One of the places they started going back to, for want of anything better, was the Casbah Club. They’d played there earlier in the year, before they’d gone to Scotland.
Mrs Best, who founded the Casbah, is small, dark-haired and very volatile. She comes from Delhi, India. She met her husband, Johnny Best, an ex-boxing promoter, in India during the war. She came back to Liverpool with him and eventually they bought a large 14-roomed Victorian house at Number 8 Hayman’s Green in the good residential district of West Derby.
Pete Best, her elder son, was born in 1941. He went to Liverpool Collegiate, another of Liverpool’s good grammar schools. He passed five subjects at O level and went into the sixth form.
His plan was to be a teacher.
He was handsome and well built, but somewhat shy, almost sullen-looking and uncommunicative, especially in comparison with his dynamic, energetic mother. When he began to bring friends back from school, she went to great lengths to encourage this.
During the summer holidays of 1959, when Pete was about to go into his second year in the sixth, he and a gang of his friends asked his mother if instead of cluttering up all her rooms playing records they could clear out the huge cellar and use that. ‘The original idea was that it would be their den,’
she says. ‘That developed into the idea of making it into a coffee club, just for teenagers, like the ones in town. We decided to make it a private club, charging a membership fee of a shilling, to keep out the Teds and roughs.’
They decided to have some of the beat groups which were springing up all over Liverpool. They knew there would be many who would jump at the chance. Mrs Best, with her flair for running things, and people, welcomed the idea.
The group they found was the Quarrymen, as they were still called. This came through a girl who knew one of the members of the Quarrymen and said how good they were. It wasn’t John, Paul or George she knew, but someone else who was playing the guitar for them at the time, Ken Brown. He was one of the many members of the Quarrymen who were always coming and going in those days.
When John, Paul and George heard they were looking for a group, they all rushed round at once.
They were immediately given paint brushes and helped with the final week or so of cleaning and decorating the cellar. John brought his girlfriend, Cynthia Powell, to help.
‘I remember telling John,’ says Mrs Best, ‘to put some undercoat on a wall. When I came back, he’d finished painting but had done it all in gloss. He was so shortsighted he hadn’t been able to tell the difference. I was in a panic that it would never dry in time.’
Even up to the opening day, they hadn’t decided on a name. ‘I went down one evening to see how they were getting on. It was so bloody mysterious, with little dark corners everywhere. It seemed oriental. I thought of this picture I’d just seen with Hedy Lamarr and Charles Boyer, Algiers I think it was called, in which they go to the Casbah. So that was the name I chose, the Casbah Club. As I come from India, it seemed very apt.’
It opened at the end of August 1959. There were almost 300 there that first night. The Quarrymen got a great reception. The Casbah seemed launched for a long time.
‘I was very pleased,’ says Mrs Best. ‘Not for myself, of course, but for Peter. He had vague notions about going into show business and I thought this might be some sort of experience for him by helping with the club. I thought it would make him less self-conscious, give him more confidence.’
The club thrived. Coffee and sweets were on sale and there were the Quarrymen to listen to. At weekends, there were crowds in the evening of up to 400. Very soon there was a membership of 3,000. A bouncer was hired, Frank Garner, to look after the door and keep out Teds.
All went well for a couple of months. Then a row developed over the Quarrymen. Their fee for playing was 15s. each a night. One night, only John, Paul and George played. Ken Brown was missing. ‘I paid the three of them 15s. each then I paid Ken Brown his 15 bob when I saw him. They said he shouldn’t have been paid at all as he hadn’t been there. They said the fee for the group was really £3 for the evening. The three who had turned up should have got £3 between them, not 15 bob each.’
This is the basis of the disagreement, as Mrs Best and Pete Best remember it. The others can’t.
Anyway, after the row over the money, Ken Brown left the Quarrymen and not long after the Quarrymen themselves started to move farther afield.
Pete Best had by this time started banging away at an old snare drum, seeing how well the Quarrymen were doing, but mainly to amuse himself in odd moments at the club. When Ken Brown left, it was decided that he and Pete should form a new group. They got two others, and called themselves the Blackjacks, aided and abetted by Mrs Best.
‘They were very good,’ says Mrs Best. ‘I remember Rory Storm, who was very big in those days, issuing a challenge to see who could get the biggest crowd. Rory got 390 but the Blackjacks got 450, the most we ever had.’
The Quarrymen went to Scotland and became the Silver Beatles but did occasional return engagements at the Casbah, when nothing else turned up. The Blackjacks, with Pete Best on drums, had now become the Casbah’s resident group. They got better during the following year and Pete Best decided he did want to go into show business.
‘I’d been thinking by then of going to a teachers’ training college. My five O levels would have got me in. But I got fed up and left before sitting A levels.’
He left school in the summer term of 1960. The Casbah was still a big success and there was enough for him to do there, but then his group began to disintegrate. Ken Brown moved south and the two others went away on courses connected with their full-time work. Pete had left school for a career in show business, but was now left with nothing to do.
But in August 1960, five weeks after he had left school, Paul McCartney rang him.
‘Paul said had I still got my drums,’ says Pete. ‘I told him I’d just got a complete new kit. I was very proud of that. He said they’d got a job in Hamburg and was I interested in being their drummer? I said yes. I’d always liked them very much. They said I’d get £15 a week, which was a lot. Much better than going to a training college.
‘I went down to Allan Williams’s club, the Jackaranda. I met Stu for the first time. I had an audition. I blasted off a few numbers and they all said fine, you can come to Hamburg with us.’
As Mrs Best had got in on the beat group scene at the teenage coffee club end, Allan Williams, as an experienced nightclub man, had got on to it slightly higher up the scale. He was not only putting on
the groups in his own nightclubs, but also finding groups for other people and acting as a sort of agent-cum-manager for groups looking for work. It was he who had helped the Beatles to get their Larry Parnes audition. The Beatles’ money for their Scottish tour, though paid for by Larry Parnes, had come through Allan Williams who had acted for them in getting the tour.
The reasons why Allan Williams, a small-time Liverpool nightclub owner, came to be exporting groups to Hamburg are rather complicated. The first contact had been established when a German seaman had heard a West Indian steel band in the Jackaranda Club and had told people in Hamburg how good they were. This had led to them being engaged by a Hamburg night club. Allan Williams had followed them over, hoping to interest Hamburg club owners in other Liverpool groups. He went to the Kaiserkeller, which seemed to be the only rock and roll club, and met Bruno Koschmeider. ‘I kidded him on that all the best British rock groups came from Liverpool.’
Koschmeider came to Britain to see for himself but instead went to London where he soon found that nobody had heard of the Liverpool groups. He went to the Two I’s in Soho, then the centre for British rock (Tommy Steele had played there), and signed Tony Sheridan and his group. He was a big success in Hamburg and Koschmeider came back to London to look for more groups. By a coincidence, Allan Williams happened to be in the Two I’s the same evening Koschmeider was looking for another group. Allan Williams was with a Liverpool group called Derry and the Seniors, trying to get them work. He fixed them up to go to Hamburg, the first Liverpool beat group to go there.
Derry and the Seniors were a success and Allan Williams was asked for another Liverpool group.
He thought of Rory Storm, but they were going to Butlins holiday camp. So he asked the Beatles. But the Hamburg contract was for a five-piece group and the Beatles didn’t have a drummer. They’d had an occasional drummer, a middle-aged man with a family, but he turned down the chance of Hamburg as his wife was against it. This was when they thought of asking Pete Best. When he agreed, everything was ready.
In the Harrison household there was no great excitement – apart of course from George. But his mother at least never tried to stop him going. She was worried about him being only 17 and going abroad for the first time, especially Hamburg. She’d heard things about Hamburg. ‘But it was what he wanted to do. They were going to get properly paid for once. I knew they were good and were bound to do well. All I’d heard up till then was “Heh, Mum, we’ve got a booking, lend’s the bus fare, eh, and I’ll pay you back when I’m famous.”’
So Mrs Harrison got George ready. She made him promise to write and gave him a tin of home-made scones.
George, despite his great youth, was at least a working man. But Paul and John were still ostensibly studying. Going to Hamburg was going to ruin their great careers once and for all.
Jim McCartney was naturally all against Paul going to Hamburg. Paul had just sat his A levels – Art and English – and they were all waiting to hear if he’d got through them so that they would then definitely know if he’d got a place at a teachers’ training college.
Michael McCartney, Paul’s brother, says that Paul, as ever, arranged everything very cleverly. ‘I remember coming home from school with Paul the day he told me they’d been invited to Hamburg. He let it out, just casually. I said, Wow! But Paul said he didn’t know if he should, pretending he was all undecided. I said it was fantastic! He was going to be a big star, wow! He said, do you think Dad will let me? That was very smart. I was then on his side in persuading Dad. He let me get all excited, so that I was desperately wanting him to go.’
Paul says that he was of course very excited. ‘We hadn’t seemed to have done anything for weeks, just hanging around. It was the long summer holidays and I didn’t want to go back to school, or college. But there wasn’t much alternative, until suddenly Hamburg came up. That meant I definitely didn’t need to go back to school. There was now something else to do.’
There was still Jim to persuade. Paul got Allan Williams to come home, to help soften up Jim.
‘Allan Williams never got our names right, though,’ says Paul. ‘He would call me John.’ However, Allan Williams managed to tell Jim how well organized it was all going to be and what a lovely respectable place Hamburg was.
‘I think, basically. Dad was quite pleased,’ says Michael, ‘though he said he wasn’t at the time.’
‘I knew they were well liked at what they were doing,’ says Jim. ‘It was their first big engagement and they were determined to go. Paul was just 18. He’d just had four weeks of his school holidays. He went on a student passport. I gave him a pep talk, you know, about being a good lad.
What else could I do?
‘I was worried all the time that he wouldn’t get enough to eat in Germany. He did send postcards, saying “I’m eating plenty. We had this, that and the other this evening.” That satisfied me, I suppose.’
Jim was slightly satisfied when just after Paul had gone, the results of the GCE A levels came through. Paul had failed Art but passed in English, though by that time even Jim realized it didn’t matter any more.
But John’s Aunt Mimi put up more of a fight. She had discouraged Paul and George that time from coming to her house and John from playing his guitar at home. She’d also tried to ban John from playing in a group. Since the Quarrymen had begun, almost five years previously, John had had to lie to her most of the time about what he was doing. She knew he was still messing around writing silly songs and that, but she didn’t know the extent of his interest.
She really thought he was sticking in at the Art College, till one day someone told her how he was spending his lunch hours – playing in a group. She decided to go and investigate for herself, to see just what depth of depravity John had sunk to.
The lunchtime she decided to investigate turned out to be one of the days they were playing at the Cavern. They weren’t the resident group, as it was still basically a jazz club, but they were getting more dates as people at the Cavern became interested in them.
‘I’d never heard of this awful place, the Cavern,’ says Mimi. ‘It took a long time to find. I just had to follow the crowds in the end, I went down some steps with them all and there was this chap, Ray McFall, taking money. “I want John Lennon!”
‘I pushed on in, but the noise was deafening. It had this low ceiling which made it worse. The girls were jammed together, with their arms down by their sides. Try as I might, I just couldn’t get near the stage. If I could, I would have pulled him off it. In the end, I just went and sat in one of the dressing rooms. Dressing room! Just a scruffy little cubicle. When he came off, with the girls still screaming, he couldn’t see me at first. He’s blind without his glasses. Then he put them on and saw me, “What are you doing, Mimi?” “Very nice, John,” I said, “this is very nice.”’
Mimi made sure he went back to college that afternoon. She went on at him all the time to stick in at his studies, not this silly playing, so that he could get some proper qualifications. But she couldn’t stop him from playing.
‘What do you mean?’ John used to say. ‘I’m not a working man and never will be. No matter what you do or say, I’ll never end up with a nine-to-five job.’
Then Hamburg came up. This was going to mean a proper severance from Mimi, for a long time in a foreign country. Mimi remembers John trying to get her as excited as he was. ‘“Mimi, isn’t it marvellous,” he told her. “I’m going to get £100 a week, isn’t that marvellous!”’
A slight exaggeration on the money, but still marvellous, for five teenage lads. John, of course, jumped at the chance of having a good excuse to leave the college. He’d survived three years, just.
Arthur Ballard, the lecturer who had most to do with him, saved him from being expelled several times. John had failed all exams and was leaving without any qualifications, though he half thought to himself that they might take him back if Hamburg failed. He was also leaving Cyn.
‘The group had started to get its own fans,’ says Cynthia, ‘I knew they had lots of girls hanging round them, but I never worried or got jealous. I seemed so much older than all the girls. I felt very secure.
‘But I was much more worried about Hamburg. That seemed so far away and for such a long time.
I knew the Liverpool girls, but I didn’t know anything about the situation in Hamburg. Anything could happen to them in Hamburg.’
11
hamburg
Hamburg is Germany’s Liverpool. It’s a large northern port. The inhabitants are rough and tough but underneath they can be soft and sentimental. The climate is wet and windy. They have the same sort of nasal accents, easily recognizable in each country. They even have the same latitude, 53 degrees north.
But Hamburg is twice the size of Liverpool and traditionally a much wickeder city. Hamburg crime and Hamburg sex life are known throughout Europe. The Reeperbahn, the main street in Hamburg’s Soho, must have more strip clubs than any other street in the world.
When the Beatles arrived there in 1960, with George sweet 17 and never been kissed, well hardly, wicked Hamburg was at its wickedest. Hamburg, being a free port, had become a centre for FLN gunrunning during the Algerian crisis. This had brought in foreign gangsters and money. When the Berlin wall went up, in August 1960, a lot of East German crooks and illegal immigrants headed for Hamburg rather than Berlin. The gang warfare which ensued centred round the clubs. Waiters were hired for their strength, rather than their waiting, to be ready to fight off the gangs from the next club.
Allan Williams brought the five Beatles himself to Hamburg. He drove them in a minivan, via Harwich and the Hook of Holland. The only thing John remembers about the journey is that he stopped off in Holland to do some shoplifting.
They were all very pleased with the attempts at stage dress – their very first; after all, they were now professionals – that they were bringing with them. It consisted of little velvet jackets which Paul had got the man next door to him to make for them. They were intending to wear them with their usual
They were all very pleased with the attempts at stage dress – their very first; after all, they were now professionals – that they were bringing with them. It consisted of little velvet jackets which Paul had got the man next door to him to make for them. They were intending to wear them with their usual