The contract was signed the following Sunday at the Casbah Club, Pete Best’s home and the Beatles’ headquarters. Each Beatle signature was signed in the presence of Alistair Taylor. Brian didn’t sign.
‘That was a great boob,’ says Alistair. ‘I signed my name as a witness to Brian’s signature. It made me look a right fool.’
Brian never did sign the contract either. ‘I had given my word about what I intended to do, and that was enough. I abided by the terms and no one ever worried about me not signing it.’
He agrees the Beatles liked the idea of him managing them because they liked the look of him. ‘I had money, a car, a record shop. I think that helped. But they also liked me.
‘I liked them because of this quality they had, a sort of presence. They were incredibly likeable.’
His parents sensed something was happening. They came back from a week in London and found him waiting for them.
‘Brian said he wanted us to listen to this record,’ says his mother. ‘It was “My Bonnie”. He said take no notice of the singing, just the backing. He said they were going to be a big hit and he was going to manage them.’
Before his father could interrupt, Brian added that of course it would just be a part-time interest, but he wouldn’t mind if he took a little time off work?
His father wasn’t too thrilled. He realized that Brian once again had found something new, but at least this time it was in Liverpool.
Brian decided to start a new company to manage the Beatles and he called it NEMS Enterprises, after the record stores. ‘That was a fortunate decision. I might easily have run them simply under the same company as NEMS, without Enterprises. When we sold NEMS, the record shops, years later, that could have been very complicated.’
Clive, his brother, came in with him in setting up NEMS Enterprises. ‘This was partly because I needed more money, but partly because I was scheming to get Clive interested in perhaps helping me.’
Their next and third Hamburg trip was as good as fixed long before Brian Epstein came along. Not long after they’d left Hamburg, Peter Eckhorn of the Top Ten and several other club managers came across to Liverpool, scouting for talent.
The Beatles had promised Peter Eckhorn they would come back to his club, but when he arrived in Liverpool, to discuss details with them and see any other likely groups, he found they now had Brian Epstein as manager.
‘Brian wanted a lot more money than I was offering,’ says Peter Eckhorn. ‘I tried Gerry and the Pacemakers, but I couldn’t get them either.’
In the end, Peter Eckhorn returned to Hamburg with a drummer, which was all he could get. This drummer, Ringo Starr, was to back Tony Sheridan.
Eventually, other Hamburg club owners came and offered better terms. Brian in the end accepted an offer from Manfred Weislieder, who was opening a brand new club in Hamburg, the Star Club. This was to be bigger and better than any of the others. His offer for the Beatles was 400 marks each a week, about £40. The Top Ten offer had been around 300 marks a week.
These were very good terms, but months before that was settled, Brian was already holding out for better terms wherever they played locally in Liverpool. He made a rule, the minute he took them over, that they would never play for less than £15 a night.
But Brian Epstein did his biggest and most immediate work in generally smartening up the Beatles — in their organization, in their appearance, and in their presentation.
Brian immediately had taken over all the bookings from Pete Best and put them on a properly organized basis. He also made sure that each of them knew exactly where and when they were playing.
‘Brian put all our instructions down neatly on paper and it made it all seem real,’ says John. ‘We were in a daydream till he came along. We’d no idea what we were doing, or where we’d agreed to be. Seeing our marching orders on paper made it all official.’
Brian’s instructions were all beautifully typed, usually on paper with his own crest on the top, a clever typographical sign made of his initials, BE. He also added little homilies about looking smart, wearing the right clothes and not smoking, eating or chewing during their performance.
‘Brian was trying to clean our image up,’ says John. ‘He said our look wasn’t right. We’d never get past the door at a good place. We just used to dress how we liked, on and off stage. He talked us into the suit scene.’
Brian also smartened up their presentation on stage which up till then had been all adlibbed. ‘He said we must work out a proper programme, playing our best numbers each time, not just the ones we felt like playing,’ says Pete Best. ‘It was no use just laughing and joking with the kids at the front when there might be 700 or 800 at the back who had no idea what was happening. He made us work out a strict programme, with no messing about.’
Things have changed enormously since then and swung completely the other way. Later John regretted slightly their smartening up, because he knew it wasn’t really them, or anyway not really John. But he went along with it. He knew that at the time it was the only way, to join the suit set.
‘It was natural we should put on our best show,’ says John. ‘We had to appear nice for people like the reporters, even the ones who were snooty, letting us know they were doing us a favour. But we would still play them along, agreeing with them, how kind they were to talk to us. We were very two-faced about it all.
‘Trying to get publicity was just a game. We used to traipse round the offices of the local papers and the musical papers asking them to write about us, just because that was what you had to do.’
Although they privately laughed at all the people who didn’t want to know them, carefully sent them up, or even openly sent them up, they were still very hurt by all the prejudice against them.
‘All we ever got in those days,’ says Paul, ‘was, “Where are you from? Liverpool? You’ll never do anything from there. Too far away. You’ll have to be in London before you can do it. Nobody’s ever done it from Liverpool.” That’s all we ever heard, for years.’
But Brian was going the right way about making them acceptable to the London sort of mind. ‘But I didn’t change them. I just projected what was there. What was there was this presence. On stage they had this undefinable feeling. But it was being spoiled by smoking and eating and talking to the front few rows.’
Brian had naturally been to see the Beatles’ parents, when he decided to become their manager. They were impressed by his manners and obvious wealth, unlike all the previous friends their sons had had.
Only Mimi, John’s aunt, seems to have been at all hesitant, though Brian should have impressed her most of all, except that she wasn’t impressed by anything to do with beat groups.
‘I had misgivings when I first heard of Brian Epstein. Not against him personally. But he was so well off. It seemed just a novelty to him and it didn’t really matter whether they sank or swam. He wasn’t depending on it, the way they were.
‘I found Brian very charming. I always did. But this was the worry I had when he came along. I thought, that’ll be it. He’ll have finished with them in two months and gone on to something else. While John and the others won’t even have got started.’
A recently discovered photo of the Quarrymen playing on the back of a lorry on the day that John first met Paul, at the St Peter’s Church Fete, Woolton, July 6, l957. Left to right: Pete Shotton, Eric Griffiths, Len Garry (with his back to the camera), John Lennon, Colin Hanton on drums, Rod Davis standing. It was Rod Davis’ dad who took the photo, part of an old roll of negatives, never printed at the time, shoved in a drawer and forgotten. In 2009, Rod discovered the photo using a modern negative scanner and was able to see it for the first time, 52 years after the photo had been taken.