Best of the Beatles

by Spencer Leigh

  Their former manager, Allan Williams, is magnanimous. “I’ll be fair and say that Brian Epstein was the best thing that could have happened to the Beatles.”

  On 31 August 1961, Bob Wooler, in Mersey Beat, described the Beatles as the stuff that screams were made of. “People were always asking me about this group, and I knew they were remarkable, magic even. The only Beatle that I mentioned by name was Pete Best. The girls at the footlights would be looking beyond the front line to this guy on drums, and there was a charisma about him that I found fascinating. The poster for Jane Russell in The Outlaw described her as ‘mean, moody and magnificent’, and I applied that to Pete Best.” It stuck.

  Pete Best: “The first time I read it I started laughing, but the fans would say, ‘It’s Pete, he’s mean and moody, he must be because it said so in print.’ I don’t think I was. It was more that I was into playing the drums and laying down a rhythm; I’d put my head down and flail away. If it looked like I was mean or moody on stage, it wasn’t through me trying to be like that personally. It was a case of putting so much into the music.”

  Promoter Ron Appleby: “When Eppy took the Beatles over we had a dance at the Kingsway in Southport and we were charging 2s 6d (12 and a half pence) before eight and three shillings (15p) afterwards. Brian Epstein decided that everyone who came into the dance before eight o’clock would be given a photograph of the Beatles. When I saw him at half-past nine, he was hopping mad because the girls were ripping the photograph up and sticking the part with Pete Best on to their jumpers. Pete Best was certainly the attraction with the girls.”

  Pete Best: “I used to be embarrassed about it to be quite honest. I used to come home and find girls on the path with a sleeping bag or someone looking at you from behind a tree. I didn’t know what to do. I’d say, ‘Hello’ or ‘I’ll send you out a coffee in a minute.’ I took it in my stride and didn’t think too much about it. I thought, ‘If they’re doing this for me, then they are doing it for the group.’ If I got more screams on stage than somebody else, it wasn’t a case of that’s one for Pete at the back. It was a case of ‘That’s good for the Beatles’ – that’s all I was concerned about.”

  John Lennon biographer, Paul Du Noyer: “The stereotype of the rock ’n’ roll manager is Colonel Tom Parker who was a complete crook, and that seems to be all too common in rock ’n’ roll management. Even people who don’t think that Epstein was a brilliant businessman will always concede that he was a very honest man. He certainly never tried to cheat the Beatles.”

  But he did try and change them. Clive Epstein: “They weren’t entirely happy about being put into shirts and collars and suits – this was not the way they appeared in Hamburg, and when Brian sent them to a tailor in Birkenhead, they were far from happy. This was not their style. Nevertheless, it was right because the mums and dads who became Beatle fans liked to see four boys looking clean and tidy in their suits.”

  Tony Sanders of Billy J. Kramer’s original group, the Coasters: “They didn’t need Epstein, he gave them a lot of bad advice – he had them wearing suits, singing the likes of ‘I Remember You’, which wasn’t their style and he destroyed the band as it was.”

  Bill Harry adds, “John gave me some photos from Hamburg which included him going on stage with a toilet seat around his neck. As soon as Brian took them over, he asked for them back. He put everything into a plastic image. He sanitised them. They had their hair done at Horne Brothers, got their suits on the Wirral and had Dezo Hoffman pictures. John preferred the raw, aggressive image of the Rolling Stones and Brian had taken that away from them. I was in the Grapes one night when Brian Griffiths of the Big Three told Epstein to argue with the two lawyers at the end of his arm. Epstein had been giving this wild, aggressive rock band Mitch Murray jingles.” Would John have been happier as a member of the Rolling Stones?

  Paul Du Noyer: “Brian Epstein did a lot for their presentation. I know they hated being put into suits but that seems to be what it took to take them on to the next stage commercially. It did get them a record deal; it did get them to EMI and George Martin. That’s where history really starts to move forward for the Beatles.”

  Where did the mop-top hairstyles come from? Okay, it could have been a mop. Eppy might have picked one up from a cleaning lady at NEMS and said, “That’s what I’m going to do with the Beatles.” But I don’t think so.

  Brian Epstein’s friend and Liverpool manager, Joe Flannery, has a photograph of his own mother from the 1930s – she has what looks like a Beatle haircut. “John Lennon liked my mother very much,” he confides, “and they based their hairstyles on this photograph.” Again, unlikely.

  Watch any 1940s film by those madcap comics, the Three Stooges, and look at their hairstyles. Pure Beatles. Could it be? No, I don’t think so.

  What about Marlon Brando in the 1953 film Julius Caesar? Hamburg photographer Jurgen Vollmer: “I wanted to look like Marlon Brando in Julius Caesar even though I hadn’t seen the movie at that time. I was still in school and I told the barber that I wanted my hair just like that, but he talked me out of it. That was the last time I went to the barber – up to this day, I always cut my hair myself.”

  Jurgen had his brushed-forward style when he met the Beatles in Hamburg. “They thought it was funny. I moved to Paris in late ’61 and John and Paul visited me there and they wanted to change their clothes. I took them to a flea market and they dressed in the style that I had, corduroy jackets and turtle-neck sweaters. They wanted my haircut so that is when I cut their hair.”

  In another variation, Astrid Kirchherr gave the boys their haircuts. “All my friends at art school used to run around with what you would call a Beatle haircut. My boyfriend, Klaus Voormann, had this style and Stuart liked it very much. He was the first one who had the nerve to get the cream out of his hair and he asked me to cut his hair for him.”

  Whatever the reason, Pete Best never succumbed. Astrid Kirchherr: “Pete’s got very curly hair and it wouldn’t have worked. Even if he wanted it, I could not have cut his hair that way.”

  Allan Williams: “I thought the Beatles were a right load of layabouts. I think Eppy only took them on because he was homosexual and they appealed to him.”

  Brian Epstein’s biographer Ray Coleman: “There are several areas concerning Brian’s private life. Although the homosexuality was crucial to his life, the crucial factor was that he was available for work 24 hours a day. A married man couldn’t do that. It was more than just another job to him. He didn’t have other priorities and he had money too.”

  Sexual freedom was practised, indeed encouraged, around the Reeperbahn in Hamburg and so the Beatles met many homosexuals and transvestites while in Germany. Hence, they would not have been concerned about Brian Epstein’s gayness when they signed their management contract on 24 January 1962, although he was acting for them before that date. Epstein was only too aware that the practice was illegal in the UK – even in private between consenting adults – but he was not totally discreet. His personal Men-Love Avenue was a bachelor flat at 37 Falkner Street, Liverpool 8.

  Alan Sytner, founder of the Cavern and manager when it was a jazz cellar, had known Brian Epstein since his schooldays. “He got expelled from Liverpool College and several other schools, which is really hard to do. I believe he was expelled for his homosexuality. His mother told him that the schools were anti-semitic, but they weren’t, as I saw a Plymouth Brethren expelled for the same thing. Brian was brought up to believe that he was something special and he developed a superior attitude. He went to school in Cambridge so he gave the impression that he had been to Cambridge.”

  An art school colleague of John Lennon’s, Ian Sharp, knew Eppy’s preferences. “I was involved in amateur dramatics at the time and I could recognise gay people. Billy Hanna introduced me to Brian Epstein, who was definitely camp by Liverpool standards. They were friends and they went to London together, and they also knew Yankel Feather who was outrageously camp and ran a club, the Basemen
t, opposite the Mardi Gras and next door to the Unity Theatre.”

  Ian Sharp was talking to John and Paul in the Kardomah café and, a week later, he was surprised to receive a letter from the solicitors, Silverman, Livermore and Co. With Ian Sharp’s permission, it is reprinted here for the first time:

  “We have been consulted by Mr Brian Epstein who instructs us that on the 21 February last in the Kardomah Café, Church Street, Liverpool you uttered a certain highly malicious and defamatory statement concerning him to two members of the Beatles. We are instructed that in the course of a conversation you said, ‘I believe Brian Epstein is managing you. Which one of you does he fancy?’ The unwarranted innuendo contained in that remark is perfectly clear and is one to which our client takes the gravest possible exception, and the damaging nature of which has caused him considerable anxiety and distress. He is not prepared to tolerate the utterance of such remarks by you and we accordingly have to require that we receive, by return, your written apology together with an undertaking that this or similar remarks will not be made by you in the future. We have to make it perfectly clear to you that should we not receive your apology and undertaking, as requested, then our client has instructed us to take such steps as may be necessary to protect his good name and character.”

  This revealing letter shows that the Beatles were made aware of Epstein’s sexual preference, if they hadn’t known it already and that Epstein was so annoyed that he was prepared to call Ian Sharp’s bluff by resorting to legal action. Also, why should this conversation have been repeated to Eppy and why was Ian Sharp shopped?

  Ian Sharp, who works as the actor/director Richard Tate, comments: “I didn’t call Eppy gay maliciously, I was joking about it in an art-college kind of way. I thought that John would have known about it but he must have confronted Eppy with the information. I could have changed the course of musical history by standing up to Eppy and saying, ‘Bugger you, it’s true, I’m standing by what I said,’ but of course I didn’t. I was 20 years old and living with my parents and I panicked. I wasn’t used to receiving letters like that and I withdrew the allegations immediately and never mentioned it again. Ironically, years later, I played Sidney Silverman in a production about Craig and Bentley.”

  In 1964 Brian published his autobiography, A Cellarful of Noise, but he couldn’t discuss a cellarful of boys. Paul Du Noyer: “He couldn’t be honest about his boyfriends in his autobiography, and that is quite touching. Homosexuality was illegal and it would also have been commercial suicide to admit it. It would have taken a very brave man to have proclaimed what was going on his life.”

  There’s no doubt that Brian Epstein was deeply attracted to John Lennon, despite, or perhaps because of, Lennon’s deep sarcasm toward him. “Sometimes he has been abominably rude to me,” says Eppy in his autobiography. Some Beatle books – notably Peter Brown and Albert Goldman’s – have stated that they had a homosexual relationship, which is easy to allege once the participants are dead.

  Considering that the female population of Liverpool was drooling over Pete Best, it is likely that Brian Epstein hoped for a relationship himself. I asked Pete about this. He tells me that Eppy propositioned him once on the way to Blackpool. Pete wasn’t interested in his stick of rock and the subject was never raised again.

  On Monday 5 February 1962 Pete Best had a virus and Ringo Starr stepped in. John, Paul, George and Ringo played the Cavern at lunchtime and the Kingsway Casino in Southport at night.

  The Liverpool Echo ran a weekly record review column by ‘Disker’ a pseudonym for Tony Barrow, an old boy of Merchant Taylors’ School in Crosby who had moved to London. “I worked for Decca as the only full-time sleeve note writer in the business. I wrote sleeve notes for Duke Ellington, Gracie Fields and Anthony Newley. Brian Epstein had written to ‘Disker’ and to his great surprise, he received a letter from London. He wanted me to write about the Beatles for the Liverpool Echo. I told him I only reviewed records but we should keep in touch.”

  Brian Epstein did keep in touch, playing Tony a tape of the Beatles recorded at the Cavern, which does not appear to have survived. “The sound quality was abominable, although it did convey the atmosphere of the Cavern. I spoke on the internal telephone to our marketing department and told them that I had Brian Epstein with me, and they might want to put pressure on A&R for an audition. They didn’t know his name but as soon as I mentioned NEMS, they said, ‘Oh yes, Brian Epstein’s group must have an audition.’”

  The Beatles had their audition in appalling circumstances on New Year’s Day 1962, details of which are in Discography 1. Despite below-par performances, the Beatles were convinced that Decca would sign them. “They’re okay, considering we were recording fifteen songs in a day” maintains Pete Best, “but the German records are of much better quality. They were merchandise and this was just an audition tape. Mike Smith at Decca told us that he couldn’t see any problems, so we were shell-shocked when we were turned down.”

  Decca preferred the clean-looking Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, and Irish balladeers the Bachelors. Epstein tried other avenues for the Beatles and was turned down by EMI. Then a technician who heard the songs at the HMV record store in Oxford Street suggested a meeting with EMI’s publishing company, Ardmore and Beechwood, and from there Brian Epstein met George Martin, who ran the EMI subsidiary Parlophone. An audition with the Beatles was arranged for 6 June 1962.

  The Beatles’ first radio broadcast was recorded before an audience at Manchester’s Playhouse on 7 March 1962. Alan Clayson, writing in his biography, The Quiet One – A Life of George Harrison, says, “Afterwards, the four were shocked when they were mobbed by libidinous females not much younger than themselves. Most were after Pete who, pinned in a doorway, would lose tufts of hair to clawing hands while the other three bought their freedom with mere autographs. Despite himself, taciturn Pete was becoming a star. Watching the frenzy sourly was Paul’s father, who was to unjustly berate the drummer for stealing the limelight.”

  Former Quarry Man Rod Davis was now at Cambridge University and in1961 he had made a record for Decca as part of the Trad Grads. “I bumped into John in Liverpool in March 1962 and I said, ‘I beat you onto record.’ I told him that I played mandolin, fiddle, banjo, guitar, concertina and melodeon. He said, ‘You don’t play the drums, do you? We need a drummer to take back to Hamburg.’ That was my second bad career move. My sister remembers my mother saying, ‘He’s not going to Hamburg with “that Lennon”. He’s taking his degree.’ That’s the way she always spoke of him – she never called him anything but ‘that Lennon.’”

  Around the same time, Brian Epstein met Rick Dixon, the manager of the Manchester band, Pete Maclaine and the Dakotas. He asked Rick if their drummer, Tony Mansfield, was available to replace Pete Best. Rick said he wasn’t but a year later, Eppy took the Dakotas on board as a backing band for Billy J. Kramer.

  Revealing stories – were John, Paul, George and Brian thinking of sacking Pete Best prior to any dealing with Parlophone? Whatever, he went with them to Germany.

  Pete Best: “We disappeared off to Germany in April and in the meantime Brian had taken a tape of the Decca auditions and was going round all the recording studios and companies in London trying to fix another date, or get a contact for us.”

  Bob Wooler: “I was the shoulder Brian would cry on as I had got to know him. He would invite me to the Peacock in Hackins Hey for lunch, which was his favourite haunt, and he would say, ‘What am I doing wrong? Why aren’t they responding?’ All I could say was, ‘I can’t believe it, Brian. They should come here and see what the Beatles are doing to audiences.’ In those days, A&R men didn’t hurry to a provincial town to see a group. It was different once the Beatles happened – we had a rush of A&R men up here.”

  Pete Best: “While we were there in Germany – in fact, we opened the Star-Club – we received a telegram from Brian saying, ‘Congratulations – you’ve got a recording test with EMI. Get cracking, write your own mater
ial. I’ve got some material back home which they want you to practice.’ That was when they wrote ‘Love Me Do’. We wanted to do our own songs anyway. We’d done standards, we’d done the American releases and other bands had copied us, and we realised that doing our own songs would be the next trick. We were dead cocky about it. I did dabble in writing some lyrics myself and I’ve still got them.”

  Tony Sheridan: “We’d all signed the contract with Polydor, not just me. Bert Kaempfert came to some arrangement with Brian Epstein and the silly bastard let them out of the contract for nothing.”

  Brian Epstein told many people that the Beatles were going to be bigger than Elvis. Not too much should be read into this – how many managers say their clients are going to be bigger than Elvis and then neither the artists nor the managers are heard of again? It is hype. If he really believed that, why did he sign so many other acts?

  Norman Kuhlke, the drummer with the Swinging Blue Jeans, recalls, “Brian Epstein may have said that the Beatles were going to be bigger than Elvis but when he tried to sign us up, he said, ‘I like your music the best. The Beatles don’t play my kind of music.’ He was more jazz-minded than rock-minded.”

  Clive Epstein: “I remember Brian coming back from London with the acetate of ‘Love Me Do’ and he played it to the family and me. We liked it, but when he suggested that these boys would be really enormous – he saw them as legends and bigger than Elvis – I couldn’t quite see it… but how right he was.”

  Billy J. Kramer comes down on Eppy’s side: “Brian Epstein said that the first time he heard the Beatles he knew that they were going to be as big as Elvis. Well, the first time I saw them at the Litherland Town Hall, I thought that, and friends of mine thought I was crazy. But I really knew it, I was positive that they would do it.”