John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

Barry Chang took what would become a famous snapshot of Paul, George, Pete, Stu, Williams, Beryl and Lord Woodbine around the casket-shaped memorial with its partially prophetic inscription THEIR NAMES LIVETH FOR EVERMORE. John, however, refused to leave the van. One can picture the scene in the bleary Dutch dawn—the big side door sliding back; the hunched and sleepy figure disinclined to move; the attempts to rouse him answered by a torrent of swear words.

      He also took time for some shoplifting, finding the unsuspicious Netherland store owners absurdly easy victims after Woolton and Liverpool 8. The haul he later showed to Pete Best included jewellery, handkerchiefs, guitar strings and a harmonica. Years later, when every detail of his early life was pored over by millions, that harmonica thoughtlessly pocketed in a Dutch music shop would cause many of his admirers pangs of vicarious guilt. Finally, a group of them resolved to set the matter right. Travelling to the Arnhem area, they found the same shop still in business and, to its owner’s bewilderment, solemnly repaid the cost of the stolen instrument.

      Though the term had still to be coined, Hamburg’s Reeperbahn was one of the world’s earliest experiments in sex therapy. The thinking—later to spread like wildfire through Europe, even unto Britain—was that being open about extreme or deviant sexual practices was healthier than being secretive. It was also a way to manage the problems of the harbour area, corralling pleasure-bent sailors all in one place and so saturating them with off-the-radar pornography that they would hopefully be less inclined to rape or other sexual crimes outside its boundaries. The district of St Pauli, which includes the Reeperbahn, was a perfect location, handily close to the dockside and well away from Hamburg’s swiftly rebuilt centre and many respectable suburbs. This supposedly untamed carnal frontier was in effect a department of City Hall, governed by a mass of surprisingly straitlaced rules and regulations and watched over by a large and zealous police force.

      Dusk was falling on 16 August when Allan Williams’s van eventually found its way through Hamburg to St Pauli, and John, Paul, George, Stu and Pete received their first sight of their new workplace. After the almost seamless night-time blackout of Liverpool, the Reeperbahn was an eye-mugging spectacle. Continuous neon signs winked and shimmered in gold, silver and every suggestive colour of the rainbow, their voluptuous German script—Mehrer, Bar Monika, Mambo Schankey, Gretel and Alphons, Roxy Bar—making the entertainments on offer seem even more untranslatably wicked. Though it was still early, the whole strip teemed with people—or rather, with men—and had the lurching, anarchic feel of pub-closing time back home. As the arrivals would soon learn, this was a place where times of day meant nothing.

      Their new employer, Bruno Koschmider, might have stepped straight from one of John’s more fanciful cartoons. Aged about 50, he was a tiny man with an outsized head and wooden-puppet face, topped off by an elaborate silver coiffure. Thanks to a war-disabled leg, he walked with a limp, thus instantly qualifying for the copious Lennon gallery of ‘cripples’.

      A guided tour of Koschmider’s Kaiserkeller club, in the Reeper-bahn’s busiest and most garish sector, did much to compensate for his strange appearance. A teeming barn of a place, it had no obvious affinity with the Great War’s ‘Kaiser Bill’, being decorated on a nautical theme with ornamental life belts, brass binnacles, pipeclayed cording and booths shaped like rowboats. Only now did the newcomers learn that they were not to appear here, with Derry and the Seniors, as they’d been led to believe. In the nearby Grosse Freiheit (Great Freedom) Koschmider also operated a run-down strip club named the Indra. The Beatles’ job would be to make the Indra as big a teenage draw as Derry and his colleagues had the Kaiserkeller.

      Worse followed when Koschmider led the way to the living quarters he had contracted to provide for them. A couple of streets away in Paul Roosen Strasse, he owned a small cinema named the Bambi, which showed a mixture of porn flicks and old Hollywood gangster movies and Westerns. The Beatles’ quarters were a filthy, windowless room and two glorified broom cupboards immediately behind the screen. The only washing facilities were the adjacent cinema toilets. ‘We were put in this pigsty,’ John remembered. ‘We were living in a toilet, like right next to the ladies’ toilet. We’d go to bed late and be woken up next day by the sound of the cinema show [and] old German fraus pissing next door.’

      The working hours laid down by Koschmider were the biggest shock of all. Back in Liverpool, they had never been onstage longer than about 20 minutes. At the Indra club they would be expected to play for four-and-a-half hours each weeknight, in sets of an hour or an hour-and-a-half, with only three 30-minute breaks in between. On Saturdays and Sundays, the playing time increased to six hours.

      The quintet made their debut the following night, 17 August, clad in matching lilac jackets that had been tailored for them by Paul McCartney’s next-door neighbour. It was far from a rip-roaring success. The thinnest sprinkle of customers watched from red-shaded tables, surprised not to see the club’s usual entertainment, a stripper named Conchita. Koschmider’s advance publicity, such as it was, had created some uncertainty as to the exact nature and purpose of the new attraction, ‘Beatle’ being easily confused with the German word peedle, or little boy’s willy. The room reeked of stale beer and wine and was lined in dusty velvet drapes that muffled already feeble amps and made Pete Best feel as if he was ‘drumming under the bedclothes’.

      All five ‘Peedles’ were still wiped out by their journey, awed by their new surroundings and doubtful of their ability to connect with their new public. For the opening numbers, they stood as still and stiff-faced as lilac-tinted zombies. Dismayed by their lack of animation but unable to communicate in English, Koschmider shouted at them, ‘Mach schau!’—‘Make a show’—a command usually given to dilatory striptease artistes. ‘And of course whenever there was any pressure point, I had to get us out of it,’ John would remember. ‘The guys said, “Well okay John, you’re the leader.” When nothing was going on, they’d say, “Uh-oh, no leader, fuck it,” but if anything happened it was like “You’re the leader, you get up and do a show.”

      ‘We were scared by it all at first, being in the middle of the tough clubland. But we felt cocky, being from Liverpool, at least believing the myth about Liverpool producing cocky people. So I put my guitar down and did Gene Vincent all night, banging and lying on the floor and throwing the mike around and pretending I had a bad leg…We did mach schau-ing all the time from then on.’

      According to myth, it was Hamburg that produced the first serious growth spurt in Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting partnership. Actually, the Beatles spent almost their whole time in West Germany as a ‘covers band’, although that underrates the ingenuity they were forced to employ. The repertoire of mainstream rock-’n’-roll hits they first brought with them from Liverpool were exhausted as quickly as their last few English cigarettes. To get through sets an hour-and-a-half-long, they had to delve deep into the creative hinterland of all their musical idols—Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers—seeking out littleknown B-sides and unregarded album tracks. They had to find other rock-’n’-roll songs by American artists, black and white, singular and plural, that had never crossed the Atlantic, let alone made the British Top 20, and also ransack the milky post-rock-’n’-roll charts for ballads they could play without nausea, like Bobby Vee’s ‘More Than I Can Say’. With the continuing popularity of Duane ‘Twangy Guitar’ Eddy, they had to be as much an instrumental as a vocal group, churning out bass-string psychodramas like Eddy’s ‘Rebel-Rouser’ or ‘Shazam’. When rock, pop, country and even skiffle could not fill out the time, they had to reach into the realm of standards and show tunes that Paul overtly loved—and John covertly did—with old wind-up gramophone favourites like ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’, ‘Besame Mucho’, ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, and ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’.

      Performing nightly in their out-of-the-way, unalluring venue, they were somewhat like old-fashioned fairground barkers, first drawing in the patrons, then working like blazes to keep them there. The best come-on, they found, was a heavy, stomping beat, laid down by Pete Best’s blue bass drum, and perhaps not a million miles from the militaristic march tempo that had recently echoed across Europe. ‘We really had to hammer,’ John recalled. ‘We had to try anything that came into our heads. There was nobody to copy from. We played what we