Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney. Howard Sounes

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СКАЧАТЬ started to dress differently, acquiring black leather jackets and leather trousers to replace their lilac stage jackets, which they’d already worn to destruction, the leathers giving them a new, macho look. Underneath the leather the Beatles were still nicely-brought-up young men who craved home comforts, so they were all grateful when Astrid took them home to meet Mummy in the suburb of Altona. ‘They loved mashed potatoes and peas and steak and things like that. So Mummy did all that for them, and a nice cup of tea, which they couldn’t hardly get in Hamburg.’ The Beatles were on their best behaviour during these Altona visits, not least Paul, in whom Jim and Mary McCartney had instilled good manners. ‘Paul was very, very polite to my mummy.’ The Beatles were slightly surprised to discover that Astrid lived in a self-contained studio flat at the top of her mother’s house, her penthouse decorated mostly in black, with one wall gold and another covered in silver foil. Here she slept with Klaus, which would have been unusual for an unmarried couple in Liverpool. The Germans were so much more relaxed about sex, with the Kirchherrs sophisticated in other ways, too. They had an extensive collection of classical music albums, which Paul spent time looking through. He picked out and played Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, as Astrid recalls, the first example of Paul’s interest in such music. Meanwhile Astrid was falling in love with Stuart Sutcliffe. Within two weeks of their meeting, she had ended her relationship with Klaus and taken Stu as her new lover, a turn of events Klaus took with laudable maturity. Everybody remained friends.

      Paul found that there were many girls in St Pauli eager to sleep with him and his band mates. ‘We were kids let off the leash,’ he later reminisced,

and we were used to these little Liverpool girls, but by the time you got to Hamburg if you got a girlfriend there she’s likely to be a stripper* … for someone who’d not really had too much sex in their lives before, which none of us really had, to be suddenly involved in these hardcore striptease artists, who obviously knew a thing or two about sex, was quite an eye-opener.

      By all accounts there was a virtual nightly orgy at the Bambi Kino, George losing his virginity in their squalid digs while the others lay in their cots nearby: ‘… after I’d finished they all applauded and cheered. At least they kept quiet whilst I was doing it.’ In his memoirs, Pete Best boasted: ‘The most memorable night of love in our dowdy billet was when eight birds gathered there to do the Beatles a favour. We managed to swap all four of us – twice!’ One of the girls who supposedly slept with Paul McCartney during his first visit to Hamburg was a teenager named Erika Wohlers. ‘I got to know Paul and the four others in 1960,’ claims Erika.

      We always sat beside the stage, me and my girlfriends. Back then I was 17 years old, and turned 18 on 22 November 1960. Thus I was still underage. During the breaks, the group would sit at our table. Paul and I got close to each other [and] had sex for the first time at some point in 1960 … We regularly had sex.

      Erika later claimed that Paul made her pregnant, a story we shall come to.

      The Beatles’ popularity at the Kaiserkeller was making Bruno Koschmider’s cash tills ring, demonstrating to other Hamburg club owners that there was money to be made from rock ’n’ roll. In October a new club, the Top Ten, opened on the Reeperbahn, showcasing a British singer named Tony Sheridan (who dated and later married Rosi Haitmann). The boys went to see Tony’s show and sometimes got up on stage with him, playing together with a passion that was partly due to their belief that rock ’n’ roll wouldn’t last, that this was a moment to be seized and enjoyed before the public lost interest in the music.

      Says Sheridan, explaining the passion with which they performed:

      In those days it was, There’s going to be one more year of rock ’n’ roll. After that the real music was coming, the real songs. We all believed it. We had about six months to do it in, then forget it. This was the attitude. It was like burning houses. Do it and get out as quickly as possible.

      The owner of the Top Ten, Peter Eckhorn, was so impressed by what he saw of the Beatles that he offered to hire the band after they finished at the Kaiserkeller. Koschmider was furious and banned the boys from visiting the Top Ten. They defied Koschmider, going to the Top Ten as often as they liked, which ruined their relationship with Koschmider. As the Beatles played out their contract, the Führer resolved to get his own back. The law stated that anybody under 18 had to leave St Pauli by 10:00 p.m., a rule the Beatles flouted nightly because George was under age. The police now enforced this law, presumably because of a tip-off from the vengeful Koschmider, deporting Harrison on 21 November 1960. The others carried on as best they could at the Kaiserkeller, moving their things over to the Top Ten, where Eckhorn had offered them digs. As they prepared to depart the Bambi Kino, Paul and Pete set a fire in the corridor. In a contemporaneous letter Paul stated that they set fire to ‘a piece of cord nailed to the wall’. Subsequently he and Pete said it was a condom. Either way, it was a tiny fire of no consequence, but Koschmider reported them for arson. The police arrested Paul and Pete at the Top Ten the following morning – the first but not the last time Paul McCartney would have his collar felt. The lads were taken to the neighbourhood police station, the Davidwache, then to jail for a few hours, before being deported from Germany by air.

      THE CAVERN

      Paul arrived home at 20 Forthlin Road early on Friday 2 December 1960, full of stories of his German adventures, but Dad soon brought his eldest son down to earth. Having had his fun, Paul was now expected to get a proper job. For once in his life Jim McCartney played the stern father. ‘He virtually chucked me out of the house,’ Paul later remarked with surprise. Paul had had pocket-money jobs in the past: working on a coal lorry, a delivery van, and as Christmas relief at the Post Office. Now the Labour Exchange sent him to his first real job, at the electrical firm of Massey & Coggins Ltd in Edge Hill. Here he was set to work coiling electrical cables, though the personable McCartney soon caught the eye of management, who expressed interest in training him up as a junior executive. Paul was at the Edge Hill works when John Lennon and George Harrison slouched by to ask what he was doing. Paul explained what Dad had said: Get a job or else! John told Paul not to be so soft. He took the view that Paul was too easily cowed by his father, and persuaded him to come back to the band. Paul agreed, but held on to his job as well for the time being.

      After a couple of warm-up gigs, the Beatles played a memorable Christmas dance at the Litherland Town Hall on 27 December 1960. Stu was still in Germany, so the boys got Pete Best’s mate Chas Newby to play bass. It was at Litherland that the Beatles showed how much they’d learned in Hamburg. They were much better musicians now, their act honed by hundreds of hours on stage. Billed as ‘Direct from Hamburg’, they were assumed by many of the girls to be German. ‘The girls used to say to Paul McCartney, “You speak very good English for a German,”’ recalls Allan Williams, who was still nominally their manager. ‘And of course Paul is a bit clever, he could speak a bit of German, he used to go along with it.’ Not long after this triumphant home-town show, Stu returned from Germany and the re-formed Beatles gigged virtually daily in January and February 1961, building a Merseyside following. So busy did they become in this short period that Paul’s old schoolmate ‘Nell’ Aspinall gave up an accountancy course to drive the boys around.

      The Cavern, where the Beatles first performed in early February 1961, was a warehouse cellar, essentially; three barrel-vaulted storerooms under the pavement of Mathew Street, a short, cobbled lane off Whitechapel in the middle of Liverpool. The warehouses in the area were used to store fruit and vegetables, the smell of rotting fruit adding to the distinctive aroma of the club (rotten vegetables plus cheap scent, plus sweat and drains). The Cavern had first come into existence as a jazz club in 1957, its stage constructed coincidentally by Paul’s carpenter Uncle Harry. The Cavern proved a popular but claustrophobic venue. Deep underground, without air conditioning or a fire exit, in an era when many people smoked, the club quickly became stuffy, while condensation caused the limewash to flake off the ceiling and fall like snow on the revellers. On the plus side, the СКАЧАТЬ