John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ life-drawing class, particularly since Janice expected her musicians to play appropriate mood pieces like ‘The Gipsy Fire Dance’ from sheet music.

      Around the middle of the month, Allan Williams was drinking at Ye Cracke when he fell into conversation with a couple of out-of-town journalists. They said they were from the Empire News, the dullest of Britain’s downmarket Sunday papers, and were researching a feature article on how college students managed on their state grants. Seeing a chance to get himself into the article, Williams held forth at length on the poverty of Liverpool art students (omitting to mention his own opportunistic employment of them as decorators and strip-club musicians). He then took the journalists to John and Stu’s Gambier Terrace flat, introduced them to its occupants, and hung around while interviews were conducted and photographs taken.

      Williams had been misled, however. The hacks were not from the Empire News, but from its huge-circulation and scandal-hungry stablemate, the People. Nor was the article about student grants, but about the growing influence of America’s beatnik movement among British youth. In America, beatniks had been considered at worst faintly comic, with their folk music, horn-rimmed glasses and earnest reading of Camus and Sartre. In Britain—or, at least, to Britain’s gutter press—they had taken over from Teddy Boys and Teddy Girls as symbols of juvenile delinquency.

      THIS IS THE BEATNIK HORROR screamed a double-page spread in the People on Sunday, 24 July. A purportedly nationwide survey gave harrowing details of the ‘unsavoury cult’ that was said (without any evidence) to have turned young Americans by the thousand into ‘drug addicts and peddlers, degenerates who specialise in obscene orgies…and outright thugs and hoodlums’. As an instance of the ‘unbelievable squalor that surrounds these well-educated youngsters,’ the report described a three-room flat in ‘decaying Gambier Terrace in the heart of Liverpool’. The accompanying photograph showed several of the tenants in what was called the living room, but was actually John’s and Stu’s bedroom. No squalid detail was left unlisted, from its broken armchairs and debris-strewn table to the floor ‘littered with newspapers, milk bottles, beer and spirits bottles, bits of orange-peel, paint-tubes and lumps of cement and plaster of Paris.’

      Of the figures shown in the picture, Allan Williams alone was recognisable, by his black beard—his journalist pals taking pains to make clear he was just a visitor who’d dropped in to Beatnik Hell to ‘listen to some jazz’. The only tenants mentioned by name were Rod Murray and Rod Jones. Mid-July being holiday time, John was probably not even in residence, but back enjoying the home comforts and steak pies of Mendips. This very first time that the media searchlight shone into his life, it missed him completely.

      Before August 1960, everything that John, Paul, George and Stu knew about Hamburg between them could have been written comfortably on the back of a postage stamp. They knew it vaguely as a northern port in the then Federal Republic of West Germany, whose name often appeared on the sterns of ships tying up in the Mersey. They knew of it even more vaguely as the one city on mainland Europe whose sexual daring surpassed even that of Paris. For years, Liverpool mariners had brought home lurid tales about its red-light district, the Reeperbahn, where female nudity was said to flourish on a scale as yet undreamed of in Britain and the cabarets to feature barely imaginable acts with whips, mud, live snakes or even donkeys. The tarts of Lime Street seemed like maiden aunts by comparison.

      Unlike London’s Soho or New York’s 42nd Street, the Reeperbahn had no history of fostering music alongside the sex. But by the late fifties, thanks mainly to West Germany’s American military occupiers (who, of course, included Elvis Presley) rock-’n’-roll culture was seeping in even there. To attract the younger customers, a club owner named Bruno Koschmider hit on the idea of presenting live beat groups at his establishment rather than simply relying on a jukebox like his competitors. The requisite live sound being still beyond West German musicians, or Belgian or French ones, Koschmider had no option but to recruit his groups from Britain. Through a convoluted chapter of accidents that would need a chapter of its own to relate, the place from which he ended up recruiting them was Liverpool, and the person who became his main supplier was Allan Williams.

      Williams’s first export to Herr Koschmider and the Reeperbahn had been the highly professional and versatile Derry and the Seniors. So powerful a draw did they prove at Koschmider’s club, the Kaiserkeller, that he sent an enthusiastic request for more of the same. Despite protests from the Seniors, that such a ‘bum group’ would spoil the scene for everyone else, Williams decided to offer the gig to the Beatles.

      The engagement was for six weeks, beginning on 16 August; it could not be slotted in among other commitments like the Johnny Gentle tour, but would require all of them to abandon their various respectable courses in life for the precarious existence of fulltime musicians. They would be working for an unknown employer in a foreign city hundreds of miles away, among a people who, not many years previously, had tried to bomb their country into extinction. Nonetheless, the response to Williams’s offer was an instant, resounding affirmative.

      To the many admirers of Stu Sutcliffe’s art, the decision seemed little short of insane. He had just been awarded his National Diploma in Art and Design with painting as his specialist subject, and was about to begin a postgraduate teacher-training course. He himself fully realised what was at stake, and had initially refused the Hamburg offer, but then John had said that the Beatles wouldn’t go without him, and he couldn’t let John down.

      His tutor, Arthur Ballard, was appalled by this seemingly pointless sacrifice of a brilliant future, and furious with John—and Allan Williams—for encouraging it. Stu had been such an exceptional student, however, that the college showed willingness to bend the rules for him. He was told he could begin his postgraduate course later in the academic year if he wished.

      Paul McCartney and George Harrison were also putting excellent career prospects at risk, as their respective families and teachers unavailingly told them. Paul had just taken his A-levels and, like Stu, planned a teaching career, probably specialising in English. George had an apprenticeship as an electrician at Blacklers, the central Liverpool department store, which in those days virtually guaranteed him employment for life.

      Alone of the five, John seemed to have nothing to lose. He had no prospect of gaining any meaningful qualification from art college, and no idea what he wanted to do as a career. The sole obstacle to be reckoned with was his Aunt Mimi. As his guardian, albeit never legally recognised as such, Mimi had the power to veto the whole trip. And, to be sure, her mixture of horror and mystification when first told about it were precisely as John expected. Mimi had no more understanding of rock ‘n’ roll than when she first sent him out to practise in Mendips’ soundproof front porch four years previously; to her, it was still no more than a hobby that interfered with his studies, involved the most unsavoury possible people and places, and could never conceivably earn him anything like a proper living.

      Now, at least, John could reply that it would be earning him a living. The Beatles’ collective weekly wage in Hamburg would be close to £100, which admittedly boiled down to only about £2.50 per day each, yet still seemed astronomical compared with the pittances they were paid in Liverpool. Fortunately, Mimi had never even heard of the Reeperbahn, let alone what was reputed to happen there. Her objections to ‘Humbug’, as she persisted in calling it, were that John would be giving up college and that he’d be associating with the erstwhile bombers of Liverpool. In the end, she decided—probably rightly—that if she didn’t give permission, he’d simply run away, and then might never come back again.

      Like most British teenagers in 1960, John had never been abroad and did not even possess a passport. To apply for one, he had to produce his birth certificate, a document that had somehow gone missing after the frantic tug-of-love that had followed his birth. It turned up in the nick of time—but the way to Hamburg wasn’t all smooth sailing yet.

      The Beatles’ new employer, Herr Koschmider, would СКАЧАТЬ