugely inflated rate
25 years later!
When that came out on the anthology, I got my three shillings
and sixpence back, plus a bit extra.
But then they stopped performing completely.
They'd more or less packed in, given up.
I'd had enough after a while, because there was no...
We didn't have cars, I was carrying them drums
on and off buses all the time.
Basically, they weren't going anywhere, so eventually,
I just gave up.
Some people might say, "Well, the first place The Beatles played
"and became famous was the Cavern Club."
But you've got to be honest and say,
"No, they played the Casbah first."
Mona Best had a little club in the basement of her house,
called the Casbah.
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe,
obviously Pete Best,
since our mother owned the house
where the Casbah was started,
the Casbah Club, but the boys
had to get involved in decorating the club,
getting it ready for opening night.
John Lennon had three attempts at this ceiling.
His first attempt he did three-toed,
potbellied, scrawny-legged figures on it.
Mo hated them.
His second attempt was to paint it green,
which Mo also hated, and his third attempt,
which was acceptable, was John's interpretation
of Aztec Mexican artwork, hence the ceiling being known
as the Aztec ceiling.
My mother was looking for a band to open the club.
She said, "Do you know anyone who might be interested?"
George basically turned round and said,
"I happen to know a couple of guys
"who aren't doing anything at the moment."
And Mo said, you know, "Bring them down," you know,
"let's have a look at them."
And they came down the next day and, lo and behold,
they turned out to be John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
My mother put the deal to them, she said, "You know,
"we want a residency, the band can play every Saturday."
She gave them the price, which was £3, you know,
which was a lot of money in those days.
This is the original stage area.
This is where the lads started on the 29th of August 1959.
The line-up that night was John Lennon, Paul McCartney,
George Harrison and Ken Brown, who were the re-formed Quarrymen.
That line-up, with The Quarrymen, opened the Casbah for us.
No drummer, just four guitarists. Yeah, incredible.
And the Casbah is always one place
that people want to go
because it's still like a museum.
Paul McCartney painted the rainbow ceiling
and these colours, for some of you, may be recognisable
from the Magical Mystery Tour.
Paul still uses these colours today on one of his touring pianos,
the one he refers to as the Magic Box.
But this really is where it all started.
Mother and Mersey Beat wanted to bring music to the kids
of Liverpool and, my goodness me, she did.
The Casbah became the catalyst for what the world knows today
as the Mersey beat sound.
The stage area, here.
This is where The Beatles first
played in this country, in the UK.
Their first show in Liverpool as The Beatles
was on the 17th of December 1960, here at the Casbah Coffee Club
and this was the stage that they played on.
Why are you called The Beatles?
That's the name John thought of.
Ringo, did you think of it?
No, John thought of it. John thought of it? John thought of it.
There are a huge number of different versions of how The Beatles
got their name.
Most groups had a lead singer,
so you had groups like Cliff Richard
And The Shadows,
but they never wanted to be like that, really.
They were, sort of, Johnny And The Moondogs
and Long John Silver
and then Long John And The Silver Beetles, for a time.
One venue advertised them
as the Silver Beats,
but they didn't even turn up,
even though he'd put them as top of the bill.
I suspect they were thinking of The Crickets,
which was their favourite group,
Buddy Holly and The Crickets,
and so you can imagine crickets, insects, beetles.
John insisted the name had originally been inspired
by seeing Marlon Brando in The Wild One.
Lee Marvin's rival motorcycle gang band were allegedly called
the Silver Beetles, but John said it wasn't
the Silver Beetles at all.
It was the girls who were with the motorcycle gang that were called
the Beetles, because they clung to the back of the motorcyclists.
John introduced the substitution of the second E to an A,
making it Beat...les, and he thought it had a French, kind of,
feel to it, Les Beatles, Les Beats.
But this was just having fun, really, and once they'd got
a recording contract, they really wanted to be The Beatles.
I think he got a bit of fun
out of laying deliberate false
information about it, and seeing it reproduced
in the papers as fact, you know.
I first met him in 1958 at Liverpool College of Art
and I saw this guy come striding past, he looked like a teddy boy,
and I thought, "That guy, he's different, you know?
"He's a bit of a rebel, I must get to know him."
John was a rebel, an individual, and very enigmatic.
I just couldn't resist him.
I knew there were easier men in the world.
In fact, I was going out with a very easy,
boring man at the time.
But I mean, John just lifted me away from all this,
and he was just the most outrageous character I'd ever come across,
and I loved him for it.
John was a great character.
People wanted to, sort of, be around him,
but not get on the wrong side
of his tongue, you know?
He had a cutting sense of humour,
almost on the verge of being nasty.
And the girls in the college used to be dead afraid of John.
If they'd be talking in the corridors, and he came along,
they all kept quiet, afraid of what he might say to them.
When he came into here in the pub, he'd sort of make sarcastic jokes
about some of the old people that were in here,
maybe an old guy with a pipe or something,
and he'd start making funny, what he thought were funny, remarks
about him, you know, "That's a bad tooth you've got, Vicar."
You know, indicating that the pipe was a tooth.
It was pretty good-natured.
Trouble is, one person's good-natured remark can be taken
as an insult.
He was like Marmite.
Some people liked him, some people didn't like him.
He could be moody, like us all, you know,
got out the wrong side of the bed one day,
and you never knew what mood John was in until you started
talking to him.
They think your haircuts are un-American.
Well, it was very observant of them,
because we aren't American, actually.
John was a strange character.
His mum was run over, quite early on, when he was at college.
He didn't mention it to anybody.
Well, there were two sides with John. There was the side
that the public saw, which was the caustic,
abrasive, devil-may-care, you know, and the other side,
which was a very tender and a very loving person.
John was somewhat anxious to get away from the home environment,
where he was treated more like a little boy.
This old building to the left is the one that we all went
to as an art school in the '50s.
A long time since I've been here.
3 Gambier Terrace, this is where we all shared a flat.
We used to be in number 3, and it was called Hilary Mansions
then, and John, Stuart and myself, Des and Duckie had the first floor,
which was one continuous big flat.
Wonderful flat, £3 a week, bargain.
Number 9, Percy Street.
Where Stuart... We spent most
of our time, when we were students, along with John, Cynthia
and everybody else that wanted to come to a party.
First of all, we lived in the back room on the first floor.
Eventually, of course, we had to move because we'd been
caught burning bits of furniture that were in the basement.
But we had a good time here, and this is where they wanted a bass
guitarist and we were practising in one of the rooms with the tape
recorder and both Stuart and I offered to be bass guitarist.
So, I thought, "I'll make a bass guitar." Carving it out of wood,
and I didn't have any money to get the strings
but I thought, "Well, one day, after I'd done a bit
"more scaffolding work."
Stuart Sutcliffe got some money through a painting being purchased
by the John Moores family and so he got a bass guitar.
He got the job, I didn't.
Stuart Sutcliffe was certainly a very, very gifted artist
but he was also John Lennon's best mate
and John wanted him in the group.
I don't think anybody ever really saw him play
with The Beatles in Liverpool.
I know the person who showed him how to play,
Dave May of The Madisons, and he said that Stuart was a pretty
competent bass player.
He could get by, certainly.
He wasn't as bad as some people say he was,
but his heart wasn't really in it.
We were all going to become famous, of course, we were quite
sure of that.
John would do it with his music, Stuart and Rod would do
it with the painting, and I'd do it with my writing.
We were a family, you know?
We lived together for four or more years.
That seemed to go quite well, until The Beatles started rehearsing
in the back room, and we started getting complaints from the agents,
saying that there's too much noise, and...
"Noise? Beatles? Noise? Ridiculous."
They went and auditioned for Larry Parnes.
Tommy Moore was their regular drummer at that time,
and they did a tour
for Larry Parnes in Scotland,
backing Johnny Gentle.
It was a bummer, you know,
it didn't happen.
Tommy Moore came back from that, he said, "I've had enough playing
"drums, I'm going back to being a forklift truck driver
"at Garston Bottle Works," and off he pottered.
So that left a berth for drums.
Howie Casey And The Seniors were the very first Liverpool group
to go to Hamburg, via Allan Williams, a local promoter.
I came down to the club one night
and there was no steel band,
and the waitress, Audrey,
said, "Didn't you know
"they've gone to Hamburg?"
Well, it could have been Outer Mongolia for...
You know, and so they wrote to me, saying, "You should come
"over to Hamburg." And we went to this club called
the Kaiserkeller and there was an awful German band playing,
with no rhythm, just singing, I can still hear
the guy singing, "Tutti frutti, oh Rudy," and the kids were bored.
So I found out where the manager, who he was, and I sold him
the idea of having, you know, bands from Liverpool.
It's a little bit quieter in here.
The second invasion of Germany
started about four years ago.
This wasn't a military invasion,
but more of a pop invasion
of British beat artists.
The club owners over here in Hamburg had been looking for a long time
for something new to offer to the Hamburg youngsters.
All they had here was television and German television programmes
are usually aimed at the adults, anyway.
They heard from young seamen who had been in Hull,
Southampton, Liverpool, such ports in Britain,
on coast-to-coast cargo vessels,
that an American style of rock
and roll music was being played
over in Britain by British artists.
Of course, it was too expensive
to bring American artists
from the States, so these club owners,
people like Peter Eckhorn, Bruno Koschmider,
decided to import British artists.
Bruno Koschmider asked for another Liverpool band,
so Allan Williams asked Rory Storm And The Hurricanes,
the most obvious ones, but they were booked to go
for a summer season at Butlins, so they couldn't do it.
Then he asked Gerry And The Pacemakers,
but Gerry Marsden was working on the railway and he wouldn't give up
his job, so in desperation, he turned to The Beatles.
The Beatles had got a booking in Hamburg
but the contract stipulated that they had to have a drummer.
I got a phone call from Paul.
I wasn't expecting it and he turned round and said,
"We've had the offer to go to Germany, Pete,
"how would you be fixed about joining the band and playing drums?"
Pete was a very good-looking lad.
People say that Pete had the James Dean look, you know?
A smashing guy. Good, solid, thumpy loud drummer.
And then, lo and behold,
which was the funniest thing of all,
they'd seen me playing, he said,
"Well, you've got to audition, Pete."
So I landed up at the Blue Angel Club, they were all there,
blasted off about six numbers, which everyone knew.
They went away in a corner for about ten minutes.
Allan Williams, who was the manager, who was taking us out to Hamburg
at that time, came in.
John and Paul shouted out, "This is the new drummer, Allan." You know?
So Allan said,
"They made you audition in case you asked for more money."
So I said, "Well, it's nice to know, but whatever they're
"getting suits me."
Next thing was to check it out with Mum and Dad.
When they asked Peter to join them,
they weren't really known.
Though I had used them in my club before,
they weren't really known.
So anyway, Peter joined them,
and Peter being with them,
as one of The Beatles,
automatically I took a more personal
interest in the boys.
They said, "If it's what you want to do, go with our blessings."
So that's how I ended up, and a couple of days after that,
we were on our way to Hamburg.
And imagine an old Dormobile van,
there must have been about 11 or 12 people in it.
You know, there's more equipment on top of the van than
what there was inside!
We had sing-alongs, we nearly froze to death
on the ferry going over, but that's another story altogether!
When we saw the Reeperbahn, it was just absolutely incredible,
it was just this maze of neon lights, you know,
absolutely spellbinding, we'd never seen anything like it before.
The red-light district was pretty
notorious at that time,
and they were in some pretty seedy areas of Hamburg.
Especially in the St Pauli area, it was gangster-controlled.
It was, you know, the red-light district of the world, at that time,
but it was very violent
and it took us a while to actually recognise that.
When we're from Liverpool, without blowing our own trumpets,
we have a reputation of being able to look after ourselves.
We thought we were going to be playing the Kaiserkeller.
Bruno Koschmider, who was the manager,
he basically turned round and said,
"No, no, no, no, no, no, you're not playing here,
"Derry's playing here." You know, "You're playing at a club further
"down the road."
They were told, "Oh, you're not at the Kaiserkeller,
"you're at this other little club, former strip club,
"called the Indra."
So we said, "OK, let's go and have a look at it."
So we walked down the Grosse Freiheit
and away from the neon lights and the colour and the crowd
and we came to the Indra.
And we dashed in.
Two people in there, you know, arguing over the price of a beer,
and he turned round and said, "You have got to make
"this into another Kaiserkeller."
That was the challenge.
And then we said, "OK, where are we sleeping?"
So he said, "Over the road."
First response was, "Great, close to the club!" You know?
So we looked over the road, and there was a cinema,
the Bambi Kino, and there was a back door to it
and we went through the back door and we went into this alleyway
at the back of the cinema.
Paul and I ran past what we nicknamed the Black Holes
of Calcutta, which became our bedrooms, which were two dungeons.
And Bruno Koschmider turned round and said,
"These are your quarters." You know?
So we kicked up a big fuss about that and he turned round
and said, "Oh, it's only going to be temporary."
You know, "We'll change in a couple of weeks."
Four months later, we were still there.
It was that great big myth, it was rock and roll, you know.
You know, we were in the Sin City.
So, you know, we were lads, let's just get on and enjoy ourselves.
When we went out to Germany, I'll be quite honest,
we were average, you know, compared with other bands in Liverpool.
But we went out to captivate the German audiences,
six, seven hours a night, six, seven nights a week.
The Beatles were very irreverent, really, and I like to look back now
and think that they were the first punk group.
A few times we got warned, you know?
A couple of the waiters came up and, you know,
the managers came up, sort of turned round and said,
"It's getting a little bit too risque, lads."
We all decided in the break that we'd all get dressed up,
and John decided that he was going to go on in
swimming trunks and, as the crowd's going wild,
our antics are getting wilder and wilder and wilder
and one of us turned round and went, "You won't show your backside
"to the German audience, right?"
Famous last words!
Middle of a number, guitar strung around his neck,
John turned round and he just flashed his backside
to the audience.
But he just didn't flash it,
he just left it up there until the end of the song.
You can just imagine his pink
derriere staring at you in the face,
like that, not far from me, and they were hysterical, you know?
We were hysterical, John po-faced, just basically
pulled his trunks up again, continued the next number
until the next break.
But the funny thing that happened after that,
the following night, they wanted that to be done again.
They thought that that was going to be part of the show.
So we had to explain to them, "No, it was just a one-off."
As far as The Beatles were concerned, I had heard
about them when I first went there.
Everyone was talking about them, you saw their picture up there,
so you thought, "Maybe there's something special."
The crowd was growing, you know, we got the crowd to the Indra
and we ended up playing in the Kaiserkeller on a regular basis.
The German audience, more so than the British audience,
like hard, driving beat music.
Pete created what was called the Atom Beat,
a way of pounding, pounding sound.
You used to have to turn everything up full blast and,
you know, I used to have to develop a beat which would keep everything
locked together so it was a lot of bass drum work,
a lot of tom-tom work.
He sort of created The Beatles' sound.
He played the drums so loud to cover up for the, sort of,
turned down bass sound of Stuart.
It was sort of a bit of an affectation that he was playing
with his back to the audience and with sunglasses on,
and it was largely so that he could see the strings and play!
I don't think this went down terribly well with Paul,
who wanted professional bass players.
Everyone was jealous of Stu,
I'll be quite honest, because, you know,
Astrid was this gorgeous German girl.
One of the first letters I got from him mentioned meeting this girl,
who was a photographer, and he was really taken with her.
She walked in and she was dressed in leather,
and she was a beautiful-looking girl anyway,
but we were spellbound.
"Leather?!" You know?
And then, of course, when Stu fell in love with her,
he started wearing leather, but this was a very expensive leather.
Rivalry, I suppose, you know, people could be dwelling on the fact
that Stu punched Paul because he had a few silly things
to say about Astrid one night.
You know, normally Stu would just laugh it off,
you know, and Astrid would just sit there
and it went over her head.
But this particular night, Stu put his bass guitar down and turned
round and punched Paul in the teeth
and that was the end of it, you know?
Paul was wanting real, professional musicians
and Stuart wasn't and Stuart knew that.
Stuart wanted to be an artist.
That's why he went to Hamburg, and studied at
Paolozzi's art academy.
And we went to the Top Ten Club
and started playing there with Tony Sheridan.
We went and told Bruno Koschmider, who threatened us
and turned round and said, "You'll never play Germany again."
To which we laughed and put two fingers up and went to the Top Ten.
But all of a sudden, George was alleged to be underage.
Because there used to be an ausweis over there,
which meant that after nine or ten o'clock at night,
you couldn't perform if you were under 18,
and then Paul and I were framed
for trying to burn the Bambi Kino
down and we got sent home.
We were deported as well.
Stu by this time had decided he was going to stay with Astrid,
and John, after playing with Tony Sheridan for a couple of weeks,
decided, you know, he missed the boys and he made his
own way back home again.
The Beatles had an image that they brought back with them,
which wasn't fully formed
but it had begun.
They'd got the leather jackets,
which were still, sort of, old hat,
in a way, I mean, old rock and roll style.
We all dashed out and got leather jackets because our stage clothes
were basically falling to bits, OK?
And it was also the idea... Leather's cheap, we can wear leather
onstage, offstage, basically live in it.
Paul was the last.
He eventually got one but it took him quite a while afterwards
and that, for some unknown reason, became our trademark.
And even when we came back to Liverpool,
that was the image we brought back.
The first time I saw The Beatles was at the Litherland Town Hall.
They'd just come back from Hamburg after being there for about
six months perhaps,
and they exploded onto the stage.
Suddenly, they had stage presence,
they had a show, they knew
how to entertain, they knew how to
engage with the audience.
You know, people were flabbergasted.
They didn't know how to take us.
The first time we played with them,
at St John's Hall, Bootle,
I came home from work and
I'd bought the Echo to see
who was on with us tonight, and it was - From Hamburg,
The Silver Beatles.
I thought, "Who the hell are they?!" You know?
And I watched them and they were fantastic.
Other groups were, sort of...came on, wearing suits and played,
and didn't communicate with the audience as much as they did.
In Britain at that time, it was pretty pop stars in shiny
suits, choreographed Shadows walking, and nice bright guitars.
They were just actually smoking on stage,
they had their amps on chairs...
At one point, they were talking German onstage
because they could speak fluent German.
People thought they were a German
band, direct from Hamburg,
and thought, "Oh, they don't half speak good English
"for Germans." You know?
Just their clothes convinced us that they were German.
We were wearing leather jackets, we were wearing polo necks,
we had cowboy boots, our hair had grown long.
We were wearing, at that time, you may laugh,
red V-neck jumpers!
So we thought, "Oh, I think we'd better look at ourselves,
"here." And we did, we just took note of The Beatles.
Never seen so many kids start to dress in leather jackets
in Liverpool after that!
Of course, the music we were playing, as well, behind it,
you know, the two and two went hand in hand together.
Raw energy, savage band that we
were, great rock and roll band.
And the audience that were dancing, I just stopped and walked
towards the stage and watched them and thought,
"This is something special, here."
The Beatles suddenly appeared in Liverpool and I thought,
"I'll go and see them."
I get on the bus and there's George sitting with a guitar.
He's doing the gigs.
So, "Can I carry your guitar to...?"
Suddenly turns out he's in this new group, The Beatles.
So, I just carried on carrying his guitar until John and Paul said,
"You can carry ours, as well."
And then, one day, Brian Epstein had become their manager.
I said, "Will you pay me to do it?"
He said, "We'll pay you."
And then I'd be paid to go and see The Beatles for free.
We flew over to Germany, we were opening The Star-Club,
and we were met
when we were coming off the plane,
on the tarmac, by Astrid.
And we all turned around and said, "Where's Stu?"
And she turned round and said, "Don't you know?"
And we said, "No."
And she said, "Stu died of a brain haemorrhage."
That was the first time I've ever seen John cry in public.
Broke down, tears cascaded down his face, and...you know...
I think that was how everyone felt, you know?
It was such a shock, we weren't expecting it
because, you know, he was no longer part of the band
but he was still with us in spirit. Every time we played over there,
he'd turn up, he'd watch us, he still loved being part of it,
being associated with it.
So, his demise, you know, was a big shock to everyone.
I don't think John and I ever spoke
about the fact that Stuart had died.
I think it was a closed book to John,
he just didn't want to think about it
because they really were very close.
Anyone who didn't enjoy their stuff at Hamburg...
..must have missed something!
We were earning what was a small fortune in Britain.
And I bought my very first car from my first month's
stay at the Star-Club, that's how good it was.
You'd mix with all the musos,
so you played with Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee,
Ray Charles, Fats Domino, the Everlys, Joey Dee.
You played with all these people, so you're learning all the time.
It was a great school.
No-one in Great Britain, outside of Liverpool,
knew who were The Beatles, Kingsize Taylor,
The Undertakers, The Big Three, one of the best bands,
or Gerry And The Pacemakers... Completely unknown.
Suddenly, we realised there was a force there.
All together, from Liverpool, it was manic.
Depending on where your line-up was in the routine of the club,
you could do two hours, three hours.
Or, if you went on very early in the afternoon,
you would find yourself doing a very-early-morning spot as well.
So, you could do four hours in a night there.
John and I were the ones who, you know, propped the bars
up and we'd talk about home and all the other bits and pieces.
Normally, you'd be walking home in daylight, early hours
of the morning, and you'd either go down to the Seaman's Mission
by the port, and get your chips and egg, or your steak,
and then you'd go home to bed, sleep most of the afternoon.
Bert Kaempfert, who was one of the biggest impresarios
in the German record industry,
came in under the radar, very low profile.
But we got tipped-off when he was there and we put on the show
of our lives.
He fell in love with us and, of course,
history portrays now, you know,
he signed us up and Tony Sheridan.
The Beatles' first chart entry
was a record they made
with Tony Sheridan, of My Bonnie.
And they made that in Hamburg in 1961 and that got to number 31
on the German charts.
So, that was The Beatles' first hit single.
Germany allowed them to express themselves.
They did do the most outrageous things on stage,
I mean, John Lennon making Nazi salutes and swearing all the time.
Partly because there was a language problem.
And he thought it was quite funny to do, you know,
call them Nazis and the heil Hitler sign
and all the other bits and pieces.
They loved it.
You know, half of them didn't know what he was talking about anyway.
John could have been a stand-up comedian.
He was funny.
People forget this about John, he was a funny guy.
John, despite all his bravado and all his bluff,
was as insecure as anyone else.
And his way of dealing with that was to get the boot in
first before anyone else could.
I was going into the Star-Club, John Lennon was coming out,
we hadn't met at that point, so I introduced myself and said,
"I really enjoyed the show last night."
So, he, kind of, "Yeah, yeah, Frank, isn't it?"
He looked at me, like, I suppose, a snake before it eats a rabbit.
And he said, "Yeah, I enjoyed your show as well.
"I've been talking to people in the club and it seems
"that, next to Cliff in the band,
"you're the most popular member.
"I can't think why, your harmonies are bloody ridiculous."
And he didn't say bloody.
So, I stood there, thinking, "I don't know if I've been insulted
"here or whether this is some kind of joke and I'm not quite
"getting the humour."
A bit snide, a bit cruel, sometimes.
Cos he couldn't walk away from a good joke.
If he saw something funny to say, he'd say it.
You know, then, "Maybe I shouldn't have said that." You know?
I admired him as a person, I admired him as a musician,
I had such great times with him, great memories of him.
He was my hero, yeah, I suppose that's the best way
of putting it.
The Beatles had a very strong following that they engineered
in Hamburg.
When they came back, they played to that audience.
I mean, The Cavern Club was pretty notorious
for having a very strong female contingent there.
It was girls with curlers in their hair, and a scarf
over the top, you know.
It was very small-time.
I lived in The Cavern. Every time they were on, I was there.
It was the only club in Liverpool that done lunchtime sessions.
You could go to hear music in your dinner hour.
The Cavern was a strange place.
You've been there, it's a filthy hovel.
It was a black door in the street and a bouncer leaning
against the door, Paddy.
And you went down one flight of stone stairs into this cellar.
To these little vaulted rooms, where people stood like sheep
in a cattle train, you know?
Getting your gear down The Cavern when it's packed, it's...
It was hard, but we were young and we enjoyed it.
Health and safety wouldn't have even
allowed people to go into it nowadays.
Hot, sweaty, smelly.
There was water running down the walls, at least we hoped
it was water.
There was clouds of smoke mingling
with the perspiration on the walls.
It smelt.
Smelt of death.
Couldn't deny that you'd been
to The Cavern because
you'd have a smell on your clothes
and it was a unique smell.
I know some people say it was, you know, because of
urine and things like that.
If it wasn't smelling of cabbages, it was smelling of some disgusting
Dettol that they were throwing around the toilets at the time.
Paints a nice picture.
Yeah, paints a nice picture.
It was blended in with...
Because there was a fruit market opposite,
so, you know, you had the smell of orange.
And, erm...
..I'm sure if I could bottle it, I could make a fortune.
Of course, it was the showplace for a lot of Liverpool bands.
The atmosphere in there, when it was packed, was electric.
Everybody was standing in the same few square yards,
right in front of the stage, just looking up at them.
If you have a look at any of the old photos,
wasn't the best of equipment!
You know, apart from the drum kit, that was great.
They only had two microphones.
So, George would be on this side of the mic, and Paul on the other
side of the mic, sharing the microphone.
Not because they thought that was a clever thing to do.
They couldn't afford another microphone.
When you talk to people who went to The Cavern,
Freda Kelly, for instance,
she'd say that, "It was great because you could talk to them
"and shout at them and shout out requests." You know?
"Sing Money, John!" You know?
"Taste Of Honey, Paul."
They were so funny with each other.
Oh, it was just magic.
And they'd shout back, "Like your hair.
"Take the curlers out next time."
I defy anybody that went down and saw The Beatles
at The Cavern to come out saying, "I don't like The Beatles."
You couldn't possibly say that.
They were all popular, but Pete was the one.
The girls used to just stand and look at Pete
and even chant, you know,
after the end of songs.
Fans would sleep outside Mona Best's home to just be near Pete Best.
I mean, he had that kind of following early on, which really
none of the other Beatles had
quite to that degree.
At the time, on the Mersey beat scene, bands weren't doing
their own songs.
If you were on last, all the other groups had probably
done all your best songs.
Paul said to John, "John, we've got to have our own stuff,
"otherwise we'll never get anywhere."
They would take a song that they loved and then write
a song that was somewhat similar to it.
I mean, if you listen to an early B-side like This Boy,
the song itself isn't very far removed from
what The Shirelles were doing.
A song like Soldier Boy, for example.
They were churning out songs every 20 minutes,
you know, like machines.
If they didn't finish it in under 20 minutes,
they threw it away and started another one.
You'd be on the coach on tour and they would write,
you know, songs for an album in between Sunderland and Doncaster.
When The Beatles started performing their own songs,
like One After 909, in live situations,
no other groups had written their own songs.
They would do a Chuck Berry thing, or whatever, and then suddenly say,
"We're going to do one of our own, now."
You know, people were sort of, "Oh, well, do you have to sing that one?
"Why can't you do another Chuck Berry?"
John would lie on the carpet,
in front of the fire,
on his stomach,
with his legs like that at the back,
beating out whatever it was in his mind,
and he'd write maybe three or four lines,
he'd go, "Ah!" Crumple it up, throw it on the floor.
There was about 30 or 40 pieces of paper all crumpled up
and I threw them on the back of the fire.
And then 20 years into his death,
I was sitting here,
and on the television news, six o'clock, it said,
"Today in London, at Sotheby's, a piece of paper with part
"of a John Lennon lyric, sold for £40,000."
And I went, "Oh, my God, how many pieces of paper did I
"throw on that fire?"
The Beatles were getting a bit fed up, they wanted to break
out of Liverpool. They were still playing
at The Cavern to crowds, but a bit static, nothing was happening.
And then Brian Epstein came on the scene.
Well, everybody knew who he was because he was the manager
of the biggest record shop.
He had very good ears for a hit single.
Of course, he had that ability to listen to a record
that was being plugged by buyers when they came into the shop.
He'd say, "That one's a hit, that isn't a hit."
Brian was telling me he was interested in this band
that was playing at The Cavern.
And he did ask me to go and listen to them.
And I sat on the steps, halfway down,
I listened to them playing Hey Babe,
and I went back and he said, "What do you think?"
I said, "If you don't take them, somebody will come along
"and take them."
And he looked at me and said, "Such as yourself?"
I said, "Possible."
I said, "They're very good."
Brian was mesmerised by us when he first saw us on stage.
You know, whether it was the leathers, our attributes, whatever,
you know, that he fell in love with.
Brian came from an upper-middle-class
Liverpool, Jewish background.
They were respectability in Liverpool personified.
A very gentle man, a very clever man.
Middle-class, probably, and he was, like, coming down to all
these working-class lads.
The Beatles always came to my house because Brian's mum wouldn't agree
to four lads in denims and told us, "No Beatles allowed in that home."
What you've got to give Brian credit for was he was the one
that took the gamble...
with these five uncut diamonds.
After Brian's death, when I talked to his mother,
Queenie, it was clear that she still couldn't reconcile
herself with the fact that their son had slummed it with these people!
Brian said, "Joe, I can't go around pubs and clubs and ask
"for bookings for a band, can I?"
He said, "Would you stand in,
"come with me and be their booking manager?"
Big difference with Brian Epstein
is that he was someone with vision.
Brian was the only person who could see over the Mersey.
Brian was a fantastic promoter.
Not a great businessman, didn't do great deals,
but he gave them his soul.
His strength, as well as his weakness, was his adulation
for the band.
It was almost obsessive.
The Beatles fulfilled a need in him.
I think he was very restless, he had a low boredom threshold.
They provided an outlet for his showbiz theatrical ambitions.
Because he wanted to be a star himself.
He was like a frustrated star, or an actor.
"An ac-tor," he used to say.
"These boys are going to be bigger than Elvis!"
That was his classic line. All the time he used it,
before they'd even had a record out, you know?
And he believed it, he sincerely believed it.
The simple fact was, his vision was very clear.
They were going to be big and he was going to help them.
London controlled the entire music industry.
Apart from Mersey Beat,
every major music paper was down there.
All the national press was down there. All the agents, managers,
and, up to then, you had to go down to London to make it.
The Beatles were very ambitious.
They wanted to make it, whatever it took.
John knew it was a game.
He was prepared to do anything within limits in order
to become successful.
He knew that Brian knew how the game was played.
He had to change The Beatles into a group that would be acceptable
to the people in the media, to the radio and TV people.
The establishment were cigar-smoking,
successful, usually Jewish, businessmen.
And they were not going to put up with a bunch of long-haired louts
coming into their office, smoking, swearing,
wearing leather jackets.
He put them in mohair suits by his own tailor, Beno Dorn.
He took them to Horne Brothers to have their hair cut.
Epstein wasn't a totally controlling manager,
you know, he talked to them about it.
I've never directed that the boys should do anything,
either, sort of, song-wise, artistically-wise,
or speech-wise.
We all make up our minds.
I contribute, I suppose, a fifth.
I understand where Brian Epstein was coming from.
Wrong word, but he probably cleaned them up because they didn't smoke
on stage, they had to be on time, and they had to bow
if it was a theatre.
You know, Brian liked the wildness, you know?
It was a foot in the door method to get across to people
that these were not just roughnecks but talented individuals.
And that's what Epstein did for them, otherwise,
they'd have never have got the stage in the first place.
Brian worked hard to promote The Beatles,
to get the deal.
You know, he trundled around London, people ignoring him.
People said to me, "They'll make mincemeat of him
"in London, they won't get anything."
He needed a record, a record was everything,
it was like the Holy Grail.
Get a record.
Brian hawked the tapes around London.
Basically every record studio.
He went to Philips, he went to Polydor,
he went to everybody, nobody wanted them.
In desperation, Brian had taken tapes to Tony Meehan,
who was The Shadows' drummer
who at that time was working as an A&R man for Dick Rowe.
I recall Brian collared him at some press reception.
He said, "Tony, have you had a chance to listen to those tapes yet,
"by The Beatles?"
And Tony Meehan said, "I'm a very busy man, Mr Epstein."
I think Tony Meehan was about 19 at the time, but anyway.
The biggest turn down was Decca.
Poor old Dick Rowe always gets it in the neck for being the man
who turned down The Beatles at Decca Records.
Dick Rowe recorded The Beatles down in London and Epstein chose
which songs to sing.
Things like The Sheik Of Araby, which was totally wrong.
Hello Little Girl was OK but, you know, Besame Mucho.
If you listen to the demos,
a lot of them aren't particularly good.
It's New Year's Day, everybody's a bit hungover.
They've had a horrendous drive.
It's a bit flat.
As John would say later,
"He was right to turn us down, we were awful."
I might have turned those tapes down, myself.
We thought we were going to get signed by Decca but we didn't.
Brian Poole And The Tremeloes did.
History has judged Dick Rowe very harshly,
but he did sign the Rolling Stones.
So, he recouped fairly quickly!
It wasn't just Dick Rowe, it was right across the board.
EMI, Pye, they all turned down those tapes and it was only
by sheer luck that Brian Epstein
persisted and took those tapes back
to EMI when he heard that
George Martin had been away
on holiday when he'd made his rounds
previously, and he was somebody he hadn't tackled.
To be quite honest about it,
most probably, EMI was one of the last studios
that he managed to get a deal with.
They went down for an audition
and it was Ron Richards, who was from Parlophone Records,
the A&R man, who was recording them.
The engineer thought it was good and he went
down to the canteen and brought George Martin
up and then George Martin took over.
We were very blase about it, you know?
It was the first time we'd really been in a proper recording studio.
In Hamburg, we'd recorded on stage and in a school hall, and all the
other bits and pieces, so seeing a proper recording studio, EMI...
People that were there were quite clinical.
George Martin never appeared without a collar and a tie, and a rather
dapper suit and spoke in a
frightfully posh voice.
And you know, they thought
he was the bee's knees.
We decided on what we were going to play, and after that, it was
in the lap of the gods, whether we got signed or we didn't.
George Martin, who was skating on thin ice at the time
and likely to have left the company anyway,
decided he'd take a chance.
The way in which they were signed to EMI was quite tortuous
and George Martin had his doubts.
In June 1962, The Beatles went down to Parlophone and were recorded
by George Martin, and did a version of Love Me Do and, if you hear
that version of Love Me Do, for whatever reason,
Pete Best sounds like he's banging a couple of bin lids on that record.
He just had an off day.
And George Martin said, "We've got to use a session drummer
"when we do this song again."
They could only think about, "We've got one chance with a record deal
"in London, that's it." You know?
And so, I think that made the others think,
"Well, this is time for him to go."
My departure from the band, though, there was no inkling
at all, whatsoever.
You know, that's still a mystery today.
It was terrible what happened to him, you know.
Poor Pete, to be told
on the brink of the first recording
that you're out.
There have been so many excuses,
but we've had no actual reason
as to why Peter should leave.
As I say, success is hard to come by
and these things do happen
but it's just the way that it was
done that has annoyed us.
What did they say, mainly?
Well, you know, the drummer wasn't too good,
the beat wasn't so hot, you know?
The reason I was given, I wasn't a good enough drummer.
People who saw me play then and people who've seen me play
since then, have turned round and said, "No,
"that wasn't the decision."
If you listen to his early drumming, or hear any of his stuff,
he's just as adequate a drummer as Ringo, if not better.
Then that opens up the enclave into what the decision
was and then we get all the other bits,
jealousy and blah, blah, blah.
It goes on.
So, I suppose the biggest myth is,
right, they're not influencing it,
it's a public decision, that's why I turn around and say, "Right,
"I'm not a bad drummer, OK?
"Let the people make their own mind up about that."
I think maybe the drumming was used
as an excuse to get rid of him.
Unfairly.
A clash of personalities? Well, probably that may be it
because Peter did have a terrific fan club,
you know? Compared to the others, girls...
Too good-looking, perhaps?
Well, I'll leave that for the other people to say,
but it could have been done a bit more straightforward,
would have been more to the mark.
We had a lot of trouble with Pete's mother,
Mona Best.
She was constantly ringing up Brian Epstein and saying,
"What are you going to do for Pete's band?"
And Brian Epstein didn't like that at all.
Brian phoned me and said, "I'm going to have to let the band go."
He said, "Maybe you would be interested?"
I said, "Why?"
He said, "I can't get over Mrs Best."
He said, "She's just, you know, overpowering."
So, we had discussed that it might be better to get rid
of Mrs Best by getting rid of Pete.
It's a bit like that Agatha Christie book, Murder On The Orient Express,
where all these people have
different grudges against this person.
All the people involved around Pete Best had a reason
for wanting Pete Best to leave the band.
He looked great and he was a great drummer, a lovely man.
But he just was not...
He didn't have the same humour as the other three, or the same...
..way of life.
You can't change your personality.
Pete's very quiet.
You know, I liked Pete, but, erm...
He was different and that probably didn't work too well
when you're away a long time together, stuck together.
We'd drive back from Newcastle and he'd go home
while we'd still finish the night off somewhere.
The other three were so outgoing and I think
they needed somebody outgoing.
I see The Beatles as being essentially pragmatic.
Once they'd been grounded and focused by Epstein,
they had a collective ambition, and anything that stood in the way
of that ambition would be sacrificed,
and I'm afraid I think Pete Best was.
The way I look at it, you know, just let it lie, now.
Except for the reports in the papers,
it gets me a bit niggled at times.
I mean, what is interesting is that the Mersey Beat that comes out
following Pete Best's sacking, says that Pete left the band
by mutual agreement.
I think Bill Harry was fed that by Brian Epstein as a press release,
and it was obviously completely wrong.
When Pete was fired, I mean, there was a huge outcry amongst
the fan club.
It was taboo, it was really upsetting people.
Nobody wanted Pete to leave The Beatles.
The reaction from people in Liverpool was
absolutely incredible.
There was demonstrations, a march through the city,
"Bring back Pete."
There were riots in Mathew Street, posters with,
"Ringo never, Pete forever."
George got punched in the face.
There was lots of trouble, even Ringo Starr was threatened.
I used to be good mates with Ringo,
you know, before the replacement.
We're still mates now but I haven't
seen him to have a chat with him
or anything like that.
It was very heart-warming for myself,
seeing the support I had,
but deep down inside, I knew that the decision had been made.
You know? Regardless of what happened, the door wasn't going
to be opened again.
Ringo had played with The Beatles on occasions, when Pete Best
had been ill, so they knew they could get on well with him.
He fitted into the band more perfectly as a personality.
He tried to fit in.
He'd be sitting, chatting and having a toasted cheese sandwich
and a Scotch and coke, and everyone became very fond of him.
I would class Ringo as the happy Beatle.
You know, he was always dancing and singing along with different
songs or humming a song, you know?
I've always said Ringo was a very lucky person,
and I was sitting here in this room one night with Paul McCartney
and I said, "There's one lucky person, isn't there, Paul?"
And he said, "Don't go down there, Joe."
He said, "Leave him alone."
Ringo had a pretty sad childhood.
In the early 1990s, he was back in Liverpool and he was remembering
the places that he knew in Liverpool, and invariably he goes to hospitals.
Did you enjoy your stay in hospital?
Oh, it was nice, thanks. I had a good time.
How did you get on with the nurses?
Not so bad, you know? Very nice nurses.
Were you a model patient, do you think?
You'd better ask the nurses about that.
What did you dislike about being in hospital?
Nothing, really, because I had to go in, so,
you know, I just sort of settled down and read and played records
and got used to it again.
He was in hospital so many times and not at school that the kids used
to call him Lazarus.
At the end of school, you had to have a signed report
saying, you know, you'd been a student at the school,
and the teachers didn't even know who he was.
I knew his mum and his stepdad.
Elsie was lovely, she'd always give you a cup of tea.
Mrs Gleave-Starkey, does Ringo want to move house?
I don't really think so, he's asked
us to have another house
but we're quite happy here.
Has Ringo suggested you should stop work
as a Liverpool Corporation painter?
He certainly has, but I don't want to move.
I like my job and I like the people I work with.
Ringo, he was like the final piece in the jigsaw,
you know, of Beatledom.
It's that indefinable element.
You just know when something works,
when something doesn't and, in particular with music,
where it is so much to do with feel and instinct,
that's very important.
They eventually got a recording contract to make the first record.
Brian came home to Lime Street and we were all waiting
there for him and it was like the Prime Minister
who was waving the paper at the beginning of the war.
He said, "Success, success!"
George Martin didn't think they were going to be this fantastic band,
he gave them a tiny royalty and he thought, "We'll try them."
Eventually, they came out with the number Love Me Do,
but it didn't have much impact in the music paper charts.
In those days, you could buy your
way into the charts and Love Me Do
wasn't doing too well, so we ordered
10,000 to help it along.
Brian bought them, stocked the shops and sold them all.
He was a record retailer, first and foremost.
Of course, it went to number one in Mersey Beat,
we were the only people to have that record
as a number-one record.
People didn't believe that Liverpool was selling all these records,
but they were.
The impact it had on kids around the country was, sort of, tremendous.
It was something different, something new.
I got shivers down my spine when I heard them singing
on the radio and I thought, "This is ridiculous,
"I've seen these guys playing so many times and now
"they're on the wireless."
I could see that something was going to happen when Please Please Me
went to number one. The second one.
And you knew something was going to happen.
Suddenly, there's John, Paul and George and I thought,
"What the bloody hell are they doing on the telly?!"
And that was it and, after that, you couldn't pick up a newspaper
without them having a haircut.
Now, Ringo, I hear you were manhandled at the embassy ball.
What happened, exactly? I don't know.
I was just talking, like I am now,
I was talking away and then...
I just looked round
and you just saw all the faces.
Well, you got the usual, didn't you?
"Oh, can I have pieces of hair?"
Which, in the beginning, I thought was a bit odd.
So, in the end, I thought, "You know what? I can do this."
So, I went over to the hairdressers, cos it was only over the road
from where we worked, and I just picked the hair up,
put in an envelope, and I would write on the envelope whose hair it
was, so I didn't get it mixed up.
So, there's a lot of hair out there.
I phoned Brian and said, "Can we have The Beatles
"for a photo session?"
And Brian's answer was, "Yes, if you send a limo
"to the Westmorland Hotel."
I said, "We don't send limos for Cliff Richard!"
Rather prissily.
And Brian said, "These boys are going to be bigger
"than Elvis Presley, never mind Cliff Richard."
So, we sent a limo.
I could not believe that The Beatles that I was seeing in The Cavern
were actually on our biggest theatre in Liverpool.
To me, that was it. They were famous.
And I think that was the point when I thought,
"Oh, dear. I think that I should have finished that guitar.
"I've missed out, here!"
Do you deliberately try and create this, sort of, screaming reaction?
No, we just, you know, arrive at the theatre
and they're always there waiting.
And whenever we're doing a show, the police always come and say,
"Don't look out the window, you know, because you excite them."
LAUGHTER
If you're going to be a star, Liverpool wasn't big enough.
They had to move down to London, you know, it was inevitable.
And people did feel left behind and there was some animosity,
but it had to happen.
The Beatles were always very aware of their roots.
They didn't, sort of, say, "We're off, now."
They said, "Come with us, we want our pals all around us."
Their pals would keep them real.
You use the word "joy"
about the best moments of it.
That's a very strong word, "joy",
was it that much fun?
Oh, yes.
It was just something that went on and on and on, and got better
and better and bigger and bigger.
And being in the centre of it, you just got swept along.
It was always like the idea, "Oh, it's all going to stop
"tomorrow." You know?
It never did.
Anthology 1, when it was released in 1995,
had, I think, 12 tracks featuring
Pete Best, and the worldwide sales of it were over 13 million.
Out of the blue, we got a phone call from Paul McCartney.
Paul was honourable
and gave Pete what he was due.
My life since then has been absolutely incredible, you know?
I've still got a great band, which tours the world.
They do a lot of Beatles songs.
And I asked him why, he said, "Well, because they're bloody
"good songs, why wouldn't you?"
I'm still alive, still healthy, still go for a pint,
still enjoy myself, got a great family.
You know, wife who I've been married to for 50-odd years.
Daughters, grandchildren.
I've had a wonderful life, I hope it continues.
You remember being part of a huge revolution that changed the music
of the world.
The Beatles turned the whole recording scene upside down.
They were, as Brian Epstein memorably said,
"Bigger than Elvis."
They were four Elvises.
They were that big.
Every day with The Beatles was a joy...
a laugh and an adventure.