Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  He also returned home looking for zing, and thought he’d got it with Manchester rock singer Paul Beattie, who played the Cavern and other clubs with his own backing group, the Beats. His first Parlophone single, “I’m Comin’ Home,” was a big brassy number with a honking sax break and heavy echo on Beattie’s deep baritone Elvis-like voice. Though derivative (and actually quite strange), it was arguably the best British rock and roll record made to date. This was virgin territory for George—a genuine rock singer, from the north, with a name that didn’t need changing, and he’d managed to produce something unusual. He had high hopes for a breakthrough, of having anticipated “the next big thing,” but it didn’t come, and it also didn’t come with the follow-up, “Me, Please Me,” or with Beattie’s two final Parlophone releases up to 1960.

  George hadn’t yet made number 1 (he came closest in December 1957 when Jim Dale was at 2 with “Be My Girl”), but he did still have impressive firsts. With the obvious exceptions of Lonnie Donegan and Tommy Steele, he produced the first skiffle LP, the Vipers’ Coffee Bar Session, and, in Jim Dale’s Jim!, the first British rock and roll LP. It was ten inches of vinyl, ten songs, twenty-four minutes of music taped in under a day, everything pseudo-American and poor. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Starkey and thousands of other teenagers awed by the genuine American sound were unmoved—British rock records seldom had authenticity or guts, just weak songs sung in a rigid formulaic style and played by session musicians, jazzers, for whom it was one for the money.

  Skiffle was soon gone, at least as far as record sales were concerned. The last releases by the Vipers Skiffle Group were credited simply to the Vipers. In true British style, the genre’s final hit was a satire, George Martin’s production of Peter Sellers’ “Any Old Iron.” More and more, comedy was becoming George’s one solo hand. “I knew I had to make a mark in some way,” he says, “and my only plan was to find a way of making records that other people weren’t making. Ones that would sell. And the way I chose was to go into comedy, because no one was doing it. People were doing it in the States—Stan Freberg, Bob Newhart—but there was nothing in England to speak of. And it seemed to work.”

  George made two particular LPs in this period. One was a live recording of the revue At the Drop of a Hat—Michael Flanders and Donald Swann’s literate and witty encapsulations of human foibles and modern life. The show became a big success in London and then on Broadway, but its mass popularity came through the Parlophone LP.

  The other, with Peter Sellers, was the most artistically satisfying project George had in 1958, and the most enduring. Over the course of just three three-hour sessions at Abbey Road, he produced The Best of Sellers, the first British comedy LP created in a recording studio. George’s role was fourfold: to find the right material, to bring the best out of a brilliant but troubled artist, to enrich the recording with the correct texture and color by his own imagination and invention, and to fashion a comedy record worth listening to even when the joke was known. George would always refer to these productions as “sound pictures,” and The Best of Sellers is a fine early masterpiece, a five-star ten-inch record that spent forty-seven weeks in Melody Maker’s Top Ten—Britain’s first LP chart, launched in November 1958.

  With ample finance and studio time to try things, even the failures could be glorious. One of George’s personal favorites was “Sparkie the Fiddle,” the record he made with a talking budgerigar. The bird was brought into EMI Number 2 studio and George gave it the full works: he hired a writer to script a hokey American film satire about a jailbird, he had Ron Goodwin compose and conduct an arrangement, and the budgie’s spoken words entailed a vast amount of editing, hundreds of pieces of tape cut up and kept carefully in order. The result was a Parlophone single that sold about forty-two copies.

  Brian Epstein continued to work dawn to dusk at Great Charlotte Street, dedicated to the challenge, and at 23 had never been so fulfilled. He moved crisply between his two record departments—pop on the ground floor, classics on the first—and he kept a shop staff of twenty-eight on their toes. As the original meaning of Nems (North End Music Stores) was irrelevant in the city, Mr. Brian and Mr. Clive reversed it into a new one they adopted for press ads: Nems Efficient Modern Service. It was, and that’s why it was so quickly prospering.

  As well as being a lifelong lover of classical music, Brian was actively enjoying the pop side. He went to several of the touring rock shows at the Empire and elsewhere, advertising Nems in the programs; he also had a specialty trick of memorizing record catalog numbers—customers could name almost any record and he’d know its label and number by heart. His knowledge of the companies, their artists, labels and sales staff, and the complex distribution networks, was formidable. It was his business to know. At the end of April 1958, the American rockabilly singer Marvin Rainwater was number 1 in Britain with “Whole Lotta Woman.” He happened to be playing Liverpool Empire for a week and Brian was the only shop owner to fix a lunchtime signing session, arranging extra stock with EMI. Queues formed out of the door.

  And then, as usual, he was reckless. At 10:30PM on May 19, 1958, cruising in his car along The Strand, in front of the Liver Building, Brian stopped to pick up some rough trade. Both men knew the score; this won’t have been the only time Brian did it. He drove out to the pavilion in Sefton Park … but whether he got what he wanted wasn’t made clear in the resulting court case.

  What was detailed, under oath, was that the man menacingly demanded £20, and when Brian said he didn’t have it on him, he was attacked about the head and face with an empty milk bottle. The glass broke and Brian was cut (though not too badly). The man grabbed Brian’s fine cigarette lighter, some papers and ten shillings, and threatened to expose him as a queer unless he also got the £20. Blackmail. He terrorized Brian into agreeing to a meeting the next day at the Queen Victoria Monument to hand over the cash.

  In a poor emotional and physical state, Brian drove himself to the Royal Infirmary, where he had four stitches inserted into his lacerated left ear and was treated for other cuts, abrasions and bruising to his face and head.33 Though his parents may not have known of the Swiss Cottage incident thirteen months earlier, he’d no way of keeping this from them. In what must have been an explosive and emotional late night, the truth of his sexuality and compulsion to danger was exposed. Queenie already knew it, or sensed it, though whether Harry did isn’t reliably recorded. Either way, it was a mess, of great embarrassment to them personally, and potentially ruinous for business. On one matter his parents were adamant: Brian had to go to the police and report the blackmail. It won’t ever be known if he divulged that he was still serving probation for the 1957 London importuning, but it must have been at the forefront of his mind: he could now go to jail for both offenses.34

  He was at the police station the following morning, May 20, possibly with a parent or two. He was interrogated, every element of the incident raked over, and he had to sign a written statement. Then the police gave Brian an envelope containing dummy money and lay in wait a discreet distance from the monument. When the packet was seen to be demanded, the police showed themselves and there was a chase through the streets before the man was apprehended. The case came before magistrates the next day and, as the Epsteins foresaw, court reporters were present. Anticipating this, proceedings began with a plea from the prosecution, that because the complainant was “a man of substance in Liverpool, and relative of another well-known man of substance in the city, he should be referred to throughout as Mr. X.” The court agreed. BEAT UP “MR. X” IN SEFTON PARK, COURT TOLD and SOLICITOR PROTESTS OVER “NO BAIL” IN MR. “X” CASE were two of the subsequent headlines.35 The defendant, a 23-year-old from Old Swan, was remanded three times over the next four weeks, twice held in custody because Mr. X feared for his safety.

  In the end, the case went to the Crown Court and the assailant was jailed for two years, while Brian, to his immense relief, was never charged. But it had been another deeply shaming episode,
and though his name never came up, he was aware of the whispering that put him squarely in the dock (and anonymity wasn’t helped by the bandages and black eyes). Psychologically, Brian was traumatized—his family now knew exactly how he behaved. It was a shocking experience and a huge secret for everyone to hold.

  Subterfuge lived elsewhere too. Anti-Semitic antagonism, mild to strong by degrees, was a fact for all Jewish people in Britain (and elsewhere), certainly in strongly Catholic Liverpool. Brian and his family’s place of worship, Greenbank Drive Synagogue, was devastated by fire in May 1959, when a thief who broke in to steal a record player and records (donated by Nems) maliciously set papers aflame before running away. It was a traumatic incident for the city’s Jewish community, especially so soon after the Holocaust; the sacred scrolls, the Torah, were burned to ashes. Harry Epstein, a member of the synagogue council, had a key involvement in the rebuilding program, and the arsonist was jailed for four years.

  It was easier for many to live their Jewishness down, to try to blend in. Brian took two steps to effect this—irrational ones, but he felt them necessary. While many changed their surname to avoid racist persecution, Brian dropped his middle name. Nems’ headed notepaper reveals the sensitivity: in the list of directors, Clive John Epstein was C. J. Epstein but Brian Samuel Epstein was B. Epstein. He also changed the way his surname was pronounced. The Liverpool Epsteins had always been “Epsteens,” and would remain that way, but Brian insisted his was said as “Epstine.”

  Friends saw Brian have two girlfriends in these latter years of the Fifties. The first was Sonia Seligson, met through amateur dramatics. They went to the theater, dinner-dances, ballet and classical concerts, and she loved his immaculate manners, finely tailored clothes and desire for everything fine. She less enjoyed his drinking. On the occasion he proposed marriage, she felt sure it was the alcohol talking; the question fell flat and wasn’t revived. For a while, Sonia was puzzled by Brian’s desire to travel alone—he’d spend weekends in Paris, a particularly exotic custom at this time—and it was only when finally he confessed his “other life” that she realized the weekends were for encounters, and the relationship ended.36

  Brian’s other companion was Rita Harris, a Nems employee. She’d been at Great Charlotte Street several months when a deep friendship dropped into place at the company’s annual staff dinner-dance, Christmas 1959. He seems to have confided in her from the start: “He was not a very happy person. He was so lonely. He said no one was really happy but that one should aim to be reasonably content. He admitted he was a homosexual and talked about it frequently: it used to make him very depressed. He hated himself for it, and never remembered being any other way.”37

  The intimacy of Brian’s revelations—his need to confide, and hers to listen—stirred something. Love developed on both sides, though it wasn’t consummated. He spoke to Rita of his private life using the record-business term “new releases”—he once wrote saying, “The New Release has stopped selling. Trouble is that having sold quite well for quite a time, it’s difficult to clear away bad stock.” (This sounds like a longish relationship—Brian had precious few of these.)

  Through staff appointments, Brian kept friends close by. Ray Standing, another Great Charlotte Street employee, saw a pattern: “I think there were nine blokes working at Nems at one time and only three of us were straight. The Walton Road shop was OK because that was his dad’s store, but when Brian opened up in town that’s when they started to flock in, so to speak.”38

  Brian had several good friends now, men with whom he was never intimate but who joined him on weekends and adventurous evenings out. Membership of this inner circle temporarily went down by one when Oxford graduate Geoffrey Ellis, known to Brian for two years, sailed from Liverpool to work in America, but then Terry Doran, a car salesman with a sharp mind and ready Liverpool wit, was added. “I met Brian by chance one day in a Liverpool pub in 1959,” Doran says, “and just fell in love with him from the beginning.”39

  Another new friend was Peter Brown, an ex-grammar-school boy from over the water (Bebington, near Birkenhead)—he met Brian in September 1958 at a mutual friend’s birthday party, and worked in the same line of business, managing the record department in Lewis’s. “Brian and I messed around, as they say, that first night, but it never went anywhere and we established very quickly we were going to be friends and that was all, and that’s how it continued to be—there was never any physical relationship.”40

  In late 1959, with the Whitechapel expansion project monopolizing Brian’s time, he offered Peter Brown the job of running the record department at Great Charlotte Street. Peter’s parents had reservations about his leaving Lewis’s “to work for a Jewish shopkeeper” but he said yes anyway. His colleague at work, his friend outside it, Peter was well placed to watch Brian’s relationship with his parents, especially the crucial axis with his mother:

  The Epsteins were very nice people. Harry was a quiet man, always polite, but Queenie was much more interesting. She was a stylish, charming, attractive woman who liked the theater and was very well-read. She and Brian were adorable together—they understood one another and liked the same things; they were a very bonded pair. Brian’s brother Clive was on his father’s level, very different. He had no interest in those things and nor did Harry. Clive was Harry’s boy and Brian was Queenie’s.

  Oscar Preuss died on Christmas Eve 1958 and George and Judy grieved together—she for her old boss, he for the man who’d taught him everything. As George reflected to the NME, “He invariably adopted the most rebellious tactics.”41

  George had been Preuss’s assistant and now he had his own—Ron Richards, whose background in music publishing would be useful for sourcing songs.e Ron shadowed George in the studio for a while and then began to take sessions himself, mostly on the pop side: George divided Parlophone’s pop singers between them and Ron was allowed to go out and find new talent. He was 30, and George, at 33, was still the youngest A&R boss in London. Record companies were not yet as they would become, they were still companies that made records, run by old gents in three-piece suits and short haircuts, characters who’d ridden the disc rodeo in distant days and were now disconnected from the pulse. The top brass at these companies weren’t nightclubbers, they were captains of industry, like EMI’s accomplished chairman, whose services to commerce were rewarded by the Queen in the 1960 New Year’s honors list—he arose Sir Joseph Lockwood.

  There was scant prospect of George receiving a “gong,” but he did have a new three-year employment contract, to expire in April 1962. His salary was up to £2,700, which George felt wasn’t enough, especially as his request for a royalty on sales—the kind of arrangement now commonplace in America—was rejected. No British company paid a producer royalty. It isn’t coincidence that George wrote his first recorded songs in this time frame. A&R men had to find some way of supplementing their salaries, and it was usually by writing numbers they recorded, earning from the publishing. The cozy production-line relationship between Tin Pan Alley and record company A&R men made such associations easy, and it was hidden from employers by the use of noms de plume. Few restrained themselves completely and some took it to extremes: George’s EMI colleague Norrie Paramor, in charge of the Columbia label, had a reputation for giving his artists his own songs to record. Even as B-sides they earned the same “mechanical” revenue as the A-side, three farthings (three-quarters of a penny) on every record sold. A hit could bring in a sum you wouldn’t sniff at.f

  George’s initial attempts earned just the farthings. He only wrote music, not lyrics, so if a piece was instrumental it was entirely his, and if it had words, he worked in collaboration. His first tiptoe through the twilight was the B-side of a Jeremy Lubbock single, where he simply left his name off. Then he popped up as the arch-foreigner Lezlo Anales, then as John Chisholm (his father-in-law’s name), until settling on Graham Fisher, his most regular pseudonym.

  Fake names peppered Songs for Swingin’ Seller
s, George’s second LP with the much-loved actor-comic Peter Sellers. The collection included a sketch that dug deep at Larry Parnes, essaying the Svengali manager of teenage rock stars Lenny Bronze, Clint Thigh, Matt Lust and Twit Conway, who all lived with him at his luxury Mayfair flat. George also succeeded in finding another Sinatralike: the LP’s title was a play on Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! and its opening track, “You Keep Me Swingin’ ” (cowritten by “Graham Fisher”), was a nailed-on parody. The singer was Matt Monro, although George renamed him Fred Flange. He sang so well, and so like Sinatra, that the song attracted heavy BBC radio play and George offered Monro a Parlophone contract that launched a great career.g

  George Martin had cracked the art of making hits, but his work was still divided. When being original, his creativity sparkled with wit and invention; when copying any established formula, especially when operating in the teenage pop market, it flopped. This was still an era when stardom followed the invention of a persona—a new name on a pretty face, rarely much substance—and George couldn’t do anything with it. “It’s not so much artistry as individuality which counts today,” he complained to the NME in 1959 … before explaining the qualities that he was always seeking: “In considering new artists, I look for a distinctive sound which, at the same time, is attractive.”42

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