John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

flames, almost setting fire to the whole kitchen. John, he recalls, was fascinated by the idea of combining rock music and poetry, and awed that someone of his young years should already have published a poetry collection. Ellis replied that his real ambition was to turn out prose for the lucrative mass market; as he put it, he wanted to be ‘a paperback writer’.

      To end his visit, he gave a poetry reading at the Jacaranda, backed by John, Paul, George, Stu and Tommy. The event was such a success that Ellis urged them to forget their college, work and school commitments and just go for it in London, the way he himself had done from Pinner, Middlesex, three years earlier. His valediction, so he claims, was to end their wavering between Silver Beetles and Beatals, and nail the pun properly at last. It should be ‘Beatles’, he told John, as a double play on beat poetry and beat music.

      There has probably never been a title whose authorship was more fiercely disputed. But Ellis’s stay at Gambier Terrace and this final, irrevocable name change undoubtedly did coincide. Early June brought two regular bookings over the water in Cheshire for the same promoter, Les Dodd: one at the Grosvenor Ballroom in Liscard, Wallasey, the other at Neston Institute on the Wirral. For the Grosvenor gig, the Wallasey newspaper advertised the Silver Beetles, ‘jive and rock specialists’; a local press story on their Neston debut a few days afterward called them the Beatles. This second mention still listed the pseudonymous Paul Ramon, Carl Harrison and Stu de Stael, but the name of ‘their leader’ was given as plain John Lennon once more.

      The Scottish tour had left Tommy feeling more battered than his drums, not to mention grievously out of pocket; he was also tired of the sarcasm and backbiting that John ceaselessly orchestrated against Stu, and—as a conscientious workingman—appalled by John’s beatnik philosophy. ‘Lennon once told me he’d commit suicide rather than get a conventional job. “Death before work”—those were his very words. His girlfriend, Cynthia, was sitting in the front seat of the van at that time.’ On 11 June, Tommy failed to rendezvous with his colleagues at the Jacaranda for that night’s appearance at the Grosvenor Ballroom. Yielding to pressure from his girlfriend, he had decided to return to his more lucrative job on the forklift at Garston bottle works, so becoming the only person ever to resign from the Beatles.

      The gap was temporarily filled by a picture framer named Norman Chapman, an accomplished spare-time percussionist whom they happened to overhear late one night practising alone in an office building close to the Jacaranda. Chapman proved amenable to joining them and fitted in well enough, but he had time to play only three gigs at the Grosvenor—including an impromptu reunion performance with Johnny Gentle—before being spirited away as one of the very last victims of National Service. The Beatles were beatless yet again.

      With no outside promoter willing to book them, almost the only work to be had through that hot Mersey midsummer was in Allan Williams’s own ever-growing entertainments empire. Williams’s newest venture was a strip club in Kimberley Street, just off Upper Parliament Street, grandiosely styled the New Cabaret Artists Club and run in partnership with a West Indian calypso musician known as Lord Woodbine. Here during their virtually gig-free July, the Beatles made a one-shot afternoon appearance as backing group to a stripper named Janice, with Paul McCartney taking the drummer’s seat. In terms of eroticism, it barely packed the charge of John’s college life-drawing class, particularly since Janice expected her musicians to play appropriate mood pieces like ‘The Gipsy Fire Dance’ from sheet music.

      Around the middle of the month, Allan Williams was drinking at Ye Cracke when he fell into conversation with a couple of out-of-town journalists. They said they were from the Empire News, the dullest of Britain’s downmarket Sunday papers, and were researching a feature article on how college students managed on their state grants. Seeing a chance to get himself into the article, Williams held forth at length on the poverty of Liverpool art students (omitting to mention his own opportunistic employment of them as decorators and strip-club musicians). He then took the journalists to John and Stu’s Gambier Terrace flat, introduced them to its occupants, and hung around while interviews were conducted and photographs taken.

      Williams had been misled, however. The hacks were not from the Empire News, but from its huge-circulation and scandal-hungry stablemate, the People. Nor was the article about student grants, but about the growing influence of America’s beatnik movement among British youth. In America, beatniks had been considered at worst faintly comic, with their folk music, horn-rimmed glasses and earnest reading of Camus and Sartre. In Britain—or, at least, to Britain’s gutter press—they had taken over from Teddy Boys and Teddy Girls as symbols of juvenile delinquency.

      THIS IS THE BEATNIK HORROR screamed a double-page spread in the People on Sunday, 24 July. A purportedly nationwide survey gave harrowing details of the ‘unsavoury cult’ that was said (without any evidence) to have turned young Americans by the thousand into ‘drug addicts and peddlers, degenerates who specialise in obscene orgies…and outright thugs and hoodlums’. As an instance of the ‘unbelievable squalor that surrounds these well-educated youngsters,’ the report described a three-room flat in ‘decaying Gambier Terrace in the heart of Liverpool’. The accompanying photograph showed several of the tenants in what was called the living room, but was actually John’s and Stu’s bedroom. No squalid detail was left unlisted, from its broken armchairs and debris-strewn table to the floor ‘littered with newspapers, milk bottles, beer and spirits bottles, bits of orange-peel, paint-tubes and lumps of cement and plaster of Paris.’

      Of the figures shown in the picture, Allan Williams alone was recognisable, by his black beard—his journalist pals taking pains to make clear he was just a visitor who’d dropped in to Beatnik Hell to ‘listen to some jazz’. The only tenants mentioned by name were Rod Murray and Rod Jones. Mid-July being holiday time, John was probably not even in residence, but back enjoying the home comforts and steak pies of Mendips. This very first time that the media searchlight shone into his life, it missed him completely.

      Before August 1960, everything that John, Paul, George and Stu knew about Hamburg between them could have been written comfortably on the back of a postage stamp. They knew it vaguely as a northern port in the then Federal Republic of West Germany, whose name often appeared on the sterns of ships tying up in the Mersey. They knew of it even more vaguely as the one city on mainland Europe whose sexual daring surpassed even that of Paris. For years, Liverpool mariners had brought home lurid tales about its red-light district, the Reeperbahn, where female nudity was said to flourish on a scale as yet undreamed of in Britain and the cabarets to feature barely imaginable acts with whips, mud, live snakes or even donkeys. The tarts of Lime Street seemed like maiden aunts by comparison.

      Unlike London’s Soho or New York’s 42nd Street, the Reeperbahn had no history of fostering music alongside the sex. But by the late fifties, thanks mainly to West Germany’s American military occupiers (who, of course, included Elvis Presley) rock-’n’-roll culture was seeping in even there. To attract the younger customers, a club owner named Bruno Koschmider hit on the idea of presenting live beat groups at his establishment rather than simply relying on a jukebox like his competitors. The requisite live sound being still beyond West German musicians, or Belgian or French ones, Koschmider had no option but to recruit his groups from Britain. Through a convoluted chapter of accidents that would need a chapter of its own to relate, the place from which he ended up recruiting them was Liverpool, and the person who became his main supplier was Allan Williams.

      Williams’s first export to Herr Koschmider and the Reeperbahn had been the highly professional and versatile Derry and the Seniors. So powerful a draw did they prove at Koschmider’s club, the Kaiserkeller, that he sent an enthusiastic request for more of the same. Despite protests from the Seniors, that such a ‘bum group’ would spoil the scene for everyone else, Williams decided to offer the gig to the Beatles.

      The engagement was for six weeks, beginning on 16 August; it could not be slotted in among other commitments like the Johnny Gentle tour, but would require all of them to abandon their various respectable courses in life for the precarious existence of fulltime musicians. They would be working for an unknown employer in a foreign city hundreds of miles away, among a people who, not many years previously, had tried to bomb their country into extinction. Nonetheless, the response to Williams’s offer was