‘But I’ve never turned down a group without first hearing them. I said there was a show in Peterborough they could join. Just a two-shot at the Embassy Theatre in Frank Ifield’s show.’ He didn’t give them a fee, just their expenses from Liverpool.
Their night at the Embassy, Peterborough, was their first night in a theatre outside Merseyside. It was a complete failure. This was the night the audience ‘sat on their hands’, as Arthur Howes was quoted as saying earlier. ‘It was a Frank Ifield show, so I suppose it wasn’t so surprising. They loved him so much that the show was good enough to take ten minutes of a bad group.’
But Arthur Howes liked the look of the Beatles. He put them on at another theatre near Peterborough. Again they were a failure. All the same, Arthur Howes put them under contract. This didn’t mean much, but it committed the Beatles to him, if he wanted them. ‘I still liked them as people and I saw Brian as a great businessman. I was very impressed by him.’
In January 1963, when they’d at last got a record out, he took up his contract with them and decided to give them a spot on his Helen Shapiro tour. When they set off, in February 1963, their second record was out, but there were few signs that it would get to number one. They were just another group, filling the bill. ‘They took six months to happen, as far as I was concerned. My concern is strictly box office. If they don’t work, there’s no income. There’s no romance for a promoter. Just hard work.’
‘Touring was a relief,’ says John, ‘just to get out of Liverpool and break new ground. We were beginning to feel stale and cramped.
‘We were always getting the pack-ups. We’d get tired of one stage and be deciding to pack up, when another stage would come along. We’d outlived the Hamburg stage and wanted to pack that up. We hated going back to Hamburg those last two times. We’d had all that scene.’
‘It was a big thrill,’ says Ringo, ‘going with Helen Shapiro and playing in real theatres. We’d done the Empire once in Liverpool, when Brian put on a show, just to get us on somewhere. We were third on the bill. Some Cockney manager of one of the so-called stars had a hassle with us. He didn’t want us to be on the show at all.
‘But touring properly round theatres was great. We didn’t know anything about things like make-up, because we’d never done proper stage shows. It was a long time before we had a go at that. I think it was watching Frank Ifield. His eyes looked amazing. We thought we’d try it ourselves. We pranced on like Red Indians, covered in the stuff.’
They caused no sensation at the beginning of the Helen Shapiro tour. It wasn’t till later, when their second record became top, that they started getting a big reaction.
‘Helen was the star,’ says Ringo. ‘She had the telly in her dressing room and we didn’t have one. We had to ask her if we could watch hers. We weren’t getting packed houses, but we were on the boards, man.’
John remembers there was a bit of screaming in Glasgow. He says they always screarned there. They liked rock and roll, long after everyone else had progressed to liking the Shadows. ‘We always got screams in Scotland. I suppose they haven’t got much else to do up there.’ The Beatles were still basically a rock and roll group. ‘Twist and Shout’, which they started putting into their act at this stage, was perhaps the most out-and-out rock and roll style they ever sang.
Although he was on the boards, Ringo, for a long time, was still a bit worried about fitting in with the others. ‘When we got to hotels I wondered who I’d be with. They all knew each other so well. What usually happened was that John shared with George and I shared with Paul. It was always OK, of course.’
John has general memories of touring, but he can’t remember things like the names of towns or places from any tour they ever did. ‘We never knew where we were. It was all the same.’
Ringo’s only specific memory of that first Helen Shapiro tour was being thrown out of a ball. ‘It was in Carlisle, I think. There was a ball on in the hotel we were staying in and we thought we’d look in. It was full of soft people, all stoned out of their heads. They chucked us out because we were so scruffy, which we were.’
When ‘Please Please Me’ got to number one, they became better known to the pop fans. Towards the end, they were getting as much applause as Helen Shapiro, the star of the show,
After the tour, with a number one behind them, Arthur Howes immediately sent them on another one. This started in March 1963. The stars of this show were Chris Montez and Tommy Roe. The Beatles were third on the bill.
Their reception on this tour increased all the time. They were now becoming well known in the pop world. Their appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars helped their record. They were asked to write songs for other people. They did one for Helen Shapiro.
Cliff Richard’s new song, ‘Summer Holiday’, soon toppled ‘Please Please Me’ from the top. But Gerry and the Pacemakers, with the song the Beatles had turned down, ‘How Do You Do It’, soon became number one. By March 1963, the Liverpool Sound was a phrase people in the pop business had started to use.
The success of ‘Please Please Me’ led, in April 1963, to their first LP, which had the same name. It included both sides of their first two records, plus ‘Twist and Shout’, ‘A Taste of Honey’ and others. This album remained in the LP charts for six months.
In April 1963 they brought out their third single, ‘From Me To You’. This reached number one, like ‘Please Please Me’, and was awarded a silver disc.
Brian was still signing up other Liverpool artists. He took over Billy Kramer, put a J in the middle of his name and gave him a new backing group, the Dakotas from Manchester. John and Paul wrote a song for him, ‘Do You Want To Know a Secret’. It became number one.
Already, even as early as April 1963, when their third record, ‘From Me To You’, came out, people were comparing their records and saying they’d gone off. Disc jockey Keith Fordyce wrote that the ‘singing and harmonizing are good and there’s plenty of sparkle. The lyric is commercial, but I don’t rate the tune as being anything as good as on the last two discs by this group’.
John and Paul had composed this song while on a coach during the Helen Shapiro tour. They were writing simple and uncomplicated lyrics, as they’d always done, using easy audience — identifying words like ‘me’ and ‘you’ in the titles.
They were signed up for another national tour in May, this time with Roy Orbison. This was the only British tour Arthur Howes didn’t do. He didn’t have a tour going out at the time, but Brian thought they should keep touring and cash in on their record fame.
Before they went off, they had a short holiday in Tenerife in the Canary Isles. This was at the holiday home of Klaus’s father, their Hamburg friend, who they still kept in contact with. Paul was nearly killed on this holiday, when he swam out too far and got swept out to sea.
Whenever they could, during these tours or in any breaks, they all went home to Liverpool. ‘We went around boasting,’ says Ringo. ‘Professional group, you know. Most groups were still going out to ordinary jobs.’
John felt slightly embarrassed and somehow self-conscious being back in Liverpool, despite their success.
‘We couldn’t say it, but we didn’t really like going back to Liverpool. Being local heroes made us nervous. When we did shows there they were always full of people we knew. We felt embarrassed in our suits and being very clean. We were worried that friends might think we’d sold out. Which we had, in a way.’