Magical Mystery Tours

by Tony Bramwell

  The bookings continued, at first mostly around the Liverpool and Merseyside area. Nearly every day there were two lunchtime sessions and usually one at a different venue in the evening, when they would play two hours nonstop. The lads had hardly any time off, and few real holidays until they broke up some years later. But despite all this frantic activity and a nice regular income—which thanks to Brian’s efforts on their behalf, was more than they had ever earned before—the Beatles kept asking, “Hey, what about our record? When are we going to make it?”

  Unfortunately, Brian didn’t have an answer. Then he got a call from George Martin, one that perhaps didn’t surprise him. George said he wanted to fix a recording session without Pete Best, who would have to be replaced by a session drummer. It’s the accepted story that Pete couldn’t hold a steady beat. After forty years, Pete Best himself says he has never got to the bottom of it. He says he never did believe that he wasn’t good enough because clearly he had been good enough for two years, and there’d never been any complaints about the style of drumming he’d named “atom beat.” (What’s more, Brian even offered to form another group around him and said he would promote him heavily.)

  Thus it was, pale-faced and tense, that Brian sat at his desk and gazed into space on August 16, 1962. John had just sprung on him the depressing news that Cynthia was pregnant and they had to get married. This wasn’t in Brian’s plans for the group nor in his private dreams for John, but meanwhile, his first onerous task was to fire Pete Best. Despite Pete’s belief that things were fine and dandy, they hadn’t been good for some time. The rest of the group had given him several clues about the way things were heading by frequently keeping him in the dark and not giving him tidbits of news as they came in. Even back in January they had decided not to mention to Pete that Decca had turned them down, but none of them had it in them to come out into the open and tell him to go.

  I was around them as they passed the buck back and forth to each other. “You tell him—no, you tell him!” Nobody asked my opinion, but neither did they conceal it, and I could see that it was an issue. Finally, they told Brian it was his job as their manager. Glad to get that piece of dirty work out of the way, John telephoned Ringo Starr at Butlin’s Holiday Camp where he was doing a season with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, to ask if he would join the Beatles. Ringo was ready to move on and agreed at once.

  Brian put in a call to the Best’s rambling Victorian home and early on the following Saturday morning Pete was on his way into the center of Liverpool, driven by Neil Aspinall. When he went upstairs to Brian’s office, instead of going with him, unusually Neil elected to lurk outside in the car. For some reason Pete thought Brian merely wanted to discuss bookings with him. This might have been the case once when Pete was responsible for most of the Beatles bookings in the pre-Brian era, but hadn’t been so for a long time. They chatted a little until, running out of reasons to delay the words, white-faced and anguished Brian blurted: “The boys want you out of the group. They don’t think you’re a good enough drummer.”

  Pete told Neil that when he heard those words, he felt sick. He couldn’t at first understand that he was being sacked. Cutting through his bewilderment, the phone on Brian’s desk rang. It was Paul, asking if Brian had done the deed. Quickly, Brian said, “I can’t talk now. Peter’s here with me in the office.”

  Carefully, Brian didn’t mention that while Ringo had already accepted John’s offer to join the Beatles, he’d said he couldn’t leave Rory Storm for another three days. He asked Pete to stay on for the next couple of dates. Pete was so numbed by such treachery that he agreed to continue until he was replaced. When Brian stood up to see Pete out, he said that he would be happy to build another group around him.

  Outside on the pavement, Pete told Neil Aspinall what had just happened, then took himself off to drown his misery in the Grapes. By the end of the afternoon, drunk and embittered by their treachery, he decided to cut himself off altogether from the Beatles and in fact never played with them again. Pete was so upset that in the pub he gave a blow-by-blow account of his conversation with Brian to whoever would listen, and in no time, it was general knowledge in the street. The grapevine system was so remarkable that there were few secrets in Liverpool, and the Grapes—hangout of so many musicians—was one of the last places that anyone with a secret to keep would have chosen to go. By the time I heard it officially, I could have quoted the scene in Brian’s office, chapter and verse.

  Left to his own devices, Neil returned to Mo Best to break the news to her. The situation between Neil and Mo and the Bests was rather complex. Neil had lived with John and Mo Best and their two sons, Pete and Rory, for some time. The previous month, on July 21, Mo had given birth to a third son, a baby boy she named Roag. It was an open secret that Neil was Roag’s father.

  It had caused some dismay among fans and musicians alike when after three years, giving no real reason, Mo closed down the Casbah Club at the end of June. We had all—the Beatles, including me—helped paint the walls of the scruffy old cellar when it first opened back in 1959 and the Beatles had played their final gig there on June 24, 1962. Everyone felt the Casbah was their club, a place where they could hang out.

  Neil now found himself in the horns of a dilemma: who should he remain loyal to—Pete or the Beatles? He said he tried to do both. Pete didn’t play out the last few bookings and Johnny Hutch of the Big Three stood in on drums. Meanwhile, Neil continued acting as roadie for the Beatles, but when Ringo started, Neil refused to set up the drums for some weeks. Often that task fell to me when I was there. Nobody had said very much, but it was clear that there had been an amputation and a falling out. The whisper that was going the rounds was that Neil had already split up with Mo and so would find Pete’s presence awkward.

  The Casbah was closed but I saw Pete around. He buttonholed me because he knew I was close to the Beatles and Brian, and complained about what he perceived as being stabbed in the back.

  “I can play as well as Ringo,” he said. “Brian even offered to put a band around me, so I can’t be that bad, can I?”

  I was uncomfortable and sort of shuffled about and listened. When Pete asked me if I knew what they’d been saying about him and if I’d heard why he’d been sacked, all I could say was, “I dunno.”

  The truth about Pete Best’s firing is probably quite simple. The Beatles just didn’t like him and said so to each other and in front of me. He wasn’t as quick and sharp and funny as they were. Both Paul and John said he wasn’t one of them, that he wasn’t “studenty” or intellectual. He tended to be sullen and morose. Pete told me that he had hated it in Germany. He moaned all the time and he didn’t hang out with them in Liverpool. He used to stay at home and snog on the sofa with his girlfriend while his mum was out and about, the life and soul of every party from one end of the Mersey to the other. Even after he joined the Beatles, while they hung out and wound down with a few drinks, Pete would go home with his girl after the gig. He wasn’t really a joiner. I’m sure that was more of a problem than his suggested lack of talent. In all the years I had been around him, I didn’t feel I knew him—nobody did. Ringo, on the other hand, was laid back and easy to get on with. He was funny and outgoing and he fitted in. The Beatles had known him in Hamburg, they’d seen him around on the scene and he had even stood in on drums a couple of times when Pete, who was often ill, didn’t show up.

  Ringo was older than the others and held in awe, always so self-contained and cool the way he dressed, in leather or sharp suits, rings on every finger, his gold chains, his flashy cars. When nobody else had two brass farthings to rub together, Ringo had money in his pocket and all the right gear. He came from the Dingle, the dockside slums of Liverpool. A succession of childhood illnesses put him into the hospital for over a year. With little formal schooling, he fell behind in reading and writing and never caught up. As a kid he’d had to run with some pretty dangerous Teddy Boy gangs in order to survive—as he said, “We had to. You n
eeded the protection.” He’d been beaten up many times, too. Despite this, he was droll and laid back. He joked that he only joined the Beatles because they offered him five pounds a week more than Rory Storm—or was it ten? “Five!” the others would chorus whenever Ringo brought it up in interviews. Then he’d say, “Well, where is it then? Let’s be having it. Who’s got me five pounds?”

  An important point where Brian was concerned was that, unlike Pete, Ringo was willing to dress like the Beatles and have his huge Teddy Boy quiff cut off. What no one anticipated was the fans’ outrage when they found out that Pete had been dumped. They adored him, he was their own “mean, moody and magnificent” local hero. America had Elvis—Liverpool had Pete Best.

  The fans kicked up a huge fuss and for a while it looked as if a huge mistake had been made. People were openly saying that it was Pete who had made the Beatles, not John, Paul or George, and Mona Best was delighted. She got on the phone and tried to drum up even more support in the press. Factions formed; hundreds of girls marched in the streets waving placards. They massed outside NEMS offices and chanted: “Pete forever, Ringo never!”

  Brian and I and some of the other staff, like Alistair Taylor, would stand at the window and look down, stepping back a little so we couldn’t be seen—or, as Brian said, in case a stone was thrown—and listen to the outrage. Brian always looked very worried. He would bite his lip and wonder if he had done the right thing.

  “They really seem to like Pete, you know,” he said. “Suppose they all turn on the Beatles?”

  “No, they won’t do that,” Alistair said. “Let them march. They’re enjoying themselves. Anyway, it’s good publicity.”

  He was right. The newspapers were filled with it, and it seemed to stimulate even more controversy. Fights broke out, the Beatles were assaulted on stage and dragged into the audience, George got a black eye and Ringo had to run for his life and be protected from a baying mob. John gloried in the rough and tumble. It was like the old days in Hamburg, though none of us in the “inner circle”—or the Beatles themselves—expected this violent reaction. Things stayed at boiling point for a long time and Brian remained very anxious.

  The heat was taken out only when the Beatles had their first hit in December and took off in the rest of the country. No one had heard of Pete outside of Liverpool. The drummer who was up there on the posters, on television and on the front pages of the national newspapers would be Ringo.

  Unexpectedly, I came to have a lot in common with Ringo, because our girlfriends were best friends, both of them closer in age to me. Maureen Cox, who became Ringo’s wife, had started out dating Rory Storm’s guitarist, “Johnny Guitar.” It wasn’t long before this girl, who was small like Ringo, with jet-black hair, a heavy fringe and heavily kohled eyes, switched her allegiance to the Beatles. She and her mate, Lorraine Flyte, used to sit right on the edge of the stage at the Cavern, and in all that sea of faces, Ringo spotted pretty, bouffant-haired Maureen and fancied her immediately. Not all the fights between fans were over Pete’s sacking. Many were between girls who had been scrapping for some time over the individual Beatles with whom they were “in lurve.”

  Ringo and Maureen—we called her Mitch—had to pretend that they didn’t know each other. Giggling conspiratorially, Lorraine would help Mitch hide under a blanket in the back of Ringo’s car and wait for him to come out during a break. When Ringo drove away after a concert, he would wait until they were several blocks away before Maureen would crawl into the front seat. But one night, a fan spotted Ringo getting into his car and chased him down the road. She managed to open the car door and saw Maureen. She dragged her out, scratching and kicking her on the cobbles of Mathew Street. In no time, a dozen girls surrounded them.

  Suddenly being a Beatle girlfriend went from exciting and fun to a potential nightmare. All this was a shock to Maureen. She was a convent girl who had gone on to work in a hairdresser’s with the unlikely name of Ashley du Pre; she was barely sixteen and still lived at home. Her parents insisted that she was always in before midnight—ten minutes to twelve, to be exact—not easy when your boyfriend was a Beatle who didn’t finish work until nearly dawn. Mostly, they dated in the afternoon on Mitch’s days off and pretended that they didn’t know each other in the Cavern.

  Maureen’s friend, Lorraine Flyte, who was also sixteen like me, became my girlfriend and in turn, I came to know Mitch quite well. Often, Mitch, Lorraine and I would hang out together on Sundays, go to the movies or walk in the park, while Ringo—or Richie, as we all still called him—slept. I was the amiable lad the girls asked to go shopping with them on their days off. When we saw posters advertising a Beatles gig, or an article about them in a newspaper or a magazine, Mitch would often giggle and say she had to keep pinching herself.

  “I can’t believe I’m a Beatle’s girlfriend,” she would say. “But I know he’ll get bored with me.”

  “ ’Course he won’t,” Lorraine would say. “Richie’s all right.”

  Sometimes Mitch would comment that her parents weren’t that happy with the situation. “They say he’s too old for me,” she confided. “They say older boys get girls like me into trouble and then dump them.”

  “Well, they only get you into trouble if you let them,” Lorraine would say. Then they’d look at each other and burst into laughter.

  Ringo used to keep Mitch very secret partly for her own safety, and partly because Brian had impressed on them that all the Beatles had to pretend they were some kind of celibate boy monks. Brian was very earnest about this. He would repeatedly insist, “You belong to every girl fan in England.”

  Such sentiments made the boys uncomfortable, but they accepted that Brian was right. Preserving their private lives from the fans, from the press and from Brian himself became a conspiracy we all invested in. Ringo said, “It’s like the bloody Secret Service,” but he went along with playing cloak and dagger with Mitch, and Lorraine and I went along with helping them.

  Lorraine lived in Wango Lane, which ran along one side of Aintree Racecourse, where the Grand National was run. With Mitch, we even watched the race from Lorraine’s bedroom window, while drinking warm cherryade from bottles with straws and eating crisps. It was great fun, hanging out of the window and cheering the horses on, though we weren’t really close enough to see very much in detail. We didn’t even make a bet.

  (Years after this episode, in 1967, Paul McCartney was to record a song with his brother, Mike McGear—who was in the Scaffold—called “Thank U Very Much for the Aintree Iron.” This was the shape of the racetrack itself, like an old-fashioned smoothing iron that you heated in the coals; and of course people like Mo Best with big winnings on the Grand National had much to thank it for. When Paul asked me to make a film based on the song, I remembered that fun day with Ringo, Mo and Lorraine and I got the Scaffold to mime the song at Liverpool Football ground, with the entire terrace strangely known as the Kop—behind one of the goals—singing away. I can’t remember it ever being used, another lost film that will be rediscovered someday.)

  John’s romantic entanglement with Cynthia became serious when she got pregnant, though how she was so sure, so soon, was puzzling. Judging by the timing—based on John’s presence in Liverpool—she couldn’t have been more than a week or two gone at the most when she broke the news to John. John was dismayed but bowed to the inevitable, though not as dismayed as Mimi—or Brian. This wasn’t in Brian’s plans for the boys at all—a Beatle had to be footloose and fancy free and available. Brian had very quickly seen huge value in the hordes of fans who followed the Beatles, in the blossoming fan clubs and fanzine newsletters, and once again, he trotted out his homily: “You belong to every girl fan in England.” On the other hand, he agreed that the Beatles’ image had to be “nice” and he didn’t want any bad press.

  Brian arranged the wedding ceremony at the registry office, with a simple chicken meal to follow in an ordinary café where he hoped nobody would notice them. To Brian’s intense
irritation—John found it hilarious—it was lunchtime and they had to stand in a queue for twenty minutes until a table became free, but Brian didn’t want to make a fuss in case they drew attention to themselves. In fact, hardly anyone knew John was married. For a long time it was a secret that really didn’t leak out beyond our immediate circle, unlike most other “secrets” in Liverpool.

  John spent his wedding night in Chester, playing at the Riverpark Ballroom. Although the whole affair was very private and had been hushed up, at one point John did say that he hadn’t really wanted to get married and felt pushed into it. (He even had another regular girlfriend he was besotted with, Ida Holly, whom he had met at the Blue, not to mention a string of one-night stands. I don’t know if John knew it, but luscious Ida went out with me too.)

  No, wedded bliss was not John’s scene at all. “Christ,” he said after the gig in Chester, as we were packing up, “I can’t believe I went through with it.”

  Mimi was too angry to go to the wedding and turned her back on her beloved John for months. Brian decided that the squalid little student bedsit so lovingly prepared by Cynthia for John wasn’t a good image for one of his precious Beatles, let alone a newly married couple. Instead, he gave them the keys to the little love nest in Falkner Street—that he once had lovingly prepared in his mind for John—hoping nobody would spot John coming and going and connect him with the pregnant young blond woman who lived there. I’m sure it was all very complicated for him—but I’m sure he also loved being mother hen.