21 touring
The Beatles began the year 1963 with one record out and another one about to be released. They’d found George Martin and Dick James. They were lined up to appear on their first London TV programme. But they were still completely unknown. Brian Epstein was finding it very hard to get them any publicity, nationally or locally.
He was still trying the Liverpool Echo’s George Harrison, but with no success. So he wrote to Disker, the Liverpool Echo’s record critic. He’d first written to Disker back in 1962 and been surprised to get a letter from Decca in London signed by someone called Tony Barrow.
Tony Barrow had become Disker in 1953, when he was 17 and still at school in Crosby near Liverpool. He kept it up while he was at Durham University and later when he joined Decca, writing sleeve notes for them. He still is Disker today, though he’s also the Beatles’ senior press officer.
When Brian wrote to him the first time, it had looked as if Decca had liked the audition and was going to record them. Tony Barrow wrote a little paragraph to this effect, the first time the Beatles were mentioned in print. When it all fell through, Tony Barrow wasn’t so keen to write about them again. But when ‘Love Me Do’, their first record, was out, he wrote about the Beatles again in his Disker column.
Brian came to London more often, once his group had a record out. He met Tony Barrow and asked him for advice on getting publicity.
‘Brian didn’t know how you promoted a record, so I put him in touch with the trade press. Then he said he hadn’t got a press officer. He’d just been sending round duplicated handouts on his own. He asked if I could help. So sitting in my office at Decca, I wrote out the very first official press release from the Beatles.’
He hadn’t actually met them and he couldn’t use his own name or phone number, as he was with Decca. He also hadn’t got a mailing list. ‘I took out a publicity man I’d met. It was a one-and-ninepenny lunch at the BBC canteen. He agreed to share his mailing list and addresses.’ This publicist was Andrew Oldham, who later worked for a spell with Brian Epstein and later became the manager of the Rolling Stones.
At the same time, October 1962, EMI also did a hand out to go with their first record, but this was in the main a rewrite of Brian’s duplicated letter, which in turn had been based on fan-club literature. It said that John’s favourite colour was black, he liked curry and Carl Perkins, hated thick-heads and traditional jazz. Under the heading marked ‘Type of car’ he put ‘bus’. All of them, according to this hand out, had the same ambition — to make a lot of money and retire. This wasn’t the correct ambition, judging by the usual hand outs of the time. Their ambition should have been to be allround entertainers.
Tony Barrow left Decca and began working for NEMS Enterprises full-time on 1 May 1963, from a one-room office in Monmouth Street, Brian Epstein’s first London office. For six months he sent out innumerable press releases, most of which were ignored.
The music papers did write about their records when they came out, especially ‘Please Please Me’, which was eventually released on 12 January. It got to number one on 16 February and they wrote about it well, but the national papers still ignored them as an item of news.
The first, and for six months, the only, general feature in any sort of national paper was in the London Evening Standard in February 1963 by Maureen Cleave. ‘Please Please Me’ still hadn’t got to number one and they were still largely unknown, even to the record business. But Miss Cleave had heard about their following in Liverpool. She said in her article how their Liverpool fans had forced Granada TV to film them but were now worried that the Beatles might leave Liverpool. She described how funny and natural they were.
She also drew attention, for the first time in any paper, to their hair. She described it as a ‘French hairstyle’ with the fringe brushed forwards. This was the correct general term for it at the time, as it had originated on the Continent.
‘Although the pop papers did a bit, I could never get any national feature writers or news reporters interested in the Beatles,’ says Tony Barrow. ‘It wasn’t till October 1963 that it all happened.
‘I would love to say that it was my brilliant handouts that built the Beatles, but they didn’t. The national press was very very late catching on. Kids everywhere were starting to go wild about them, not just in Liverpool, yet nobody seemed to notice. They’d got to the top of the hit parade with their second record, but the nationals still couldn’t see them as a news or feature story.’
The simple explanation is that, as it had never happened before in Britain, the British press had no way of recognizing it. They had to wait until it jumped out and hit them over the head.
Though they were being ignored nationally, the Beatles were at last getting good coverage in Liverpool. On 5 January 1963, Disker gave a long review of their forthcoming second record, ‘Please Please Me’ — without mentioning that he also worked part-time as the Beatles’ PR man.
The famous George Harrison was also lumbering on to the bandwagon. In his ‘Over the Mersey Wall’ column on 21 February, he gave a plug for the TV appearance they were about to make on Thank Your Lucky Stars. He said this had been recorded before ‘Please Please Me’ had got to number one. He also wondered, in his column, if they were going to be a one-hit group or not.
But a couple of months later there was no holding him. It was his turn to boast that his name was the same as the really famous George Harrison. He said he’d been getting masses of birthday cards addressed to ‘George Harrison, Liverpool’. He was even getting requests for locks of his hair, the earliest sign of the fans’ craze for getting bits of the Beatles. He only wished he had some hair for himself, never mind to give it away.
People in Liverpool called Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starkey were also beginning to be pestered, with strange girls ringing them up all night long.
But the big result of getting into the Top Twenty was not the Liverpool Echo writing about them, but getting a national tour. This didn’t mean big success, because all packaged tours that go round on one-night stands have big and small stars. But getting on to this circuit was vital to them at this stage. They needed to break out of Merseyside and become exposed nationally, to see if they could have the same sort of effects on strangers as on the Liverpool fans they’d grown up with. Doing a big tour was also the steadiest way of plugging a record, by playing it live all over the country.
The first tour the Beatles went on, in February of 1963, was Helen Shapiro’s. She was the star of the show. She’d caused a sensation a couple of years previously by becoming the first of the very young teenage girl singing stars.
Arthur Howes, the promoter, was already a success in his field. He’d promoted all the Cliff Richard tours. But by spotting the Beatles very early on, before they’d got to number one, he became the promoter of all their British tours, except one.
Brian had been trying to contact Arthur Howes for a long time, once he’d been given his name as the promoter of the Cliff Richard tours. He was surprised, when he eventually got his home number, to find he lived in Peterborough. This was back in 1962, while he was still trailing round the record companies.
‘One Saturday afternoon I got a telephone call at home in Peterborough. Someone saying he was called Brian Epstein was ringing from Liverpool. He said he had a great group, was there anything I could fit them into? He told me their name, Beatles, and I laughed. Oh, God, here we go again, I thought. Another group with a funny name.