Paul McCartney (18 page)

Representations were also made in Hamburg by the Top Ten’s owner, Peter Eckhorn, and through the West German Consulate in Liverpool by Allan Williams. As a result, the ban on Paul and Pete was lifted on condition they promised to be of good behaviour in future and Eckhorn paid back the costs of flying them home. So on 1 April 1961, the Beatles began a 13-week stint at the Top Ten, also doubling as backing band to its resident singer, Tony Sheridan.

This would have been the perfect moment for Paul to take over from Stu Sutcliffe on bass guitar without rancour or embarrassment. Stu by now had had more than enough of playing an instrument he would never fully master, and intended to waste no more time away from his true métier. His plan was to return to Liverpool College of Art, where he’d been so bright a star before John lured him into rock ‘n’ roll. He would complete his interrupted studies, then take the teacher-training course on which, thanks to his brilliant record as a student, he’d been as good as promised a place.

At the last moment, the college rejected him for the course. Though no official explanation was ever given, it seemed he was being blamed for the loss of the student union’s PA system, which the then Quarrymen had walked off with back in 1959. So he and his weighty Hofner President bass stayed in the Beatles’ line-up, leaving Paul still in the rather awkward, skiffle-ish role of third guitarist. It didn’t last long. The red Rosetti Solid 7 that had done duty both as a guitar and bass was by now almost falling apart but not worth the expense of repairing. Accordingly–in a ritual that would become part of later bands’ stage-acts–John, George and Pete joined Paul in smashing it to pieces. From then on, he switched to the grand piano on the club’s stage, using its bass keys to provide the runs that Stu couldn’t.

While diving zestfully back into St Pauli’s sexual smorgasbord, John and Paul both had steady girlfriends back home. John’s was his art college classmate, Cynthia Powell; Paul’s was still the elfin Dot Rhone, who’d miscarried his child a year earlier while he was still at school. After that grown-up emotional trauma, they had returned to teenage dating, with Dot always at his beck and call, her hair and clothes always as he liked them. Since he’d brought her home a gold ring, she’d considered them engaged while never putting any pressure on him to set a wedding-date.

Dot and Cynthia had become friends and together led a life rather like service wives’, writing long letters several times a week to their boys overseas, with snapshots to show they were keeping up their required Brigitte Bardot look; both remaining absolutely faithful without wondering too much whether the boys overseas were doing the same.

With the more civilised conditions of the Top Ten engagement, Cynthia and Dot could be invited to Hamburg for a short visit. Cynthia stayed with Astrid–who was welcoming and hospitable to both girls–but actually spent almost every night sharing John’s bunk bed in the musicians’ dorm in the attic of the club building. For the fastidious Paul, however, more elaborate arrangements were necessary.

He had become a special pet of Rosa, the elderly toilet attendant who’d also defected from Bruno Koschmider’s employment to work for Eckhorn. Known to the Liverpudlians as ‘Mutti’–mummy–Rosa kept an outsize glass jar of Preludin and Purple Hearts under her counter to sustain them through their long nights onstage. For Paul, her favourite, she’d also steal extra rations, sardines or bananas, as she walked through the market to work. Now, to save him from the squalor John never minded, she arranged for him and Dot to stay on a houseboat on the River Elbe, which Sheridan and some of the other musicians also used.

Though the two girls were shielded from St Pauli’s more extreme entertainments, they were soon initiated into Preludin and other ‘sweeties’ from Mutti’s glass jar. The result did not altogether please boyfriends accustomed to their meek silence. ‘Usually, we hardly dared open our mouths,’ Dot remembers. ‘Now the two of us couldn’t stop talking.’

Many young men in that era remodelled their girlfriends’ appearance, as Paul and John had Dot’s and Cynthia’s. But with Astrid and Stu Sutcliffe, the opposite was the case. The boyishly beautiful blonde turned the delicate little Scot into her mirror-image. Her first step was to put Stu into the black leather she and her exi circle habitually wore despite its lingering associations with fascism and Hitler’s SS. An accomplished seamstress, she made him a suit of blouson and trousers that, with his tiny stature and fine-boned face, turned him into more of a Hell’s Cupid than Angel.

It was in fact an ideal outfit for boy rock ‘n’ rollers on the round-the-clock Reeperbahn, which could be worn both on-and offstage, absorb beer-splashes, sweat and other stains without a trace, even be slept in if necessary. John, Paul, George and Pete immediately had copies run up by a St Pauli tailor, setting them off with fancily-tooled cowboy boots and pink flat caps. John later recalled that they looked like ‘four Gene Vincents’ (though, in fact, Vincent hadn’t worn leathers until British TV producer Jack Good suggested it).

They baulked, however, at Astrid’s next creation for Stu, a high-buttoning jacket with a round collar, inspired by Pierre Cardin’s recent Paris collection. To John and Paul, this still looked altogether too much like the upper half of a woman’s two-piece ‘costume’. ‘Borrowed mum’s jacket have we, Stu?’ they would sneer whenever he appeared in it.

The last thing any of them had thought of copying was the forward-combed hair, known as the ‘French’ style, worn by most of their male exi friends. As handy with scissors as with a needle, Astrid had created her own version for her previous boyfriend, Klaus Voormann, mainly to hide Klaus’s rather protuberant ears. Now she persuaded Stu to part with the Teddy boy cockade he’d had since his early teens and let her give him ‘a Klaus’. For John and Paul, this was more extreme than a wardrobe full of ‘mum’s jackets’. Only George, whose quietness had always belied his stylistic daring, came to Astrid and requested the same cut. But after a couple of days with it, he lost his nerve and bared his forehead again.

It was during the girlfriends’ visit that the tension between Paul and Stu finally boiled over. Stu’s disillusionment with studying art and his supposed renewed commitment to the Beatles had begun to waver as soon as he returned to Hamburg and linked up again with Astrid and the exis. He’d begun secretly attending drawing-classes at the city’s art college, whose tutors happened to include the renowned Scottish-Italian painter and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi. So impressed was Paolozzi by Stu’s talent that he became his mentor, even arranging for him to receive a grant from the West German government.

This made Stu even more unreliable in attending rehearsals, which had always been Paul’s main gripe against him. At the same time, Pete Best was dating a stripper and would disappear for hours, similarly cutting band-practice and reappearing just in time for the night’s performance. One night, Stu and Pete were both playing so erratically–while still drawing squeals from their respective female followings–that Paul’s patience finally snapped. Rounding on each of them in turn, he hissed, ‘You may look like James Dean and you may look like Jeff Chandler, but you’re both crap!’

An even more out-of-character incident occurred on an evening when the two girlfriends were not watching the show in rapt admiration as usual, but having a hen-session at Astrid’s. Between songs, Paul made a remark about Astrid; what exactly he said no one now remembers, but it caused the usually gentle, stoical Stu to square up furiously to him.

According to Paul, it was no more than a scuffle: ‘We gripped each other fiercely until we were prised apart.’ But Tony Sheridan, who was onstage with them, always described it as a serious scrap, in which Stu came off decidedly worst. ‘I’ve seen Paul fight,’ Sheridan recalled. ‘Like this [miming cat-scratch]… with his claws.’ Stu, at any rate, took the fracas very seriously, telephoning Astrid and telling her to order Paul’s girlfriend out of her house.

About a third of the way through the Top Ten engagement, Stu resolved the problem by quitting the Beatles for good and Paul took over on bass–something which, he later said, he’d never really wanted. ‘There’s a theory that I ruthlessly worked Stu out of the group in order to get the prize chair of bass. Forget it… Nobody wants to play bass, or nobody did in those days. Bass was the thing that fat boys… were asked to stand at the back and play. So I didn’t want to do it, but Stuart left and I got lumbered with it.’

Between the former onstage grapplers, friendly relations were sufficiently restored for Stu to lend Paul his bass until Paul could buy one of his own. Hofner guitars being manufactured in West Germany, he could pick up a ‘violin’ model (officially the 550/1) brand-new for the equivalent of about £30. As luck would have it, the Reeperbahn’s main guitar dealers stocked one of the only two left-handed versions Hofner had ever produced. It arrived just in time for the Beatles’ first professional recording-session.

Earlier that summer, Tony Sheridan, their Top Ten club colleague and occasional lead singer, had been signed up by the German Polydor label. His producer was to be Bert Kaempfert, an internationally famous bandleader and composer whose instrumental ‘Wonderland by Night’ had been an American number one in 1960. As at the Top Ten, Sheridan’s backing band was to be the Beatles–renamed ‘the Beat Brothers’ because of that unfortunate assonance with ‘peedles’ or little boy’s willies.

The recording session took place in the assembly hall of a Hamburg infants’ school on 22 June 1961. In an unhappy augury for Pete Best, Bert Kaempfert didn’t care for Pete’s heavy ‘Mach Schau’ beat and (according to Tony Sheridan) stopped him using his bass drum pedal and limited him to brushes instead of sticks.

As Kaempfert was aiming solely at the unadventurous West German pop audience, the choice of material was not inspiring. The ‘Beat Brothers’ backed Sheridan on four tracks including two rocked-up old chestnuts, ‘My Bonnie’ and ‘When the Saints’, then were allowed to tape two numbers of their own. One was an instrumental, ‘Cry for a Shadow’, a parody of Cliff Richard’s shiny-suited sidemen with George on lead guitar; the other was the jazz standard ‘Ain’t She Sweet’, sung by John. Apart from the boom of his brand-new bass, Paul was unnoticeable.

This time when the Beatles returned from Hamburg, no one in Liverpool mistook them for Germans. During their absence, thanks largely to the revivified Cavern, there had been a huge increase in the number of local bands and the clubs, halls and ‘jive hives’ where they could perform. So much was going on that in July John’s art school friend Bill Harry had started a fortnightly newspaper named Mersey Beat to cover it.

Mersey Beat naturally gave star treatment to the only Mersey beat-makers with anything resembling a recording deal. On page one of its second issue was a report about their session with Tony Sheridan for Bert Kaempfert, illustrated by one of Astrid’s photographs of them at Hamburg fairground back in the autumn of 1960. Paul’s surname was misspelt as ‘McArtrey’.

To lighten the news of which bands were playing where and who’d quit one to join another, Bill Harry turned to John for the zany drawings and writing with which he’d always amused his cronies. The most famous of numerous columns and skits he contributed is ‘A Short Essay on the dubious origins of the Beatles’, purporting to explain the name that no one any longer thought a bad idea. It had come, John wrote, in a vision: ‘a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them “From this day forward you are Beatles.”’ Fluent writer and clever cartoonist though Paul was, he found no similar niche in the paper–but half a century later, that ‘flaming pie’ line would come in useful.

Yet, for all their hometown celebrity, the Beatles seemed to have run into a brick wall–one 18 steps underground, steaming with condensation and odorous with rat-shit. They had parted acrimoniously from Allan Williams after refusing to pay his commission for the second Hamburg trip (arguing, not unreasonably, that they’d negotiated it themselves). Now, their only management was Mona Best, assisted by her son, their drummer. And Mrs Best, for all her virtues, was not the one to launch them into the wider world beyond Liverpool and St Pauli. Never before or since, in fact, was a band such a plum ripe for picking.

This sense of having gone as far as they ever could seems to have made even Paul forget his usual punctilious professionalism. On 9 October, John turned 21 and received the munificent gift of £100 from his Aunt Elizabeth in Edinburgh. To spend it, he asked Paul to accompany him on a hitch-hiking trip down through France to Spain. Paul agreed, even though it meant reneging on several important Beatles gigs. He added a tip, learned on previous such journeys with George: that wearing some distinctive garment or headgear was the surest way of getting lifts. Accordingly the two just took off together, wearing matching bowler hats–the Nerk Twins reincarnated. George and Pete Best were so disgusted at being left in the lurch that both started looking around for other bands to join while Stu Sutcliffe in Hamburg told Astrid and several other people that the Beatles had broken up.

Having crossed the Channel by the Dover–Calais ferry, Paul and John found their bowler hats to be totally ineffective in hitching rides, so decided to take the train to Paris. For the British, this had always been the world capital of sex, and so it seemed to them, even after their Hamburg experiences. Neither spoke much French–surprisingly for the future composer of ‘Michelle’–and their misadventures with the language were worthy of the Ealing film comedy Innocents in Paris. At one point, they chummed up with some prostitutes and were wildly excited to be offered ‘une chambre pour la nuit’. But, to Paul’s regret, ‘une chambre’ proved to be all that was on offer.

They dropped the idea of moving on to Spain when one of their Hamburg exi friends, Jürgen Vollmer, proved to be in Paris, studying photography. Jürgen gave them a guided tour of the city, showing them L’Opéra, where they danced around singing mock arias, and taking them to flea markets where they beheld their very first pair of bell-bottomed jeans.