Beatles (36 page)

Some even thought that being in the presence of the Beatles might miraculously cure them. It was one aspect of their adulation which never made the papers. Pictures of cripples being carried out of their dressing room would not have been very suitable.

Riots were starting on these early tours, as they travelled up and down the country, but they were still completely a Liverpool group, doing shows round their old Merseyside haunts between tours. They didn’t do their last performance at the Cavern until 23 August 1963.

John was home in Liverpool for the birth of his son Julian – named after his mother, Julia. When he visited Cyn at Sefton General Hospital he had to wear a disguise so noone would see him. This was still April 1963. They were household names in Liverpool, but unknown elsewhere. ‘A few did recognize me. “Dere’s one of dem,” I heard someone shout, and I had to run for it.’ A few days after the birth, John went on holiday to Spain with Brian.

Cyn moved out of the little flat they’d had in the centre of Liverpool and moved in with Mimi in Menlove Avenue. ‘When I was pushing Julian in his pram round Woolton, people would come up to me and say, “Are you Cynthia Lennon?” I’d say no.’

They were all still Liverpool-based in June 1963, when it was Paul’s 21st birthday. All the fans knew of course, so he couldn’t have a party at his home in Forthlin Avenue. Instead he had it at his Aunt Jinny’s, one of the two aunts who had helped a lot when his mother died.

This was a huge, drunken, noisy orgy, with all the other groups playing, as at Ringo’s party, and as at all their welcome homes from Hamburg. The Fourmost, who had also been signed on by Brian, played, and so did the Scaffold, the Liverpool group that had just got going. This consisted of Roger McGough, the Liverpool poet, John Gorman, a comedian actor and boutique owner, and Michael McGear, formerly Michael McCartney, Paul’s brother.

Michael was still working as a hairdresser, but had started appearing with the Scaffold in his spare time. Once Paul became famous in Liverpool, Michael had changed his name for any acting work, in case anyone felt he was cashing in. He also refused to sing.

During this party, John picked a fight with a local disc jockey, who at one time had done a lot, before Brian, to get them bookings.

‘I smashed him up,’ says John. ‘I battered his bloody ribs for him. I was pissed at the time. I think he’d called me a queer.

‘He sued me afterwards, for thumping him. I paid him £200 to settle it. That was probably the last real fight I’ve ever had.’

The end of an era, in many ways. It was the beginning of the end of John’s violently aggressive, chip-on-the-shoulder attitude to life and everyone. And it was the beginning of the end of the whole Liverpool stage, as their touring was at long last receiving national attention.

Back in London, in August 1963, they produced their fourth single, ‘She Loves You’. This was the start of ‘Yeh Yeh’ and the beginning of national fame. Liverpool was now where they had come from.

Beatlemania descended on the British Isles in October 1963, just as the Christine Keeler–Profumo scandal fizzled out.

It didn’t lift for three years, by which time it had covered virtually the whole world. There was perpetual screaming and yeh yeh-ing from hysterical teenagers of every class and colour, few of whom could hear what was going on for the noise they were making. They became emotionally, mentally or sexually excited. They foamed at the mouth, burst into tears, hurled themselves like lemmings in the direction of the Beatles, or just simply fainted.

Throughout the whole of the three years it was happening somewhere in the world. Each country witnessed the same scenes of mass emotion, scenes which had never been thought possible before and which are unlikely to be repeated. Today, it all sounds like fiction, yet it was only yesterday.

It is impossible to exaggerate Beatlemania, because Beatlemania was, in itself, an exaggeration. For those who can’t believe it, every major newspaper in the world has miles of words and pictures in its cuttings library, giving blow-by-blow accounts of what happened when the Beatles descended on their part of the globe.

Once it had stopped, by 1967, and everyone was overcome by either exhaustion or boredom, it was difficult to believe it had
all happened. Could everyone have been so mad? People of all ages and all intellects eventually succumbed, though perhaps not all as hysterically as the teenagers.

World leaders and famous personages, who had often started by warning or criticizing, fell over each other to drag in references to the Beatles, to show that they were in touch, to let people see that they also knew that a phenomenon of mass communication had occurred.

It occurred suddenly and dramatically in Britain in October 1963 and Brian Epstein said he wasn’t prepared for it. He was prepared for success, because they were already having it. What he wasn’t prepared for was hysteria.

‘She Loves You’, which had come out at the end of August, also went to number one, following the pattern of their previous two singles. As early as June, even before it had a title, thousands of fans had already ordered the next Beatle single. The day before it went on sale, there were advance orders for it of 500,000.

By September the Beatles had reached a unique position in Britain. They had the top-selling LP record,
Please Please Me
. They had the top-selling EP record, ‘Twist and Shout’. They had the top-selling single, ‘She Loves You’.

But it wasn’t until the night of 13 October 1963 that the Beatles stopped being simply an interesting pop-music story and became front-page hard
news
in every national newspaper.

This was the night they topped the bill at the London Palladium, on a show that was televised as
Sunday Night At The London Palladium
. An estimated audience of 15 million viewers watched them that night.

Argyll Street, where the Palladium is situated, was besieged by fans all day long. Newspaper reporters started arriving, once they’d heard the stories of the crowds. The stage door was blocked by fans, mountains of presents and piles of telegrams. Inside, it was almost impossible to rehearse for the continual screams of the thousands of fans chanting outside in the streets.

Other TV companies turned up, from the news departments, to record the crowd scenes, even though the show was being put out by a rival network. The police, taken completely by surprise, were unable to control most of the crowd. It was decided that the Beatles’ getaway car should be stationed at the front doors, as everyone expected them to leave afterwards by the stage door. Their car, by this time, was a chauffeur-driven Austin Princess. Neil’s old van had long since been discarded, once the hit records started appearing.

The police, thinking they were clever, moved the car slightly away from the front door, trying to conceal it. This meant that when the Beatles did appear, shepherded by Neil, they had to search wildly for the car, then make a dash of 50 yards, almost being killed by the mobs in the process.

The front page of every newspaper next day had long news stories and large pictures of the hysterical crowd scenes. The stories weren’t about how well or how badly the group had played their songs, but simply about the chaos they had caused.

‘From that day on,’ says Tony Barrow, their press officer, ‘everything changed. My job was never the same again. From spending six months ringing up newspapers and getting no, I now had every national reporter and feature writer chasing
me
.’

His job entailed simply selecting, along with Brian and other press officers who were later used, journalists who were allowed to interview the Beatles.

‘Even before that, I’d never been in any sense a publicist, the way most groups have publicists, thinking up publicity stunts. I didn’t know about that, as I’d never been one. Brian anyway would have been against any stunts. We never used any and we never had to.’

The following Wednesday, Bernard Delfont announced the names for what is looked upon by most British show-business people as the biggest show of the year – the Royal Variety Performance. Marlene Dietrich was also to be on the bill.

The Beatles were back on tour when this news came out. They were actually in Liverpool, about to appear at a Southport Ballroom, when the news came out. All the national newspapers sent reporters and photographers across from their Manchester offices to get the Beatles’ reactions to the news. They were obviously hoping for some satirical remarks about the royal family, but to Brian’s relief, there were none.

The Royal Variety Show was planned for 4 November. Before that, they continued touring in Britain and for the first time went abroad, to Sweden.

In Britain, each one-night stand was now resulting in the same hysterical crowd scenes. Every day the newspapers had, almost word for word, the same front-page news story as the day before, only the name of the town was different.

Even in smallish towns, like Carlisle, where earlier in the year they’d been ejected from a ball at a local hotel, the crowds were huge. On the night of 24 October, over 600 teenagers waited all night long in a queue for tickets. Most of them brought sleeping bags and slept. Some had been there for as long as 36 hours. When the box office opened and the queue moved forwards, shop windows were smashed and nine people were taken to hospital. In bigger towns the casualties ran into hundreds.

The Swedish tour, their first foreign trip since Hamburg, was a direct result of their record sales. ‘She Loves You’ soon reached the one million figure in Britain, for which it got a gold disc, and also sold well in Europe, which British pop stars had rarely done before.

They were in Sweden for five days, from 24 to 29 October. Day by day they made the British papers at home, as well as the Swedish press and TV. At a concert in Stockholm, police with police dogs tried to control the fans who couldn’t get in. Inside, 40 policemen, with batons, stood guarding the stage, to stop fans climbing on. The fans did eventually break through the barrier of police and got on the stage. George was knocked over but the police managed to restore order before he was trodden on.

Swedish fans were already affecting Beatle hairstyles and clothes, as British fans had started to do. In Sweden, their hairstyle was known as the Hamlet style.

The Beatles themselves date the beginning of Beatlemania slightly later than the Palladium Show, when Brian and Tony Barrow first realized it. They weren’t aware of their massive popularity until 31 October, when they arrived back at London Airport from Sweden.

They had, of course, been aware of the chaos at the Palladium two weeks previously, and all the other riots up and down the country. But this had been going on, building up all the time, though less publicized, since their Cavern days. They’d got into a pattern on tour of having to be smuggled in and out of theatres. They were trying to escape it, rather than face up to it and risk being killed.

But when they arrived back at London Airport the scale of their popularity suddenly hit them. It was their first triumphal arrival from anywhere, since the Cavern welcome homes. Thousands of screaming fans had been choking London Airport for hours. In the chaos surrounding their arrival, the car containing the prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, was held up. Miss World, who was also passing through London Airport, was completely ignored. These airport scenes became familiar pictures during the next three years.

The Royal Variety Performance, their second big London date, was held at the Prince of Wales Theatre on 4 November. The audience wasn’t as big as at the Palladium show, but in theory much more select, as the seats were about four times the normal price. It was a charity show, full of show-business establishment, minor society and rag-trade moguls, all hoping for a glimpse of the royals. On this occasion they were the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. It’s said to be a difficult audience to play to. There is the nauseating tradition of the audience craning to see what effect each act is having in the royal box before they clap or laugh.

Paul got a laugh all round from the beginning. The Beatles came on immediately after Sophie Tucker. Paul said how pleased they were to be following their favourite American group.

Musically, they did their usual act – causing hysterics just by announcing they were going to sing ‘She Loves You’. Then they did ‘Till There Was You’ and ‘Twist and Shout’.

John introduced one number. ‘The ones in the cheap seats clap their hands,’ he said. Nodding towards the royal box, he added: ‘The rest of you just rattle your jewellery.’

This joke was on every front page the next day, everyone loving the implied, though very slight, joke at the royals’ expense. All completely harmless, of course. But it was looked upon as being rather cheeky, but of course very lovable, because the Beatles had become so very lovable.

The Queen Mother, talking to them afterwards, showed that she was well aware of what they did. She even made her own jokey remark, though it probably wasn’t meant to be jokey. She asked them where they were appearing next, and they said Slough. ‘Oh,’ said the Queen Mother, ‘that’s near us.’

The show was televised the following Sunday and had an audience of 26 million.

The front-page stories about their concerts became monotonously the same. Even papers like the
Daily Telegraph
, which up until then had considered itself too staid to cover pop stories, (although they now religiously publish the top ten each week), gave columns to every riot. For a long time, however, they still referred in their reports, as in one about a Newcastle concert on 28 October, to ‘teenagers fighting to get tickets for the Beatles “pop” group …’ They still felt it necessary to explain who the Beatles were.

There were questions in Parliament about the thousands of extra policemen all round the country being made to do extra and dangerous duties because of the Beatles. One MP suggested that the police should withdraw and see what happened. Luckily, no one took that suggestion seriously.

On 1 November they began another tour, this time billed simply as the Beatles Show. There was no other joint star, as there had been with Roy Orbison, because none was needed.