‘Derry and the Seniors had come back from Hamburg first. Pete had sent them round to his mother’s and she’d given them an evening at the Casbah. They were very much improved. They said wait till we hear the Beatles.
‘When I heard that the Beatles were definitely coming home I wrote out lots of posters saying “Return of the Fabulous Beatles” — I put them up on walls and doors all over the place. I’d never seen them as a group with Pete as a member. I didn’t know how they’d changed in Hamburg. They might have been awful.’
But despite Neil’s enthusiasm, it wasn’t possible to put the Beatles on at the Casbah right away. Nobody seemed to know what the others were doing, or even if they were all back. ‘I didn’t know for a week after John came back that he had had to leave Hamburg as well,’ says Pete Best. ‘We didn’t know for weeks what had happened to Stu, till well into January.’
But their first post-Hamburg booking was at the Casbah and they did very well.
‘They were great,’ says Neil. ‘They had improved enormously. They began to get other jobs and a big following. Frank Garner, the fellow on the door at the Casbah, started to drive them round in his van. I saw a lot of them from then on as the Casbah was the base for their amps and tackle. Rory Storm also came back from Hamburg and played at the Casbah. It was a big scene.’
But their most important engagement after Hamburg took place on 27 December 1960, at Litherland Town Hall. If it is possible to say that any date was the watershed, this was it. All their development, all their new sounds and new songs, suddenly hit Liverpool that night. Their Casbah fans turned up at Litherland and helped the evening’s success. From then on, as far as having a devoted fanatical following was concerned, they never looked back.
They owe that engagement to Bob Wooler, who was about to become DJ at Litherland Town Hall. He’d worked as a clerk for British Railways until the skiffle era began. He wasn’t involved in it himself, being by then almost 30, but he was fascinated by its development. ‘It was amazing to see teenagers making their own music for the first time and becoming entertainers themselves.’
The idea of a Liverpool Top Ten club had collapsed, which would have been a big chance for him as well as the Beatles. ‘They were really sorry for themselves. I knew their capabilities, but they were really down at the time. George was very bitter about the way his Hamburg trip had ended.’
He managed to get them the Litherland Town Hall date. This is a big hall which was used regularly twice a week for teenage dances. It was the biggest hall they’d played in up to then. Their loud, stomping, pounding Hamburg music caused literally a riot, the first they’d ever caused. They also got £6 for the night, again the best they’d had.
‘The kids went mad,’ says Pete Best. ‘Afterwards we found they’d been chalking on our van, the first time it had happened.’
They were billed for that evening as ‘The Beatles, Direct from Hamburg’. A lot of the kids who rioted that night, and for many other nights, thought they must be German. When they signed autograph books and were heard to speak they all said with surprise, ‘You speak good English.’
‘We probably looked German as well,’ says George. ‘We looked very different from all the other groups, with our leather trousers and cowboy boots. We looked funny and we played differently. We went down a bomb.’
‘It was that evening,’ says John, ‘that we really came out of our shell and let go. We discovered we were quite famous. This was when we began to think for the first time that we were good. Up to Hamburg we’d thought we were OK, but not good enough.’
Not only had the Beatles changed, there had been important changes in Britain while they’d been away. Every group was now trying like mad to be like the Shadows.
Cliff Richard’s success had led the Shadows, his backing group of Jet Harris, Tony Meehan, Bruce Welch and Hank Marvin, to go on to become successes in their own right. Their instrumental record, ‘Apache’, had swept the country. Every group was copying their sober, terribly neat stage dress of grey suits, matching ties and highly polished shoes. They did little dance steps, three one way and three the other. In their appearance as well as in their music, everything was neat, polished and restrained.
The Beatles, on the other hand, played loud and wild, and looked scruffy and disorganized, like some aboriginal throwback. They had continued in the rock and roll style, which had been the fashion when they left Liverpool but was now dying out. If anything, they’d become even more rock and rollish, adding extra pounding, volume and wild ‘mak showing’ on stage. They had created in effect their own new sound. A sound which was light years away from the discreet Shadows. A sound which you had to run away and hide your ears from, or go as wild and ecstatic as the people producing it.
‘It was Hamburg that had done it,’ says John. ‘That’s where we’d really developed. To get the Germans going and keep it up for twelve hours at a time, we’d really had to hammer. We would never have developed as much if we’d stayed at home. We had to try anything that came into our heads in Hamburg. There was nobody to copy from. We played what we liked best. The Germans liked it, as long as it was loud.
‘But it was only back in Liverpool that we realized the difference and saw what had happened to us while everyone else was playing Cliff Richard shit.’
Their own passion and personalities, which were contagious and affected the audience, also helped. They had a new sound but it was being made by people who were like the Liverpool audiences, natural, unaffected, unsmooth, untarted up, unshow business.
Bob Wooler, who soon moved on from being the Litherland DJ to the Cavern DJ, was one of the first to rush into print with his analysis of the Beatles. This appeared just six months later in the summer of 1961 in a local Merseyside beat newspaper. He is summing up in this early 1961 period, when they first hit Liverpool after the Litherland Town Hall, long before they had any publicity or promotion of any sort:
‘Why do you think the Beatles are so popular? They resurrected original rock’n’roll music, the origins of which are to be found in American Negro singers. They hit the scene when it had been emasculated by figures like Cliff Richard. Gone was the drive that inflamed emotions. The Beatles exploded on a jaded scene. The Beatles were the stuff that screams were made of. Here was the excitement, both physical and aural, that symbolized the rebellion of youth.
‘Essentially a vocal act, hardly ever instrumental, they were independently minded, playing what they liked for kicks, kudos and cash. Privileged in having gained prestige and experience in Hamburg. Musically authoritative and physically magnetic, example the mean, moody magnificence of drummer, Pete Best — a sort of teenage Jeff Chandler. A remarkable variety of talented voices but when speaking, possess the same naivety of tone. Rhythmic revolutionaries. An act which from beginning to end is a succession of climaxes. A personality cult. Seemingly unambitious, yet fluctuating between self-assured and the vulnerable. Truly a phenomenon — and also a predicament to promoters! Such are the fantastic Beatles. I don’t think anything like them will happen again.’
In the New Year of 1961, other large ballroom dates followed their Litherland Town Hall success. In most places it ended in riots, especially when Paul sang ‘Long Tall Sally’, a standard rock number, but done with tremendous beat and excitement. They were beginning to realize the effect they could have on an audience, and often made the most of it, until things got out of hand. Paul says that some of the early ballrooms were terrifying. ‘At the Grosvenor Ballroom in Wallasey, there would be 100 Wallasey lads all ready to fight 100 lads from Seacombe when things got going. They started one night before I realized what was happening and I tried to save my amp. An El Pico amp, it was my pride and joy at the time. One Ted grabbed me and said don’t move, son, or you’re fucking dead. The Hambledon Hall was another place there was often fights. They used fire extinguishers on each other one night there. When we played “Hully Gully”, that used to be one of the tunes which ended in fighting.’