With Ringo fitting in, as a personality and as a drummer, the Beatles were now the indisputable top group in Liverpool. They had a gentleman-manager and had at last made contact with London. But their success, however local, was beginning to split up some of the old loyalties that Ringo, particularly, had been very fond of.
‘There were so many groups in Liverpool at one time that we often used to play just for each other. It was a community on its own, made up of groups. All going to the same places, playing for each other. It was all nice. Then when the record companies came up and started signing groups, it wasn’t so friendly. Some made it and others didn’t.
‘You’d meet someone you’d known and he’d say “Fine, man, just crazy. Just did a recording, but they’re not releasing it. They said I’m too much like Ray Charles.”
‘It broke all the community up. People started hating each other. I stopped going to the old places. But it was one of the great times of my life, those early days in Liverpool. Like at my 21st birthday party, they were all there.’
The Beatles, complete with Ringo, were waiting now to hear a definite date from George Martin for their recording debut. In the meantime, other things in Liverpool fell into place. Brian at last decided that running two record stores and a beat group was too much, which is what his father had been saying for a long time. He decided to give up day-to-day work at the Whitechapel record store and moved Peter Brown across from Charlotte Street as manager. He concentrated on NEMS Enterprises, popping down from his upstairs office now and again to see how Peter was getting on. This led to rows, as Brian couldn’t bear to see his lovely arrangements being changed. Peter was fired, after a furious row, but was reinstated.
But Brian never had rows with any of the Beatles. The nearest was an incident with Paul. They all came round to pick him up one night, but Paul was in the bath and refused to come out. ‘I shouted to them to wait, I’d just be a few minutes. But when I got out, they’d all driven off with Brian. So I said, fuck them, temperamental fool that I was. If they can’t be arsed waiting for me, I can’t be arsed going after them. So I sat down and watched telly.’
The real reason was that Paul had got it into his head that he should revolt. ‘I’d always been the keeny, the one who was always eager, chatting up managements and making announcements. Perhaps I was being bigheaded at first, or perhaps I was better at doing it than the others. Anyway, it always seemed to be me.’
It led to an argument between Paul and Brian, but nothing serious. Paul was soon back to being the keeny. ‘I realized that I was being more false by not making the effort.’
He and John were as keen as ever on writing songs, turning out ‘another Lennon-McCartney original’ all the time. But Mimi still thought it wasn’t serious. ‘I always expected John to come home one day and say he wasn’t doing the group any more. “It bores me to death.”
‘I was the last to realize they were doing well. Little girls started to come to the door and ask if John was in. I’d say, why? They’d say they just wanted to see John. I couldn’t understand it. They were such little girls. I knew his only serious girlfriend had been Cyn.’
In the summer of 1962, Cyn found that she was pregnant. ‘I didn’t know if John would want to get married. I didn’t want to tie him down.’
‘I was a bit shocked when she told me,’ says John. ‘But I said yes. We’ll have to get married. I didn’t fight it.’
They were married on 23 August 1962, at Mount Pleasant Register Office in Liverpool. ‘I went in the day before to tell Mimi. I said Cyn was having a baby, we were getting married tomorrow, did she want to come? She just let out a groan.’
No parents were at the wedding. From all accounts, it was conducted in the same spirit as his own parents’ wedding, held in the same register office 24 years previously. John, Paul and George all wore black. ‘There was a drill going on all the time outside,’ says John. I couldn’t hear a word the bloke was saying. Then we went across the road and had a chicken dinner. I can’t remember any presents. We never went in for them. It was all a laugh.’
They tried to keep the marriage secret from Beatle fans, but one of the tea ladies from the Cavern saw them coming out of the register office and the news leaked out, though they denied it. ‘I thought it would be goodbye to the group, getting married, because everybody said it would be. None of us ever took any girls to the Cavern, as we thought we would lose fans, which turned out to be a farce in the end. But I did feel embarrassed being married. Walking about, married. It was like walking about with odd socks on or your flies open.’
Cynthia was all for keeping their marriage quiet. ‘It was bad enough John being recognized and chased everywhere. I didn’t want that to happen to me.’
The girl fans had grown to enormous proportions by this time, fanatically following them everywhere and screaming at the slightest excuse. Yet no one outside Liverpool had heard of the Beatles. They were still waiting for George Martin, the great A and R man in London, to tell them when he was going to record them.
Even in Liverpool, it had all happened with no publicity and promotion. The fans had discovered the Beatles by themselves.
Maureen Cox was one of these fans. She and a friend ran after Ringo in the street one day, just after he’d joined the Beatles. He was getting out of his car. His little grey streak at the front of his hair gave him away. She got his autograph and wrote down his car number on her exercise book. She was on her way to night class as a hairdresser at the time, having just left school. ‘I can remember his car number to this day — NWM 466.’
Today, Maureen Cox is Ringo’s wife. But it was Paul she first kissed, slightly to her embarrassment now.
She was in the Cavern one evening with a friend, and the friend bet her that she wouldn’t go and kiss Paul. ‘I said to her that it was she who was scared to do it. She said I was scared. So just for a bet, I fought my way to the band room and kissed Paul when he came out. My friend was so annoyed and jealous that she started crying. But it was really Ritchie I liked best. I’d just kissed Paul for a dare. So I waited till Ritchie came out and kissed him as well.’
Ringo has no memory of being kissed by Maureen, nor of giving her his autograph. ‘That was the scene at the time, getting kissed. It had progressed from getting a Beatle’s autograph to touching one, then kissing one. You’d be trying to get to the band room and you’d suddenly have some girl’s arms flung round you. I probably thought Maureen was some fly pecking me.’
But three weeks later, at the Cavern, he asked Maureen to dance. He took her home afterwards, but he had to take her friend home as well. This went on for several weeks. Maureen says she didn’t like to tell her friend she was in the way. ‘I felt a bit scared.’
From then on, Maureen hardly missed a Cavern session, but she soon realized there were fans far more fanatical than even she could be. ‘They used to hang round the Cavern all day long, just on the off chance of seeing them. They’d come out of the lunchtime session and just stand outside all afternoon, queuing up for the evening. Ritchie and the boys once went past at midnight and there were fans already queuing up for the next day. They bought them some pies. They were knocked out.
‘The object was to get as near the front row as possible, so that they could see the Beatles, and be seen by them. I never joined the queue till about two or three hours before the Cavern opened. It frightened me. There would be fights and rows amongst the girls.