John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

many admirers of Stu Sutcliffe’s art, the decision seemed little short of insane. He had just been awarded his National Diploma in Art and Design with painting as his specialist subject, and was about to begin a postgraduate teacher-training course. He himself fully realised what was at stake, and had initially refused the Hamburg offer, but then John had said that the Beatles wouldn’t go without him, and he couldn’t let John down.

      His tutor, Arthur Ballard, was appalled by this seemingly pointless sacrifice of a brilliant future, and furious with John—and Allan Williams—for encouraging it. Stu had been such an exceptional student, however, that the college showed willingness to bend the rules for him. He was told he could begin his postgraduate course later in the academic year if he wished.

      Paul McCartney and George Harrison were also putting excellent career prospects at risk, as their respective families and teachers unavailingly told them. Paul had just taken his A-levels and, like Stu, planned a teaching career, probably specialising in English. George had an apprenticeship as an electrician at Blacklers, the central Liverpool department store, which in those days virtually guaranteed him employment for life.

      Alone of the five, John seemed to have nothing to lose. He had no prospect of gaining any meaningful qualification from art college, and no idea what he wanted to do as a career. The sole obstacle to be reckoned with was his Aunt Mimi. As his guardian, albeit never legally recognised as such, Mimi had the power to veto the whole trip. And, to be sure, her mixture of horror and mystification when first told about it were precisely as John expected. Mimi had no more understanding of rock ‘n’ roll than when she first sent him out to practise in Mendips’ soundproof front porch four years previously; to her, it was still no more than a hobby that interfered with his studies, involved the most unsavoury possible people and places, and could never conceivably earn him anything like a proper living.

      Now, at least, John could reply that it would be earning him a living. The Beatles’ collective weekly wage in Hamburg would be close to £100, which admittedly boiled down to only about £2.50 per day each, yet still seemed astronomical compared with the pittances they were paid in Liverpool. Fortunately, Mimi had never even heard of the Reeperbahn, let alone what was reputed to happen there. Her objections to ‘Humbug’, as she persisted in calling it, were that John would be giving up college and that he’d be associating with the erstwhile bombers of Liverpool. In the end, she decided—probably rightly—that if she didn’t give permission, he’d simply run away, and then might never come back again.

      Like most British teenagers in 1960, John had never been abroad and did not even possess a passport. To apply for one, he had to produce his birth certificate, a document that had somehow gone missing after the frantic tug-of-love that had followed his birth. It turned up in the nick of time—but the way to Hamburg wasn’t all smooth sailing yet.

      The Beatles’ new employer, Herr Koschmider, would obviously expect them to have a drummer. In the absence of any successor to Norman Chapman, Paul agreed to take on the role permanently, assembling a scratch kit from odds and ends that previous incumbents had left behind. The problem was that Koschmider had requested a group exactly like Derry and the Seniors—i.e., a quintet. That left only two weeks to find a fifth Beatle. At one point, John even considered asking Royston Ellis to join, in the role of ‘poet-compère’, as if he expected the Reeperbahn to be like some earnestly attentive student union.

      On 6 August, complaints from surrounding residents about noise, drunkenness and violence shut down the Grosvenor Ballroom in Wallasey, thereby depriving the Beatles of their last regular Merseyside gig. For want of anything better to do that night, they ended up at the Casbah coffee club in Hayman’s Green.

      In the ten months since John, Paul and George had played there as the Quarrymen—and walked out in a huff over a 15-shilling payment—the homely basement club had gone from strength to strength under Mona Best’s vigorous management. Even more gallingly, Ken Brown, the former Quarryman and cause of that bitter 15-bob tiff, had formed a new group, the Blackjacks, who now regularly drew bigger weekend crowds than even Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. A major factor in their success was Mrs Best’s moodily handsome son, Peter, playing a sumptuous new drum kit in a pale blue mother-of-pearl finish (with real calfskins), which his adoring mother had bought him.

      Pete Best and his blue drums solved both of the Beatles’ predeparture problems at a stroke. ‘We just grabbed him and auditioned him,’ John remembered. ‘He could keep one beat going for long enough, so we took him.’

       10 MACH SCHAU

      The Germans liked it as long as it was loud.

      What Liverpool had endured at the time of John’s birth, Hamburg had received back with interest. On the night of 24 July 1943, an Allied ’thousand bomber raid’, code name Operation Gomorrah, dropped 2,300 tons of bombs and incendiaries on this most crucial of Hitler’s ports and industrial centres, unleashing greater destruction in a few hours than Merseyside had known over weeks during the purgatory of 1940. Four nights later, Gomorrah’s cleansers returned, creating a 150-mph firestorm that reduced 8 square miles of the city to ashes and claimed 43,000 civilian lives, more than Britain had lost during the entire Blitz.

      Now, only 15 years after the war’s end, with its scars still far from healed, young survivors from that bomb-battered British city were taking music to young survivors of that devastated German one. In its small, unwitting way, it was a notable act of reconciliation that was to bind Liverpool and Hamburg together forever afterward and foreshadow the apolitical youth culture soon to dominate the whole Western world. Though John never thought of it as such, he had embarked on his very first peace campaign.

      To deliver Bruno Koschmider’s new employees as cheaply as possible—and being unable to resist any kind of lark—Allan Williams offered to drive them to Hamburg personally. In the end, a party of nine squeezed into Williams’s battered green-and-white Austin van outside the Jacaranda early on 15 August, 1960. Besides John, Paul, George, Stu and new drummer Pete Best, the Welshman took along his wife Beryl, his brother-in-law, Barry Chang, and his West Indian business partner, Lord Woodbine. In London, they picked up an additional passenger, a German waiter named Georg Steiner, who had also been hired by Koschmider. The van was not like a modern minibus with rows of seats, but a bare metal shell: those in its rear had nowhere to sit but on the piled-up stage equipment and baggage.

      The two-day journey was fraught with problems that somehow only Liverpudlians could have created and only Liverpudlians had the resilience and humour to endure. At Harwich, whence they were to cross the North Sea to the Hook of Holland, dock workers initially refused to load the grotesquely overloaded vehicle aboard the ferry. According to Williams, it was mainly John who persuaded them to relent, striking up a rapport as easy as if he himself had spent a lifetime on the dockside.

      In those days, when foreign package tours were still in their infancy, most Britons setting foot on mainland Europe underwent a profound culture shock. Now every European nation wears the same clothes, drives the same cars, listens to the same music, eats the same fast food. But for 19-year-old John, this first-ever trip abroad meant entering a totally alien landscape where not a single person or thing looked or sounded or smelled the same as at home, food and toilet arrangements were hideously unpredictable, and drinking water, bizarrely, came in bottles rather than from the tap. There was as much fear as fascination in that introductory whiff of continental coffee, disinfectant, drains and tobacco as darkly pungent as liquorice.

      With customary disregard for detail, Williams had not obtained the work permits his charges needed in order to appear for six weeks in a West German club and be paid in West German currency. If challenged en route, he said, they should pretend to be students on holiday. Fortunately, this was an era of mild frontier controls when, with wartime shortages still lingering, the most serious contraband was not drugs but food. The recurring official challenge, Paul Mc-Cartney remembers, was whether they had any illicit coffee. As with the Harwich stevedores, it was usually John’s mixture of charm and cheek at checkpoints that got them waved on with friendly smiles.

      He was