Fab

by Howard Sounes

  With the release of ‘Please Please Me’ Paul found himself in direct rivalry with Frank Ifield, whose two previous singles had gone to number one, and who was looking for a hat trick with ‘The Wayward Wind’. ‘I found that they were chasing me up the charts. I thought, Well that’s fine. I give them a break on a show and now they’re chasing me up the bloody chart!’ recalls the Australian star. ‘I thought they were going to knock me out of the number one, but they didn’t.’ The Beatles’ single stalled at number two.8 Paul was doubly defeated when Iris finally dumped him for Frank. Surprisingly, given Paul’s later well-documented love of animals, the break-up was triggered by cruelty to a dog.

  One night in March 1963, shortly before Iris’s birthday, Paul and Ringo called in at Stormsville after driving up from London. ‘They’d got to our house really late. Me brother and I opened the door, said, “Come in, the kettle’s on,” you know, and they said, “Oh, we’re starving. We’re so tired. We’ve been recording.”’ Ringo mentioned that just before they got to the Caldwells’ house, he and Paul had accidentally run over a dog. The Caldwells were great animal lovers, with a pet dog named Toby, which Paul never liked. ‘Toby used to want to be stroked all the time and he used to go, “Oh, it’s got fleas,”’ recalls Iris. ‘He didn’t like dogs.’ Concerned by what Ringo had said, Rory and Iris asked the boys if the dog they’d hit was all right. Ringo said they’d been too tired to stop and find out.

  ‘Get out of the house! I never want to speak to you again!’ Iris raged at the boys, appalled by such lack of feeling. She later reflected that Ringo might have simply made the story up to rile her. Still, it was enough to make her finish with Paul, who pursued her for a while, calling and visiting her house, also trying to see her when she was working summer season at Great Yarmouth, but she shunned him. ‘He kept saying to me mother, “Why won’t she see me?” And me mother said, “Because you’ve got no heart, Paul.”’

  5

  THE MANIA

  THE FIRST ALBUM

  Seeking to capitalise on the success of ‘Please Please Me’, George Martin called the Beatles back to EMI and asked them to perform their stage show for him, thus creating in one amazing day, Monday 11 February 1963, a complete album. The Beatles recorded ten songs on the day, to which EMI later added the four numbers previously released as singles, making a 14-track LP. It opened with John and Paul singing in joyful harmony ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, one of eight original Lennon-McCartney compositions on the record, and ended with John alone - his voice by now in shreds - screaming ‘Twist and Shout’.

  This, the Beatles’ début album, established the convention whereby John and Paul would write and sing most of the songs, with at least two lead vocals reserved for George and Ringo. Not yet a songwriter in his own right, George was given ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’ on the first LP, while Ritchie croaked out the Dixon-Farrell number ‘Boys’, as he had with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Ringo’s voice was limited, but a Ringo song was part of what became the successful recipe. Here then was essentially the sound of the Beatles on stage in 1963, as they would have sounded at the Cavern: four young men having the time of their lives, as emphasised by the album cover photo of the lads grinning from the stairs at EMI headquarters in Manchester Square. Entitled Please Please Me, to hook fans who’d bought the single, the LP went to number one in May 1963 and held the top spot month after month, right up until the band’s second LP displaced it. This was sensational.

  A careful reading of the fine print on Please Please Me reveals that the original songs on the LP are credited to ‘McCartney/Lennon’ (sic), and published by Northern Songs Ltd, details that would cause Paul more angst than almost anything in his career. The first two songs the Beatles released, ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘PS I Love You’, the A- and B-side of their début single, had been published by Ardmore & Beechwood, the firm Brian Epstein stumbled upon shopping the Beatles around London. Brian was disappointed by the way Ardmore & Beechwood promoted these songs, so when ‘Please Please Me’ was ready he asked George Martin to suggest a new publisher. Martin directed him to another friend, in the small world of the British music business, Dick James.

  George Martin and Dick James had enjoyed a hit together in 1956 when Parlophone released a recording of James singing the theme to the television show Robin Hood. In mid-life, Dick settled down to work as a song-plugger and music publisher, latterly operating from an office on the Charing Cross Road near the junction of Denmark Street, where music businesses cluster. It was Dick who brought the Tin Pan Alley tune ‘How Do You Do It?’ to George Martin, and George assured Brian Epstein that his friend was honest and hungry for success. Like Brian, Dick was Jewish, which helped the two form a bond. Dick also knew how to charm the younger man. Forewarned that Epstein was dissatisfied with the promotion Ardmore & Beechwood had secured for ‘Love Me Do’, Dick telephoned a contact at BBC television while Brian was in his office and talked the Beatles onto the TV show Thank Your Lucky Stars. Brian was so impressed he offered Dick the rights to John and Paul’s new songs. ‘Please Please Me’ and its B-side ‘Ask Me Why’ were duly published by Dick James Music, with a new company created to handle John and Paul’s subsequent compositions.

  The boys wanted a company. ‘We said to them, “Can we have our own company?”’ Paul recalled. ‘They said, “Yeah.”’ Northern Songs was thereby created, named in honour of the fact the songwriters were from the North of England. It was not entirely Paul and John’s company, though. Dick and his partner Charles Silver owned half of Northern Songs. John and Paul were assigned 20 per cent each, Brian the remaining 10 per cent. Furthermore, Northern Songs would be managed by Dick James Music, the publisher taking a 10 per cent commission off the top, which meant that James earned more money from publishing John and Paul’s songs than they did themselves. Under the terms of the deal all the songs John and Paul wrote for the next three years would go into Northern Songs, with an option to extend the agreement for an additional three years. Brian wasn’t experienced enough to know whether this was good or bad. He was, after all, merely a record-shop manager. He took George Martin’s advice that the deal was sound, and it wasn’t unfair for its day. So it was that one February morning in Liverpool, before hurrying to Manchester to do a show, John and Paul signed their songs away to Dick’s company. Paul came to regret deeply the fact he hadn’t taken independent legal advice before doing so, for he was agreeing to more than he realised at the time; ‘we just signed this thing, not really knowing what it was all about,’ as he complains now, ‘and that is virtually the contract I’m still under. It’s draconian!’

  Paul’s other eternal bugbear is song credits, the form of which was also established at this early stage in the Beatles’ story. In the tradition of the great songwriting teams of the past - from Gilbert and Sullivan to Leiber and Stoller - John and Paul paired their surnames together when they became published writers, styling themselves ‘McCartney and Lennon’ on Please Please Me. This suited Paul, but his business partners didn’t think McCartney and Lennon euphonious. ‘You’ll be Lennon and McCartney,’ he was told.

  ‘Why not McCartney and Lennon?’

  ‘It sounds better.’

  ‘Not to me it doesn’t.’ Yet Paul agreed to the change, implemented for the Beatles’ third single, ‘From Me to You’, which went to number one in May 1963, and remaining the form for every subsequent song published in their name. This came to irk Paul when Beatles songs he had written entirely on his own, notably ‘Yesterday’, were credited to Lennon and McCartney, and he could do nothing to change it.

  For the time being, though, there was just the pure, innocent joy of making music and seeing it successful. On one of his increasingly rare mornings home in Liverpool, in the spring of 1963, Paul awoke in his bed at 20 Forthlin Road to hear the milkman coming up the garden path whistling a familiar tune, ‘From Me to You’. It was the moment that Paul felt he’d made it. And now he met the girl of his dreams.

  JANE AS
HER

  She was a lovely-looking young woman, just as pretty as Paul had seen in the newspapers, for Jane Asher was equally if not more famous than Paul McCartney in early 1963, an actress on stage and screen since she was only five years old, recently a regular panellist on the television pop music show Juke Box Jury. Tonight, Thursday 18 April 1963, Asher, two weeks shy of her 17th birthday, was helping review a pop concert at the Royal Albert Hall for the BBC’s listing magazine, the Radio Times.

  The show was the Beatles’ first engagement at what is perhaps the most famous concert hall in England: a colossal, oval-shaped theatre built in the 1860s to commemorate the life of the Prince Consort, Prince Albert, and a venue Paul would return to many times to perform and watch others play. The Beatles were on a bill with a host of other acts including fellow Liverpudlians Gerry and the Pacemakers and singer Shane Fenton (whom Paul’s ex, Iris Caldwell, was now dating and would marry) for a show named Swinging Sound ’63, part of which would be broadcast on BBC radio. ‘Noisy’ was Jane Asher’s less than enthusiastic verdict of the concert until the Beatles bounded on stage. ‘Now these I could scream for,’ she remarked, and duly did so for the Radio Times’ photographer, showing herself a good sport. When the Beatles met Jane backstage, they clustered around this pretty celebrity, kidding and flirting, asking - as they typically asked their female fans (even though Lennon was already married with a child, Julian, born the previous month, a fact Brian was keeping from the press) - if she would marry them. Pretty though she was, Jane looked different to what Paul had imagined. Although he had seen her many times on TV and in the papers, these were monochrome media in 1963, leading him to assume that Jane was blonde. In real life, Miss Asher was a spectacular redhead.

  After the show the Beatles, Shane Fenton and Jane adjourned to the Chelsea apartment of journalist Chris Hutchins, where the boys popped pills and drank up all the wine in the flat. ‘John, who could be waspish at the best of times, was in a lethal mood without the required amount of alcohol to dampen the effect of the uppers,’ Hutchins recalls in his memoir, Mr Confidential. Falling into a contrary mood, John invited Jane to tell him and his friends how she masturbated. ‘Go on, love,’ he said. ‘Tell us how girls play with themselves. We know what we do, tell us what you do.’ Other crude and embarrassing sexual remarks followed. Paul rescued Jane from his boorish friend, taking her into the bedroom where they talked of less provocative matters, such as the food they enjoyed. Like her mother, Jane was an excellent cook. ‘It appears you’re a nice girl,’ Paul concluded, having realised that a person he perceived initially as a ‘rave London bird’ was a well-brought-up young woman of whom his mother would have approved. So began the most significant romance of Paul’s young life to date.

  Paul’s new girlfriend was almost four years his junior, having been born in 1946 to Margaret and Richard Asher. Mrs Asher, to whom Jane owed her red hair, was a member of the aristocratic Eliot family, whose seat, Port Eliot, is a stately home at St Germans, Cornwall. The Earl of St Germans was her uncle, the poet TS Eliot a distant American cousin. Margaret Asher was a professional musician, an oboist who had taught George Martin at the Guildhall School of Music. (The story of Paul’s life is filled with similar, almost Dickensian coincidences.) Jane’s father was an equally interesting person: head of the psychiatric department at the Central Middlesex Hospital, an expert on blood diseases, published writer and shrink whose clients had included the Arabian adventurer T.E. Lawrence. Like Lawrence, Dr Asher was an eccentric and depressive. Shortly after Paul and Jane got together, the doc went missing for a time, causing such consternation that the story made the daily newspapers. He ultimately took his own life.

  Jane was one of three children, with a younger sister, Claire, and an older brother named Peter: three personable, carrot-top kids who’d all been encouraged by their parents to go into show business from an early age. Jane’s acting career had been the most notable, but Claire Asher had also made a name for herself as a regular actress in the radio drama Mrs Dale’s Diary; while Peter Asher appeared on stage, screen and radio, and had recently formed a singing duo with his school friend Gordon Waller. The whole family was musical, Jane playing the classical guitar and Claire the violin. The Ashers often performed en famille at home in Wimpole Street, ‘the most august of London streets’, as Virginia Woolf observes in Flush, her book about a literary romance a few doors up. For 50 Wimpole Street was the former home of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who famously eloped with fellow poet Robert Browning in 1846.

  The Ashers lived at 57 Wimpole Street, a tall eighteenth-century townhouse with a basement music room in which Mrs Asher gave music lessons, a first-floor, book-lined drawing room in which Dr Asher kept a grand piano and, adjacent to that, his consulting room; the bedrooms arranged on the upper floors. All day, Ashers young and old dashed up and down the stairs, and across the checker-pattern threshold to pursue their interests outside the home, gathering in the evening for one of Mrs Asher’s gourmet meals, and conversation, after which it was often out again to the theatre or concerts. Everything was wonderfully close at hand, with the Wigmore Hall, for example, where Jane started to take Paul to hear classical music, just around the corner. Jane was more interested in Beethoven than the Beatles when she met Paul; a cultured girl who read Honoré Balzac in bed.

  Paul was welcomed into this stimulating home, which was akin to his Liverpool family in that the Ashers were another clever, energetic musical clan, but obviously socially a world apart. Paul’s home life was the epitome of the northern working-class; the Ashers were an upper-middle-class London family with aristocratic connections and sophisticated interests. Sitting at their dining table, Paul began to receive the education he might have had at college, if he had turned his back on pop music. It was a world he was intellectually equal to. Paul had, after all, attended one of the best grammar schools in England. Mum would have been proud to have seen her son welcomed into this fine London home, while noticing that Paul was starting to sound different. Her son never had a strong Scouse accent, not like George Harrison, and he never lost his Liverpool twang entirely, but there was a refinement in his speech from the time he met the Ashers, teenage slang words - such as ‘soft’ (stupid) and ‘gear’ (great) - appearing less frequently in his conversation. There was, some say, an element of social-climbing in Paul’s relationship with the Ashers. ‘He felt it was important to be in the centre of things,’ says the Beatles’ PR man Tony Barrow. ‘And that’s where Jane Asher came in, to a great extent, being not just the girlfriend, but somebody who could lift him up that social ladder … He felt that she would be helpful to him and useful to him in progressing his march up through London society … there was nothing to achieve in the way of Liverpool society.’

  In a deeper sense Liverpool would always be home, though, and when he turned 21 in June 1963 Paul celebrated his coming of age on Merseyside. Four days prior to his birthday, driving himself back from a Beatles’ gig in New Brighton, Paul was stopped by the police for speeding. He was subsequently fined and disqualified from driving for 12 months in what was the third speeding conviction that year for a young man in a hurry. On the morning of his birthday, Tuesday 18 June, the Epsteins hosted a drinks party for Paul and Jane - suddenly very much a couple - at their house in Queens Drive, followed by a bigger, livelier party in the evening at Aunt Ginny’s in Huyton, the party held here partly in order to avoid the fans who had started to find their way to Forthlin Road, and because Ginny and Harry had a big enough garden for a marquee. Paul’s many relatives were invited, as were his fellow Beatles, NEMS staff and other musicians, including various Mersey Beat bands and brother Mike McCartney’s new group, the Scaffold.

  Having left school, Paul’s lanky kid brother Mike had started work as a ladies’ hairdresser in Liverpool, then formed a Beyond the Fringe-style comedy troupe, the Scaffold, with mates John Gorman and Roger McGough, the trio landing a TV contract in 1963 simultaneous with the Beatles’ rise to fame. When Mike, now a tall
, toothy 19-year-old, went into show business he took a stage name, Mike McGear, a play on the trendy teen term ‘gear’ (good). So long as he remained Mike McGear, Paul was relaxed about his kid brother’s aspirations, and supportive. When Mike dropped the McGear mask and became a McCartney in public life, as he sometimes did, friends and associates noted a degree of tension between the brothers, though Paul never spoke about it in public. ‘I think he probably got pissed off occasionally because Mike would be McCartney, occasionally, rather than McGear,’ says Tony ‘Measles’ Bramwell, who became a Beatles roadie in 1963. ‘Mike McGear was [one thing]; Mike McCartney was his brother and should not be [in show business].’

  The Scaffold performed at Paul’s 21st birthday party. John Lennon, in an obnoxious mood, heckled the trio, then swung a punch at fellow guest Cavern MC Bob Wooler, who had apparently teased John about a recent holiday he’d taken with Brian Epstein. Everybody knew Brian held a torch for John, so there was some surprise when, in late April 1963, John chose to leave Cynthia and baby Julian at home and go off to Torremolinos with Brian (while Paul and George spent a few days with Klaus Voormann at his parents’ holiday home on Tenerife). On John’s return, friends sniggered about Brian and John’s ‘honeymoon’, a reference to the fact that John hadn’t seen fit to give Cynthia a honeymoon yet. It is this wisecrack that Wooler supposedly used to John’s face at the party. In another version of the story, Wooler, who was gay, propositioned John. ‘Bob Wooler fancied John, and made a pass at him at Paul McCartney’s 21st birthday party, and John reacted by socking him on the nose,’ states Epstein’s lawyer Rex Makin, who was hired to resolve the dispute. Whatever the reason, Lennon certainly attacked Wooler. Not content with this, Lennon also lunged at a girl named Rose, grabbing her breasts. Rose slapped him. ‘So wonderful, save-the-Earth John Lennon turns round and chins her. Bang! Down she goes. And as she was on the floor he was going to kick her,’ recalls Merseyside musician Billy Hatton, who intervened to stop John going further. Wooler went to Makin, threatening to sue the Beatle, and Makin struck a compromise whereby the MC received £200 ($306) damages and a written apology. The Beatles’ new PR man was given the job of managing the story. ‘It was one of the first damage limitation jobs I did,’ says Tony Barrow, who gave a cleaned-up version of the fracas to Don Short of the Daily Mirror.