Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  3 Ibid.

  4 Author interviews—Ness, October 29, 2004; Steen, June 12, 2005. Paul’s involvement in refining “Please Please Me” doesn’t alter the fact that John composed it solo—a point he was eager to make in a postcard sent to Melody Maker (reproduced in the August 28, 1971, issue): “I wrote ‘Please Please Me’ alone. It was recorded in the exact sequence in which I wrote it.”

  5 The BBC’s daily “Audience Barometer” reported a listening audience of 3.7 percent for this Here We Go, about 1,813,000. The figure was well down on the Beatles’ previous broadcast but that first show went out on a cold Thursday afternoon in March and this second one a bright warm Friday afternoon in June.

  6 The BBC’s internal-use “program-as-broadcast” report for the June 15 Here We Go was the first time the songwriting credit “Lennon, McCartney” was put into print. “Ask Me Why” was mostly John’s song, so “Lennon, McCartney” confirms both the 50:50 partnership and Brian Epstein’s projection of it—he provided the information to Peter Pilbeam. The song went down as “MSS”—meaning manuscript, naturally copyright but not yet published.

  7 Beatle!, p149. “They’re thinking of getting rid of you” appears in Shout!, p149.

  8 Interview by Tony Fletcher, Jamming, issue 14, 1983.

  9 Davies, p143; George from evidence given at the Royal Courts of Justice, London, May 6, 1998.

  10 From the raw transcripts of interviews for his autobiography A Cellarful of Noise.

  11 Ibid.

  12 Document in the Epstein files.

  13 Interview by Mike Read, October 13, 1987, for BBC Radio 1.

  14 The Beatles’ album Live at the BBC includes 1963 recordings of “Soldier of Love,” “Don’t Ever Change” and many other songs mentioned in these pages.

  15 Author interview, June 21, 2007.

  16 Interview by Stuart Colman, Echoes, BBC Radio London, June 17, 1984.

  17 Author interview, January 19, 2008.

  18 Author interview, October 29, 2004.

  19 Stage shot, Remember, p75. The advertised picture of John, Paul and George with the Anglia is best seen in Remember, p95, preceded and followed by outtakes. The photo of John and Paul with Gene Vincent, all three of them looking cool in leather jackets, is the frontispiece in Remember. Published photos of Paul and Jim McCartney in the back garden at 20 Forthlin Road were taken earlier the same day, Sunday, July 1.

  20 Mike McCartney quote from interview by Evert Vermeer, Beatles Unlimited magazine, issue 75 (September/October 1987). These “make me look famous” photos are dotted around Mike’s photographic books. Liverpool handkerchief from interview by Peter Doggett, Beatles Book magazine, issue 199 (November 1992).

  Mike was employed at André Bernard—upstairs at Ranelagh House, opposite Lewis’s and the Great Charlotte Street branch of Nems, just along from Blackler’s, where George had worked. He was called Peter (his true first name) because there was already a Michael, and his colleagues included two other likely lads who would become big stars—Jimmy Tarbuck (John Lennon’s primary school nemesis) and Lewis Collins. In his May 9 letter to Mike, sent from Hamburg, Paul said of the hairdressing job, “It’s gear about André Bernards cos you can start earning good money if you like it. I don’t know why I said that, maybe it’s because I used to fancy doing it too.”

  21 Author interview, May 2, 1991.

  22 Beatles Gear, pp66–8. Everything one could wish to know about Vox amplifiers, including the Beatles’ long-term use of them, is in Vox Amplifiers: The JMI Years, by Jim Elyea (The History for Hire Press, Los Angeles, 2008); Beatles chapter, pp570–611.

  23 Author interview, February 20, 2004.

  24 Author interview, June 30, 2003.

  25 Interview by Spencer Leigh.

  26 Author interview, March 4, 2008.

  27 The wedding was June 30, 1962; Leach’s premature Echo ad ran on July 5.

  28 Author interview, July 20, 2006.

  29 Mal Evans quote from unpublished manuscript.

  30 Mike Mac’s White and Blacks Plus One Colour, p16. Joe Brown quote from interview by Spencer Leigh.

  31 Author interview, March 18, 2005. Bobby Graham was really Robert Neate (1940–2009).

  32 Interview by Spencer Leigh—one of very few Hutchinson has done. He doesn’t like talking about this part of his life, and despises talking about the Beatles. An interview approach for this book was rejected out of hand. John Lennon quote from interview by Paul Drew, US radio, April 1975: “There were the Big Three and Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and the two best drummers were in those groups. Ringo was the second best drummer in Liverpool.” “Berdzerk” from Paul McCartney interview by Mike Read, October 13, 1987, for BBC Radio 1.

  33 In the midst of a 2007 lunch, Neil Aspinall casually told me that Paul once drove John in the Beatles’ van to see Ringo in Skegness. This tied in with the quotes by Johnny Guitar and Vi Caldwell—but when asked for further details Neil said he’d talk about it another time and then passed away before it could happen.

  In 2011, during the writing of this book, I asked Paul about it, who e-mailed in reply, “I have a vague recollection of the story you mention so I suppose it is true but, quite honestly, I’m not all that clear on the details.” The following McCartney quote, while proving nothing, is interesting in this context. Talking in a 1986 interview about long-distance road travel, he said, “When you were a kid, if you ever traveled four hours you would have reached Skegness and been at Butlin’s.” (Paul had childhood holidays at Butlin’s Pwllheli and Filey, never Skegness, and reached them by train; in 1962 he was 20.)

  34 A Butlin’s photographer took publicity shots of them in which Ringo is holding open the program and they’re looking at their own photograph. The Rock and Calypso Ballroom had finally shed the suffix added in anticipation of the craze that never came.

  35 The August 23 Mersey Beat, which went to press no later than the 17th, indicated that a replacement drummer had been sought long enough for Rory to be “inundated with applications.”

  36 Beatle!, p165. “Colonel Joe” from Mersey Beat, May 3, 1962; “manager and producer” from his Mersey Beat ad, July 26.

  37 A Twist of Lennon, p70; John, p120.

  38 “Didn’t fight it” from Davies, p159; “make an honest womb of her” from “Halbut Returb,” In His Own Write, p71.

  39 Cynthia from A Twist of Lennon, p71; Dot from the invaluable website It’s Only Love.

  40 Author interview, December 30, 2011.

  41 From Bill Harry essay in The Literary Lennon, by Dr. James Sauceda (Pierian Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 1983), p148. The office move was one floor, from the top story of 81a Renshaw Street to the middle.

  42 Davies, p173; George Martin quote from author interview, June 9, 1995.

  43 Author interview, April 30, 2002.

  44 Interview by Nicky Campbell, BBC Radio 1, November 19, 1991.

  45 Author interview, May 19, 1987.

  46 Interview by Murray the K (Murray Kaufman), August 28, 1964, for WINS (New York radio). Ringo didn’t mention the prior conversations that had brought him to this point.

  47 Ringo says only Brian called him, not John: “I don’t remember John calling, which is in somebody’s book” (The Beatles Anthology TV series). The call was first detailed in A Cellarful of Noise, p70.

  48 Interview by Spencer Leigh.

  49 Davies, p142.

  50 He was earning a little less than £50–60 a week at this time.

  51 Interview by Spencer Leigh.

  52 Author interview, June 21, 2007.

  53 It’s Love That Really Counts: The Billy Kinsley Story, by Spencer Leigh (Cavern City Tours, Liverpool, 2010), p40.

  54 Interview by Spencer Leigh.

  55 Author interview, June 21, 2007.

  56 Ibid.

  57 Interview by Spencer Leigh.

  58 Nothing is known about this session beyond the fact that it happened. Another rehearsal was photographed two days later.

  59 The Beat
les’ first appearance here was July 7, 1962—coincidentally, Ringo’s 22nd birthday.

  60 Author interview, June 21, 2007. Ringo addressed this in The Beatles Anthology, p72, prefacing his quote with the words “A light-hearted side note.” According to Neil, it was never light-hearted and never a side note: Ringo took it as a snub and didn’t forget it.

  61 Author interview, August 27, 2004; Hank Marvin from Melody Maker, May 5, 1962.

  Ringo’s friend Dave “Jamo” Jamieson recorded some of the show. “I had a little Philips reel-to-reel recorder, stuck it on the table and let it run. It recorded some of the Four Jays’ and quite a few of the Beatles’ numbers. A little while later I sold it and all the tapes to my next-door neighbor, and when the Beatles became really big I went back and he’d taped Slim Whitman over it.” (Author interview, August 12, 2004.)

  62 Author interview, July 5, 2007.

  63 Evidence given at the Royal Courts of Justice, London, May 6, 1998.

  64 Author interview, June 21, 2007.

  THIRTY-ONE: Some Other Guy (August 19–October 4, 1962)

  1 WPLJ-FM, June 9, 1971.

  2 Author interviews—Liz Tibbott-Roberts, June 11, 2005; Joan McCaldon, November 25, 2005; Beryl Johnson, August 4, 2005; Margaret Chillingworth, June 8, 2005; Thelma Wilkinson, August 29, 2005; Margaret Kelly, November 25, 2005. Mal Evans and “others” from Davies, p143.

  3 John from interview by Paul Drew, US radio, April 1975. First Paul from Davies (1985), p471; second from interview by Richard Williams, for The Times, December 28, 1981.

  4 Interview by Spencer Leigh.

  5 Wooler from The Best of Fellas, p168.

  6 Interview by Tom Hibbert, Q, June 1992.

  7 Author interviews—Chillingworth, June 8, 2005; Murphy, July 1, 2006.

  8 Sue Wright later became Sue Johnston, the TV and film actor. Aged 18 at this time, she was a lunchtime Cavernite and Beatles fan who worked as a shop assistant in the Whitechapel branch of Nems. Her interview by Spencer Leigh. Author interviews with Sandra Marshall (February 17, 1999), Marie Guirron (December 30, 2011) and Elsa Breden (June 9, 2005).

  9 Author interview, June 30, 2003.

  10 Beatle!, p172.

  11 “You’re too young!” from Lennon, by Ray Coleman (2000 edition), p282; vow of non-attendance from A Twist of Lennon, p73; John’s words to Mimi, Davies, p159.

  12 “To have and to harm, till death duty part” from “Nicely Nicely Clive,” In His Own Write, p56. Details of the wedding from A Twist of Lennon, pp74–8.

  13 Davies, p159; “… and a wife to boot” from “Sad Michael,” In His Own Write, p35.

  14 Interview by Chris Hutchins, NME, February 19, 1965.

  15 Author interview, October 29, 2004. Lindy Ness makes no extravagant claims for John’s “Norwegian wood” comment, but swears it’s true. She doesn’t know if it had any bearing on John writing a song of that name three years later, but as soon as her friend Marie Guirron (George’s girlfriend in summer 1962) heard it, in December 1965, she was certain John had Lindy in mind. No interviewer ever asked John to explain his song’s title.

  16 Author interview, May 2, 1991.

  17 Author interview, September 6, 2010, and e-mails August 29, 2010, and February 28, 2012.

  18 Author interview, December 30, 2011.

  19 Author interview, February 13, 1997.

  20 The Beatles Anthology, p163.

  21 Interview by Ray Coleman, Melody Maker, November 14, 1964.

  22 The Beatles Anthology, p73; “got over it,” p72. It seems to have lasted about three months, as far as November 1962.

  23 Author interview, May 28, 2004.

  24 Melody Maker, December 25, 1965.

  25 Author interview, June 21, 2007.

  26 Love Me Do! The Beatles’ Progress, p37.

  27 Author interview, December 30, 2011.

  28 Interview by Colin Irwin, Melody Maker, April 1, 1978.

  29 Interview by Paul du Noyer, Paul McCartney World Tour program (1989–90), p37.

  30 Interview by Ray Connolly, Evening Standard (London), February 24, 1968.

  31 Interview by Mike Read, October 13, 1987, for BBC Radio 1; “… the face won’t smile” from interview by Larry Kane, August 20, 1965.

  32 Beatles Book magazine, issue 3 (October 1963).

  33 The Beatles Anthology, p266.

  34 The Beatles Anthology, p86; “three-and-one” from interview by Horst Königstein, Hamburg, September 29, 1976, for Ringo und die Stadt am Ende des Regenbogen (Ringo and the City at the End of the Rainbow), West German NDR-TV, June 9 and 16, 1977.

  35 Author interview, July 18, 2006. Flynn himself is unavailable for comment: he died of cancer in 1971, aged 27. “Bugger off” from The Beatles Anthology TV series; Paul from author interview, May 19, 1987. Dedicated George fan Sue Houghton agrees: “I never thought his black eye was anything to do with Pete Best, it was somebody’s jealous boyfriend.” Mike Berry, who shared a Cavern bill with the Beatles on Sunday, August 26, remembers George saying he’d been “nutted” by a man jealous because his girlfriend had taken a shine to him. Other witnesses claim, variously, that it was Paul, not George, who cussed at the hecklers in the audience; that John fought to protect George; that when George returned to the stage for the Beatles’ second lunchtime set John and Paul were in hysterics and kept calling him “Teddy Boy!”; or that when George didn’t return to the stage with them John announced it was because he was “feeling a little bit aye.” It’s Billy Kinsley who maintains the Beatles carried on as a trio—he says they played songs that didn’t need lead guitar, including a number his group the Mersey Beats often did, “I’ll Never Let You Go” (Little Darlin’), one of Elvis’s great Sun records.

  36 The Beatles Anthology TV series.

  37 Author interview, June 21, 2007.

  38 The photo dominated the front page of the September 20 Mersey Beat, where Brian’s report was given the headline “BEATLES RECORD FOR EMI story inside.” Below this was a display ad for Nems’ three stores: “We are now accepting orders for the Beatles first record on Parlophone.”

  39 Author interview, June 9, 1995.

  40 Interview by Elliot Mintz, April 18, 1976. George Martin comment from All You Need Is Ears, p130; Paul from The Beatles Anthology, p90.

  41 Davies, p169.

  42 Grateful thanks to Kevin Ryan, coauthor of Recording the Beatles, for carefully analyzing and explaining the technical procedure used at this session.

  43 Interview by Richard Williams, Melody Maker, August 21, 1971. The NME chart current at the time of this Beatles session had two harmonica records—“I Remember You” by Frank Ifield at number 1, “Sealed With a Kiss” by Brian Hyland at 6.

  44 Interview by Jann S. Wenner, December 8, 1970, for Rolling Stone. Ringo’s support expressed eloquently in The Beatles Anthology, p77.

  45 Interview by Richard Williams, Melody Maker, August 21, 1971. In an interview by Robert W. Morgan (US radio, circa 1982), George Martin again said it was John who went to see him.

  46 Interview by Paul Drew, US radio, April 1975.

  47 Interview by Nicky Campbell, BBC Radio 1, November 19, 1991; “quite forceful” sentence from author interview, May 19, 1987.

  48 Interview by Keith Skues, BBC Radio 1, November 2, 1970.

  49 From author interview with Kim Bennett, July 27–28, 2003.

  50 Part information from Dick James interview by Johnny Beerling, early 1972, for BBC Radio 1.

  51 White was 32, based in London but raised in Glasgow and speaking with a Scots accent. He was a busy session player who drummed on a range of records across the labels, notably on Jack Good’s sessions for Decca. Good used him on Billy Fury’s fine 1960 album The Sound of Fury and put him on TV in Boy Meets Girls. The Beatles had watched that, and also seen Drumbeat, a short-lived 1959 BBC-tv series where White was in the house band; Paul had also watched him drum with the Vic Lewis Orchestra when, as a short-trouser schoolboy, he went to see Bill Haley in 1957. The Beatle
s might even have seen White’s photo in the Liverpool Echo, on the occasion of his recent (April) wedding to local singer Lyn Cornell. When White played this Beatles recording session, he and Cornell had just returned from their honeymoon, delayed by his nightly employment in the pit orchestra of Stop the World—I Want to Get Off, Anthony Newley’s London stage musical bound for Broadway.

  52 The Beatles Anthology, p76; “highly upset” from interview for Earth News Radio, May 1978.

  53 Author interview, September 23, 2003.

  54 Author interview, January 18, 1987.

  55 Ringo from The Beatles Anthology TV series.

  56 Interview August 28, 1963, for The Mersey Sound (BBC-tv, October 9, 1963).

  57 The Beatles Anthology, p96. Paul’s reference to “walking up past Woolton Church with John” is an intriguing one. They weren’t particularly prone to nostalgia, so it’s curious that when discussing what amounted to going into business together, they were at the place of their first meeting, five years on—the only time they’re known to have gone back.

  58 Interview by Alan Freeman, BBC Radio 1, December 6, 1974.

  59 John’s microphone antics remembered by Lindy Ness.

  60 Author interview, September 30, 1987; “failed attempt at a single”—Many Years From Now, p83.

  61 Interview by Raoul Pantin, Trinidad Express, May 4, 1971.

  62 King Curtis was also credited as the song’s composer, but it’s likely that Holly was its true author.

  63 Author interview, June 30, 2003.

  64 Author interview, March 26, 2003.

  65 Author interview, June 10, 2005. Chadwick was 23 and had studied graphic design at Liverpool College of Art, two years ahead of John Lennon and one ahead of Stuart Sutcliffe. The Beatles’ location shoot was on September 28.

  66 Around the end of August, Paul and Ringo had separate appointments with Les Chadwick at the Peter Kaye studio (top floor of 24 Newington—where an unsatisfactory group session also took place, on probably September 20). The idea was that these images would match Astrid’s classy half-shadow shots of John and George in Altona, Hamburg, in the spring—the ones John said “made Paul mad with envy”—but the results were more like passport photos than arty portraits. Chadwick was a good photographer but chiaroscuro camera settings and lighting weren’t an everyday requirement, on top of which his subjects were ill at ease. While John and George had been looking into the lens of someone for whom they’d deep affection, standing in the spot where their bandmate/close friend/her fiancée had just died, Paul and Ringo were in a Liverpool studio with a man they knew only a little, straining so hard not to smile that they ended up stern. Brian invited Harry Watmough to reshoot the session at his studio (top floor of 24 Moorfields)—“He asked me to photograph them with half their faces in shadow,” Watmough remembers; “I did think they had some strange ideas”—but the results were no better. In the end, Chadwick’s photos were used for the throwaway cards and Watmough’s appeared on the cover of Introducing THE BEATLES, Tony Barrow’s press release.