Magical Mystery Tours

by Tony Bramwell

Yes, I was an early roadie, particularly for Gerry and the Pacemakers, until they suddenly disappeared off to Hamburg.

  We knew Allan Williams saw something in the Silver Beetles, and he had been busy. He’d been down to London looking for work for them, where he bumped into Bruno Koschmeider again, this time in the Two I’s coffee bar. Bruno had discounted Liverpool as a pool of talent, but went to London looking for acts to take back to Germany. This time, Allan got through to him and as soon as he returned to Liverpool, he told the Silver Beetles that he had a booking at the Kaiserkeller but they needed to sort out a proper, full-time drummer, not someone they picked up at the very last moment. (As last resorts at various times, they had even hired a Salvation Army drummer and a bent-kneed old geezer who only knew the “Gay Gordons” and the “Death March” from being the drummer in a military pipe band.)

  Pete Best looked like a real rock star with his dark good looks, his leather jackets and tight jeans and his Elvis quiff, which had earned him a huge following. The band decided that if anyone could help them succeed in virgin territory, it was Pete. They dangled the bait of Hamburg, and that was all it took to steal Pete away from the Blackjacks, the group he was drumming for. They were all set, and off they went. Their lineup was John, Paul, George, Stuart Sutcliffe (a fragile-looking art student in John’s year) on a bass he was still learning to play and had bought from the proceeds of a big art prize he had won—and Pete Best. For Pete, it was the worst thing that could have happened, because it ended up breaking his heart.

  So it was just after the Christmas of 1960 when I read in the Liverpool Echo that a new band called “The Beatles” were appearing direct from Germany at Litherland Town Hall on December 27, with Bob Wooler, a young Liverpool deejay, acting as master of ceremonies. I decided to go—and found myself on top of that number 81 double-decker bus with George, on his way to that first real Beatles gig. From then on I was sort of known as “George’s mate.”

  For me things had really changed while they’d been away in Hamburg. I’d grown tall, filled out. It’s amazing what a year or so can do in the life of a boy. I went from being a scruffy little kid far beneath John’s dignity to notice, to a bona fide teenager of fifteen with an opinion and a Brylcreem quiff.

  “You can carry my fucking guitar too if you like!” John would say to me, in a way that only John could do.

  They were so successful that night that the promoter, Brian Kelly, booked them for thirty-six gigs, starting with another one a week later at Litherland Town Hall on January 5. They haggled hard and their fee was upped to seven pounds ten shillings. Chas Newby, the bass player who temporarily replaced Stuart Sutcliffe, dropped out in order to return to art school, so that gave the remaining four Beatles the princely sum of thirty-seven shillings and sixpence each. It was those gigs that firmly established them as a charismatic group with a growing army of besotted fans. In a year I went to about three hundred Beatles gigs, from one end of the Mersey to another. I never stopped.

  4

  None of them had regular day jobs, but officially the Beatles were now professional musicians. Gigging was what they earned their money from, even though they were always flat broke. Their organization and timekeeping was still a bit shambolic because finding transport was always hit-and-miss to start with, and they had no roadies. In fact, I was the roadie, the one and only. If they were going to Manchester for instance, it was like, “Hey, let’s get George’s mate to help us with the gear, eh?”

  Neil Aspinall was an early member of our little clique who also helped out. He was six months younger than Paul and had been in his class at the Liverpool Institute. (George was a year below them but he and Paul used to go home on the bus together, so they became friends, despite the age difference—which incidentally, was always with them. Right to the end, Paul always saw George as “our kid.”)

  Neil was training to be an accountant with a mail-order correspondence course, though his heart was in rock ’n’ roll. Somehow he managed to lay his hands on eighty pounds to buy a van, a little Bedford, then he got an old Thames van, followed by a succession of crap vans which were always breaking down and off we’d go, with Neil driving, hoping that we would get to the gig on time, if at all. It was all very hairy and exciting. He was living with the Best family in the big Victorian house above the Casbah Club and he and Pete would go straight home with the gear so it would be locked up safely, while the rest of us bad people would stay out and go to all-night drinking clubs like the Blue Angel (known as “The Blue”) or to one of the Chinese caffs, the kind of place where they probably had heroin and hookahs in the back room behind a bead curtain, the kind of place where if they’d had heroin and hookahs, John would have been in like a shot because he was always like a moth dicing with flames: he wanted to get burned. We felt it was very daring to drink Scotch and Coke or occasionally, rum and black, which I think was introduced to Liverpool by sailors. People thought we only drank Scotch and Coke to be pretentious when we came to London and hung out at the Scotch of St. James’s, but we were into it long before. I’m not sure where it started. I could even have introduced it to our group, from the American family who were our neighbors in Hunts Cross.

  The Macmillans lived four doors away from us. Charlie Macmillan was a captain in the USAF, at Burtonwood, one of the huge air bases along the Mersey. He was a nice man, who would bring home the latest American comics and records—ones we couldn’t get in England, including some obscure labels and artists we’d never heard of—to be shared by his kids and my brothers and me (and of course these records would be passed along the grapevine to George, Paul and John). There’d be chocolate and bubble gum during the years when such things were seriously rationed in Britain and almost impossible to get, and endless supplies of Coca-Cola, all from the PX stores. In the summer, the Macmillans would have barbecues in their garden and as well as friends from the base; they’d ask the neighbors. I can remember the big bottles of Scotch and the cases of Coke and even ice—which was in short supply among most Brits in the fifties and even sixties—that went to make these exotic American drinks. I can still hear the ice tinkling in the glass and the smell of newly mown grass mingling with meat sizzling on the outdoor grill. To me, Scotch and Coke seemed terribly grown-up and exotic—but then, I was growing up fast and sprouted several inches in a year, so I looked older than I was.

  It was during this period that I got a part-time job working on a farm. It all came about because I had a pony that I kept in a field on the outskirts of Hunts Cross. Sometimes, I’d help the farmer feed the animals, or with mucking out, or with the hay, all of which I loved, so when the opportunity came to work on a larger farm near Halewood, I grabbed it. I wasn’t paid a lot, about ten bob a week, but it was fun. The farm was owned by Frank Parker, a very forward-looking man. He had dairy cows and fields of vegetables, wheat and hay, and all the latest equipment to service it, from electronic milking parlors to pea-podding and fast-freezing machinery for packs of garden peas that he supplied to the first supermarkets. It was my job to feed the hens twice a day. I’d rush over there on my bicycle before school in the morning, pour out the split peas, wheat and linseed and do the same again after school. On weekends and during the summer holidays I was there from dawn to dusk. I drove the tractors and baled the hay and anything else that had to be done. It became my ambition to be a farmer and I applied to agricultural college, which you could go to before university age. Part of this was my passion for driving. I loved handling the farm machinery, especially riding around on the tractors, and despite my youth and marked lack of a license, had first got into motorbikes when I was twelve or thirteen. One pound would buy an old wreck from a junkyard and our gang would fix them, get spares, and make them go, then we’d race around farm fields.

  As we got older we were more biker rockers than Hell’s Angels. We were a gang of my brothers and friends from school, just kids together, hanging out on the corner on our bikes, looking cool, eyeing the girls. We had some exciting times.
On weekends or during holidays, we’d roar down to the docks and take the ferry across the Mersey to seaside places like New Brighton or Hoylake. Sometimes, we’d go into North Wales for the day, or to Rhyl, where my auntie’s house was.

  None of the Beatles had motorbikes. George hated them—though he was once photographed on one—but I’d offer to give him lifts to gigs and rehearsals and he’d reluctantly get on the back. We didn’t wear helmets. They were sissy things. One rainy day I had a bad crash down by the docks, where railway lines and tram tracks crossed old cobbles. A car came out of a side road and in avoiding it, I skidded on the wet cobbles and my wheel got stuck in a track. I was in the hospital for weeks with broken elbows, a broken leg and a fractured skull.

  It seemed a strange life I was leading, on the one hand at school, playing sports, riding my pony, working on the farm, being healthy and outdoors, and on the other, holed up in smoky dungeons and dance halls, drinking Scotch and Coke. Girls came into it too, but I was still young and not a sex fiend like John and Paul. On the whole, not many girls my age went all the way. They had a dreadful fear of pregnancy. We had our own fears too, the horror of getting a girl in trouble and having to leave school and get married. So it was more a matter of walking them home and hoping they would let you get away with something forbidden. I was still very shy, so for me at least that something was not much to shout about.

  John’s first serious girlfriend, Linda—known as Louie—came from Allerton like John. They were dating before he met Cynthia and I got to see him hanging out with her quite a lot. She was a pretty girl but John dumped her when he went to art school. Paul’s girl, Dorothy Rohne, lasted longer. She even moved into a bedsit next to Cynthia and the two shared more than rollers, stockings and coffee. It seemed to me that they shared their fears and dreams over these two wild youths they were trying to tame and snare.

  George’s very first girlfriend was Iris Caldwell, when he was fourteen and she was twelve. She used to stuff her bra with cottonwool, and all the lads fancied her, but George was her sweetheart. They didn’t do much more than play kissing games in the living room of the family home in Broadgreen Road. As with Mo Best, Vi Caldwell—“Ma”—was the attraction. She would welcome all the local kids in and make chip butties or bacon sandwiches for them at any hour of the night. Her home became our teenage hangout. Iris’s brother Alan, of the Texans, became Rory Storm of the Hurricanes. He even changed their address to Broadgreen Road, Stormsville.

  Paul also started going out with Iris in 1961 when he spotted her all grown up and stunning, twisting energetically away at the Tower Ballroom where the Beatles were booked. She was working there as a professional dancer, glamorously fetched out in black fishnets and stilettos. I’d often stop to chat with her when I went to the Tower because we’d known each other for ages. But when Paul saw her, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. When he asked her out, she said, “Don’t you recognize me? I’m Iris Caldwell.” They dated on and off for a couple of years, finally breaking up when he went to London and fell for Jane Asher. Iris married Shane Fenton—who became glam rocker, Alvin Stardust.

  I suspect George was a virgin before he went to Hamburg, but he certainly wasn’t when they returned. Like all the Beatles, who were considered sex machines by this time, whether they were or not, George could pull women by the time they returned. However, he was always very insecure and shy, and it took him ages to make a move. John was also very shy, but he was loud and aggressive to make up for it and girls just flocked to him. Later, it didn’t seem to matter that he and Ringo couldn’t drive. In fact, they didn’t get licenses for years, but it didn’t stop either of them. With or without a license, John was a dreadful driver. And he refused to wear his glasses, which made it worse. George pulled his first real bird when he was eighteen, during one of the breaks from Hamburg. She was a strawberry blonde called Bernadette O’Farrell, a real stunner to look at, and a very nice girl into the bargain, the kind of girl you really could take home to meet your mum. We were all amazed because back then everybody wanted a girlfriend who looked like Brigitte Bardot, and lucky old George had landed a Bardot lookalike. None of us knew how he had done it because he wasn’t what you would call good at chatting girls up. He was a dark horse, more laid back and less pushy than the others, but I suspect the real reason he snapped up Bernadette from right under their noses was that he was the only one back then with a driver’s license. Long after George moved on and left her behind, Bernadette remained a loyal Beatle fan. For years she ran the Beatles Museum in Liverpool until the National Trust bought it out.

  Pete Best became a kind of manager for the Beatles simply because the Bests had a telephone and someone was always around to take a message. Most of our families had telephones by the early 1960s, but they were so expensive, teenagers weren’t encouraged to use them. Generally, if we wanted to get in touch with our mates we’d cycle round, or send a message via someone else who said they’d pass it on, or I would zoom round on my motorbike. In order to get bookings further afield, or to be booked, a manned telephone was a necessity. John, who always saw himself as the nominal leader of the group, couldn’t take messages at the scruffy little bedsit he was now sharing with Cynthia Powell, his unlikely girlfriend. She was also an unlikely art student.

  I knew Cyn as well as it was possible to know her, given how shy she was. She’d be at all the Beatles gigs, sitting at the back or to one side, sipping a drink and not talking to anyone. People said that John was wildly jealous, but it never occurred to me that he was. I’d nod and say something to Cyn, and she’d smile, and that would be about it. She was like a nervous fluffy Angora rabbit around John. Nicely brought up and sweetly pretty, she wore the standard middle-class uniform of twinsets and pearls. When she fell hard for John, daringly she bleached her hair blond and did it like Bardot—and she looked stunning. She switched to the Paris Left Bank look of big sweaters and fishnet stockings but her amazing new look didn’t seem to lend her much confidence. With the change in her appearance, there also came an unexpected and tragic change in her circumstances. Her father died of cancer and her newly widowed mother, finding it hard to make ends meet, rented out their comfortable family home in posh Hoylake and went to Canada to become a nanny.

  The Beatles returned to Germany in April 1961 to play at the Top Ten Club. Technically homeless and on holiday from art school, in June Cynthia and Dorothy Rhone, Paul’s current girlfriend, went to Hamburg. John and Cyn stayed with Astrid and Stuart, while Paul and Dot moved into a bungalow by the docks, owned by Rosa, the obliging cleaning lady at the Indra nightclub where they played. Cynthia was stunned by the dangerous life the Beatles were living, with drugs and fights every night in the clubs, a new world that she didn’t find that exciting, although she tried to fit in for John’s sake.

  On her return to Liverpool, Cynthia braved the dragon’s lair to move in with Mimi. This was surprising and, not unsurprisingly, didn’t work out. Mimi was too house-proud, too possessive of John to share him. In tears after a particularly snappy outburst from Mimi, Cynthia fled, to rent a squalid little bedsit close in the city center, which no amount of scrubbing and painting improved. Not that John cared when he returned from Germany in early July. Having a free central place to stay complete with resident blow-up sex doll and slave amused him, because Hamburg had changed the Beatles yet again and given them a sexual as well as a musical edge. (After Hamburg, Paul went round to see Dot and said they were through. She said he told her, “There are too many girls out there to be faithful to just one.” In floods of tears, Dot moved out and disappeared from our lives.)

  They were lean and wore skintight leathers. Astrid, Stuart’s German girlfriend, tried to give them all a new Continental hairstyle, a casual preppy look, very different from their former greased-back Eddie Cochran DA, but Stuart was the only one brave enough to have the full floppy bang over the eyes. George and Paul went halfway, while John would only allow Astrid to trim it a bit. Only Pete held out and totally refuse
d to abandon his beloved greaser look. It wasn’t until almost a year later, when John blew the one hundred pounds he got for his twenty-first birthday to treat himself and Paul to a two-week trip to Paris that he saw the new style out in force among the French youth and dragged Paul off with him to have it done. When they returned with the new French look that Astrid had been so keen on, George immediately copied them, and before long, so did I. It was a boyish, fresh clean style that bounced up and down when the boys leapt about the stage. It seems odd, looking back, how individual that style looked to us then. We didn’t know it then, but it was to become world-famous as the Beatles’ look.

  Long before the rest of England—or the world—Liverpool boys took to this new style in a big way. It was so easy. We washed our hair every day and just shook it dry. There was no more Brylcreem, no more preening for ages. Before, when we’d gone to the swimming baths, for example (where a horrible greasy scum used to float on the surface), afterward, we used to squirt a blob of white glop from the dispenser at the side of the pool and spend half an hour sculpting the works of art on our heads. With the Beatles’ cut we were freed from all that. It might not seem a big deal, but was in fact a revolution.

  Another more subtle revolution—one the fans didn’t appear to notice—was that the Beatles started to wear makeup on stage. At first, it was to hide their spots. After all, George especially was still a spotty teenager, but they all flared up from time to time, as most teenage boys did. I can remember standing in dressing rooms as they stared into the mirror and poked and squeezed their spots, sometimes in unison. At times, spots became boils that looked pretty gruesome after being stabbed at with dirty fingernails. We used some horrible stuff that used to sting, dabbing it on with cotton wool, but the spots still rose to torment us, mini-volcanoes. It was hell to shave and frequently spots of blood marked white collars and torn-off scraps of paper stuck to faces. No wonder that black polo-necked sweaters became so popular.