Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney. Howard Sounes

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СКАЧАТЬ Bodies pressed close. One felt connected to the music and to the other patrons.

      Ray McFall, the owner, started to open the Cavern at lunchtime as a place for office and shop workers to come for a snack, with the attraction of live bands on stage. The boys had already played the venue as the Quarry Men. They performed there as the Beatles first on Thursday 9 February 1961, and almost 300 times over the next two and half years, the Cavern becoming inextricably linked with their rise to fame. Here the band met their manager, finalised their line-up and tasted success; while the intimacy of the venue helped the Beatles bond with their audience. They were performing in what was virtually a tunnel face to face with their public, with whom they had to engage simply to get to the dressing room, or drezzy (‘three coat hangers and a bench,’ recalls ‘Measles’ Bramwell), standing close enough to the patrons when on stage to talk to them without raising their voices. Sometimes they plucked cigarettes from the lips of girls, took a drag, then handed the ciggies back.

      The audience was not exclusively female. Boys also liked the Beatles from the start. ‘Their sound was different and they looked different … they were an outrageous lot,’ recalls Cavern regular Ray O’Brien.

      Whereas all the other bands, like the Remo Four, were reasonably well dressed, and you knew what they were going to do next, you never knew with the Beatles. It was sort of off-the-cuff stuff they were doing at the time. There was a lot of repartee with the audience – I was attracted to that.

      For girls, the Beatles were of course also objects of affection. ‘I used to think Paul was the best-looking,’ muses Frieda Kelly, a fellow Cavern-dweller who founded the Beatles’ fan club, though Frieda changed her favourite Beatle almost as often as her socks; ‘then I’d look at John – he’s got like a strong face … then George was the youngest and he was sort of attractive [too].’ Like most girls, Frieda relished the direct, friendly contact with the boys at the Cavern. Nobody became hysterical. The original female Cavern fans disdained the crazed girls who came later, when the Beatles became a nationwide, then worldwide sensation. ‘I never screamed. Liverpool people didn’t scream in the beginning,’ says Frieda. ‘If you start screaming, you can’t hear what they’re saying … I was a fan. But I wasn’t a maniac.’

      BACK TO HAMBURG

      Since being deported from Germany, Paul had paid a visit to the German Consulate in Liverpool and written to the German police giving his account of the fire at the Bambi Kino, all to try and get permission for the band to return. The reply now came that the Beatles could return to Germany as long as they obtained work permits. They did so without delay. George had also turned 18, so there was no further difficulty there. Paul quit his job with Massey & Coggins, and returned to Hamburg with the Beatles in March 1961, gambling his future on the success of the band.

      This time the Beatles would be playing for Peter Eckhorn at the Top Ten, sleeping in the club attic, which was a slightly better arrangement than before, though the conditions were still basic and the hours very long. Taking the view that they had secured this gig themselves, the boys wrote to Allan Williams informing him that he would not receive a commission. Williams wrote a two-page letter of reply, dated 20 April, that was by turns indignant, threatening and pleading: he claimed he had a deal pending to book Ray Charles, whom he knew the Beatles admired. ‘I had thought of you going on tour with him.’ The Beatles evidently didn’t believe Williams, or didn’t care. They had outgrown Allan, who would have to live with the fact that he had briefly had the biggest band in the world in his hands, but had let them slip away. ‘And if you think I lose sleep over this, you are on the right track,’ he wrote in his book The Man Who Gave the Beatles Away. ‘I often wake in the night and stare at the wall, and I can feel my teeth grinding together …’

      Paul and John’s Liverpool girlfriends, Dot and Cynthia, came over to Hamburg for a visit. John was willing to bed down with Cyn in the band’s communal room above the Top Ten, along with Paul and Dot, Tony Sheridan and his girlfriend Rosi, but Paul didn’t want to bring Dot into this overcrowded den. ‘Paul thought it’s not good for Dot,’ recalls Rosi. The boys were friendly with an older woman who looked after the toilets at the club, and she kindly allowed Paul and Dot to sleep together alone on her houseboat on the Elbe, a happy and romantic visit culminating in Paul giving Dot an engagement ring.

      It was while Dot was in town that the problem of Stuart Sutcliffe came to a head. Paul’s relationship with Stu was increasingly strained. While being an enviable young man in many ways, Stu was a useless musician who had failed to improve. Paul was now not only proficient on lead guitar, but could turn his hand to playing bass, piano and drums. Stu couldn’t even master the simplest of rock instruments. The Beatles were carrying Stu, who was only in the band because he was John’s mate. ‘Very much later I understood that Paul sometimes was very angry with [Stuart], because he never practised. And when Paul moaned about it, John said, “It doesn’t matter. He looks good.” That was John’s answer,’ notes Stu’s lover Astrid Kirchherr. ‘Paul was a professional, [so] it was hard for him to [put] up with a guy who just looked cool, and his best mate John protected him all the time.’

      Paul had recently dropped and broken his cheap Rosetti guitar. Having decided the guitar was a write-off, the boys enjoyed stomping it to pieces, after which Paul had little choice but to play the Top Ten piano during their set. One night when he was at the keyboard, Paul made a rude remark about Astrid. Nobody remembers exactly what he said, but it was bad enough to cause Stu to lose his temper. Slightly built though he was, Stu swung a punch at Paul. ‘Don’t you ever say anything about Astrid again!’ he said, defending his sweetheart.

      ‘I’ll say what I like!’

      This altercation is often presented as the only time Paul and Stu came to blows. In fact, ‘they were always fighting,’ says Ruth Lallemann, who remembers the boys regularly pushing and shoving each other. ‘You didn’t talk about things. You fought.’ George Harrison said he had ‘a lot of fist fights with Stuart’ to establish a pecking order. Tony Sheridan adds: ‘Paul didn’t get on with [Stu]. There was animosity. There was open fighting on stage … Some ugly stuff went on.’ This particular fight over Astrid was bad enough to signal the end of Stuart’s tenure as a Beatle. He quit the band soon afterwards to live with Astrid and study art in Hamburg, remaining friendly with the boys. Indeed, as soon as Stuart left the band Paul seemed better inclined towards him. As a musician, Stu held them back; now he could just be a mate. As neither John nor George wanted to take up Stuart’s bass – the least glamorous instrument in a band – this job fell to Paul, who needed a new instrument. To get him started, Stu generously leant him his expensive Höfner. Later Paul bought the smaller, cheaper Höfner violin bass, which became his signature instrument. It is a mark of Paul’s talent, and strength of personality, that despite being on a backline instrument he remained an equal front man with John.

      Soon after Stu’s departure the boys were talent-spotted by a German music publisher, who hired them to back Tony Sheridan on a recording session for Polydor. The result was a single, ‘My Bonnie’, released locally in August 1961. Credited to Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers, the track is a lively cover of the traditional song ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’, starting quietly, then breaking into a rave-up, Paul hollering with joy in the background. It made number 32 in the German singles chart that year, and remains a very engaging record.

      The band returned to Liverpool before ‘My Bonnie’ was released, finding themselves increasingly in demand on Merseyside where there were now scores if not hundreds of similar ‘beat bands’. The stock in trade of nearly all these groups was American songs, often learned from discs brought into Liverpool by sailors, becoming proprietorial about tunes they considered their own, though bands would swap songs. ‘I remember swapping with George “Roll Over Beethoven”; and I let him do “Jambalaya”,’ recalls Gerry Marsden, leader of Gerry and the Pacemakers. Bands were rivals – for gigs, exposure and the El Dorado of a record contract – but also mates. One memorable night at СКАЧАТЬ