‘When the doors opened the first ones would tear in, knocking each other over.
‘They’d keep their rollers in and jeans on for the first groups. Then when it got near the time for the Beatles to come on, if there was a gang of four, say, they would go off in turns to the ladies with their little cases to get changed and made-up. When the Beatles came on they’d all look smashing, as if they’d just arrived.
‘I suppose it was partly sex and partly the music. That was the attraction. They were obviously dying to be noticed and get to know one of them. But no, it was really just everything about being there. It was terrible, the mad screams when they came on. They went potty.’
When Maureen did go out with Ringo, she had to keep completely in the background.
‘I might have been killed otherwise. The other girls were not friendly at all. They wanted to stab me in the back. It was part of their image, that they weren’t married and so each girl thought she might have a chance. None of them were supposed to have steadies.
‘A few eventually found out, of course. They used to come into the hairdresser’s where I was working. I couldn’t do anything about that. I would have to do their hair. Then they would threaten me — “If you see that Ringo Starr again you’re for it.” When I went outside they’d push me. I used to get threatening phone calls — my brother’s going to get you, they used to say.
‘They were playing at the Locarno once. Just before they’d finished, Ritchie told me to go outside and sit in the car and wait for him, so no one would see me. I was sitting in the car when this girl came up. She must have followed me.
‘She said, “Are you going out with Ringo?” I said no, oh no, not me. He’s just a friend of my brother’s. “Liar,” she said, “I just saw you talking to him.” I’d forgotten to wind the window up. Before I could do anything, she had her hand through the window and scratched me down my face. She started screaming and shouting some very select language at me. I thought this is it. I’m going to get stabbed. But I just got the window up in time. If I hadn’t, she would have opened the door and killed me.’
part 2
20 george martin and dick james
George Martin always seems light years away from the Beatles in class, tastes and background. He is tall and handsome, in a matinée idol sort of way, with a studied prep schoolmaster manner and a clipped BBC accent. But his early background, at least, was as humble and working-class as the Beatles’.
He was born in 1926, in Holloway, north London, the son of a carpenter. He went first to a Jesuit College in Stamford Hill, then the family moved to Kent and he went to Bromley County School. There was no musical tradition in the family and he had no musical training as a young boy, but he taught himself to play the piano by ear and by the age of 16 he was running his own school dance band.
During the war he served in the Fleet Air Arm, rising to the rank of lieutenant. He was demobbed in 1947 and found himself with nothing to do. Thanks to someone who’d heard him play the piano in wartime concerts, he tried for the Guildhall School of Music. He spent three years there, taking up the oboe as a second instrument. After graduating, he freelanced for a while as an oboist, but never rose above pit orchestra work or Sunday- afternoon playing with bands in London parks. He got the sack from that eventually, for not being good enough.
Late in 1950 a proper job presented itself, as an assistant A and R man at Parlophone, one of EMI’s smaller companies. At the time he didn’t know what EMI meant. It stands for Electrical Musical Industries, now the world’s biggest record organization.
Although it was his Guildhall classical training that had got him the job, he was expected to help with jazz and light music. The range was wide at Parlophone but, in the main, unexciting. ‘Parlophone was the poor relation in those days, compared with the EMI big boys, HMV and Columbia. We were still recording on wax when I joined in 1950.’
Parlophone had been bought just before the war from Germany. It had done little since being taken over and a lot of people inside, according to George Martin, expected it not to last very much longer.
Its familiar symbol ‘£’, the pound sterling sign, has no connection with the millions of pounds it has made since. It comes from the initial of the founder’s surname, Carl Lindberg.
George’s salary at EMI was very modest, £7 4s. 9d. a week. To eke it out, he still played occasional Sunday-afternoon concerts in the parks, when he could get them, and arranged some school orchestral recitals.
George Martin found himself doing more and more of the popular records. Two of his earliest stars were Bob and Alf Pearson, who used to sing songs about ‘My Brother and I’. He also recorded The Five Smith Brothers and the Scottish country dance band, Jimmy Shand and his Band. He recorded their ‘Bluebell Polka’, still a successfully selling recording. He moved into jazz, recording Johnny Dankworth and Humphrey Lyttleton.
LPs were a great innovation in the early 1950s, though they now seem to have been with us for ever. ‘EMI were very late getting on to them, not until 1954. I don’t know why it took us so long. Decca had them about 1952. It meant we had a lot of leeway to catch up.’
In the early 1950s, producing records in Britain was a very routine, traditional business. It was like bringing out a regular monthly magazine. Each month, a company like Parlophone brought out around ten new records, all planned about two months ahead, which they called their monthly supplements. They were always very strictly and fairly balanced. Out of the ten new records, two would be classical, two jazz, two dance music — the Victor Silvester sort of dance music — two would be male vocal and two would be female vocal. There was no such category as pop. ‘We never talked about pop. All we had was classical, jazz, dance and vocal.’
Out of all these categories, Parlophone had very few of the leading lights. Victor Silvester, for example, was with Columbia, one of EMI’s more successful offshoots. The main money-spinning singers came from America. Parlophone had none of them.
But slowly George Martin managed to create a little niche for himself by producing a stream of comedy records, though no one in the record business said they would ever sell.
One of his earliest comedy records was Peter Ustinov’s ‘Mock Mozart and Phoney Folklore’. He also did Peter Sellers, Flanders and Swann and, later on, ‘Beyond the Fringe’, recording them in Cambridge, before they came to the West End.
Then skiffle and rock arrived, transforming the teenage pop music scene. British groups at last started to make hit records, though still nothing on the scale of the American stars. But poor old Parlophone was left farther behind, despite George Martin’s comedy numbers.
‘Everybody seemed to find a group or a singer, except Parlophone. I toured the London coffee bars looking for talent.’ He turned down the chance of signing Tommy Hicks, or Tommy Steele as he became, because he thought he was just another Elvis copy.
‘I envied so much HMV and Columbia with their American stars or other companies with British stars like Cliff Richard. In a way that is so easy. Once you have a singer or a group that you know the public likes, all you have to do then is find them another song. With comedy, you start each time completely from scratch.’
As rock revealed a huge new teenage market and as record charts and record sales became increasingly important, Parlophone, the company which many people didn’t think had much life left anyway, got even farther behind.
By May 1962, unbeknown to Brian Epstein and the Beatles, Parlophone was desperately waiting for something like the Beatles to turn up. The great George Martin, whose every cough and comment they tried to analyse, was far from being great.