Astrid photographed George side-on, aware he was sensitive about his splayed ears, what the angel friends lovingly called his Segelohren. (“I tried to capture George’s childlike and naive aspects.”) Paul is natural, not mugging this time; he shows no trace of his awkward relationship with the photographer, but one eyebrow hovers as if slightly, fascinatingly, questioning. (“I tried to bring out Paul’s wit and his airiness.”) John doesn’t pull a crip but lets Astrid get close, full into his face and deep into his eyes, behind defenses to sorrow and vulnerability. (“I tried to capture John’s wit and sensitivity.”)
Pete slipped away after the group shots and features in no other image, and Astrid never took his photo again. He wasn’t with the Beatles when, after the session, she drove them back to her house for something to eat—and another world opened up. Stu had already been to 45a Eimsbütteler Strasse but this was the first visit for John, Paul and George, their first real blessed release out of St. Pauli, into the trees and quieter streets of residential Hamburg and Astrid’s arty world. They instantly loved it.
Astrid’s home was a spacious four-story Altona townhouse belonging to her maternal family, the Bergmanns.‖ Three generations lived here in separate spacious apartments: her grandparents on the first floor, her aunt on the second, Astrid and her mother, Nielsa, on the third. Other relatives formerly lived in the attic, and Klaus Voormann—who had no family in Hamburg because he was from Berlin—had lived here too. Astrid’s father, Emil Kirchherr, died in 1958; he’d had a good job, as a senior salesman for the Ford motor company, and Nielsa was also of independent wealth, from her father, whose company (Theodor Bergmann) manufactured jukeboxes. There was taste, elegance, culture and a particular cleanliness about the house, aided by a maid. Nielsa was a gourmet cook and bought only the finest meats and fish, so the meal she served the Beatles was the best they’d had in months, and perhaps ever. They had to wait for each other to start, resist wolfing it down in the usual St. Pauli manner, and not stub out their cigarettes on the plate afterward.
Starved of home comforts since August, the Beatles made full use of the big house at 45a: they took baths, had their clothes washed and perhaps even ironed, and enjoyed being in a warm and cultured environment. “Paul always used to look through my LPs—though I had only classical and jazz—and John always went straight for the books.”
Stu had already been enthusing to them about Astrid’s bedroom and now they saw it for themselves. No girl in Liverpool had a room like this. It was black. Black carpet, big black velvet blanket on the black bed, black walls on which she and Klaus glued silver foil, and on a table was a silver candelabra. “It was my Jean Cocteau phase,” she says. “They were impressed.” Klaus says Nielsa hadn’t wanted Astrid to decorate the room like this, “but whatever Astrid wanted to do she was going to do; she was a pampered only-child who could get anything she wanted.”
Astrid had little difficulty persuading Nielsa to let Stuart escape the filthy and freezing Bambi and move into the apartment.a It was no hardship for Nielsa: she liked the young man, nor was she in the least troubled when, in mid-November, Astrid spoke of marrying him. Stuart expected no such reaction from his own mother. He knew, as Allan Williams knew, “Millie Sutcliffe’s attitude was the one lots of people had in Britain after the war: the only good German is a dead German.”
In an undated letter sent home during November, Stuart wrote:
I want your permission and my father’s to become engaged to Astrid when I return to England. The question of when I marry her will be one of one or two years … I’ve loved before but never so tenderly and intensely. The last three weeks or so have been a dream, but I feel calm and collected about this. She knows that I have to go back to college for a year and excepts [sic] it. Please write quickly and tell me what you think, but I’ve made up my mind anyway.
The last nights with Koschmider were bitter. Chief among their missions was to smash his stage. Only a few inches off the floor, it wasn’t much more than wooden planks on top of beer crates, like the bar at a McCartney New Year’s Eve party. They’d had trouble with it from the start, but Koschmider ignored all their complaints. They’d show him. Hour after hour the Beatles and the Hurricanes held a Stompfest. The Kaiserkeller audience lustily encouraged it, probably unaware of the secret motive. It was Rory who finally managed it, dropping leaden off the piano during “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and sending his feet right through the wood. The deed done, the other Hurricanes and Beatles accidentally joined in rather a lot, destroying it some more. Koschmider was appalled; Rory was first fined and then sacked, and the Hurricanes were put on notice too. He could take no more. The man who’d brought British rock and roll to Hamburg was, within six months, waving the white flag—er hat kapituliert—and returning to more easily managed forms of entertainment.
When they weren’t arguing about guitars, the Beatles and the Hurricanes became close during their two months together. Every Sunday morning, by habit, they’d stagger out of the Kaiserkeller exhausted and seriously drunk after twelve straight hours of Schauing, eat a late dinner or early breakfast, maybe top up with a bit more booze, and then walk down to the harbor, to wander with glazed eyes around and around the weekly Fischmarkt. Only then would they finally fall into their beds at the Sailors’ Society and Kino.
It was Rory who inspired the only new Beatles composition to emerge from these Hamburg months. Having had local success with the Shadows’ “Apache,” the Beatles wanted to learn “Man of Mystery,” its follow-up and another huge British hit. They’d never heard it, but somehow Rory had, and they tried to get him to sing the notes. He whistled or sang the first few bars and they tried to play them, but then Rory couldn’t remember any more and dissolved into his usual chronic stammering. John and George carried on, imagining how it might have gone, Rickenbacker and Futurama together, and the first Harrison-Lennon composition emerged. Mostly it was done to send up Rory, but at the end of the exercise they had themselves their very own Shadows-like twangy instrumental, which they called Beatle Bop.33
George’s first impression of Ringo—that he looked “the nasty one”—was shared by the other Beatles, but to know him was to like him; they had good times. Butlin’s heavy drinking culture was merely an aperitif for Hamburg, and in the small hours of every morning—when the last group was playing the last session for St. Pauli’s last customers, and the music was getting slower and slower—the Beatles and Hurricanes lounged around, all pissed, and requested songs. If the Beatles were playing, Ringo sat at the front and asked for mournful numbers. “Moonglow” was one, and Paul fondly remembers him requesting a low-down Duane Eddy instrumental: “Ringo used to ask us, in a slurred, drunken voice, to play 3:30 Blues.”34
They weren’t familiar enough to call him Richy, but John, Paul and George formed a bond with Ringo at the Kaiserkeller. Klaus witnessed it:
He often came across to the Beatles’ table and he always had a joke, and his one joke would trigger off the next person, so every time Ringo came near the Beatles it was happiness.
I know the three of them discussed changing their drummer while they were in Hamburg, because I heard them. It wasn’t said too explicitly because you don’t just go and steal someone else’s drummer, but they always liked Ringo.
Four years later, John looked back to 1960 and outlined the Beatles’ position at that time: “We met Ringo in Hamburg and we liked his style, but we’d only just got the other drummer so we couldn’t do anything about it.”35
Pete was closest to John of all the Beatles, and it was this pairing that performed the most notorious act of the Hamburg trip. John had been indulging in the odd bit of “slap leather” here—Astrid remembers how he “would suddenly rub his hands and say, ‘I know, let’s go shoplifting!’ It was all fun, you couldn’t be shocked”36—and the St. Pauli extension of this was to steal from a drunken sailor. It was being done all over the place. The term, in English, was to “roll” someone.
John once
spoke about it to a journalist, saying their choice was a British sailor; they plied him with drinks on the promise of an interesting scene with a few birds, until they judged him so drunk they could knock him out—but after hitting him twice, they gave up. Pete says four of them (not Stu) were in on the plan, and the sailor was a fat German; they offered to walk him up the Reeperbahn, intending to rob him in one of its quieter corners. Though Paul and George dropped out, John and Pete carried on, and after felling the man with a rugby tackle, they grabbed his wallet, ran … and then dropped it when their victim fired a gas-gun at them. They hared back to the Bambi, slammed the door shut behind them, and for the next few nights watched carefully from the Kaiserkeller stage in case the sailor came for revenge—watched, in John’s case, with eyes that could barely see.37 An identity parade would have been interesting. Dressing and looking as they did, the Beatles always turned heads in Hamburg. Some St. Paulianer called them beknackt—literally “cracked” and figuratively “crazy.” Their stage gear, which was also their everyday gear and often their sleeping gear, gained greater uniformity during November when Paul bought a leather jacket to fall in with George, John and Pete. Another new addition to the stage uniform was a flat peaked cap, like the blue caps worn by Gene Vincent’s group in The Girl Can’t Help It, only these were pink. Being Liverpool lads, and in celebration of the color, they called them twat ’ats. Then they went a step further again and bought multicolored leather cowboy boots that extended halfway up their calves. They tucked their jeans into them, and the wooden heels stomped louder yet on the Kaiserkeller’s patched-up stage.
The first to buy a leather jacket, George, was also the first to get the boots, bought from the leather shop Erdmann. John and Pete quickly followed, then Paul a couple of weeks later (Stuart didn’t participate in the boots or caps). Dressed now in their pink twat ‘ats, black leather jackets, black drainpipe jeans and vivid Texan boots, they were a sight, and completely at odds with the Beatles who’d ducked out of Liverpool and arrived here three months previously. Klaus felt they were just great, poetically describing John as “Rock hair, rock boots, rock clothes and rock jargon. Rock ’n’ roll in his fingertips, from top to the tip of his toes, in the stomach but above all his throat.”38
On November 28, Stu and Astrid exchanged rings and announced themselves engaged. There was still no news from the Western Front. Stuart’s request for parental permission had not been accorded a reply. “I assume you are rather annoyed about the whole situation,” he wrote again, on December 2. “I don’t know what you or my father would have done in the same situation, but I don’t feel I’ve let you down …”
By then, everything had changed, because the Beatles’ fourteen sensational weeks under Bruno Koschmider ground to a halt even more abruptly than expected. According to statements written for the police in January 1961 by Paul and Pete, the group had an unplanned interview with Koschmider (and his interpreter) in his Kaiserkeller office at 1:30 one morning. For “interview” read “showdown.” Their hopes of playing in Berlin had come to nothing, though Munich remained a post-Christmas possibility. In the meantime, Koschmider had got wind of their plan to stay in Hamburg and join Tony Sheridan at the Top Ten. In a rapidly escalating tit-for-tat, Koschmider tried to make the Beatles sign a document agreeing they wouldn’t work any other Hamburg venue in December, and when they refused he threatened them with physical violence (broken fingers, Pete remembers) and said he’d not pay their return fares to England.b It was another of those moments when all eyes turned to leader Lennon. He told Koschmider they’d never play for him again, and he could stuff the notice period. Koschmider shouted he wouldn’t pay them their latest wages, at which point events became so heated he brought the meeting to an end and had them manhandled from his office. The Beatles simply couldn’t wait to shift everything over to the Top Ten, their accommodation included, and stick the biggest V-sign ever right up Koschmider’s fat nose.
George, though, was going home. The night before, he sat up with John and ran through the lead guitar lines he’d need to know. (Presumably, though not necessarily, Paul was switching to rhythm.) It was a time of torment for George—he was being thrown out just at the moment they had a new booking, and if the Top Ten arrangement extended to Christmas, and then they went on to Munich, who knew when he’d see them again? Would someone else take his place? Was this the end of George Harrison and the Beatles? He certainly thought so. “I felt terrible … I had visions of our band staying on there with me stuck in Liverpool, and that would be it.”39
Astrid and Stu drove him to the Hauptbahnhof and put him on the express train to the Hook of Holland. “He was just standing there, little George, all lost,” says Astrid. “I gave him a big bag of sweets and some apples. He threw his arms around me and Stu, which was the sort of demonstrative thing they never did.”40 He faced a lonely and arduous journey, twenty-four hours weighed down by his guitar, an amp and several pieces of luggage, depressed about Hamburg and anticipating the embarrassment of being back in Liverpool without the others. He knew he’d come under renewed pressure from his dad to “get a proper job,” and if it was weeks or months before the other Beatles came home it’d be harder to dig in his cowboy-booted heels and resist.
George might have been placated to some small degree by the inclusion of his name on a letter agreement, that the Beatles would play at the Top Ten for at least a month from April 1961—a basic document written in Peter Eckhorn’s hand and dated November 30—but then this paper also named Stuart and he’d made it clear he was quitting. In the meantime, the final four could start playing there now, and move themselves into the bunk-bed accommodation at the top of the building.c Tony Sheridan was already here, possibly others too, and the Beatles were welcome to shoehorn themselves in. It was neither the Ritz nor the pits. John was the first to move. Then Paul and Pete went back to the Bambi to grab their gear.
The place was in near darkness, as usual. They had to strike a match to see their way about … and then they decided to leave Koschmider a little gift. Pete had a few “spunk bags,” and he and Paul had the idea to hang them on nails in the wall in the long concrete passageway and set light to them. “The place was dank and dark,” says Pete. “They spluttered, they stank, and OK, maybe they singed a tiny bit of tapestry on the wall. It caused nothing but a little smoke and a few scorch marks and then they went out.”41 It was the ultimate fuck you, Bruno, or so they thought.
They got to play one night in the Top Ten, and it seems to have been a good one, pulling business away from the Kaiserkeller, but it was just this one night. Having been shafted once by Eckhorn, when he’d prized away the Jets and Tony Sheridan from the Kaiserkeller, Koschmider wasn’t going to sit back and let it happen again. He might also have guessed the Beatles would make some grand gesture for his “benefit”—they could even have hinted of it—because an inspection was made of the Bambi’s rooms very quickly. When the stinkende qualmende Piedeltüten were found, he decided to form the view it was an attempt to burn down his cinema, and informed the police.
The chronology of events over the next twenty-four hours is rife with confusion and contradiction, but may have gone something like this. Paul was picked up by the police while walking along the Reeperbahn, taken by car to the Davidwache police station (two hundred meters from the Top Ten) and locked in a cell. Pete and John were also arrested. Koschmider didn’t know which of them was responsible for the “attempted arson,” so the Polizei rounded them all up. As Stuart wrote in a letter back to Liverpool a few days later:
I am living in the lap of luxury and contentment. Better than the cell I spent a night in last week. I was innocent this time though accused of arson—that is, setting fire to the Kino (cinema) where we sleep. I arrive at the club and am informed that the whole of Hamburg Police are looking for me. The rest of the band are already locked up, so smiling and very brave on the arm of Astrid, I proceed to give myself up. At this time I’m not aware of the charge. All my belongings,
including spectacles, are taken away and I’m led to a cell where without food or drink I sat for six hours on a very wooden bench, the door shut very tight. I fall asleep at two in the morning. I signed a confession written in Deutsch that I knew nothing about a fire, and they let me go.42
John was also allowed to go. It was now clear who’d done the dirty deed, and for them the ordeal continued; Paul would always remember the little one-way peephole in the door of their detention room, through which he sensed they were watched. It seems he and Pete were then allowed to leave, but a few hours later—early the following morning—they were dragged out of their Top Ten bunk beds and interviewed a second time. Pete suggests they were taken to Hamburg’s main prison at Fühlsbuttel, Paul remembers it being “the Rathaus … it doesn’t mean rat house, it just felt like one.” They were interviewed by an official of the Bundeskriminalamt (Federal CID), one Herr Gerkins, and it was definitely inadvisable to snigger. Instead, they requested permission to contact the British Embassy, like people did in the films, and were refused; then they were taken for a car ride. “We tried our best to persuade him it was nothing,” Paul says, “and he said, ‘OK fine, well you go with these men.’ And that was the last we knew of it. We just headed out with these couple of coppers. And we were getting a bit ‘Oh dear, this could be the concentration camps’—you never know. It hadn’t been that long [since the war].”43
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