Wooler lost no time in urging McFall to hire the Beatles. Paddy Delaney, the club doorman and an accomplished mimic, would from then on impersonate Wooler’s voice and wagging forefinger as he told McFall they would bring in a following of sixty, at least.
Delaney, a huge, straight-backed, kindhearted Irishman, had seen service both in the Guards and the Liverpool Parks Police. He was equally immaculate in his spare-time profession of helping to dissuade Teddy Boys from entering Liverpool’s premier dance halls, the Locarno and the Grafton Rooms. In 1959, to oblige his brother-in-law, he agreed to put in one night on the door of the Cavern Club. “I thought it was a proper place, like the Grafton Rooms, so I turned up smart. I had three dinner suits in those days. I put one of them on with a maroon bow tie, a matching cummerbund with a watermark in it, and three diamond studs in my shirt. I walked up and down Mathew Street three times before I could even see the Cavern.”
Paddy Delaney was still there—still in evening dress complete with studs and cummerbund—when the Beatles first played at the Cavern in January 1961. Ray McFall had booked them, tentatively, to appear on a Tuesday, midway through the Blue Genes’ Guest Night.
“I’m standing there under the light and I see this lad coming along in a leather jacket, a black polo-necked jersey. I remember thinking to myself, ‘That’s the youngest tramp I’ve ever seen.’ ‘Are you a member, pal?’ I said to him. He said, ‘I’m George Harrison. I’m in the Beatles.’ I let him go in; then Paul McCartney came along; then John. Then a taxi came with Pete Best and the drums and their two amplifiers. Just chipboard, those were, no paint or anything, with the speakers nailed up inside.”
Bob Wooler’s prophecy was fulfilled. The Beatles brought in at least sixty extra customers, in contingents from Aintree, Litherland, and West Derby. The Blue Genes, supposedly the main event of the evening, were totally eclipsed. Paddy Delaney witnessed the furious row upstairs on Mathew Street between Ray McFall and his outraged regular musicians.
McFall was impressed by the door receipts but shocked to the depths of his jazz-pure soul by the Beatles’ unkempt appearance. He had thought, after seeing Cliff Richard’s Shadows, that groups wore suits. He told Bob Wooler that if the Beatles wanted to play the Cavern again, they must not wear jeans. To this the Beatles replied that Ray McFall could get stuffed. Wooler interceded on their behalf, pointing out to McFall the advantage of block-booking a group that, being “professional”—that was to say, unemployed—would be available to play lunchtimes on any day of the week. “The Beatles,” Wooler said with pride, “were what I called the first rock and dole group.”
So it came about that, on three or four days each week, the delivery-men and warehouse checkers in Mathew Street witnessed the unprecedented sight of scores of young girls, from city center shops and offices, in beehive hair and stiletto heels, picking their way down the alleys among the delivery trucks and cast-off fruit crates. By noon, when the session began, a queue would stretch from the corner leading to Whitechapel to the doorway, like a ship’s hatch, that would be unnoticeable but for the bouncer who stood there, blocking it with his arm. As the city clocks struck noon that queue would start to move forward, by degrees, into the hatchway and down the eighteen steps to the table where Ray McFall sat, surrounded by soup bowls full of money. Admission cost 1s (5p) to members or 1s 6d (7p) to nonmembers. Beyond McFall’s table was a microscopic cloakroom, tended by a girl named Priscilla White during her lunch break from a neighborhood typing pool.
Under the gloomy arches Bob Wooler’s voice would gravely resound in what had become each session’s inaugural catechism. “Hi, all you Cavern-dwellers—welcome to the best of cellars.” Wooler broadcast, not from the stage but from behind it, in a tiny recess that served also as a changing room for the bands. The sole ventilation came from the next-door cellar, via a grille that became gradually blocked by a mounting pile of drum sets. A single cupboard served to accommodate the DJ’s amplifier and record-playing deck. Between each live session Wooler sat in this reeking priest hole, playing records from his own large personal collection.
Ray McFall paid the Beatles 25s (£1.25) each per day. For this they did two forty-five-minute spots at the end of the center tunnel, on the tiny stage with dead rats under it, and positively no acoustics. The low-arched brick, and the wall of impacted faces and bodies, so squeezed out all empty air that Pete Best’s drumbeats rebounded an inch in front of him, making the sticks jump like pistols in his hand. A single Chuck Berry number, in that heat, caused even tidy Paul to look as if his head had been plunged into a water barrel. The bricks sweated with the music, glistening like the streams that coursed from their temples and sending a steady drip of moisture over equipment in which there were many naked wires. Each breath they took filled their lungs with each other’s hot scent, mingling uniquely with an aroma of cheese rinds, damp mold, disinfectant, and the scent of frantic girls.
For their lunchtime audience they poured out the vast Hamburg repertoire that could switch crazily from American blues to maudlin country-and-western; from today’s Top Twenty hit to some sentimental prewar dance-band tune. It seemed to Bob Wooler that they took a perverse delight in playing what no rival group would dare to. “They had to let you know they were different. If everyone else was playing the A-side of a record, they’d be playing the B-side. If the others jumped around, they’d decide to stand still like zombies.” Wooler himself possessed a number of rare American singles that he would play as surprise items over the Cavern loudspeakers. One of these, Chan Romero’s “Hippy Hippy Shake,” besotted Paul McCartney, who begged to be allowed to borrow it and copy down the words. “Hippy Hippy Shake” became the climax of their catalog of sheer stage-stamping rock. A moment later, they would change to the cocktail-lounge tempo of “Till There Was You,” from the stage show The Music Man, crooned by Paul with the sweat drying on him.
Stu Sutcliffe was back with them on bass guitar, although little more proficient than he had been before the Hamburg trip. “He’d bop around like the others,” Bob Wooler said. “But he seemed to know that the others were carrying him.” Stu was hardly noticed by John and Paul in their perpetual contest to be the cynosure of all eyes. They in turn failed to notice how often those eyes would pass over their bobbing heads, to settle on Pete Best. George, on the right, took no part in the clowning, but waited solemnly, biting his lower lip, for the moment when his solo arrived. To his mother, Louise, he explained that he had no time to horse around—it was up to him to keep the music together.
In the intervals, they would go across Mathew Street to the Grapes, a marine-looking pub with scrubbed wooden tables much frequented by postmen from the GPO in North John Street. There they would sit as long as possible over a fivepenny half of bitter each. The landlady complained they took up seats that might have been more profitably occupied by postmen drinking pints of draft Guinness.
The Cavern provided lunch of a sort—hot soup with mysterious lumps in it; meat pies and rolls and soft drinks. “Paul borrowed a halfpenny off me once,” Paddy Delaney, the doorman, said. “He wanted a Coke and a cheese roll; it came to sevenpence halfpenny, and he’d only got sevenpence. ‘There you are, Paul,’ I said to him. ‘Remember me when you’re up there, famous.’”
Paul’s father, Jim McCartney, was the first of their parents to investigate this new epoch. He had noticed the state in which Paul came home from the Cavern, with clothes stinking of mold and a shirt so drenched it could be wrung out over the kitchen sink. Jim was still in the cotton business, working at the Cotton Exchange just round the corner from Mathew Street. Venturing into the Cavern on his own lunch hour, Jim could not get near enough to the stage to speak to Paul. When he came after that it would usually be to drop in some meat he had bought to cook for Paul and Michael that evening. Above the din in the band room he would give Paul careful instructions about when, and at what number, to switch on the electric cooker.
John’s aunt Mimi was less easily placated. Ray McFall, si
tting behind his soup-bowl exchequer, was dismayed to be confronted by a lean and angry woman demanding the whereabouts of John Lennon. For Mimi, up to that point, still believed John to be studying at art college. He was on stage at the time, doing a song whose lyrics suddenly changed—as at the Woolton fete—to: “Oh, oh, Mimi’s coming. Mimi’s coming.” In the break, when he reeled into the band room, he found waiting for him, as well as faithful Cynthia, an extremely grim-faced aunt. “I said to him, ‘This is very nice, John, isn’t it? This is very nice!’”
George’s mother also happened to be at the Cavern that day, but in the audience. She would go along and shout and scream for George as loudly as any girl. She saw Mimi going out one day, and shouted exuberantly, “Aren’t they great?” “I’m glad somebody thinks so,” was Mimi’s tart reply.
Allan Williams, although busy with his Blue Angel club, was still the sole exporter of Liverpool groups to Hamburg. Early in 1961, he booked Gerry and the Pacemakers to play a two-month session for Peter Eckhorn at the Top Ten Club. It was a well-deserved chance for Gerry Mars-den, the smiley little delivery boy from Menzies Street, who had made such a success at the Boxing Stadium show by singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”
Gerry and his group were quiet boys, intent on saving their Hamburg money to buy new equipment. Even so, they brought home enough stories—of Willi’s Café, the Gretel and Alphons, and Jim Hawke’s Seaman’s Mission—to reawaken the Beatles’ addiction to Reeperbahn life. Peter Eckhorn had told them they could go back to the Top Ten any time, subject to police and immigration approval. Pete Best’s drums were still there, together with the clothes that he and Paul had been compelled to leave behind in the attic.
Pete, with the approval of the other four, rang up Eckhorn from Mona Best’s house in Hayman’s Green. Eckhorn instantly gave them a booking, to begin in April, at forty pounds each per week—exactly twice as much as they had been paid by Bruno Koschmider. Nor would they have to pay Williams his 10 percent agent’s commission, having fixed the engagement without his help. Williams, unaware of this decision, applied to the German consulate in Liverpool for work permits on their behalf, explaining the circumstances of the Bambi Kino fire and rendering heartfelt assurances as to their reliability and good character.
Stu Sutcliffe originally had no intention of accompanying them. Guilty at having traded on John’s loyalty for so long, he was now perfectly prepared to hand over the role of bass player in the band to Paul, as Paul so desperately wanted. He was even more full of guilt at having so long neglected his art studies for a career as musician that clearly would never lead anywhere. His intention was to accede to his mother’s wishes and return to Liverpool Art College to take his teacher-training diploma. On the strength of his previous brilliant record as a student, the college had indicated that he could go back whenever he liked. But now they informed him that he could not be readmitted. When Millie Sutcliffe made enquiries she learned Stu was suspected of having stolen the Student’s Union amplifier that the Beatles had appropriated months before.
This unexpected about-face plunged the sensitive Stu into a depression so intense that, for a time, he feared he might never pick up a paintbrush again. His one desire was to get away from Liverpool, with what he saw as its constricting narrow-mindedness, and back to the freedom of Hamburg and the arms of his beautiful fiancée. In exchange for that, a little more humiliation on stage with the Beatles seemed a small price to pay.
The Beatles’ Top Ten engagement started in April 1961. Thanks to Allan Williams they had proper work permits this time, and proper train tickets, purchased with money sent across by Peter Eckhorn. They arrived at Hamburg Station to be greeted by Astrid in her black leather trouser suit. Even the bashful George did not hesitate to fling his arms around her.
The hours at the Top Ten were, if anything, more punishing than at the Kaiserkeller. They went on at 7:00 P.M. each night, playing in alternation with Tony Sheridan’s band, until 2:00 or 3:00 A.M. The club’s barn-like size meant they must “mak show” even more obviously and violently to be seen out in the remoter parts. Now, too, along the front of the stage, there would often be photographers—friends of Astrid and Klaus Voorman—training their long lenses upward and shouting, “More sveat, boys! More sveat.”
Most of their Kaiserkeller friends had forsaken Bruno Koschmider to work at the new Top Ten. There was Horst Fascher, the Reeperbahn’s champion bouncer, just released from another prison sentence and ready, in the Liverpool phrase, to “worship the bones of their bodies.” There was Rosa, the WC attendant, and her big sweet jar of Prellys. There were three bold-eyed, powerful barmaids with whom almost everyone had explored the delights of “muff-diving,” “finger pie,” and “yodeling up the canyon,” and who signified when a song had gone down well by setting all the lampshades above the bar counter swinging and jogging.
Astrid continued her flattering habit of photographing the Beatles at every opportunity. She produced studies of them, lounging on the docks or in railway yards, complementing their beardless menace with tugboats, freight wagons, or other specimens of German industrial design. She did studio portraits, too, using a technique pioneered by the American Richard Avedon, which gave drama to the face by halving it between shadow and light. George and John were photographed in this way, but not Pete Best—who was genuinely unconceited about his appearance—and, strangely, not Paul. Astrid tended to be with George, whom she mothered, and John, because, as well as being Stu’s closest friend, he fascinated her.
It was no coincidence, perhaps, that Stu persuaded John to allow his own steady girlfriend, Cynthia Powell, to come out to visit him in Hamburg. Paul’s steady, a girl named Dot Rhode who worked in a Liverpool chemist’s shop, was also invited. The two girls had become friends in their common purdah, squeezing themselves into photography booths for snapshots to send to their lords and masters, or laboriously transcribing the words of the newest Chuck Berry song.
The visit took place in Cynthia’s Easter college vacation, and passed off happily, against all the odds. For most of the fortnight she stayed with the hospitable Kirchherr family. Astrid was nice to her, lent her stunning clothes, and drove her down to the Reeperbahn each evening to see the Beatles play. Some nights, she stayed behind, heroically sharing John’s bunk in the Top Ten attic, while George snored in the bunk below. Paul and Dot stayed, with Tony Sheridan and other itinerant lodgers, on a harbor barge lent to them by Rosa, the club’s lavatory attendant. Most of the meals, as usual, were provided by Jim and Lilo Hawke at the Seaman’s Mission. Rosa, walking through the early morning fish market, would steal extra rations for Paul, slipping bananas or sardines into her coat pockets or up her sleeves.
Relations between Stu Sutcliffe and Paul McCartney, meanwhile, grew steadily worse. Paul made no secret of his contempt for Stu’s bass playing, and his own conviction that he could do it better. There were rows on the Top Ten stage, behind John’s back; one night, Paul’s taunts even goaded Stu to physical violence. “Paul had made some remark about Astrid,” Tony Sheridan says. “Stu went for him, but he was only a little guy. Paul started beating the shit out of him.”
Stu spent the club intermissions talking wistfully to exis, like Peter Markmann and Detlev Birgfeld, who were students at the Hamburg State Art College. They and Astrid urged him to try to enroll there as a student. Things were especially good just now, they said, as the college had appointed the famous sculptor Edouardo Paolozzi—one of Stu’s longtime idols—to run a course of painting and sculpture master classes. Eventually, he was persuaded to go and meet Paolozzi, taking some samples of his Liverpool College work.
A brief glance was enough for Edouardo Paolozzi. He promised to use his influence, not only to admit Stu to the state art college but also to get him a grant from the Hamburg City Council.
In Paolozzi’s class, and in an attic studio that Frau Kirchherr gave him, Stu nerved himself to paint again. And once he had started, he could not stop. His Liverpool work, though accom
plished, had always been derivative, slipping in and out of identities that caught his fancy. Hamburg, and the Reeperbahn’s dark, sleazy colors, gave him his own line at last. Huge swirling abstracts, like crushed Rio carnivals, like cities crumbling into impacted seas, thronged the canvases that, once again, were almost too tall for him to reach the top. Each one, completed in a day or a night, was impatiently stacked aside. Life now seemed too short for the miles his brush had to travel.
For the first month he led a dual life, both studying under Paolozzi and playing at the Top Ten club. At 2:00 or 3:00 A.M., he would go into his attic and work there until it was time for class. He existed for days without sleep, borne up by pills and drink and the feverish excitement of his work. The headaches, which had intermittently troubled him, began to increase, in frequency and ferocity. Sometimes the pain would send him into a kind of fit, in which he would smash his head against the wall or scream at Astrid for some supposed infidelity—then, equally without warning, the anguish would disappear.
He quit the Beatles gradually, without rancor, glad to see how easily they closed ranks behind him. Paul, as Paul had so long wanted, took over bass guitar, borrowing Stu’s Hofner President until he could get one of his own. When it came, it was a bizarre new Hofner model, shaped like a violin. Once or twice, for old times’ sake, Stu sat in with the Beatles, playing bass alongside Paul. A photograph taken at one such moment shows him half in shadow, his eyes frowning, sightless, as in some study taken a hundred years ago. It was a look that his college tutor, Edouardo Paolozzi, found especially disturbing. “I felt there was a desperate thing about Stuart. I was afraid of it. I wouldn’t go down to that club.”