He was confined to barracks for some time. It wasn’t his first offence. He’d been guilty of other minor insubordinations, or at least inabilities to do the right thing. ‘The army was generally getting on my nerves. I really was becoming genuinely upset. It was getting me down so much that I reported to the barracks doctor who referred me to a psychiatrist.’
Other psychiatrists were consulted and all agreed that Private Epstein wasn’t one of nature’s soldiers. They agreed that he was mentally and emotionally unsuited to military service. After twelve months, his national service only half completed, he was discharged on medical grounds. As is the way of the army, they still gave him most impressive sounding military references. These described him in glowing terms as a ‘sober, reliable and utterly trustworthy soldier’.
Brian told the story of his army debacle in very cheerful terms, almost hinting that he might have engineered his discharge. But there seems little doubt that he had been seriously disturbed by it all.
He ran all the way to Euston and caught the first train to Liverpool. He went back to the family store and worked very hard. He began to take an increasing interest in the record side. He’d always been interested in music, classical records mainly, but popular music as well. Edmundo Ros was one of his favourites at the time.
But he began to get even more interested in a new hobby, one he had been very fond of at school — acting. He was beginning to realize that perhaps he was more interested in artistic things than being a furniture salesman. He went to every production at the Liverpool Playhouse and began to spend more and more of his spare time either in amateur productions, or in the company of professional actors from the Playhouse. He became very friendly with two in particular, Brian Bedford and Helen Lindsay.
They suggested that he too could be an actor. He had the interest, the right feelings and, they were sure, the talent. Why didn’t he apply for RADA? They would help him. So he applied for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. And he got in.
‘I read two pieces for the director, John Fernald. They were from Eliot’s Confidential Clerk and from Macbeth. I got in without a full audition, for some reason. Perhaps the fact that I had no money problems helped.’
His father, naturally enough, wasn’t particularly pleased. Acting was second only to dress designing in his list of unmanly jobs. But at 22, his son and heir went off again to interrupt his career. This time willingly, unlike the army. Perhaps even for ever.
He was in the same year at RADA as Susannah York and Joanna Dunham. Albert Finney and Peter O’Toole had just left. While a student at RADA he took a part-time job in a record shop in Charing Cross Road.
‘I was doing reasonably well. John Fernald had great faith in me. But I began to loathe actors and all their social life. I hadn’t enjoyed school. And here I was seven years later in another community life. I just didn’t like it, or any of the people. I began to think it was too late. I was more a businessman after all.’
From the day he’d started RADA his father was always asking him when he was coming back to the business. Each holiday, as he was going back to RADA, he asked him to stay. During the summer vacation of 1957, before he began his fourth term, he asked Brian again over dinner at the Adelphi Hotel. This time he said yes.
His father had decided to open a new branch in Liverpool, this time in the city centre, in Great Charlotte Street. It was hoped it would interest Brian in the firm. Clive, Brian’s younger brother, was by this time also working in the firm.
Brian was in charge of the record department with one assistant. Anne Shelton, the singer, opened the new store. On the first morning the record department took £20. In Walton the record department took £70 in a good week.
‘Most record shops I’d ever been in were lousy. The minute a record became popular, it went out of stock. I aimed to have everything in stock, even the most way-out records.
‘I did this by ordering in triplicate any record that anyone ever wanted. I reckoned that if one person asked for something, there must be others who would want it too. I even ordered three copies of the LP “The Birth of a Baby”, just because one person had wanted it.’
Every customer was encouraged to leave an order for a record if by chance it wasn’t in. An immediate delivery was always promised. Brian worked out a simple but ingenious stock index whereby it could be seen immediately which record had sold out. This consisted of strings attached inside each folder. When any were dangling down, it could be seen immediately that more records were needed. This was checked constantly throughout the day and replacements put in or reordered immediately.
He also worked out his own top twenty best-seller list of the pop records being sold in NEMS. This was checked twice daily. Apart from being a good gimmick, of interest to customers and an encouragement for them to buy certain records, it also showed him exactly which of the up-and-coming records should be ordered in bulk.
‘I’ve never seen anybody work as hard before,’ says his mother. ‘He seemed to have found something which completely fulfilled him for the first time in his life.’
Brian agreed. ‘I did work very hard. I don’t think I worked physically harder in my life before or after. I started at eight each day and didn’t finish until well into the night. On Sundays I was in the store all day making orders.’
By 1959, two years after opening, NEMS in Great Charlotte Street had an extensive pop and classical department covering two floors of the store. The staff had expanded from two to thirty. Business was going so well that it was decided to open another branch of NEMS in Whitechapel, the heart of Liverpool’s shopping centre.
The new shop was opened by Anthony Newley. Brian had got in touch with him through a Decca sales contact. The crowds on the opening day in central Liverpool were compared to the return of a triumphal cup-final team. Nobody in Liverpool had seen such a turnout for a pop singer, up till then.
Both shops thrived and expanded. By the August of 1961 Brian was boasting that the two NEMS records departments in central Liverpool in Whitechapel and Great Charlotte Street contained, ‘The finest record selections in the North’. This boast appeared in an advertisement on 31 August 1961, in Mersey Beat, that same Merseyside pop music newspaper which had begun the previous month. Brian himself was not personally a fan of pop music. His favourite composer was by then Sibelius. But as a smart businessman, he saw that Mersey Beat was thriving and a good advertising market.
In that same issue he started a column called ‘Record Releases’. This was bylined by ‘Brian Epstein of NEMS’. In this he reviewed forthcoming records, light, jazz and pop. In that first column he said that ‘The Shadows’ popularity seems to increase continually.’ That must have made the Beatles puke.
The column gave him free publicity for his shops and also helped him to push certain records. But it was also smart of Mersey Beat to have got him. In the four years since he’d left RADA, fed up and disillusioned, he’d become about the leading personality in the record retailing business on Merseyside. His name and solid business background gave weight to Mersey Beat.
But very soon he was beginning to feel he had expanded as far as he could go. There weren’t many fresh fields to conquer in Merseyside, at least in his line. By the autumn of 1961 the feeling of boredom and dissatisfaction was coming on again. His mother remembers sensing it.