Mersey Beat July 6 1961
BEING A SHORT DIVERSION ON THE DUBIOUS ORIGINS OF BEATLES
Translated from the John Lennon
Once upon a time there were three little boys called John, George and Paul, by name christened. They decided to get together because they were the getting together type. When they were together they wondered what for after all, what for? So all of a sudden they all grew guitars and formed a noise. Funnily enough, no one was interested, least of all the three little men. Soooo on discovering a fourth little even littler man called Stuart Sutcliffe running about them they said, quote ‘Sonny get a bass guitar and you will be alright’ and he did — but he wasn’t alright because he couldn’t play it. So they sat on him with comfort ‘til he could play. Still there was no beat, and a kindly old aged man said, quote ‘Thou hast no drums!’ We had no drums! they coffed. So a series of drums came and went and came.
Suddenly in Scotland, touring with Johnny Gentle, the group (called the Beatles called) discovered they had not a very nice sound — because they had no amplifiers. They got some. Many people ask what are Beatles? Why Beatles? Uh, Beatles, how did the name arrive? So we will tell you. It came in a vision — a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them ‘From this day on you are Beatles with an A’. Thank you. Mister Man, they said, thanking him.
And then a man with a beard cut off said — will you go to Germany (Hamburg) and play mighty rock for the peasants for money? And we said we would play mighty anything for money.
But before we could go we had to grow a drummer, so we grew one in West Derby in a club called Some Casbah, and his trouble was Pete Best. We called ‘Hello, Pete, come off to Germany!’ ‘Yes!’ Zooooom. After a few months, Peter and Paul (who is called McArtrey, son of Jim McArtrey, his father) lit a Kino (cinema) and the German police said ‘Bad Beatles, you must go home and light your English cinemas’. Zoooooom, half a group. But even before this, the Gestapo had taken my friend little George Harrison (of Speke) away because he was only twelve and too young to vote in Germany; but after two months in England he grew eighteen, and the Gestapoes said ‘you can come’. So suddenly all back in Liverpool village were many groups playing in grey suits and Jim said ‘Why have you no grey suits?’ ‘We don’t like them, Jim’ we said speaking to Jim. After playing in the clubs a bit, everyone said ‘Go to Germany!’ So we are. Zooooom. Stuart gone. Zoom zoom John (of Woolton) George (of Speke) Peter and Paul zoom zoom. All of them gone.
Thank you club members, from John and George (what are friends).
The jokes, and the deliberate mistakes in John’s article, were reproduced many times in the next few years. The whole front page of the second edition of Mersey Beat was about their German recording contract. They used one of Astrid’s photographs, one of the five of them taken in a railway siding in Hamburg. In the caption Paul is still called ‘Paul MacArthy’. In the same issue there were some fashion notes by someone called Priscilla in which she said that ‘grey was now the colour for evening wear’. This was Cilla Black, then a typist and part-time cloakroom girl and occasional singer at the Cavern.
The Beatles were by now the main group at the Cavern, but they were still using the Casbah Club, Pete Best’s home, as their headquarters. Mrs Best had branched out as a dance promoter, though the Casbah was still her main interest. ‘Most people referred to them as “Pete Best and the Beatles”,’ so she says. Pete did take the main responsibility for their bookings, helped by his mother, and tried to organize them.
The Casbah became even more their centre when Neil Aspinall, Pete’s friend who was still living there, bought himself an old van for £80 and started driving the Beatles round Merseyside. He got five bob from each of them for each session. ‘The evenings became a real drag. I’d drive them somewhere, come home and do a bit of studying, then go back for them. I began to think, what am I doing? I was still getting only £2 10s. a week as an accountant, yet I could get £3 for three lunch hours at the Cavern. So in the July I left work for good.’
Neil became their road manager, which he still is, though he hates the term. It was his job to pick up Pete and all their gear from the Casbah, then take them all to where they were playing.
‘They were beginning to cause riots everywhere,’ says Neil. ‘The kids would get going, then the Teds would try to wreck the place. John once got his finger broken in a fight in the bogs.’
But despite their large fan following and the fact that some weeks they were earning up to £15, out of which they now had to pay Neil, nothing was really happening. London seemed to be the only place where pop singers came from, or at least the only place where they could make their name.
Mersey Beat was doing them proud, and selling lots of copies, and Pete Best was trying hard to organize them, but by being on the road so much they missed many bookings. They didn’t seem to care about bookings anyway, mocking any promoters who were interested in them. They’d by this time broken with Allan Williams, who had got them their first Hamburg date. He says that during their second Hamburg trip he stopped getting his commission which he should have had. They say that they’d got the Top Ten engagement on their own and didn’t think they should therefore pay him a percentage. There was a row, although they later became friends again. ‘I felt they’d let me down, after all I’d done for them. I know now what I missed. I suppose I could have held on to them, but I wasn’t really a businessman. I was just doing it for kicks.’ No other manager or agent was interested. They weren’t earning enough to attract the normal manager and anyway, they weren’t the sort of clean, neat, well-mannered blokes that managements liked.
They spent most of their time between lunch and evening sessions just walking round Liverpool, sitting in coffee bars or hanging around record shops, listening to records for nothing. They were always hard up. Danny English, who was the manager of the Old Dive, a pub (now knocked down) near the Cavern, remembers them spinning out a glass of brown ale for hours. He told them one day that it was about time they bought the barmaid a drink.
‘After a lot of discussion, they asked me what she was drinking. I said stout. They said how much was that. After more discussions they produced 4½d. each and bought her a Guinness.’
Danny English tried to get another of his customers to help them. This was George Harrison, no relation to our George Harrison, who has written a column in the Liverpool Echo for what seems like centuries. But he didn’t do anything. There were so many groups competing for his attention and the Beatles looked the scruffiest of them all.
They were getting more and more depressed by their lack of progress. All the parents, except Mrs Harrison and Mrs Best, were continually on at their sons once again to give up and get proper jobs.
‘I knew John would always be a bohemian,’ says Mimi. ‘But I wanted him to have some sort of job. Here he was at nearly 21 years old, having thrown away his chance at art college, touting round stupid halls for £3 a night. Where was the point in that?’
When John was coming up for 21, in September 1961, he got some money as a present from his aunt in Edinburgh and decided on the spur of the moment to go off with Paul to Paris. George and Pete Best were naturally very hurt at being left on their own. ‘We got fed up,’ says John. ‘We did have bookings, but we just broke them and went off.’