John arrived back home from Hamburg in the middle of the night. He had to throw stones up at Mimi’s bedroom window so that she would get up and let him in.
‘He had these awful cowboy boots on, up to his knees they were, all gold and silver. He just pushed past me and said, “Pay that taxi, Mimi.” I shouted after him up the stairs, “Where’s your £100 a week, John?”’
‘Just like you, Mimi,’ shouted John, ‘to go on about £100 a week when you know I’m tired.’
‘And you can get rid of those boots. You’re not going out of this house in boots like that.’
John went to bed and stayed at home for over a week, not because of the awful boots but because there didn’t seem much alternative. Cyn was naturally pleased to see him. He’d written to her all the time he was away. ‘The sexiest letters this side of Henry Miller,’ says John. ‘Forty pages long some of them. You haven’t destroyed them, have you?’
George, who had got home first, didn’t know for some time that the others had eventually followed him. ‘I felt ashamed, after all the big talk when we set off for Hamburg. My dad gave me a lift to town one night and I had to borrow ten bob off him.’
Paul was also hanging around at home and soon had his father to contend with. Jim hadn’t wanted him to leave school and go to Hamburg in the first place. He said Paul should now get a job and not just mess around doing nothing.
‘Satan finds things for idle hands,’ so Jim told Paul, with great originality, several times a day.
Paul, never a rebel on principle and always willing to please, eventually gave in.
‘I went down to the Labour Exchange. That seemed to be the scene. They fixed me up with a job as second man on a lorry. I’d been on the Post Office the Christmas before from school, so I thought I’d try something different.
‘The firm was called Speedy Prompt Delivery – SPD. They did deliveries round the docks way. I got the early bus down to the docks and bought the Daily Mirror, trying to be a real working lad, though I was really just a college pudding.
‘I used to sit on the back of the lorry and helped to carry parcels. I was so buggered sometimes. I fell asleep on the lorry when we went to places like Chester. I was with them about two weeks and felt very worldly, having a job and a few quid in me pocket. But I got laid off. The Christmas period was over and there wasn’t so much work.
‘Dad started moaning again, the usual stuff about the group being all very well but I’d never make a living at it. I half agreed with him, but there was always somebody who said we were promising, some fans liked us and made us feel good.
‘I got another job at Massey and Coggins, winding electrical coils. I had to wear a donkey jacket for that. A fellow called me Mantovani, with me long hair. I had to stand astride this winch and wind the coils. I was always breaking it. I did about one and a half coils in a day, some of the others could do eight, even 14. I wasn’t much good.
‘The tea breaks were great, though, with jam butties and all the lads playing football in a sort of prison exercise yard.
‘I’d actually gone, now it’s all coming back to me, for a job brushing up the yard, which I thought would be all right. When the bloke noticed I had a few GCEs, he became suspicious, as if I might have a criminal record as well. Then he decided I was OK and gave me a better job, which was winding the coils. He said if I stuck in I’d be all right. I imagined myself as working my way up, being an executive one of these days, if I tried hard.
‘I was getting £7 a week for winding coils and making the tea. The group had got going again but I didn’t know if I wanted to go back full-time. I stayed on at work, just going over the wall for lunchtime sessions or being off sick. But I left in the end. I was there about two months all together. I quite enjoyed being a working man. I met this bloke Albert and had some good chats with him.’
‘I’ll say this for Paul,’ says his father Jim. ‘He was always a tryer. He wasn’t really interested in either job. It was just to oblige me.’
They’d come back from Hamburg in early December 1960. In all they were probably not more than two or three weeks without a date. With a bit of luck, they might have started club work straight away, which would have brightened up their pathetic arrival home. While they’d been away, Allan Williams had decided to build a large beat club on the lines of the Hamburg ones. He’d by now sent so many groups over there, including Gerry and the Pacemakers, that he thought there should be somewhere for them back in Liverpool. Just before the Beatles arrived home, he opened a new Liverpool club called the Top Ten, after the Hamburg one, and put in a manager called Bob Wooler.
But six days after it opened, it was burned down. What would have been an ideal place for the Beatles disappeared before they’d even seen it.
Their first post-Hamburg date turned out to be back at the Casbah, Pete Best’s mother’s club.
They got a great welcome there, especially from Pete’s friend, Neil Aspinall.
Neil had been a friend of Pete’s for a couple of years. He was actually living at the Casbah, at least he’d left home and taken a room in Mrs Best’s house. He hadn’t gone to school with Pete but had been at the Institute, starting in the same form as Paul. He’d known George as well. They’d both been in trouble for smoking. But he hadn’t been affected by the skiffle craze, though he’d supported the local groups. With a gang of his classmates, he’d gone along to cheer the Beatles (or Moondogs) at the Empire in the early audition for the Carroll Levis Show.
Neil had left the Institute with eight O levels and was training to be an accountant. He was getting
£2 10s. a week, plus luncheon vouchers, and seemed all set for a professional career. Most of his nights at first were taken up with correspondence courses. ‘I hated taking abuse from some fellow 300 miles away. It was like sending it off to the moon, just to get shit on.’ When he started hanging around the Casbah, his courses began to slip, especially when he moved in and lived there full-time.
‘Pete had written to me all the time he was in Hamburg,’ says Neil. ‘He said it was going great and they’d been asked to stay on another month, then another month, and another.
‘Derry and the Seniors had come back from Hamburg first. Pete had sent them round to his mother’s and she’d given them an evening at the Casbah. They were very much improved. They said wait till we hear the Beatles.
‘When I heard that the Beatles were definitely coming home I wrote out lots of posters saying
“Return of the Fabulous Beatles” – I put them up on walls and doors all over the place. I’d never seen them as a group with Pete as a member. I didn’t know how they’d changed in Hamburg. They might
have been awful.’
But despite Neil’s enthusiasm, it wasn’t possible to put the Beatles on at the Casbah right away.
Nobody seemed to know what the others were doing, or even if they were all back. ‘I didn’t know for a week after John came back that he had had to leave Hamburg as well,’ says Pete Best. ‘We didn’t know for weeks what had happened to Stu, till well into January.’
But their first post-Hamburg booking was at the Casbah and they did very well.
‘They were great,’ says Neil. ‘They had improved enormously. They began to get other jobs and a big following. Frank Garner, the fellow on the door at the Casbah, started to drive them round in his van. I saw a lot of them from then on as the Casbah was the base for their amps and tackle. Rory Storm also came back from Hamburg and played at the Casbah. It was a big scene.’
But their most important engagement after Hamburg took place on 27 December 1960, at Litherland Town Hall. If it is possible to say that any date was the watershed, this was it. All their development, all their new sounds and new songs, suddenly hit Liverpool that night. Their Casbah fans turned up at Litherland and helped the evening’s success. From then on, as far as having a devoted fanatical following was concerned, they never looked back.
They owe that engagement to Bob Wooler, who was about to become DJ at Litherland Town Hall.
He’d worked as a clerk for British Railways until the skiffle era began. He wasn’t involved in it himself, being by then almost 30, but he was fascinated by its development. ‘It was amazing to see teenagers making their own music for the first time and becoming entertainers themselves.’
The idea of a Liverpool Top Ten club had collapsed, which would have been a big chance for him as well as the Beatles. ‘They were really sorry for themselves. I knew their capabilities, but they were really down at the time. George was very bitter about the way his Hamburg trip had ended.’
He managed to get them the Litherland Town Hall date. This is a big hall which was used regularly twice a week for teenage dances. It was the biggest hall they’d played in up to then. Their loud, stomping, pounding Hamburg music caused literally a riot, the first they’d ever caused. They also got £6 for the night, again the best they’d had.
‘The kids went mad,’ says Pete Best. ‘Afterwards we found they’d been chalking on our van, the first time it had happened.’
They were billed for that evening as ‘The Beatles, Direct from Hamburg’. A lot of the kids who rioted that night, and for many other nights, thought they must be German. When they signed autograph books and were heard to speak they all said with surprise, ‘You speak good English.’
‘We probably looked German as well,’ says George. ‘We looked very different from all the other groups, with our leather trousers and cowboy boots. We looked funny and we played differently. We went down a bomb.’
‘It was that evening,’ says John, ‘that we really came out of our shell and let go. We discovered we were quite famous. This was when we began to think for the first time that we were good. Up to Hamburg we’d thought we were OK, but not good enough.’
Not only had the Beatles changed, there had been important changes in Britain while they’d been away. Every group was now trying like mad to be like the Shadows.
Cliff Richard’s success had led the Shadows, his backing group of Jet Harris, Tony Meehan, Bruce Welch and Hank Marvin, to go on to become successes in their own right. Their instrumental record, ‘Apache’, had swept the country. Every group was copying their sober, terribly neat stage dress of grey suits, matching ties and highly polished shoes. They did little dance steps, three one way
and three the other. In their appearance as well as in their music, everything was neat, polished and restrained.
The Beatles, on the other hand, played loud and wild, and looked scruffy and disorganized, like some aboriginal throwback. They had continued in the rock and roll style, which had been the fashion when they left Liverpool but was now dying out. If anything, they’d become even more rock and rollish, adding extra pounding, volume and wild ‘mak showing’ on stage. They had created in effect their own new sound. A sound which was light years away from the discreet Shadows. A sound which you had to run away and hide your ears from, or go as wild and ecstatic as the people producing it.
‘It was Hamburg that had done it,’ says John. ‘That’s where we’d really developed. To get the Germans going and keep it up for twelve hours at a time, we’d really had to hammer. We would never have developed as much if we’d stayed at home. We had to try anything that came into our heads in Hamburg. There was nobody to copy from. We played what we liked best. The Germans liked it, as long as it was loud.
‘But it was only back in Liverpool that we realized the difference and saw what had happened to us while everyone else was playing Cliff Richard shit.’
Their own passion and personalities, which were contagious and affected the audience, also helped. They had a new sound but it was being made by people who were like the Liverpool audiences, natural, unaffected, unsmooth, untarted up, unshow business.
Bob Wooler, who soon moved on from being the Litherland DJ to the Cavern DJ, was one of the first to rush into print with his analysis of the Beatles. This appeared just six months later in the summer of 1961 in a local Merseyside beat newspaper. He is summing up in this early 1961 period, when they first hit Liverpool after the Litherland Town Hall, long before they had any publicity or promotion of any sort:
‘Why do you think the Beatles are so popular? They resurrected original rock’n’roll music, the origins of which are to be found in American Negro singers. They hit the scene when it had been emasculated by figures like Cliff Richard. Gone was the drive that inflamed emotions. The Beatles exploded on a jaded scene. The Beatles were the stuff that screams were made of. Here was the excitement, both physical and aural, that symbolized the rebellion of youth.
‘Essentially a vocal act, hardly ever instrumental, they were independently minded, playing what they liked for kicks, kudos and cash. Privileged in having gained prestige and experience in Hamburg. Musically authoritative and physically magnetic, example the mean, moody magnificence of drummer, Pete Best – a sort of teenage Jeff Chandler. A remarkable variety of talented voices but when speaking, possess the same naivety of tone.
Rhythmic revolutionaries. An act which from beginning to end is a succession of climaxes.
A personality cult. Seemingly unambitious, yet fluctuating between self-assured and the vulnerable. Truly a phenomenon – and also a predicament to promoters! Such are the fantastic Beatles. I don’t think anything like them will happen again.’
In the New Year of 1961, other large ballroom dates followed their Litherland Town Hall success. In most places it ended in riots, especially when Paul sang ‘Long Tall Sally’, a standard rock number,
but done with tremendous beat and excitement. They were beginning to realize the effect they could have on an audience, and often made the most of it, until things got out of hand. Paul says that some of the early ballrooms were terrifying. ‘At the Grosvenor Ballroom in Wallasey, there would be 100 Wallasey lads all ready to fight 100 lads from Seacombe when things got going. They started one night before I realized what was happening and I tried to save my amp. An El Pico amp, it was my pride and joy at the time. One Ted grabbed me and said don’t move, son, or you’re fucking dead. The Hambledon Hall was another place there was often fights. They used fire extinguishers on each other one night there. When we played “Hully Gully”, that used to be one of the tunes which ended in fighting.’
Most of the ballrooms hired large numbers of bouncers to stop that sort of trouble. The bouncers also began to be used for another purpose.
‘I remember one hall we were at,’ says John. ‘There were so many people that we told each other that there must be other managers around and we’d get a lot of work out of it. What we didn’t know was that the management had laid on lots of bouncers to stop the other promoters getting near us. So nobody came to us, except this bloke from the management who said he liked us and would give us a long series of dates at £8 a night. It was a couple of quid more than we were getting anyway, so we were pleased.’
They could have made a lot more money from 1961 onwards because they were in demand and very gradually catching up on Rory Storm (Mr Showmaker, as they called him) as Liverpool’s leading group. But they didn’t have a manager and they didn’t really appreciate themselves what was happening to them. ‘It took us a while to realize how much better we’d become than the other groups,’
says George. ‘Then we began to see that we were getting big crowds everywhere. People were following us round, coming to see us personally, not just coming to dance.’
They were still picking on Stu and Pete Best, but there were no serious fights the way there had been in Hamburg. They used to argue instead over the best seat in the van after a show, or fight for food. There was often an argument about who should drive, because it was thought that the driver always had the best seat, instead of being crammed in with all the gear.
‘This sort of bickering was usually between me and George,’ says Paul, ‘as we were about the same age. John was older and the natural leader. George and I were very bitchy, arguing about who would drive. Later on when we had our own van, I’d rush to get the keys and get in the driving seat first. George would get in and say, “Heh, I thought I was driving. You drove last night.” I would say,
“Well, you’re not, are you?”’
Their successes at the various ballrooms around Merseyside naturally led to them being offered their own place, where they could be the resident group, where their fans would always know where to expect them. This, thanks to Bob Wooler, was the Cavern Club. They’d outgrown the Casbah coffee club, which was away from the main centre of Liverpool and very much a small local club.
The Cavern had for a long time been the main club for live music in the centre of Liverpool, but it had been purely for jazz. Even at the time of that article by Bob Wooler quoted above, written in the
The Cavern had for a long time been the main club for live music in the centre of Liverpool, but it had been purely for jazz. Even at the time of that article by Bob Wooler quoted above, written in the