Tony Bramwell’s remarkable life began in a postwar Liverpool suburb, where he was childhood friends with three of the Beatles long before they were famous. And by the time he caught up with George Harrison on the top of a bus going to check out ‘The Beatles, Direct from Hamburg’ – one of whom turned out to be George – Tony was well on his way to staying by them for every step of their meteoric rise.
If anything was needed taken care of, Tony Bramwell was the man the Beatles called, the man they knew they could trust. His story has been sought after for years, and now, here it is, full of untold adventures, detailing with an insider’s shrewd eye the Apple empire’s incomparable rise, Brian Epstein’s frolics, Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, Phil Spector’s eccentric behaviour, and new stories about Yoko Ono, Cilla Black, the Stones, and the life – his life.
From developing the first Beatles music videos to heading Apple Films, and from riding bikes and trading records with George Harrison to working and partying with everyone from the Beatles to Hendrix, Ray Charles to The Who, Tony’s real life did (and does) encompass a who’s who of rock.
He offers fresh insights into the Beatles’ childhoods and families, their early recordings and songwriting, the politics at Apple and Yoko’s pursuit of John, and her growing influence over the Beatles’ lives. And he reveals new information about the Shea Stadium concert footage, John Lennon’s late-night ‘escapes’, and much, much more. From the Cavern Club to the roofttop concert, from the first number one to the last, and from scraps of song lyrics to the famous Mr Kite circus poster, Tony Bramwell really did see it all.
Conversational, direct and above all, honest, the ultimate Beatles insider finally shares his own version of the frantic and glorious ascent of four boys from Liverpool who became rock and roll kings.
Magical Mystery Tours
Magical Mystery Tours
MY LIFE WITH THE BEATLES
TONY BRAMWELL
WITH ROSEMARY KINGSLAND
To my family and friends, with love
In memory of Roger Houghton.
Always courteous, kind and thoughtful, he was one of the publishing world’s true gentlemen.
prologue
It was a snowy night on December 27, 1960, when I got ready to go to a concert at Litherland Town Hall. I was on Christmas holidays from school and looking forward to seeing a new group that had been advertised on fliers glued to lampposts and hoardings. They were billed as THE BEATLES! and it said they were DIRECT FROM HAMBURG! Everybody in Liverpool knew that Gerry and the Pacemakers had just gone to Hamburg—as had the Silver Beetles—a place that sounded incredibly exotic to a young lad like me. But the fliers gave us no reason to think anything other than that these Beatles were a German group, and we presumed they were.
The number 81 double-decker bus, which made a stop at Litherland Town Hall, started in our suburb of Speke and went round a whole ring in Liverpool to the far side. I got on it that cold night at my local bus stop in Hunts Cross and, as usual, ran upstairs to sit right at the front. To my surprise, there was my old friend George Harrison, with his guitar next to him. He must have gotten on at his stop. I knew George well. I just hadn’t seen him for a few months, not since the days when he was a delivery boy on Saturday mornings for one of our local butchers, E. R. Hughes, who had a shop in Hunts Cross. They supplied George—the future vegetarian—with a big old bike, a rattling, black boneshaker that had originated before WW I. It had a large basket on the front, which George would fill with meat so he could deliver all the local orders, including my mum’s. He’d stop at our house for a bit of gossip, or a cup of tea and a slice of cake, and we’d discuss all the latest records. After work, George would come by occasionally to borrow records from me, or from a guy round the corner named Maurice Daniels, a drummer in a skiffle group. I used to lend Maurice records and he would lend his to George and so on, all of us swapping and sharing and talking records. Seven inches of black plastic with a hole in the middle. Life, magic.
Then, one day, George Harrison sort of disappeared. Time went by. Now, here he was again, on the 81 double-decker bus, wearing blue jeans and a black leather jacket. I felt suitably impressed and somewhat gauche in my smart little suit and tie. When George saw me, he grinned that lopsided smile of his.
“Hi, Tone, how are you?”
“Where you going, George?” I asked, and sat down next to him.
“Litherland Town Hall,” he told me. “We’re playing there tonight.”
That’s when it slowly dawned on me. George Harrison was one of those DIRECT FROM HAMBURG BEATLES!
“You’re the German group?” I asked, amazed.
George nodded. “Direct from Liverpool!” he said.
I jangled the five bob in my pocket and thought, Hey, I can almost buy a new record with this. I looked down at George’s guitar.
“Can I carry your guitar for you, George? So I can get in free?”
“Of course you can,” George said.
As the bus rumbled along, George and I chatted about this and that. But looking back on it now, it was a strangely moving moment, riding on the top deck of a double-decker bus, with a Beatle on his way to the first-ever Beatles gig in Liverpool. We could never have guessed in our wildest dreams, as we handed over our thruppences to the conductor, what was in store for George Harrison in terms of fame, wealth and adulation. But on that chilly night in Liverpool, that ocean of success still lay ahead in the distant future. If we had had a crystal ball instead of George’s guitar in a battered black case up there in the front of the bus, we might have seen huge stadiums filled with screaming fans across America, the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas, movie stars and yachts, and bowing to the Queen at Buckingham Palace. The list is almost endless.
But we saw none of that, George and I. We were just a couple of teenagers with our whole lives ahead of us, chatting about girls and records as we rode the bus around Liverpool two days after Christmas. The whole town was glowing with magic and celebration. As we looked at the lights and the sparkling trees in people’s windows, we had no notion that soon every day would seem like Christmas. That within two or three years our bomb-ravaged Liverpool would become famous around the world.
The number 81 was as familiar to us as fish and chips. George’s dad, Harry, was a driver on the 81 route. I don’t know if he was our driver that night, but we would often see him sitting up front in his worn serge uniform with the cap. He always had a smile and a wave for us, and often we didn’t have to pay. The idea that one day we would move away, and that vast estates in the country, ranches in America, apartments in New York and French chateaux would be home to my old mates would have seemed crazy. The idea that the River Mersey—just another muddy old river—would soon lend its name to Merseybeat, a bona fide genre in the history of music, would have made us laugh. We had no concept that Strawberry Fields, a wildflower wilderness where we hung out and played as kids, would be forever enshrined in millions of hearts. How could we have guessed that the name would be borrowed as a place of remembrance and pilgrimage in New York, to use John’s word—forever?
We had no clue that quiet night, riding the familiar old bus route, George and I, that we were about to go from the simple to the symphonic, with hometown places like Penny Lane and its rich, evocative characters living in, and living on, in the hearts of generations as if Shakespeare had set a play there. The idea that the humble, everyday goings-on in a scruffy Liverpool street could be set in sound and song was as far away as getting to heaven, which, according to Eddie Cochran, just took three steps. But then he wasn’t talking about barbers and firemen and bankers. He was talking about girls, and girls and music were all we ever talked of.
At the town hall, I carried Geor
ge’s guitar and walked with him through the stage door, then I wandered off to hang out in the hall to wait with the audience for the Beatles to appear. The hall was a smallish room, with a small stage and a few seats along the walls. A large glitter ball spun slowly in the middle of the ceiling, throwing dazzling patterns of light on dancers, walls and floor.
Legend has it the place was packed; it wasn’t, but the fans who had braved the freezing snow to get there made up for it in noise. The Beatles ran on stage, wearing jeans and leather jackets and pointy-toed cowboy boots, hair a bit looser than the old DA, but still flicked back and greased. There was John Lennon—our local juvenile delinquent—and my old cycling pal, Paul McCartney. Chas Newby, John’s friend from art school, was on bass that night because Stuart Sutcliffe, their original bass player, had decided to stay behind in Hamburg with his German girlfriend. Seated at the back on drums was Pete Best, the mean and moody one who made all the girls swoon. We all had his mum, Mo Best, to thank for opening the Casbah, one of the best clubs ever, in the basement of her rambling old house.
Despite their new name, to me, John and Paul were still the Quarrymen, the skiffle group who played the village halls doing their “Rock Island Line,” Lonnie Donegan stuff, their “Cumberland Gap,” “Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O” stuff. They’d gone a bit rock ’n’ roll with the Silver Beetles before they’d gone off to the trenches and we’d lost touch. Now, suddenly, they were a proper beat group with George and Pete Best, who I’d last seen around with the Blackjacks.
The Beatles were pretty good that night, tight and full of energy. Hamburg had made them grow up. They were told to mach shau in the clubs they played there and were almost literally thrown to the lions, being ordered to play for eight hours nonstop before a baying crowd that seemed to consist largely of drunken sailors who wanted to fight. If they stopped making a show of it bottles flew at the stage and there was a punch-up equivalent to any in a Western movie.
On stage that long-ago night in 1960 the audience seemed to sense that the Beatles were different from the other Liverpool bands. They seemed more aware, they had an edge, you felt they were dangerous. Part of the mystique was that they were different. You could jive when they played R&B, or Elvis hits—even though they changed the rhythm, which was confusing—but it was almost impossible to dance when they played their own songs. It was totally the wrong rhythm, so we’d just cluster around the stage and watch.
Despite the so-so attendance that December night, it was a great show. But no one screamed. (Girls didn’t start screaming en masse until the spring of 1963 when the Beatles exploded out of Liverpool with an energy that had never been known before.) In those early days the girls just sat by the stage and drooled. Where the lads in the audience were concerned, there was too much unrequited testosterone flying around. To compensate, after a gig they got into fights. It was pell-mell bedlam—one of the reasons why, traditionally, pop bands were banned from posh venues—while the girls would go off arm in arm in giggling groups to their homes.
I waited while Brian Kelly, the promoter who had organized the gig, paid the Beatles. He counted it into their hands, and then they went into a huddle while they split it between them—twenty-four shillings each. Brian said they’d gone down so well, he’d like to book them again. By the time we got outside, the crowds had thinned and the bus stop was almost empty. The Beatles were on a high, laughing and talking excitedly about how now that they were back and with bookings to look forward to, things were looking up.
We grew cold waiting at the bus stop and we stamped our feet and turned up the collars of our jackets. None of us had gloves, and I remember how cold my hands were, carrying George’s guitar. We were glad to jump into the warm, smoky fug of the last bus home. Talking and laughing, we stumbled upstairs to the front where the panorama of the snowy streets and Christmas lights spread wide. The Beatles were still up, adrenaline still pumping, as they discussed the wild time they’d had in Germany. To them, I was a new audience, albeit of just one.
I asked, “What’s it like being back?”
“Fucking fabulous!” John replied.
Paul said, “It’s great to have a hot bath at home, instead of washing in a cracked old sink in the Top Ten Club toilets.”
I think they were glad to be back so they could have a rest, eat familiar food, take regular baths and get their laundry done. They acted like hardened rock ’n’ rollers, but at heart they were middle-class boys who liked home, friends and family.
The bus trundled past Heyman’s Green, where the Casbah Club was—Pete Best’s stop—into Childwall and posh Queen’s Drive, home to Brian Epstein from the record shop where we all bought our records. John and Paul got off, leaving just George and me.
Sometimes I wonder if I could ever have imagined, from those days of catching buses to gigs, that ordinary places in the center of Liverpool would become iconic images known the world over. That John and Paul would turn our childhood haunts into songs that one day I would help to capture on film. The idea that one day I would work for them, tour with them and promote their records didn’t seem real. The idea that I would go from handing them their modest pay packets on a Friday night, to reading on one of Paul’s bank statements two years later the dizzy figure of one million pounds—six zeros—seemed utterly preposterous.
I smile. I really do. I catch myself doing it. Remembering how, just after we decamped to London, by February 1967 when I was still twenty, I was directing the symphonic “A Day in the Life” on 35 mm film, the kind used for Hollywood movies. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Donovan took turns with handheld cameras. That night at Abbey Road, a producer named George Martin would instruct the orchestra thus: “Start quiet, end loud.”
On a quiet December night six years earlier I had only carried George’s guitar into Litherland Town Hall so that I could get in free to a Beatles gig, well before their lives got loud.
When I started to work on this book, just like those haunting words that open Daphne du Maurier’s novel—“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again”—I dreamed I was in Liverpool again. In sleep, I went back in time to that faraway night on the 81 bus riding home with the Beatles through the empty streets. We were all having a wonderful time, but when I looked at the reflection in the bus window, John and George weren’t there. But somehow they felt close, as they and all the Beatles always do with me, and outside the window, snowflakes whirled and all the fairy lights on all the Christmas trees along the route blended into one.
PART I
Liverpool 1940–1963
1
Liverpool, the grimy northern town that John, Paul, George, Ringo and I were born and grew up in, was a dynamic port full of sea shanties, sailors and music. The ancient town had long been a melting pot of musical influences and traditions. Jazz, soul, blues, Irish music, sea shanties, folk and pop all blended from a dozen directions to create a unique sound. African music was introduced when the port became a center for the slave trade in the early eighteenth century. Scandinavian sailors, selling whale oil and salt cod, brought in a tradition of music that went back far beyond the Vikings and influenced all Celtic music. In fact, the slang word for a Liverpool citizen was “Scouse,” the name of the cheap and popular Norwegian sailors’ stew, made of vegetables and ships’ biscuits with whatever scraps of meat or fish were available. Scouse was what poor people crowded into dockside slums ate as their main meal, and Scousers were what they became. (All the Beatles considered themselves Scousers, rather than the more grandiose Liverpudlians.)
Most importantly for the tradition of music along Merseyside, Liverpool was the gateway to England from Ireland. This was the route by which many Irish immigrants came when escaping poverty or famine, the largest influx being in the 1840s during the Great Famine when over a million shipped across to Liverpool alone, swelling a population that previously had been a mere ten thousand or so. By the turn of the century, Liverpool had the largest Irish population of any English town. Irish music
, with the sound of the fiddle, Uilleann pipes, tin whistle, a handheld drum called a bodran and Celtic harmonies, could be heard in almost every home and bar, particularly among the dockside slums.
The transatlantic shipping trade took Liverpool music to the eastern seaboard of the United States and, significantly, brought it back, changed, enlivened and made more commercial with the emergence of pop records. In fact, like sailors, the music shipped in and out on almost every tide. By World War II, when American soldiers and airmen were stationed at huge bases in Merseyside, the exchange of music was well established. In the wartime years, GIs brought all the top hits of the 1940s, with stars like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Doris Day and Ella Fitzgerald—but also Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Western Swing music from Texas and folk heroes like Woody Guthrie. After the war, merchant seamen and ships’ stewards, like John Lennon’s recalcitrant father, Fred, continued to bring in the latest American records.
The boys who became the Beatles were born during the Second World War when bombs were raining down. I was born at the end. But for all of us it was a period of great change, deprivation and excitement. Our lives were influenced by the widespread ruin and by the lean times and hard rationing that followed.
Liverpool was a target for enemy planes because it was the main receiving port for vital war supplies from America. Night after night, while people ran for the Anderson shelters, the drone of the Junkers 88s and Dornier bombers would get louder, searchlights speared into the black sky and antiaircraft guns started firing. At times, all the sky would be brightly illuminated with radiant but deadly chandelier flares that slowly drifted down on their parachutes. With the docks, shipping, factories and railways lit up by flares, the German bombs would begin to fall. The worst period of all was during the so-called Liverpool Blitz, which started on May Day—May 1, 1941—and lasted for seven consecutive days and nights. It was the heaviest bombing of the war in Britain outside London. Bombs hit a munitions ship on the night of May 4, causing the greatest explosion ever heard in Liverpool. Three thousand people were killed and eleven thousand homes completely destroyed that week alone. The Mersey estuary was so clogged from shore to shore with smoking, ruined ships that nothing could leave or enter. Seventy percent of the housing was destroyed. The relentless bombing, the grinding poverty and the overcrowding forged a ruined city of such squalor and citizens of such courage that after the war, there was only one way to go and that was up: to rebuild, expand and start over.
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