Best of the Beatles (12 page)

Jimmy Tushingham, Ringo Starr’s replacement in Rory Storm and the Hurricanes: “Ringo was the only one of the Beatles who kept in touch. When he made it with the Beatles, he had to declare everything to the Revenue. We got hit for an income tax bill which stemmed from Ringo having to disclose what he had been doing. He sent a cheque to Rory, saying he was sorry about what happened but to put this towards the bill.”

By taking Pete Best’s drum seat, Ringo Starr became the luckiest man in the world. He became a star in his own right and he even took lead vocals on the Beatles’ records, proving everything sounds good on LSD. Tony Barrow: “The interest in each individual Beatle seemed to move of its own accord, in natural cycles as it were. From time-
to-time
there was a conscious effort on our part to decide, ‘Well, George hasn’t done much in the way of interviews – let’s get a couple of George solo interviews.’ But by and large that worked itself out in the end because the kids themselves would have an ‘I love Paul’ week, or month, or ‘I love John’ week or month, and this was reflected in the fan mail. It did shift around and at one stage the kids did feel that Ringo was being left out of things and sitting at the back as it were. There was a ‘Let’s all love Ringo’ campaign, which was slightly before the record ‘Ringo for President’ and all that hysteria.”

After Lee Curtis and the All Stars, Pete Best formed his own band with Mona doing her best to help him get established. They cut ‘I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door’ for Decca in June 1964, but most of the records were made for small companies in America. The band recorded ‘Boys’, ‘Rock And Roll Music’ and ‘Kansas City’ and, rather cheekily, Savage Records called an album
Best of The Beatles
. Some good, original material was written by band members Wayne Bickerton and Tony Waddington, who went on to have success writing and producing the Rubettes. The Pete Best Band’s most significant UK gig was playing at the re-opening of the Cavern in July 1966.

Wayne Bickerton: “Having an ex-Beatle in the band worked against us. We didn’t have the opportunity to develop. It was always, ‘Why did you leave the Beatles?” instead of ‘What’s the future of the band?’ The fact that Pete was an ex-Beatle overshadowed everything else, and the talent in the band was a secondary situation. Calling an album
Best of The Beatles
was ridiculous to say the least.”

Every newspaper that Pete Best opened told him how the Beatles were becoming more and more successful and, indeed, reaching a level of international fame that had never been experienced before. “I couldn’t get away from it. I was aware of it all the time.”

The Beatles never gave him credit in interviews, culminating in the
Playboy
feature in which Ringo inferred he was a drug addict. Pete didn’t have the finances to take full legal action and had to agree to an out-of-court settlement. The damage had been done as references to Pete as a drug addict appeared in other American magazines. All this contributed to his general malaise.

Pete married his girlfriend Kathy and lived in a first floor flat in the family home at Hayman’s Green. In 1965 when Kathy was away visiting her mother, Pete decided to
kill himself. He blocked all the gaps in the bedroom, put a pillow in front of the gas fire, turned on the jets and waited for the end. As it happened, Pete hadn’t blocked the gaps thoroughly and the gas seeped on to the landing outside. Pete’s brother, Rory, smelt it as he was passing, tried the door and broke it down. Mo and Rory coaxed him back to life. “That was the worst period of my life,” says Pete, “nothing like that ever happened again.” Maybe not, but he did have the ignominy of being described as dead in a Trivial Pursuit question.

In nearly every band that makes it, there is a Pete Best – someone who just missed out on the glories. There is a Pete Best Spice, a Pete Best Rolling Stone, a Pete Best Who, a Pete Best Nirvana and a Pete Best member, or rather non-member, of Oasis. How they adjust to the situation is worthy of a book in itself. Also, I have thought from
time-to
-time about writing a book about those on the periphery of the Beatle’s scene – Pete Best, Alf Bicknell, Joe Flannery, Sam Leach, Uncle Charlie Lennon, Mike McCartney, Father Tom McKenzie and Allan Williams. In many ways their struggles are as absorbing as the tales of the Beatles themselves.

While the music world was celebrating the Summer of Love and Timothy Leary was proclaiming ‘Tune in, turn on and drop out’, Pete Best was dropping out. He was looking for regular employment to provide for his wife and two daughters. “I thought it would be dead easy to get a job, but people would see on the applications forms that I had been a rock drummer for 8 years and they had their doubts. I had to take a job, any job, to prove I could do it, so I worked the first 12 months as a bakehouse labourer. Then in 1968, I went to the unemployment office in Old Swan and they asked me if I was interested in working for the Civil Service. I was taken upstairs to see the manager
and she told me to start in 2 weeks’ time. I was with them for over 20 years.”

Pete Best worked for the government employment scheme, Restart, or its equivalent. When a person who had lost his job came to the Restart offices, he or she would be told, “Pete Best will see you now.” “I think it helped them”, said Pete, “whatever they’d been through, they knew I’d been through it as well. I’d lost the biggest job in show business, millions of pounds and everything that went with it, and here I was giving advice on how to secure employment.”

Pete Best confided to Peter Trollope in, ‘May The Best Man Win This Time’, in the
Liverpool Echo
on 26 August 1988: “Life’s strange – leaving the Beatles set me on a new life. I now have a wonderful wife, great children and I can walk into my local for a pint whenever I want to. I’m happy – I wonder if they can honestly say that.”

Pete was speaking shortly before he appeared at the Merseybeatle Convention at the Adelphi Hotel and just 2 weeks before the death of his mother, Mona, from a heart attack. Pete wasn’t playing at the Convention, but that would happen for a charity appearance at the Grafton Rooms in 1989. John Banks, the Merseybeats’ original drummer, had died and Pete took part in his benefit. How ironic that Pete Best should make his comeback drumming for the Merseybeats, the very job he turned down with Brian Epstein.

Kathy Best encouraged her husband to undertake his own Restart. At first, he worked with member of the Merseybeats and Liverpool Express, notably Billy Kinsley, but then he formed a band with his brother, Roag. In 1996, Pete Best was featured on BBC1’s
Animal Hospital
as the band found a live snake in an amp they had hired for a UK tour. Pete Best couldn’t escape from snakes.

To mark the tenth anniversary of John Lennon’s assassination in December 1990, Yoko Ono gave support to an all-star charity concert at the Pier Head in Liverpool – ‘Imagine… John Lennon’. It was a programme of extremes – Lou Reed chilling out with ‘Mother’ and Kylie Minogue prancing through ‘Help!’ Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr decided not to appear live, while George Harrison declined to appear at all – in retrospect, a wise decision as battles raged over the monies raised by the concert. Paul submitted a video of a medley of ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘PS I Love You’, while Ringo evoked the Traveling Wilburys with his video of
I Call Your Name
with Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty. Despite representations from the Merseycats charity, none of the 1960s Liverpool musicians or bands was allowed on the bill.

Not to be outdone, the Merseycats organised their own charity event. ‘Imagine… the Sixties’, at the Philharmonic Hall on the previous day and I went to that as a kind of Phil Inspector. The show was closed by the Pete Best Band featuring Billy Kinsley of the Merseybeats, who included a stomping version of the Beatles’ ‘I’ll Get You’. The compere, Billy Butler, introduced Pete as, “The only Beatle performing in Liverpool this weekend.” Would Pete Best have appeared on a John Lennon tribute if he believed that John was responsible for ousting him from the Beatles?

Pete Best took early retirement in 1993. His brother Roag had an entertainment agency, Splash, and played drums for a contemporary band. Roag says, “I went through a heavy metal phase where you play like Animal off the Muppets. You hit everything as hard and fast as you can. Then jazz and funk came along, so what I do is a fusion of everything that has come along since the 1960s.”

They amalgamated their resources and formed the Pete Best Band, which has been touring the UK, the USA,
Australia, Japan, Canada, Italy and Argentina. The band plays a mixture of old and new material, but many Beatle covers have been radically changed. It is like hearing the Beatles’ hits played by Free. Pete and Roag create a very solid sound with their double-drumming, but surely fans want at least one number where Pete is drumming on his own. The duo can hardly criticise listeners who think that Pete’s drumming is being deliberately obscured.

The Pete Best Band consists of young musicians, mostly known to Roag through his other ventures. They have also made several albums together and a surprising assessment came when I played some of their music to drumming authority Garry Tamlyn. “It sounds like one drummer to me. I can’t hear any layering of rhythms there. If they are both playing exactly the same, then it is incredibly accurate as there is no flange effect where one snare hits just after the other. It is incredibly in time – or there is just one drummer playing the basic drumbeat. Maybe one of them is just playing cymbals or hit-hat, but it certainly doesn’t sound like two drummers. What they do is nothing like the Allman Brothers’ early stuff where one drummer would be laying down a basic drumbeat and the other would be ornamenting around various rhythms, so you can clearly discern that there are two types of drumbeats in the one recording.”

Over the years, Pete Best has been involved in various projects relating to his days with the Beatles. He was an adviser on the film
Birth of The Beatles
(1979) which was shot in Liverpool and directed by Richard Marquant. Ryan Michael plays Pete Best and the drumming in that film is surprisingly good.

Who can tell what will happen? Who could tell that Robbie Williams would have more success than Gary Barlow after Take That? In 1995, I saw a very entertaining new play at the Liverpool Everyman,
Best!
, by Fred Lawless,
which was directed by Paul Codman. ‘Love Me Do’ makes Number 17 but the Beatles’ second single flops, while Pete Best has a Number 1. The play creates an alternative universe in which Pete becomes a major star and good jokes abound – Linda McCartney works at the Stanley Abattoir and Cynthia Lennon runs off with a Japanese businessman. The other Beatles decide to take their revenge. Pete Best, played by Tony O’Keefe, is portrayed as a total shit who is assassinated in the same way as John Lennon.

The 1994 film
Backbeat
was about Stuart Sutcliffe and it captured the sheer
joie de vivre
of the Beatles in the early 1960s, particularly in Hamburg. Although Stuart may not have contributed much to the Beatles, he was a very decorative element of their stage show. The Beatles are shown, first and foremost, as John Lennon’s band – so much so that the weedily-dressed Paul McCartney is only given one song, ‘Twenty Flight Rock’. Even ‘Long Tall Sally’ is put into John’s mouth.

In the film, the foul-mouthed John Lennon, played by Ian Hart, anxious to start a fight, says to Pete Best, “You don’t say much, do you?”

Pete Best (Scot Williams) replies, “Drummers don’t talk, you must have noticed that. Just might as well be deaf and dumb, drummers. I mean, when was the last time you heard a drummer say anything? See? You know why, don’t you. I’ll tell you why, ‘Cause nobody fucking listens.’”

The real Pete Best says, “I didn’t meet Scot until after the film had been completed, as the film-makers had told him that it wasn’t a good idea to meet me. He said he would have portrayed me differently had he met me, which is a nice compliment. They got the publicity wrong: they marketed it as the story of five lads in Germany, but it was really the love story of Astrid and Stu with John making the eternal triangle.”

Scot Williams: “I tried to mime playing the drums on the soundtrack. Most of the time it was Dave Grohl of Nirvana, but they used Tony Sheridan’s version of ‘My Bonnie’ and that was the one I had difficulty with. I couldn’t keep up with Pete’s playing.”

By 1990, the market was flooded with bootlegs of outtakes and alternative versions from the Beatles’ recording sessions, which were easily obtainable through record fairs. The Beatles obtained no income from this – and this – more than anything, prompted them to look at their back catalogue and compile a series of CDs and videos under the blanket title
Anthology
.

They decided that the interviews for the videos should be restricted, by and large, to themselves, George Martin and Neil Aspinall. Pete Best was not asked for his views. When the double-CD
Anthology 1
was released, the Beatles couldn’t resist a further dig at Pete. A well-known poster advertising ‘The Savage Young Beatles’ was prominently featured. Pete’s face had been torn away and replaced by Ringo’s. Okay, Klaus Voormann did the artwork but the Beatles approved it. “When I saw it, I thought, that’s funny, my head’s missing”, says Pete good-naturedly, “it was out of order but it’s their project and it’s up to them.” Pete got his revenge because Carlsberg filmed an advert for ‘Probably the Pete Best lager in the world’ that was shown in the advertising break for the first TV episode of the
Anthology
series.

To be fair, ‘In My Life’ is used for a montage in the first
Anthology
video. As John Lennon sings, ‘Although I’ll never lose affection for people and things that went before’, we’re shown a picture of Pete Best.

Apple had to contact Pete Best because twelve tracks with Pete on drums were to be used on the CD. “Apple told me that they had decided to use certain tracks with
myself on the first
Anthology
CD. I was more excited about the world tour I was planning at the time and the terms and conditions for
Anthology
were handled by my lawyers and their lawyers. I stood back in amazement when it was released. There was massive publicity and it was Beatlemania all over again.”