Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney. Howard Sounes

Stones were of an age with the Beatles, both bands led by clever, ex-grammar school boys infatuated with American music. ‘Although it was not exactly the same thing, partly because we were more blues-orientated, there was an awful lot of crossover,’ drummer Charlie Watts observes. ‘We could all meet around Little Richard and Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and Carl Perkins.’ The musicians met while the Stones were still obscure, and became friends, Paul forming a particularly close and enduring association with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.* It was thanks to George Harrison putting in a good word for the Stones that the London-based band got their record deal with Decca. Their début single, a cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Come On’, reached number 21 in the summer of 1963.

      The afternoon Andrew Loog Oldham bumped into John and Paul on Charing Cross Road his band were in a jazz club on nearby Great Newport Street trying to work out what should be their next single. ‘I explained I had nothing to record for the Stones’ next single,’ Loog Oldham recalls of his chance meeting with Lennon and McCartney. ‘They smiled at me and each other, told me not to worry and our three pairs of Cuban heels turned smartly back towards the basement rehearsal.’ So it was that John and Paul gave the Stones what proved to be their breakthrough second single, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, teaching the band the chords that afternoon. ‘They ran through it for us and Paul, being left-handed, amazed me by playing my bass backwards,’ Bill Wyman noted. The record went to number 12, from which point the Stones were in the ascendant, becoming almost as popular as the Beatles themselves. Although it is often assumed the two bands were deadly rivals, their friendship actually strengthened as they became more famous. ‘They were all living that same sort of life so when they did see each other, socially, they would be some of the few individuals that they could actually sit and be completely normal with, because they were sharing the same experience,’ notes record producer Glyn Johns, who worked with both bands in the Sixties. ‘Mick Jagger wasn’t sitting with Paul McCartney because he was Paul McCartney.’

      STAR TIME

      By now the Beatles were a youth sensation in Britain. Every teenager who listened to the radio knew about this exciting new band, which had achieved three smash-hit singles and had a number one album. The Beatles were a major concert draw; lionised on Merseyside; supported by a large and well-organised fan club, their activities chronicled in the music press and a new dedicated monthly fanzine, The Beatles Book. Yet the national newspapers based in and around London’s Fleet Street all but ignored the band, notwithstanding the fact that the fight at Paul’s 21st birthday party had made a short piece in the Daily Mirror. There was less entertainment news in the papers in those days, anyway, and most show business writers considered home-grown pop groups of less interest than American stars. Derek Taylor, show business correspondent for the Daily Express in the North, felt differently. Taylor managed to review a Beatles concert in Manchester for his paper, on the basis of regional interest, and followed up with a profile of Brian Epstein, the beginning of a long and important association with the band. Taylor’s interest was almost unique so far as the national print media was concerned until Sunday 13 October 1963, when the Beatles appeared on Sunday Night at the London Palladium.

      The Palladium, a big old music hall on Argyll Street, near London’s Oxford Circus, was considered the most prestigious venue in British light entertainment. A variety show was broadcast live from the theatre every Sunday night on national television, and acts from around the world made it their ambition to top the bill. ‘Only the biggest acts in the world did Sunday Night at the Palladium. That was the ultimate career high. Lots of them would come over from America,’ explains the show’s presenter Bruce Forsyth, adding that when an invitation was extended to the Beatles to top the bill in 1963 it was the sign that ‘they really had arrived’. Forsyth and his producer Val Parnell went to see the Beatles in concert in advance, and were troubled by the racket their fans made. It was customary for artists who topped the bill at Sunday Night at the London Palladium to talk to Forsyth on the show. If Beatles fans got tickets, nobody would be able to hear a word that was said.

      So I hit on the idea of them doing a conversation all with idiot boards that were facing the audience. Paul would rush on and say, just written on the board, ‘It’s great to be here tonight.’ Then John would rush on from the other side, ‘Yes, what a lovely audience.’ They did a whole conversation [like that] because they couldn’t be heard if they’d spoken.

      The fact the Beatles were topping the bill at this very important show made national newspaper editors pay full attention to the group for the first time, sending writers along to meet the Beatles at rehearsals. ‘At the end of each song they bowed to an imaginary audience,’ Godfrey Winn reported for the Daily Sketch. ‘George [Harrison] went through the introduction a dozen times. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are very pleased to be here at the Palladium.” The Palladium, the Palladium, they shouted out, screaming like their own fans …’ On the night, the Beatles performed briefly at the start of the programme, and again at the end, to a raucous reception from their fans, whom John mocked with his horrible spastic routine and half-jokingly told to ‘Shut up!’, which only made them laugh and scream more. Finally the boys joined Forsyth on the revolving stage, waving goodbye to the audience in the theatre, and the wider TV audience, to the tune of ‘Startime’, as every edition of the show concluded. Forsyth: ‘That night we could have gone round 50 times and those young fans would have kept screaming.’

      Sundays are typically quiet news days, editors struggling to find enough good stories to fill Monday’s papers. On just such a quiet Sunday in October 1963 editors were only too happy to seize upon the Beatles’ success at the Palladium, and the extravagant behaviour of their fans, and blow it up into front-page news. The next morning’s papers thereby presented the Beatles as the stars of a new youth phenomenon, one not seen by journalists as dangerous and unpleasant, like the recent Teddy Boy cult which was associated with violence and vandalism, but that was approved of as part of mainstream family entertainment.

      The Daily Sketch devoted two inside pages to an interview with the band. ‘Good morning. Did you watch the Beatles on television in the Sunday Night at the London Palladium show?’ Godfrey Winn asked his readers conversationally, going on to report that 12 million Britons had, and he was ready to reveal what these ‘new kings of pop’ were really like. The Evening News similarly reported on the ‘Sweet Sound of Success’, noting in a thumbnail portrait of Paul McCartney that he was ‘a head in the clouds dreamer who lives for nothing but music’. Paul’s egoism and personal ambition had not yet been detected, though the British press would never be keen to portray Macca, as they came to call him fondly, as anything other than a decent bloke touched by genius. Paul enjoyed good press from day one.

      The Beatles’ appearance at the Palladium also signalled a change in the way British newspapers covered the entertainment industry. ‘Suddenly the golden years of Hollywood seemed to come to an abrupt end when the music era came in with the Beatles’ music and the Rolling Stones – all the old film stars of Hollywood seemed to be of no more importance any more,’ notes the Mirror’s Don Short, one of a coterie of Fleet Street reporters who documented the Beatles’ exploits over the next few years, becoming close to the band in the process, especially Paul who cultivated writers who could help them. As an example of how accommodating he could be, Paul once picked up Don personally at the Mirror building in Holborn and drove him to a West End club to interview his dad; another time Paul and George came round to the Short household for dinner and Paul sang a lullaby to the journalist’s six-year-old daughter. As time went by, Paul learned to manipulate his press contacts, feeding them stories that would benefit him personally, but making himself scarce when it was not to his advantage to talk. ‘If it wasn’t going to be helpful to Paul, he wouldn’t surface,’ notes Short.

      It wasn’t only the popular press that had become closely interested in the Beatles. At the end of 1963 William Mann, music critic with The Times, wrote a serious appraisal of the Beatles’ music that still stands as one of the most highfalutin but perspicacious articles about the band ever published. ‘The outstanding English composers of 1963 must seem to have been John Lennon and Paul McCartney,’ Mann began his seminal piece, going on to explain that