Stu died in the ambulance, in Astrid’s arms. “At half past four,” Millie Sutcliffe said, “I was in my bedroom at home in Liverpool. I felt as if a great strong cold wind came through that house, lifted me up, and laid me across the bed. For fifteen or twenty minutes not a muscle in my body was capable of movement. That was the time, I discovered later, when Stuart was dying.”
The news came in two telegrams from Astrid, out of sequence. The first said he had died, the second that he was seriously ill.
Stu’s father was away at sea. Mrs. Sutcliffe faced alone the ordeal of breaking the news to her two daughters, getting leave from the school where she was teaching, and booking herself on the first available flight to Hamburg. By chance, it was the one on which Brian Epstein and George Harrison were traveling to join the other Beatles. Brian gave her a lift to Manchester and sat with her on the flight.
At Hamburg Airport, Astrid was waiting with John, Paul, and Pete Best. Paul and Pete were red-eyed, but John showed no emotion. With unintended harshness then, the Beatles’ and Millie Sutcliffe’s paths diverged. Theirs lay to the Star-Club, where they were to open in a few hours. Hers lay to the mortuary, the formal identification of Stu, the receipts to be signed for his clothes, his watch, and his signet ring.
Cause of death was given officially as cerebral paralysis due to bleeding into the right ventricle of the brain. “The doctors told us,” Astrid says, “that Stu’s brain was actually expanding—getting too big for the space it floated in. It’s a very rare medical condition, but it can happen. Even if Stuart had lived, he would have been blind and probably paralyzed. He wouldn’t have been able to paint. He would have preferred to die.”
From the mortuary Millie Sutcliffe was taken to the Kirchherr house, to see the room that had been Stu’s last home, and the attic where he had worked. Scores of canvases, stacked against every wall, showed with what desperate energy his last months were spent. Mrs. Sutcliffe picked up, and never afterward let out of her sight, the palette on which Stu had mixed his final brilliant colors.
The shock expressed by such eminent figures as Edouardo Paolozzi bore witness to the tragedy that such a talent should be so brutally extinguished. At twenty-two, Stu left behind a body of work in which mere promise already yielded to virtuosity. Those last visions, torn between agony and exhilaration, the blue and crimson carnivals, now left the city whose squalor and glamour had inspired them. So did a sketch of himself Stu had made at a time when the attacks were getting worse. Both his hands are pressed to a head that is almost a nuclear mushroom cloud of pain and confusion.
Millie Sutcliffe bequeathed Stu’s brain for scientific research at the hospital that had been treating him. Eighteen months later, a set of German X-ray plates, taken after his death, were brought across to Liverpool by Astrid. These revealed, for the first time, the presence of a small brain tumor. The Hamburg radiologist had attached a note in English: “Note the depressed condition of the skull.” Studying the tumor’s small shadow, and the cranial depression that seemed to press down on it, Mrs. Sutcliffe remembered a night, some three years before, when Stu had been playing bass with the Beatles, and she had found him in his room late at night with blood pouring from his head after being kicked in a scuffle outside Litherland Town Hall.
The Beatles were devastated by Stu’s death. Neither George nor Pete Best could stop crying. Paul felt especially bad, remembering his fights with Stu in the past. He tried to find words of consolation for Mrs. Sutcliffe but, unfortunately, they did not come out quite right. “My mother died when I was fourteen,” he told her, “and I’d forgotten all about her in six months.”
John alone showed no outward emotion, even though he felt the loss as badly as Stu’s own family. To the end of her days, Millie Sutcliffe would bitterly remember his failure to shed a single tear or show his feelings apart from one small detail. He asked for, and was given, the long woolen scarf that Stu used to wear in their winters together among the cold Liverpool streets and alleys.
In fact, John’s toughness and pragmatism helped others through the tragedy. “It was John who saved me,” Astrid says. “He convinced me, after Stu was gone, that I couldn’t behave as if I were a widow. He pretended to be heartless, but I knew what he said came from a heart. ‘Make up your mind,’ he told me. ‘You either live or die. You can’t be in the middle.’”
Thanks to the efforts of his mother and, after Millie Sutcliffe’s death in 1983, his younger sister Pauline, Stu would eventually achieve international renown as a painter who only incidentally happened to have invented the Beatles’ name and most abiding image. His work would be shown in prestigious galleries all over the world and form an exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio; his drawings and sketchbooks would feature in the same blue-chip auctions as handwritten Lennon or McCartney lyrics. He would be the subject of numerous books, academic treatises, and TV documentaries and, in the mid-1990s, of a British-made film, Backbeat, although in a loutish and foulmouthed incarnation that few of his contemporaries can have recognized.
In 2001, Pauline Sutcliffe would come forward with further information bearing on her brother’s death. She said that while John and Stu were together in Hamburg in May 1961, John had flown into a sudden rage over his friend’s poor musicianship, knocking Stu to the ground, then kicking him repeatedly in the head as he lay there. The depression found in Stu’s skull after his death was consistent with such an attack—as much, Pauline believes, as that earlier fight outside Litherland Town Hall when John and Pete Best came to Stu’s rescue. She said Stu himself had told her of John’s assault, and that, many years afterward, John himself had owned up to it. To the end of his life, Pauline believes, he remained troubled by the thought of possibly having been an unwitting factor in Stu’s death.
Awful as the tragedy was for all of them, the Beatles could not stay miserable around the clock. They were, after all, the main attraction at the largest and newest of the Reeperbahn beat clubs. It stood in Grosse Freiheit, next door to St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, in the bowels of what had formerly been a movie theater, the Stern Kino. As the Star-Club, it put Koschmider’s Kaiserkeller and Eckhorn’s Top Ten in the shade. Not that Koschmider or Eckhorn attempted serious competition. The Star-Club’s owner, Manfred Weissleder, a huge man with a dusting of golden hair, was the biggest strip-club owner on the Freiheit: His sex shows thrived owing to the particular predilection Weissleder had for filming naked girls under water.
During the Star-Club’s hours, from 4:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M., as many as fifteen thousand customers could pass through it, most staying long enough to hear their favorite band, moving on to other bars or clubs, then returning later to hear the band’s second, third, fourth, and fifth spot. After midnight, the place would be swollen by the Freiheit’s own population of whores, pimps, strippers, and transvestites. To maintain order, Weissleder had recruited Horst Fascher, the Kaiserkeller’s old chief bouncer who, luckily for the Beatles, “worshipped the bones of their bodies.” For the Star-Club Fascher recruited a new and even more deadly “Hoddel’s Gang,” including a much feared one-armed doorman and a waiter named Ali who would instantly floor any troublemaker with a wrestler’s dropkick.
However exploitative—and frightening—Weissleder was a good employer, whose evident power in the Hamburg underworld protected his young British employees from the Reeperbahn’s darker perils. Each was issued with a small gilt Star-Club badge that acted as a potent shield in cases of difficulty or danger. “The usual thing was that you’d be walking along and someone would try to pull you into a doorway and rob you or rip you off,” Liverpool musician Kingsize Taylor remembers. “But as soon as they saw that badge, and realized you worked for Weissleder, they’d back off straight away.”
The bands were given accommodation in a block of flats above Maxim’s Club where Weissleder’s strippers and mud wrestlers also recuperated between shows. “We were all pretty rough and ready,” Kingsize says, “but the Beatles were the w
orst of all. Theirs was the only flat where, if the toilet was occupied, they’d go on the floor, then cover it up with newspaper. When they moved out, Weissleder had to have the whole place fumigated.”
The ringleaders in all the maddest and most pointlessly offensive escapades were John Lennon and Adrian Barber, the Big Three’s guitarist who later took a management job with Weissleder. It developed into a kind of contest to see who could be the most outrageous. Barber would walk along the Reeperbahn, dragging a hairbrush behind him on a dog lead. John would come onstage at the Star-Club, goose-stepping and Sieg Heil–ing, or naked, with a lavatory seat round his neck. Barber bought a pig at the fish market, brought it back to the flats, and threw it onto a bed where a fellow musician named Buddy Britten was sleeping. Kingsize Taylor remembers Britten’s terrified shrieks and the “shit coming out of the pig’s arse like a flamethrower.”
But even Barber could not match John in the acts of sacrilege that seemed to spring from some profound loathing of his own churchgoing past. On Sunday mornings, he would stand on the balcony of the Beatles’ flat shouting abuse at people walking to services at nearby St. Joseph’s. In yet another misuse of his art school training, he carved a wooden effigy of Christ on the Cross and attached a water-filled condom to represent an erection. One Easter Sunday, he urinated from the balcony onto the heads of a party of nuns.
“That was the sort of crazy thing you did, full of drink and pills,” Johnny Hutch of the Big Three remembers. “Before we started playing at night, we’d shake Preludin down our throats by the tubeful. I’ve seen John Lennon foaming at the mouth, he’s got so many pills inside him.”
The Beatles were still in Hamburg when, toward the end of April, Brian set off from Liverpool for one last try with the London record companies. As his train rattled south he could not even be sure with whom that try should be made. Every label he could find in the NEMS stock catalog had by now turned the Beatles down. The only hope really did seem to be Embassy, the one everyone laughed at because it was stocked by Woolworth’s.
Someone had suggested that, instead of offering the Beatles on tape he should have a proper “demo” disk to play to the A&R men. That was what brought Brian, in his smart dark overcoat, to the teeming HMV record shop in Oxford Street. Above the shop was a small recording studio where, for a fee of one pound, a tape spool could be converted to an acetate demo.
Brian’s luck finally began to change when the studio engineer, a man named Jim Foye, looked up from processing the disk to remark that the music on it was “not at all bad.” The studio in fact belonged to a firm of music publishers named Ardmore and Beechwood who were in turn a subsidiary of EMI, the record giant from whom Brian and the Beatles had already suffered multiple rejections. So enthused was Foye that he took the demo up to Ardmore and Beechwood, one floor above the studio, and played it to the company’s boss, Syd Coleman. Coleman in turn saw “something” in the demo, asked to see Brian, and offered to publish two of the numbers on it, “Love of the Loved” and “Hello Little Girl.” He also asked whether the Beatles were signed with a record label, to which Brian’s diplomatic answer was “not yet.” In fact, he nurtured one final hope and had seriously been on the point of auditioning the Beatles with Embassy, the despised “Woolies” label.
Coleman’s deputy at Ardmore and Beechwood, a former singer named Kim Bennett, was so taken with their demo that he suggested recording them as an independent production in the studio below. According to Bennett, Coleman put this idea to EMI’s recording head, Len Wood, but the company’s rigid internal protocol could not permit its publishing arm to start dabbling in recording. Instead, Coleman sent Brian to yet another EMI subsidiary, the Parlophone label, whose A&R head, George Martin, happened to be a personal friend. According to Kim Bennett, a “gentlemen’s agreement” was made between Coleman and Brian that if the Beatles proved successful, Ardmore and Beechwood would handle their song publishing.
At that time, the only George Martin known outside Tin Pan Alley was a cockney radio comedian specializing in domestic monologues. Nothing could have been more unlike the Parlophone label boss who shook Brian’s hand a few days after that chance visit to the HMV shop. This George Martin was tall and gauntly elegant, with a clipped BBC newsreader’s accent and the air, Brian himself later said, “of a stern but fair-minded schoolmaster.”
Martin listened politely to Brian’s claim that the Beatles would one day be “bigger than Elvis.” Like everyone else in the business he had heard that many times before. Playing the acetate, he could understand why a group partial to “Sheik of Araby” and “Your Feet’s Too Big” might not be considered an instantly commercial proposition. But, unlike everyone else, he found things to praise. He said he liked Paul’s voice and some of the guitar playing, and the jaunty harmony in “Hello Little Girl.” He was not excited, merely interested. “There was an unusual quality—a certain roughness. I thought to myself, ‘There might just be something there.’”
Martin agreed to give the Beatles a recording test in June, after their return from Hamburg. It would only be a test, a studio audition like the one they had failed at Decca, and for a label not much in prestige above Embassy. But Brian was never one to downplay things, least of all now. “Congratulations, boys,” ran the telegram he at once sent to Hamburg. “EMI request recording session. Please rehearse new material.”
NINE
“SOMEBODY HAD TO PAY FOR THOSE 10,000 RECORDS BRIAN BOUGHT”
When George Martin joined EMI in 1950 people still played “gramophones” cranked up by handles, and records were heavy black objects one foot in diameter that broke if you dropped them. Record studios were drab institutional places supervised by men in white coats, and so rigidly formal that not even a jazz drummer could take his jacket off during the recording session.
Young George Martin had joined EMI’s Parlophone label as assistant to the head of A&R, Oscar Preuss. He was, even then, suave, elegant, and polite. His superiors, in the trade jargon, said he was “very twelve inch.” They little realized he came from a humble North London background and that his father had once sold newspapers on a street corner.
He taught himself to play piano by ear, and at school ran his own little dance band, George Martin and the Four Tune Tellers. In 1943, aged seventeen, he joined the Fleet Air Arm. It was his navy service that gave him a large social leg up and also allowed him later to attend the London Guildhall School of Music, to continue his piano studies and take up the oboe. His first job, before joining Parlophone, was with the BBC Music Library. A little of the BBC manner and accent stuck.
EMI in 1950 was a corporation not much different in size and spirit from the BBC. Founded in 1931 as The Gramophone Company, its name changed, as its field diversified, to Electrical and Mechanical Industries. EMI invented the first practicable British television system: It manufactured television sets, medical equipment, and weapons systems under contract to the then War Office.
It also made records on a series of labels ingested mostly during the prewar years. Its pride was HMV, the definitive label of wistful dog staring into a gramophone trumpet. An HMV dealership in the retail world was as prized as one in Rolls-Royce cars.
No one ever prized the dealership for Parlophone. EMI had bought it in the 1930s as the German Lindstrom label—hence the L label logo that was one day to be mistaken for a £ sterling sign. Within EMI in the fifties it was known derisively as the “junk” label. To Oscar Preuss and his assistant George Martin were left the despised light music catalog—Sidney Torch and his Orchestra; Bob and Alf Pearson; Roberto Inglez, “the Latin American Scot.” A sale of only a few hundred copies made any artist viable; to sell a thousand was spectacular. It happened in 1954 when a crooner named Dick James went to number two in the Top Twenty with the theme song from the Robin Hood television show.
That year, as it happened, EMI was in deep trouble. Its chief product, the heavy wooden cabinet TV set, was fast growing obsolete against the new, light, plastic s
ets coming from Japan. Decca, EMI’s great rival, had just introduced the long-playing record, for which EMI’s technicians predicted no future other than passing novelty.
In 1954, the EMI chairmanship passed to Joseph Lockwood—not a showbiz man, like his predecessor, but a successful industrialist, big in engineering and flour milling. Lockwood was appalled by the decay of the organization he had inherited. He also quickly decided where the future lay. He ended the production of cabinet TV sets and ordered twenty of the new LP record presses. A year later, in what was considered a foolhardy enterprise, he paid 3 million pounds for an established American record company, Capitol.
It was in the flurry of Lockwood’s first year as chairman that Oscar Preuss, Parlophone’s head of A&R, retired. By oversight more than anything, George Martin became, at twenty-nine, the youngest boss of an EMI label, at a salary of £1,100 per year.
Parlophone, to EMI’s bureaucratic mind, remained the junk label. It was simply junk of a different, not unsuccessful kind. Martin, in the late fifties, went in heavily for comic dialogue records like Peter Ustinov’s Mock Mozart and Peter Sellers’s Songs for Swinging Sellers. One of his coups was to recognize what potential cult followings lay in the new generation of London comedy stage revues. He produced live album versions of Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat, and of a four-man undergraduate show, destined to influence comedy throughout the next decade, called Beyond the Fringe.
When rock ’n’ roll arrived George Martin shared in the general detestation felt by all trained musicians. It was his duty, however, as an A&R man, to tour the Soho coffee bars for talent. He auditioned and turned down Tommy Steele, preferring to sign up Steele’s backing skiffle group, the Vipers. Significantly, in six years up to 1962, Parlophone’s only Top Ten hit was a comedy number, “You’re Driving Me Crazy,” by the Temperance Seven.