Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney. Howard Sounes

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      There have been several explanations advanced about how the Beatles got their name. I know, because it was my idea. The night when John told me the band wanted to call themselves ‘the Beetles’ I asked how he spelt it. He said, ‘B – e – e – t – l – e – s’ … I said that since they played beat music and liked the beat way of life, and I was a beat poet and part of the big beat scene, [why didn’t they] call themselves Beatles spelt with an a?

      Yet Bill Harry says nobody used terms like ‘big beat scene’ on Merseyside before he started his Mersey Beat fanzine in 1961, and he chose the magazine’s name because he saw himself as a journalist with a beat, like a policeman’s beat, covering the local music scene. ‘Once we’d started [publishing] Mersey Beat, after a while we started calling the [local bands] beat groups,’ says Harry. ‘That’s where the ‘beat group’ [tag] came about, after the name Mersey Beat, the paper.’

      However, the phrase ‘big beat’ had already been used: The Big Beat was, for example, a 1958 comedy-musical featuring Fats Domino. Paul himself says that it was John Lennon who dreamed up the final band name, with an A. It was certainly John who explained it best by turning the whole subject into a piece of nonsense for the début issue of Mersey Beat, published in July 1961, writing:

      Many people ask what are Beatles? Why Beatles? Ugh, Beatles, how did the name arrive? So we will tell you. It came in a vision – a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them ‘From this day on you are Beatles with an A’. Thank you, Mister Man, they said, thanking him.

      Even this explanation gives rise to debate, because Royston Ellis further claims that the night he gave John and Stuart the name Beatles he heated up a chicken pie for their supper, and the pie caught fire in the oven. Thus Ellis was the man with the flaming pie. All that can be said for sure is that John’s band didn’t call themselves ‘the Beatles’ consistently until August 1960.

      Three months prior to this, at the Larry Parnes audition, they were the Silver Beetles, a band without a drummer. To enable his young friends to audition for Parnes, Allan Williams hooked them up with a part-time drummer, 26-year-old bottle-factory worker Tommy Moore. As it happened, Moore was late for the Parnes audition, so the boys borrowed Johnny Hutchinson from another auditioning band, Cass and the Casanovas. In the end the Silver Beetles were not selected by Mr Parnes to back Billy Fury on a northern tour, as they had hoped, but they were offered a chance to back one of the impresario’s lesser acts, Liverpool shipwright John Askew, who, in light of the fact he sang romantic ballads, had been given the moniker Johnny Gentle. The Silver Beetles were to go with Johnny on a seven-date tour of provincial Scotland. It was not what they wanted, but it was something, and in preparation for this, their first foray into life as touring musicians, the boys chose stage names for themselves. Paul styled himself Paul Ramon. In mid-May 1960 they took the train from Liverpool Lime Street to the small town of Alloa, Clackmannanshire.

      There was only a brief opportunity to rehearse before Johnny Gentle and the Silver Beetles went on stage for the first time in Alloa on Friday 20 May 1960. Johnny explained his act to the boys: he said he came on like Bobby Darin, in a white jacket, without a guitar, and stood at the mike singing covers such as ‘Mack the Knife’, before ending with a sing-along to Clarence Henry’s ‘I Don’t Know Why I Love You But I Do’. Paul was the first to grasp what Johnny required from his backing band. ‘He just seemed to know what I was trying to get over. He was one step ahead of John in that sense.’ After Johnny’s set, which went over well enough, the star signed autographs for his girl fans. The Silver Beetles played on, so everybody could have a dance. Johnny noticed that, as he signed, the girls were looking over his shoulder at his backing band, as much if not more interested in them than him.

      On tour, Johnny’s hotel bills were paid direct from London by Larry Parnes. The Silver Beetles were not so well looked after, and soon ran out of cash. Lennon called Parnes, demanding help. The promoter referred him to their ‘manager’ Allan Williams, who belatedly sent money, but not before the boys had been obliged to skip out of at least one hotel without paying their bill. Talking with Gentle, Lennon asked if Parnes would be interested in signing them permanently; he seemed more professional than Williams. Gentle asked Parnes, but he declined: ‘No, they’ll be fine for any gigs I get for you lads up North. But I don’t want to take on any more groups. We’ve got enough down here [in London].’

      ‘At the moment he’s a bit tied up,’ Johnny reported diplomatically.

      ‘Never mind,’ replied Lennon. ‘We’ll make it some other way.’ It was that confidence again. Not just with Paul. The whole band possessed remarkable self-assurance. They didn’t have a regular drummer ‘and they had a bass player that was fairly useless’, as Johnny observes of Stuart Sutcliffe, ‘[but] they had that belief that they were going to make it’.

      Driving from Inverness to Fraserburgh on 23 May Johnny crashed their touring van into an oncoming car, causing drummer Tommy Moore to bash his face against the seat in front of him, breaking some teeth. The boys took the injured man to hospital, but Lennon soon had Moore out of bed, telling him: ‘You can’t lie here, we’ve got a gig to do!’ Tommy played the Fraserburgh show with his jaw bandaged but, not surprisingly, quit the Silver Beetles when they all got home to Liverpool a few days later. He went back to his job in the bottle factory. The boys went round to Tommy’s to plead with him to change his mind, but his girlfriend gave them short shrift. ‘You can go and piss off!’ she shouted out the window. ‘He’s not playing with you any more.’

      Broke and drummerless, the boys asked Williams if he had any more work, and were rewarded with perhaps the lowliest gig in their history. Allan had a West Indian friend, nicknamed Lord Woodbine for his partiality to Woodbine cigarettes, who was managing a strip club on Upper Parliament Street. Lord Woodbine had a stripper coming in from Manchester named Janice who would only work to live music. The Silver Beetles were persuaded to accompany Janice. ‘She gave us a bit of Beethoven and the Spanish Fire Dance,’ Paul recalled. ‘… we said, “We can’t read music, sorry, but instead of the Spanish Fire Dance we can play the Harry Lime ChaCha, which we’ve arranged ourselves, and instead of Beethoven you can have “Moonglow” or “September Song” – take your pick … So that’s what she got.’

      The boys got a little more exposure when they filled in at the Jacaranda for Williams’s house band, a Caribbean steel band, who had upped-sticks and left one night, deciding they could do better elsewhere. The band eventually called Williams to tell him they’d gone to Hamburg in Germany, which was pulsating with life, the local club owners crying out for live music. Allan and Lord Woodbine went to see for themselves. In the city’s red light district they met a club owner named Bruno Koschmider, a former First World War airman and circus clown with a wooden leg (some said his leg had been shot off in the war). A sinister impression was emphasised by the fact that Koschmider’s staff addressed him as Führer. Herr Koschmider told Williams that his Hamburg customers were mad for rock ’n’ roll music, but Germany lacked good, home-grown rock bands. He needed English bands. No agreement was reached at this meeting, but some time later Williams ran into Koschmider in London and this time Williams persuaded the German to take a young Liverpool act he nominally managed named Derry and the Seniors, featuring Howard ‘Howie’ Casey on saxophone. Derry and the Seniors did so well in Hamburg that Koschmider asked for an additional Liverpool act. This time Allan suggested the Silver Beetles. Howie Casey, who had seen the boys give their amateurish audition for Larry Parnes, advised Williams against sending a second-rater over in case they spoilt things. The matter would be moot, anyway, unless Allan could persuade the boys’ guardians to let them go.

      The Silver Beetles were all under 21, and a trip to Germany would disrupt what plans their families had for their future. Paul had started out as a promising student at the Liverpool Institute, passing O-level Spanish a year early. But music soon displaced hard study, and he did so poorly in his main O-levels he was kept back СКАЧАТЬ