by Ken McNab
‘He joined me on the stage and played underneath my vocal,’ said Yoko. ‘He played an incredibly creative avant-garde guitar that no one in the world had ever heard before and since. The audience didn’t react to it. I was probably the only musician who was totally impressed by it.’ By any stretch of musical imagination, it was a bizarre performance, light years away from The Beatles. After about twenty minutes, in the spirit of the event, Stevens and Tchicai gingerly joined in before the whole thing wrapped some nine minutes later.
As it happened, the entire performance was recorded by the Cambridge University Tape Recording Society. Lennon and Yoko’s segment was also recorded by Apple engineers and would be released the following month on the experimental album Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With The Lions. Sadly, it was not filmed. As a piece of cinéma vérité it would have been fascinating.
Barnett, however, was furious at the way the duo had seemingly hijacked the entire event for their own egotistical purposes.
I contacted Barnett to ask him for his version of events. Initially, he held firm to a near fifty-year vow of silence on the matter while making clear the fact that his anger had not dissipated in any way. But my correspondence spurred him to go on the record for the first time.
‘I do not have to tell you how disgraceful John’s attitude was and Yoko’s is,’ he wrote. ‘What prompts me to open up now, forty-seven years later, is that every so often I am approached to tell the story. Till now I have done so only to a limited extent. A trawl through the web brings up references in books, interviews and online, a few all right, most garbled, others plain wrong. So there is reason to set the record straight.’
Much of his disdain springs from the fact that Apple’s subsequent release featured only the Lennons, with the rest of the cast reduced to the role of extras at what, after all, was their own show. And when Lennon and Yoko released the recording, they resisted all efforts by Barnett for a contribution to help offset the £130 losses the event had incurred. Then, as he tried to organise the release of the tapes on a double album through Polydor, the exercise was capsized by wave after wave of record-company red tape.
Fifty years down the line, the upshot is Barnett never received a penny but still retains ownership of the original audio reels of the show. His recollections, however, are at odds with those of a number of other witnesses. In a 2010 interview for the Cambridge News, Tchicai betrayed none of Barnett’s antipathy: ‘John was very pleasant, quiet, calm. Both of them were like this. I remember seeing them come in an old Rolls-Royce with a chauffeur wearing funny clothes, it was some kind of military uniform. I also recall John had a big alarm clock and when they started performing, he set it to ring at a certain time . . . that was the signal for the end of their part.’
Wingman he may have been to Yoko, but the significance of the occasion never left Lennon. Cambridge ’69 may have been as far from his rock ’n’ roll roots as it was possible to get, but it afforded him a tantalising glimpse of an alternative future. In 1980, days before his death, he told the BBC’s Andy Peebles: ‘That was the first time I had appeared un-Beatled. I just hung around and played feedback and people got very upset when they finally recognised me. “What’s he doing here?” It’s always “stay in your bag”. So when she tried to rock, they said, “What’s she doing here?” And when I went with her and tried to be the instrument and not project, like a sort of [Ike] Turner to her Tina, only her Tina was different, avant-garde Tina – well, even some of the jazz guys got upset.’
In another interview, he credited Yoko’s freeform approach with liberating him as a guitarist. ‘What she’d done for my guitar playing was to free it the way she’d freed her voice from all the restrictions. I was always thinking, “Well, I can’t play like Eric Clapton or George Harrison or BB King.” But then I gave up trying to play like that and just played whatever I could, whatever way I could, to match it to her voice.’
Paul McCartney found out about the Cambridge performance the same way as everybody else – by reading about it in the papers the next day. As he read the reports he couldn’t help but feel a stab of pain. News of Lennon’s impromptu stage return offered hope to all those promoters who had long ago accepted that The Beatles would never again play live. Quickest out the traps was Sid Bernstein, the American former GI who had risked everything on booking them for the Carnegie Hall in the days when they were still an unknown quantity across the pond and Beatlemania was picking up speed. The ‘sold-out’ notices at their gigs there told him he had scored the biggest act since Elvis, and he subsequently promoted their stadium shows at Shea in 1965 and 1966. Bernstein was adamant that gave him an ‘in’ with the band and even though three years had passed, he reckoned he had first refusal. Midway through March, he flew to London and turned up unannounced at Apple, convinced that his charm offensive would succeed. In his pocket he carried a $4m cheque for four gigs in Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. But Bernstein never even got past first base. None of the band would meet him.
‘The Beatles are the biggest draw in the world but they are letting their fans down by refusing to play their new songs in public,’ he said that month. ‘It would be a bigger comeback than Elvis.’
Of a more pressing nature was the fate of the moribund tapes for ‘Get Back’, which were still languishing in the Apple basement. A decision had to be made – either scrap them for good or attempt a last-ditch salvage job.
On Monday, 10 March, Lennon and McCartney delivered the same ultimatum to Glyn Johns. When he said he would take on the challenge, they promptly handed over a boxful of tapes. ‘I had to do it,’ recalled Johns. ‘Picture the scene. You are there with John Lennon and Paul McCartney and they are asking me to bring some kind of order from chaos. It was a huge task but you just couldn’t say no, could you? I have always loved making records and that was what they were asking me to do.’
In the meantime, McCartney and Harrison were drawn back to the studio along with Preston to help an old mate. Jackie Lomax, who played with Merseyside band The Undertakers, had been one of the first names on Apple’s A&R roster. McCartney, Harrison and Starr had played on his first Apple single, the Harrison-penned rocker ‘Sour Milk Sea’, which had flopped. With his debut album, Is This What You Want?, due for release, a new single was needed. Harrison had briefly considered giving Lomax the now lyrically complete ‘Something’ before changing his mind and deciding finally to offer it to Joe Cocker, who included it on his second album after it became the standout track on Abbey Road.
On 11 March, McCartney and Harrison set aside their business differences to play on Lomax’s cover of The Coasters’ ‘Thumbin’ A Ride’, a favourite of McCartney’s, the Beatle reckoning it would be perfect for Lomax. The second song committed to tape was ‘Going Back To Liverpool’, which, however, would remain locked in the vaults for years. McCartney’s decision to play on the session later seemed strange – he was due to get married the next day.
McCartney arrived at Marylebone Registry Office to do the decent thing by the now four months pregnant Linda. It was the third Beatle shotgun wedding after Cynthia Lennon and Maureen Starkey. Linda was a reluctant bride, slightly fearful over the future direction her life would take as a Beatle wife and the bitchiness her new status would attract from jealous fans. She herself acknowledged: ‘I was an unfashionable woman who married a Beatle.’
McCartney had already tipped off a select few friendly journalists about the occasion before Apple made it official with a press release to catch the final editions of the Fleet Street papers. Years later, Paul offered up a possible explanation for his decision to head to the Apple Studios the night before his wedding and leave his bride-to-be at home, listening with her young daughter Heather to the catcalls from the small knot of fans gathered outside.
In Many Years from Now, he admitted: ‘We were crazy. We had a big argument the night before we got married and it was nearly called off. We were very up and down, quite funky to the eventual image of “Twenty-five
years of married bliss! Aren’t they lucky for people in showbiz?”’
Then again, it could have been his reported last-minute purchase of a £12 wedding ring that ticked Linda off.
At the wedding, the only major hitch was the late arrival by train from Birmingham of Paul’s best man, his brother Michael. When the couple emerged as man and wife, after ‘giggling’ their way through the ceremony, they were met by dozens of sobbing fans. One told the BBC: ‘I just had to be here, but I still can’t really believe it. Paul was always my favourite.’
None of the other Beatles were invited. McCartney claimed he simply couldn’t remember if he had told them. ‘It didn’t seem important,’ he said in 2001 during a family-produced Wingspan. ‘It was really about the two of us.’ In Many Years from Now, he was more candid. ‘We were all pissed off with each other. We certainly weren’t a gang anymore.’ Harrison certainly knew since he and Pattie were invited to the lunch that followed at the Ritz. It’s inconceivable that the others weren’t aware of his plans.
As it turned out, while the McCartneys were tying the knot, John and Yoko were at Abbey Road, finessing Life With The Lions, Starr was still tied up with his film and Harrison was putting the finishing touches to the Lomax songs. At the Ritz, the guests included Princess Margaret and her husband Lord Snowdon. But Harrison’s plans for the day were sent into disarray when a phone call from Pattie was put through to the Apple studio.
She was at Kinfauns, their bungalow home in Esher, Surrey, playing genial hostess to a group of visitors from Scotland Yard’s drug squad. She recalled the events in her memoir Wonderful Tonight: ‘Suddenly I heard a lot of cars on the gravel in the drive – far too many for it to be just George. My first thought was that maybe Paul and Linda wanted to party after the wedding. Then the bell rang. I opened the door to find a policewoman and a dog standing outside. At that moment the back doorbell rang and I thought: “Oh, my God, this is so scary! I’m surrounded by police.”
‘The man in charge introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher from Scotland Yard and handed me a piece of paper. I knew why he was there: he thought we had drugs, and he said he was going to search the house. In they came, about eight policemen through the front, another five or six through the back and there were more in the greenhouse. The policewoman said she would follow me while the others searched and didn’t let me out of her sight.
‘I said: ‘‘Why are you doing this? We don’t have any drugs. I’m going to phone my husband.” I rang George at Apple. “George, it’s your worst nightmare. Come home.” ’
The officers clearly thought the Harrisons would be at Paul’s wedding. The timing was not a coincidence.
After conferring with Derek Taylor, Harrison calmly told Pattie to let the police do what they had to do. But by the time he arrived home, he was furious. And when he glimpsed a newspaper photographer lurking in the garden, it only confirmed his suspicions of a fit-up. As he marched into his house, it quickly became clear that the police, using a sniffer dog called, with no hint of irony, Yogi had found what they came for. A large chunk of cannabis, discovered in a shoe, would serve as Exhibit A when the matter came to court.
Pilcher had already busted Mick Jagger, Brian Jones and Donovan, as well as Lennon and Yoko the previous year. National treasures or not, The Beatles were no longer protected from the law.
Taylor recalled: ‘I was with George in the office when that call came through. It was the end of a long day at Apple. Pattie rang and said, “They’re here – the law is here,” and we knew what to do by then. We phoned Release’s lawyer, Martin Polden [Release had been formed in London to provide legal assistance to those who had been busted for drug offences]. We had a routine: he came round to Apple, and we all went down to Esher, where the police were well ensconced by then – and I stood bail for George and Pattie. They went off to the police station. We were all extremely indignant because it was the day of Paul’s wedding, a poor way to celebrate it.
‘George kept his dope in the box where dope went, and his joss sticks went in the joss stick box. He was a man who ran an orderly late-Sixties household, with beautiful things and some nice stuff to smoke. In my opinion he didn’t have to be busted because he was doing nobody any harm. I still believe what they did was an intrusion into his personal life.’
Harrison never denied having drugs at home but it didn’t require a leap of faith for him to believe the hash had been planted. He said, ‘I’m a tidy man. I keep my socks in the sock drawer and stash in the stash box. It’s not mine.’ After being released from a local police station, the Harrisons returned home before heading to the McCartneys’ wedding reception.
When he narrated the day’s events to his fellow guests, no one could quite believe it. But what is the point of being a Beatle if you can’t use your fame to your advantage? Spotting Princess Margaret, George made a beeline for her. ‘We got busted today,’ he told her. ‘Can you do anything?’ Royal rebel she may have been, but even the party-loving Margaret knew where to draw the establishment line. Possibly fearing headlines of the ‘Queen’s sister helps Beatle George escape drug charge’ variety, she grabbed Snowdon by the arm and left.
The affair strengthened Harrison’s conviction that it was time to quit The Beatles. He told the Daily Express’s David Wigg that month: ‘All I’m doing is acting out the part of Beatle George and we’re all acting out our parts. Even if it’s being a Beatle for the rest of my life, it’s still only a temporary thing.’ He would ultimately be proved correct on both counts.
*
David Nutter instantly recognised the voice on the other end of the line when the phone rang early at his London photographic studio on Wednesday, 19 March. It belonged to Peter Brown, one of the key movers and shakers in the days when London was still swinging. Brown was among a select group, including Cilla Black and her husband Bobby Willis, who had financially backed Nutter’s brother Tommy, a Savile Row tailor whose flamboyant fashion sense was his golden ticket to the capital’s showbiz elite. As a director of Apple, and Brian Epstein’s former right-hand man, Brown’s biggest calling card was his membership of The Beatles’ high command.
Nutter told me: ‘Peter called me up at my studio. He just said, “I need you to come to Gibraltar tomorrow and bring your camera.” I had no idea what it was for, but I had no reason to distrust Peter or have any reservations. I knew that Apple would probably take care of all the expenses et cetera. Yes, I was obviously intrigued but Peter made it clear that secrecy was paramount and he didn’t want to say too much on the phone. And the reason for that was simple . . . I think that my phone was tapped.
‘I was involved with Oz magazine [a radical, late-Sixties, left-wing publication] and I always got the feeling I could hear clicks on the phone. They were tapping everybody’s phone, probably even The Beatles’. So maybe Peter sensed that and thought it was better not to go into any details. But it was all very cloak and dagger.’
The reason for the covert arrangements became clear at 8.30 the following morning when Nutter stepped off a privately chartered Hawker Siddeley jet piloted by Captain Trevor Copleston and onto the tarmac at Gibraltar. In the lounge he came face to face with Brown. Next to him were a couple dressed in matching cream outfits, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who was also sporting a wide-brimmed floppy white hat. It was only then that Nutter was told why he was there. The couple were getting married – in secret, of course – and his job was to record the civil ceremony for posterity. Brown would be on best man duties, just eight days after he had acted as a witness at the McCartneys’ wedding.
Nutter said, ‘I was in shock. I couldn’t believe it. My brother knew John and made clothes for him. His shop was opposite Apple. So I suppose I got the job through him in a way. But that was the first time I had met John. At that time John was probably the most famous person in the world but I never was very starstruck. I was never in awe of everybody really because I was used to meeting lots of famous people. John was just a nice, North Co
untry English person. He was very down to earth and we could all have a laugh. He was lovely. I was very pleasantly surprised at how non-starry he was.’
Lennon and Yoko had spent a few days in Paris’s Plaza Athénée Hotel before apparently deciding on the spur of the moment to follow McCartney’s example. ‘Intellectually,’ he said, ‘we didn’t believe in getting married, but one doesn’t love someone just intellectually. For two people marriage still has the edge over just living together.’ More likely, they were both just jealous of Paul and Linda’s wedding-day publicity.
Lennon’s initial idea was for his wedding to be blessed by a suitably qualified captain on a cross-channel ferry called The Dragon, which sailed from Southampton. But that was swiftly scrapped due to difficulties with Yoko’s visa while European countries such as France and Holland required a minimum two-week residency for any couple wishing to get hitched on a whim. Brown, in tandem with Apple’s expensive lawyers, brokered the perfect solution. In Gibraltar there was no need for anyone to abide by any outmoded residency requirements. All they needed were passports and the necessary papers. It was the last place on earth anyone would expect to see John and Yoko getting hitched. Lennon said, ‘We chose Gibraltar because it is quiet, British and friendly.’
With Brown and Nutter in tow, the wedding party made its way to the British consulate. After a brief wait, with Lennon nervously smoking a cigarette, the elderly registrar, Cecil Wheeler, carried out the formalities before pronouncing them man and wife. Nutter was roped in as an official witness, his name being misspelt on the marriage certificate.
The couple, of course, knew their cover would soon be blown. Some local photographers, spotting a financial opening, rushed to picture the newlyweds before they could board the plane that would take them to Paris. The cat was quickly out of the bag. Nutter joined the Lennons on the flight to Paris, his reward being dozens of exclusive pictures of a surreal day.
