John leading the Quarrymen — photo from around 1957.
Ringo, aged about 15, enjoying himself with friends.
George in Hamburg, with Stu in the background.
The Beatles with some of the staff of EMI — an unpublished photograph, taken around January, 1964.
Notes from John about ‘Lucy in the Sky’.
John at the microphone.
Ringo, the teenage Teddy Boy. His grey streak is already beginning to show.
Paul, John and George in German leather
with cowboy overtones, on a roof in Hamburg, 1961.
Paul and John in underpants.
The Beatles going up in the world — in a lift at the Lonsdale Cinema in Carlisle, November 21, l963, before their performance. They had been smuggled in by a back door and into a goods lift to avoid the screaming teenagers in the road outside. A fierce looking cinema attendant stands guard. Photo by Jim Turner of the Cumberland News — reproduced in a book for the first time.
17 decca and pete best
Almost from the beginning, Brian Epstein started using his record contacts, exerting any pressures he could as the owner of the self-styled ‘finest record store in the North’. And almost from the beginning it began to work. Decca said they were interested.
His contacts with Decca had always been the best, though of course they were solely on the retail side. But by getting his credentials passed from department to department, he managed to land a promise that an A and R man — artists and repertoire manager — would come up to Liverpool to see what all the boasting was about.
Mike Smith of Decca duly appeared towards the end of December 1961. Success at his first go. Brian was ecstatic. ‘What an occasion it was! An A and R manager at the Cavern.’
Mike Smith was very impressed. He liked the sound of the Beatles and promised to arrange for them to come down to London and have an audition at Decca studios. This sort of audition, just to hear their sound and see how they would react to taping, doesn’t mean all that much. But it did to Brian Epstein, to the Beatles and to Liverpool.
The audition was arranged for 1 January 1962. Brian went down to London by train for the appointment. The Beatles — John, Paul, George and Pete Best — were taken down by their road manager, Neil Aspinall, on New Year’s Eve.
‘I hired a bigger van specially. I’d never been anywhere near London before. It took ten hours and we got lost in the snow somewhere near Wolverhampton.
‘We got to London about ten o’clock at night and found our hotel, the Royal, off Russell Square. Then we went for a drink. We tried to get a meal in some place in the Charing Cross Road. We all went in, a right gang of scruffs we were, and sat down. It said six bob for soup and we said, you’re kidding. The bloke said we’d have to go. So we had to.
‘We went to Trafalgar Square and saw all the New Year’s Eve drunks falling in the fountain. Then we met two blokes in Shaftesbury Avenue who were stoned, though we didn’t know it. They had some pot, but I’d never seen that either. We were too green. When they heard we had a van they asked if they could smoke it there. We said, no, no, no! We were dead scared.’
Brian was first at Decca Studios next morning, bang on time. ‘The Decca people were late and I was pretty annoyed. Not because we were anxious to tape our songs, but because we felt we were being treated as people who didn’t matter.’
At last they were told it was their turn. They got out their old, battered amplifiers and were immediately told to put them away. ‘They didn’t want our tackle,’ says Neil. ‘We had to use theirs. We needn’t have dragged our amps all the way from Liverpool.’
They got going and George sang, in a very clipped voice, ‘The Sheik of Araby’. Paul sang rather nervously, ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’ and ‘Like Dreamers Do’. They didn’t try any of their own compositions, although they had scores they could have done. Brian advised them to stick to standards.
‘They were pretty frightened,’ says Neil. ‘Paul couldn’t sing one song. He was too nervous and his voice started cracking up. They were all worried about the red light. I asked if it could be put off, but we were told people might come in if it was off. You what? we said. We didn’t know what all that meant.’
They finished doing the tapes about two o’clock and everyone seemed very pleased.
‘Mike Smith said the tapes were terrific,’ says Pete Best. ‘We thought we were in. Brian took us all out for dinner that night at some place in Swiss Cottage. He ordered wine, but it never turned up for some reason.’
The weeks passed and nothing happened. They continued playing their local dates on Merseyside, but all the time expecting Decca to whisk them off to the big time. Then in March, after a lot of pestering, Brian heard from Dick Rowe, Mike Smith’s boss at Decca, that they had decided not to record the Beatles. ‘He told me they didn’t like the sound. Groups of guitars were on the way out. I told him I was completely confident that these boys were going to be bigger than Elvis Presley.’
It was suggested to him that as he had a good record business in Liverpool he should stick to it. It was also hinted that there were other ways of having a record made — for a payment of £100, for example, he could hire a studio and an A and R man. He contemplated this for a day or so. But he was still being treated in such an offhand manner, so he thought, that he decided it was a complete waste of money.
‘I think Decca expected us to be all polished,’ says John. ‘We were just doing a demo. They should have seen our potential.’ After that began a long and dispiriting trail round all the other major recording companies. In turn, Pye, Columbia, HMV and EMI turned them down. Other smaller companies also said no.
‘I was the last to hear about being turned down by Decca,’ says Pete Best. ‘John, Paul and George heard long before me. They just let it slip out one day, that they’d known for weeks. Why didn’t you tell me? They said they didn’t want to dishearten me.’
The others veered between being disheartened and an illogical optimism that something would turn up in the end.
‘We did have a few little fights with Brian,’ says John. ‘We used to say he was doing nothing and we were doing all the work. We were just saying it, really. We knew how hard he was working. It was Us against Them.’
‘We used to wait for Brian at Lime Street to hear his news,’ says Paul. ‘He’d ring us up and we’d think perhaps he’d have something for us. He’d come off the train with his briefcase full of papers and we’d go for a coffee in the Punch and Judy and hear how Pye or Philips or whoever it was had turned us down.’
‘But we still used to send up the idea of getting to the top,’ says George. ‘When things were a real drag and nothing happening, we used to go through this routine: John would shout, “Where are we going, fellas?” We’d shout back, “To the Top, Johnny!” Then he would shout, “What Top?” “To the Topper-most of the Poppermost, Johnny!”’
Alistair Taylor, Brian’s assistant at NEMS, says that Brian was often near to tears with the trail round the record companies. ‘He was bringing all the pressures he could, but there are always 10,000 groups, bringing all the pressures they can. He was getting nowhere.’