Best of the Beatles

by Spencer Leigh

  Peter Cook of the Top Spots: “Early in 1960, we played with the Beatles virtually every week at the Grosvenor Ballroom in Wallasey. Paul was on rhythm guitar then, he had a Lucky 7, which was a crappy thing. They were a very average band and I used to think that we were far better. Paul did have a brilliant voice for singing ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ and John had a good voice as well but, apart from that, they were nothing special. They went to Germany and then there was a buzz going round, ‘Have you heard the Beatles?’, and I pooh-poohed it. We played Lathom Hall in Seaforth and the Beatles were on, and I had my arms folded thinking, ‘Let’s see how good you are.’ The curtains opened and they started off with ‘Lucille’ and they were so tight and so good that every hair on my neck stood up. I had never heard anything like it in my life. I know now that they had the drums miked up, they had a mike in the bass drum, and they were playing together. Nobody had ever played together before as everybody did their own thing. I was completely in awe of them.”

  Alan Stratton of the Black Cats: “The Beatles were really the first band to have harmonies and they would switch lead vocalists – John would sing one, then Paul and then George, which was very interesting as a lot of the bands only had one singer. They were into harmonies, plus that deep, throbbing bass drum with Pete Best. The most exciting thing for me with the Beatles was watching Pete Best set up his drums. The atmosphere was electric. They were intelligent and they knew that was wanted. They would speak to the audience a lot, and if they snapped a string, as Paul did once, he would smile and continue. He wouldn’t go off and change it.”

  Harry Prytherch, the drummer with the Remo Four: “Most of us did two or four beats to the bar, which was a bomp-ba-bomp, bomp-ba-bomp. Now Pete Best had the original Beatles sound because he would drum eight – bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp. That was lashing out at you, and that was half of their sound. When they went to a recording studio, I think George Martin must have said, ‘This isn’t going to come over on record.’”

  John Cochrane, drummer with Wump and His Werbles: “I was knocked out the first time I saw the Beatles, not because I thought they were particularly good, but because they were playing stuff I liked. We were all trying to be Cliff Richard and the Shadows, which is what we thought people wanted, and here was a band that had the nerve to play hard rock ’n’ roll. There was no Top of the Pops or promotional films then so we had to work out for ourselves how the Americans did it. I used to watch Pete and think, ‘This doesn’t look right but it certainly sounds good.’ I found it intriguing that he had worked out how to do it.”

  Pat Clusky of Rikki and the Red Streaks: “The Beatles were the first group I heard with the bass drum actually driving along, which made a great rock sound. We’d been pussyfooting around and trying to sound good and the Beatles just came straight at you. That was due to Pete Best, whom I thought was a fabulous drummer and a fabulous person.”

  1961 was a good year for the Beatles… maybe they were at their best as a live band. They worked non-stop in Liverpool January to March; in Hamburg April to June and Liverpool the rest of the year. Hundreds of performances and their first chart hit to boot. The Beatles? A hit in 1961? Does this guy know what he’s writing about?

  When the Beatles returned to Hamburg in April, they worked with Tony Sheridan at the Top Ten Club. Sheridan influenced many Merseybeat musicians, notably John Lennon and Gerry Marsden. I have a video of ITV’s Oh Boy! From 1959 and Tony Sheridan’s stance is pure John Lennon. Les Maguire of Gerry and the Pacemakers: “Any group that came back from Hamburg would say, ‘Tony Sheridan, fabulous. He’s a knockout.’ He influenced so many people that the Liverpool sounds should be called the Tony Sheridan sound. He did more for Liverpool and the Beatles than anybody else.”

  Johnny Hutch of the Big Three agrees: “It was like going out with an old banger and coming back with a Rolls Royce. The Beatles owe everything to Sheridan because they copied him to a T. They copied his style on guitar. Sheridan was a fantastic guitarist, the guv’nor.”

  Ian Edwards of Ian and the Zodiacs: “We used to copy a record as best we could, and then we came across Tony Sheridan, who didn’t give two hoots as to how somebody else had recorded it. We realised that we shouldn’t be carbon copies and we got a lot more adventurous.”

  Fred Marsden of Gerry and the Pacemakers: “I played with Tony Sheridan a few times and he said I wasn’t good enough for him. He said I was too slow. He’d say, ‘Come on Fred, you’re dragging there, get going.’ He was brilliant but he was unpredictable.”

  Tony Sheridan: “You have a lot of highs, good nights where you turn yourself on and you turn on everybody else. I have decided that being spontaneous is the best way – you’ve got to surprise yourself. There’s no point in playing ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ the same way two thousand times – you’ve got to be innovative; you put in sevenths, ninths and elevenths, anything to make it interesting. When you’re playing several hours a night, you start putting in chords where they don’t really belong.”

  Despite the accolades, Tony Sheridan never became a star and I didn’t understand why until I met him at the 1989 Merseybeatle Convention. The first evening he’d had too much to drink and couldn’t appear on stage. The next morning he appeared on my radio programme and libelled someone (not a Beatle) who might have been listening (he wasn’t, but his mother was). When I said, “Tony, you don’t mean that”, he said, “Yes, I bloody well do.” That evening the nightmare continued as he told Roag Best’s band there was no need to rehearse as he’d be playing rock ’n’ roll standards. He opened with Leonard Cohen’s ‘First We Take Manhattan’, a unique choice for a rock ’n’ roll standard. I don’t know what Tony did the next day but I caught up with him at Southport Theatre 2 days later. He was again backed by Roag’s band but, having spotted Merseybeat friends in the audience, he heckled the band, called them incompetent and invited his mates on stage in their place. “It was a nightmare,” remembers Roag. “He would start a song in D and then jump to E. We didn’t have a clue as to what he was going to do and I was on the verge of tears.” All this is in front of a paying audience who must have wondered what the hell was going on. Okay, he’s an exciting musician, but I realised that he had no discipline whatsoever. Ideal for a wild, uninhibited place like Hamburg, but not suitable for elsewhere.

  In 1961, the German orchestra leader Bert Kaempfert had had a US Number 1 with ‘Wonderland by Night (Wunderland Bei Nacht)’. He disliked touring and preferred making sophisticated, orchestral albums with studio musicians. He also worked as an A&R man discovering talent for Polydor. God knows why, he was giving up a wonderland by night – first class hotels and restaurants – for Hamburg’s underworld. He had wide musical tastes and he signed Tony Sheridan to make records accompanied by the Beatles. He thought German record-buyers might purchase a rocked-up version of an old folk tune, ‘My Bonnie’, which had been an instrumental hit for Duane Eddy as ‘Bonnie Came Back’ in February 1960. “What a silly choice, “recalls Tony Sheridan, “but Bert Kaempfert said that we had to do something that the Germans would understand and they all learnt ‘My Bonnie’ in English lessons. We went to bed at five and got up at eight to make the record. We took some uppers to get us awake. The guitar solo in ‘My Bonnie’ is all right.”

  And so was the drumming. Garry Tamlyn: “‘My Bonnie’ has a snare rhythm that Pete Best uses consistently on his records and it dates back to the late 1950s. A lot of Sun Records like ‘Great Balls of Fire’ have that rhythm. You can also hear it in ‘Surf City’ and a lot of surf records. Pete Best’s drumming is very tight on this recording. There are snare fills at the end of the four eight-bar phrases, semi-quavers on the snare drum and they are very tightly executed. It’s very accurate drumming on a fast tempo recording.”

  The Polydor sessions are chronicled in Discography 1 and you will see that Kaempfert allowed the Beatles to record two numbers on their own. Kaempfert was the only musician to work with the Beatles, Frank Sinatra (writing ‘Strange
rs in the Night’) and Elvis Presley (writing ‘Wooden Heart’, which was based on a German folk tune). ‘Wonderland by Night’, ‘Wooden Heart’ and the Beatles – 1961 was a momentous year for Bert Kaempfert.

  Bert Kaempfert’s instincts were right about ‘My Bonnie’ – according to Hit Bilanz, the book of German chart singles, ‘My Bonnie’ was on the German Top 40 for 12 weeks, albeit only reaching Number 32. The Germans were the first to put the Beatles on the chart, the Germans had taste but, mind you, the book also reveals that Sweet had eight Number 1s.

  The Cavern decided to hold lunchtime sessions and because the jazz musicians had day jobs, they had ipso facto to be beat ones. Jazz was losing its popularity anyway, and soon the programme was almost exclusively beat music. And, as Bob Wooler says, the rest is hysteria.

  The Beatles were working for Ray McFall at the Cavern and other promoters like Sam Leach and Brian Kelly. They filled as many days as possible, usually making the arrangements through Pete and Mona Best. “She was a real bundle of energy, full of bright ideas,” says Sam Leach.

  Southport promoter, Ron Appleby: “In the early days, that is BE (before Epstein), the only person you could contact was Pete Best as he was the only one with a telephone. The way we were in those days, anyone with a telephone was rich, they were posh and I think it was also Pete’s van. Really, the only way to book the Beatles was via Mona Best and Pete.”

  Mrs Best had a tough side. Paddy Delaney, the doorman at the Cavern: “I wouldn’t want to cross Mona Best. She dominated Pete, she was his guiding light, but she had a very nice personality and she liked a laugh and joke whenever she came to the Cavern. She guided the Beatles to a certain extent and took them under her wing.”

  I have spoken to scores of musicians and Cavern dwellers about the Beatles in the Pete Best days. They have their favourite Beatles, but all testify to Pete’s extraordinary popularity.

  Geoff Nugent (Undertakers): “It was Pete Best that put the Beatles on the map. Wherever Pete went, you would see two or three girls around the others, and fifty around Pete. You rarely saw him smile, yet he was always pleasant and never nasty. If you look at any of the photos of the Beatles, it is his face that you are drawn to – even if you’re a feller.”

  Paddy Delaney: “I remember a show at the Tower Ballroom, New Brighton with a couple of thousand kids and all you could hear was ‘Pete, smile.’ Pete very rarely smiled, but there was a trace of humour around the corner of his mouth. If you cracked a joke, he’d give a whimsical smirk and this fascinated the girls.”

  Lee Curtis: “They used to scream like hell for Pete to sing. They wouldn’t stop until he sang, and then he did ‘Matchbox’. He used to sing with his head down. It may have been shyness, but they loved the way he did it.”

  Bill Harry: “The Beatles even brought Pete to the forefront of the stage with his drums, with the others to the side of him. The girls mobbed the stage so he had to go behind again.”

  Pete Best: “It was Bob Wooler’s idea. He said, ‘It would look good to have everybody together across the stage.’ When we tried it, the drum kit was nearly pulled off the stage and I wasn’t too far behind. The other Beatles were in hysterics at the plight I was in.” Really?

  Not that all the bookings were the right ones and not that everyone appreciated the Beatles. Take Ken Dodd, who had made the Top 10 in 1960 with the gentle balled ‘Love Is Like A Violin.’ He recalls, “I agreed to do a charity show at the Albany Theatre, Maghull one Sunday afternoon in October 1961. I got there about three o’clock and there was chaos. People were walking out in droves because some idiots on the stage were making the most terrible row. I said, ‘You’ve got to get these fellers off, they’re killing the show completely’ and they said ‘Okay, we’ll have the interval and then we’ll put you on.’ So they had the interval and, while I was changing, one of these idiots came in and said, ‘Somebody told me that if we gave you our card, you might be able to get us a few bookings.’ I threw the card away. A year or so later, my agents said, ‘How would you like the Beatles on your radio show? You can have them for two dates.’ I said, ‘I’m not sure. What do you think?’ He said, ‘I think we should just have them for one show because they’re going to be one of those groups that fade overnight.’ We brought them in for one show and Paul McCartney said, ‘We’ve worked with you before, Doddy.’ I said, ‘No, you’ve never worked with me, lad.’ He said, ‘Yes we did, at the Albany Maghull’. I said, ‘That noise wasn’t you was it?’ He said, ‘Yeah, we were rubbish, weren’t we?’ I said, ‘You certainly were. I had you thrown off.’”

  The show at the Albany had been put together by Jim Gretty who sold guitars at Frank Hessy’s. Hessy’s was close to NEMS and if he’d invited the suave Brian Epstein to that concert, would Eppy have appreciated their talent? No, I think he would have taken the Ken Dodd line, so thank heavens he saw the Beatles at the right time in the right context. Luncheon beat at the Cavern.

  Bob Wooler had been playing ‘My Bonnie’ to the troglodytes at the Cavern. Many of them wanted the single but it had only been released in Germany. NEMS was the place to order records.

  NEMS boasted that it could fulfil any request, so customers would put down a sixpenny (two and a half pence) deposit for a single and Eppy would then track it down. I can testify to NEMS’ willingness to find obscure records. I was at the counter one day, a young lad of sixteen buying a single by Ben E. King or the Drifters, when a man next to me asked surreptitiously, “Have you got that LP I ordered of Adolf Hitler’s speeches?” The record, clearly imported, was produced from under the counter. It amazed me at the time. It amazes me even more now. Brian Epstein was Jewish but he would nevertheless satisfy a customer’s request for something as repugnant as this. Business was business.

  Eppy certainly knew his customers’ requirements. Just a couple of doors away from NEMS in Whitechapel was Beaver Radio, run by Walter Beaver. He is known for three statements: In the 1950s, he said that stereo would never catch on – people wouldn’t want second speakers and besides mono was just as good: then, in the early 1980s, he said that video would never catch on as there were already too many repeats on TV and, finally, in the mid-1980s, he came down against CDs, saying that the public would never want to buy their records over again.

  As every Beatle book tells you, Brian Epstein’s interest in the Beatles began when an 18-year-old lad, Raymond Jones, ordered a copy of ‘My Bonnie’ from NEMS. I wondered why Raymond Jones had not come forward to claim his part in the Beatles story. Now I knew the reason. There was no Raymond Jones.

  Alistair Taylor worked in NEMS and was Brian Epstein’s personal assistant. He tells me. “I am Raymond Jones, and Brian Epstein never knew that. Brian would only order a record if there was a firm order in the book. We kept getting asked for ‘My Bonnie’ but no-one had ordered it. I put the release in the order book and made up a name, ‘Raymond Jones’, and then we set out trying to find it. We rang Polydor in Germany who told us that we had to buy a box of 25. I bought one myself and I told Brian that Raymond Jones had been in for it. Brian put a note in the window saying, ‘Beatles record here’ and within the day the rest had gone. We kept shipping in boxes of them and Brian rang Polydor in London and suggested that they released it over here. They as good as told him to get lost.” (Pinocchio-time, I’m afraid. I was misled here: the true story of Raymond Jones is in the Postscript.)

  In July 1961, Bill Harry started a local newspaper about the music scene in Liverpool. He called both the music and the newspaper Mersey Beat. By now there were 300 groups on Merseyside so there was plenty to write about, with the Beatles being the predominant local group. NEMS sold the newspaper and Harry asked Epstein to review pop singles and original cast albums on a regular basis. All writers check out their column in print to see how it looks on the page, to see if there are any misprints and to boost their egos. Therefore, I am certain that Brian Epstein would have looked through Mersey Beat to find out what was going on. The newspaper was so heavil
y Beatle-oriented that he must have seen their name.

  Also, the Beatles used to go to NEMS to hear, and occasionally buy, records. They would disrupt staff by requesting repeated plays in the listening booths so that they could scribble down lyrics. More than once, Brian Epstein had told them to move on.

  The evidence suggests that Brian Epstein knew who the Beatles were. Maybe not. He appears to have been surprised when he discovered that the group who had recorded ‘My Bonnie’ were playing regularly at the Cavern, which was only 200 yards away in Mathew Street. He decided to check them out during the lunch hour on 9 November 1961 with Alistair Taylor, who recalls, “We looked out of place in our white shirts and dark business-suits. The Beatles were playing ‘A Taste of Honey’ and ‘Twist and Shout’ but we were particularly impressed that they included original songs. The one that sticks in my mind is ‘Hello Little Girl.’”

  As a result of that, Brian Epstein decided that he wanted to manage the group with Alistair Taylor as his personal assistant. His brother, Clive: “Brian told me about his visit to the Cavern but I didn’t take much notice at the time. After all, we had some very successful stores on Merseyside and we were expanding into the suburbs. It wasn’t until the spring of 1962 that I took the whole thing more seriously. We had dinner at the 23 Club in Hope Street and he wanted to form a company to manage artists and to promote concerts. At the time I was single and so the idea of some extra activities outside business hours interested me. Also, it was a useful way of diversifying. It became a matter for the whole family as he wanted to use the NEMS name. After careful consideration, my father decided that it was not for him and we decided that NEMS Enterprises should be a company jointly controlled by Brian and myself.”