‘Once the news got about that we were making a show,’ says Pete, ‘the club started packing them in. We played seven nights a week. At first we played almost non-stop till 12:30, when it closed, but as we got better the crowds stayed till two most mornings.
‘We saw lots of fights. Real big ones, with people swinging from lights and jumping off tables, just like in film fights.’
They all used to beat on the stage with their feet, when they weren’t jumping in the air, to add to the noise and increase the beat. Pete Best didn’t fit exactly into their ways at the beginning, so they all had to pound out the rhythm as well. But Pete soon improved, as they all did.
The ‘Making Show’, as the Germans called it, was the vital thing. Although they were a rock group, they’d been pretty quiet in Liverpool. Now they were actively encouraged to let themselves go and make as much show on stage as possible, which of course was easy for John. He made a show all the time, jumping in ecstasy or rolling on the floor, much to the delight of the local rockers they were soon getting as their fans. Stories about John are still told in Hamburg, a lot of them improving with age.
‘It was hard work,’ says Pete, ‘but we were just five fellows having a good time. We did daft things all the time. John had a pair of Long John underpants, as it was getting very cold with winter drawing on. George bet him ten marks that he wouldn’t go out, wearing them and nothing else. He went out in the street, just in his Long Johns, with sun specs on and read the Daily Express for five minutes. We watched him, killing ourselves laughing.’
But after two months, the Indra was closed. There had been complaints from neighbours about noise. The Beatles then moved to the Kaiserkeller. The stage at the Kaiserkeller was very old, more or less planks on orange boxes. They decided to go through it so they’d have to have a new one. They did go through it in the end, by jumping around and making show, but they never got a new one. They just played on the open floor.
‘I drank a lot,’ says Pete Best. ‘You couldn’t help it. They’d be sending us drinks up all the time so we naturally drank too much. We had a lot of girls. We soon realized they were easy to get. Girls are girls, fellers are fellers. Everything improved 100 per cent. We’d been meek and mild musicians at first, now we became a powerhouse.’
The Kaiserkeller was making them work even harder than ever. The group which had been there in the first place had now gone back to Liverpool and been replaced by another Liverpool group, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. They were officially booked to play six hours a night. As there were now two groups in the same club, they did alternate hours through the night. But their time off was too short to do anything or go anywhere, so they were in effect playing for a period of twelve hours at a time.
‘Your voice began to hurt with the pain of singing,’ says John. ‘We learned from the Germans that you could stay awake by eating slimming pills, so we did that.’ The pills at first were pretty harmless, but they moved on to other ones, like Black Bombers and Purple Hearts, though they never appear to have been dependent on them or to have taken them to excess. But it was the beginning of an interest in and a liking for drugs, however minor. All of them tried them at some time, except Pete Best who had no wish to be connected in any way with drugs.
They never let the pills get out of control because they were genuinely taking them to keep awake, not for kicks. They wanted to keep awake because they were loving everything, playing the sort of stuff they wanted to, to wild Hamburg teenagers, for as long as they wanted. They didn’t mind the long hours at all.
The times they did get fed up, usually with the living accommodation, were very few. If they hadn’t been so far from home, of course, and in a foreign country, they might have packed up many times and gone home to Liverpool. But they couldn’t, stuck away in Hamburg. They were also spending all the money as quickly as they got it.
It’s surprising their health didn’t suffer more. They never ate properly and hardly slept. ‘What with playing, drinking and birds, how could we find time to sleep?’ says John.
George and Paul knew a little bit of German. Pete knew most of all as he had passed German at O level. John and Stu spoke no German and weren’t interested in learning. ‘We just used to shout in English at the Germans,’ says John. ‘Call them Nazis and tell them to fuck off.’ The audience just cheered even more.
The audiences were entranced by them, devoted to them, and the Beatles became less scared of the club, the waiters and the fights. They saw the waiters taking money out of the pockets of drunks and as they were hard up, John decided one night to try it himself.
‘We chose a British sailor to roll. I thought I could chat him up in English, kid him on we could get him some birds. We got him drinking and drinking and he kept on asking, where’s the girls? We kept chatting him up, trying to find out where he kept his money. We just hit him twice in the end, then gave up. We never made it. We didn’t want to hurt him.’
The Beatles had lots of little arguments amongst themselves, but nothing serious. It was mainly Stu and Pete, the relatively new boys, being picked on by the rest. Stu took it to heart, but Pete didn’t seem to notice. It all passed over his head. He can’t remember being involved in any rows or anyone criticizing him or mocking him, though the others do.
But Stu and Pete were proving popular with the audience, though not as much as Paul, who was always the most popular everywhere. Stu wore his sunglasses on stage and looked very defiant. Pete never smiled or jumped around, the way John did, but simply looked sullen and menacing. Both of them were looked upon as James Dean figures by the audience, moody and magnificent. The others, particularly John, were the wild extrovert ones.
‘Paul was telling me the other day,’ says John, ‘that he and I used to have rows about who was the leader. I can’t remember them. It had stopped mattering by then. I wasn’t so determined to be the leader at all costs. If I did argue, it was just out of pride.
‘All the arguments were just trivial, mainly because we were fucked and irritable with working so hard. We were just kids. George threw some food at me once on stage. We usually ate on stage as we were on so long. The row with George was just over something stupid. I said I would smash his face in for him. We had a shouting match on stage, but that was all. I never did anything.’
They were in the main very friendly with each other and also very friendly with Rory Storm and his group, who were alternating with them at the Kaiserkeller.
They already knew Rory’s group very well. He was much better known at the time in Liverpool than they were. Rory had been offered the Hamburg trip before them. Because he turned it down, as he had another engagement, they’d got it instead. Apart from Rory, there were other Liverpool groups doing better than the Beatles in those days, like Cas and the Casanovas. The Beatles, at the time they left Liverpool for Hamburg, were probably about third or fourth in the hierarchy of Liverpool beat groups.
‘We all knew Rory,’ says George. ‘He was the big star of Liverpool, very flash and wild on stage.’ George knew the group well because at one stage, before he joined the Beatles, he was thinking of joining them. ‘I’d met Rory because I was once trying to knock off his little sister.’
The drummer with Rory Storm’s group spent a lot of his sitting-out time watching the Beatles and requesting songs from them.
‘I didn’t like the look of Rory’s drummer myself,’ says George. ‘He looked the nasty one, with his little grey streak of hair. But the nasty one turned out to be Ringo, the nicest of them all.’