Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney

Broke and drummerless, the boys asked Williams if he had any more work, and were rewarded with perhaps the lowliest gig in their history. Allan had a West Indian friend, nicknamed Lord Woodbine for his partiality to Woodbine cigarettes, who was managing a strip club on Upper Parliament Street. Lord Woodbine had a stripper coming in from Manchester named Janice who would only work to live music. The Silver Beetles were persuaded to accompany Janice. ‘She gave us a bit of Beethoven and the Spanish Fire Dance,’ Paul recalled. ‘… we said, “We can’t read music, sorry, but instead of the Spanish Fire Dance we can play the Harry Lime ChaCha, which we’ve arranged ourselves, and instead of Beethoven you can have “Moonglow” or “September Song” – take your pick … So that’s what she got.’

The boys got a little more exposure when they filled in at the Jacaranda for Williams’s house band, a Caribbean steel band, who had upped-sticks and left one night, deciding they could do better elsewhere. The band eventually called Williams to tell him they’d gone to Hamburg in Germany, which was pulsating with life, the local club owners crying out for live music. Allan and Lord Woodbine went to see for themselves. In the city’s red light district they met a club owner named Bruno Koschmider, a former First World War airman and circus clown with a wooden leg (some said his leg had been shot off in the war). A sinister impression was emphasised by the fact that Koschmider’s staff addressed him as Führer. Herr Koschmider told Williams that his Hamburg customers were mad for rock ’n’ roll music, but Germany lacked good, home-grown rock bands. He needed English bands. No agreement was reached at this meeting, but some time later Williams ran into Koschmider in London and this time Williams persuaded the German to take a young Liverpool act he nominally managed named Derry and the Seniors, featuring Howard ‘Howie’ Casey on saxophone. Derry and the Seniors did so well in Hamburg that Koschmider asked for an additional Liverpool act. This time Allan suggested the Silver Beetles. Howie Casey, who had seen the boys give their amateurish audition for Larry Parnes, advised Williams against sending a second-rater over in case they spoilt things. The matter would be moot, anyway, unless Allan could persuade the boys’ guardians to let them go.

The Silver Beetles were all under 21, and a trip to Germany would disrupt what plans their families had for their future. Paul had started out as a promising student at the Liverpool Institute, passing O-level Spanish a year early. But music soon displaced hard study, and he did so poorly in his main O-levels he was kept back a year. Paul had just taken his A-levels, with half a hope of going to teacher-training college. It was an ambition Jim McCartney wanted to hold him to. ‘All the families were against them going,’ says Allan Williams, who drew upon his experience as an encyclopaedia salesman to talk the adults round. ‘I sort of described Hamburg as a holiday resort!’ Jim McCartney was a particularly hard sell, knowing Mary would have wanted her son to get on with his studies and become a teacher, or something else in professional life. Still, if Paul really meant to go, his father knew it would be a mistake to try and stop him.

Before they could go anywhere the band had to find a new drummer. Mo Best’s son Pete had taken up the drums, playing in a group named the Black Jacks. Approaching 19, Pete Best had been thumping the skins for the best part of two years, merely as a hobby. Like Paul, Pete was planning on going to teacher-training college. Paul and John watched Pete play at the Casbah, then Paul called the boy on the telephone. ‘How’d you like to come to Hamburg with the Beatles?’ he asked. Pete said he’d love to.

On Tuesday 16 August 1960, the Beatles, as they were now finally calling themselves, assembled outside the Jacaranda in Slater Street where Williams was loading his Austin van for the road trip to Germany. Into this puny vehicle would be crammed all five Beatles (John, Paul, George, Stu and now Pete), their baggage and musical equipment, plus five additional passengers: Allan and Beryl Williams, Beryl’s brother Barry Chang, Lord Woodbine and an Austrian waiter friend of Bruno Koschmider’s to whom they were giving a lift. As they waited for the off, the boys cut out paper letters spelling THE BEATLES and stuck them to the side of the van. When all their belongings had been stowed, the overburdened vehicle pulled away from the kerb and trundled down the road. Among the small crowd waving them off was John’s sweetheart, Cynthia Powell, ‘tears running down my cheeks as the van disappeared around the corner’. Further back, not wanting to embarrass her son, was Millie Sutcliffe, who had said goodbye to Stuart at home, but felt compelled to see him off in person. As the women wept, the boys were beside themselves with the excitement of what was going to be a great adventure.

* When James approached retirement in 2006, and his pension fund wasn’t as healthy as he’d hoped, he asked Paul to authenticate the Rex as the guitar he’d learned on, and with that endorsement he sold the instrument at auction for an astonishing £333,000 ($509,490).

* Julia later had other children by other men.

CHAPTER 3 HAMBURG

MACH SCHAU!

The 760-mile drive from Liverpool to Hamburg took Paul and his friends more than 24 hours, driving south through England, catching a ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland, then travelling east to the border of what was then the Federal Republic of West Germany, where the boys had to pretend to be students, because they didn’t have work permits, before pushing on to their final destination.

Like Liverpool, Hamburg is a northern port on a river, the Elbe, which flows into the North Sea; and, like Liverpool again, Hamburg was bombed heavily during the Second World War, worse hit than Merseyside in fact, one devastating night of British bombing killing 42,000 people. Bearing in mind the history it is surprising how well treated the Beatles were in Hamburg only 15 years after the war. Equally remarkable is the fact that, despite being on the losing side in that recent war, Hamburg had been almost completely rebuilt by 1960, part of the Wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle, that saw a defeated Germany rise again as the richest nation in Europe. Indeed, Hamburg already presented a more prosperous face than Liverpool.

The boys arrived after dark on Wednesday 17 August 1960, leaning out of the windows of Allan Williams’s van to ask directions to the Reeperbahn, a road which everybody could point them towards. This most infamous of Hamburg streets lies a couple of miles east of the Hauptbahnhof, parallel with the docks in St Pauli, a neighbourhood renowned for uninhibited night-time entertainment. Men flocked here then as now to drink, eat and have sex, sex being treated more candidly in Germany than in England. Indeed, much that was and remains illegal in the UK, notably prostitution, was and remains legitimate in the red light district of Hamburg. Regulated and sanctioned by the authorities, whorehouses, sex cinemas, pornographic bookshops and lewd clubs lined the Reeperbahn and its tributary streets, such as Herbertstrasse, where hookers sat in brothel windows touting for trade. Amazing sights though these were for the boys, there was also a familiar vulgarity to St Pauli, putting Paul in mind of the Lancashire resort of Blackpool, ‘but with strip clubs’.

Their van turned off the Reeperbahn into Grosse Freiheit, a side street the name of which translates as the Big Freedom. The street was lit up with lurid signs advertising sex, beer and music. They parked outside the Kaiserkeller, Bruno Koschmider’s underground club: a big old joint fitted out with a nautical theme, like an underwater world. Derry and the Seniors were on stage, blasting out rhythm and blues to an audience of enthusiastic Germans, including Horst Fascher, a former featherweight boxer who’d served time for accidentally killing a man in a fight and now worked as a pimp. Horst spent much of his free time in the Kaiserkeller listening to rock ’n’ roll. Hearing that a new group had just arrived from England, Horst rushed upstairs to greet them, finding ‘five tired guys’ in a van, rubbing the grime from the windows with their elbows as they peered out at this new world. Horst, or Horsti as Paul called him, became firm friends with the boys, a pal and protector in the rough-and-tumble world of St Pauli.

The reality of their engagement came home to the Beatles the next day when Koschmider informed the band that they weren’t playing the Kaiserkeller, but a smaller place he owned up the street, a former strip joint named the Indra which he wanted to turn into a club catering to the new rock ’n’ roll craze. The Indra had the dimensions and charm of a large shoebox, closed in by a low ceiling and fitted out with whorehouse-red booths. Further disappointment came when the boys were shown their digs. Further up the same road, on the corner of Paul-Roosen-Strasse, was the Bambi Kino, a fleapit cinema also owned by Koschmider. The Beatles were to be accommodated in the windowless back rooms, without proper toilet facilities or even hooks to hang up their clothes. They might have been forgiven if they had turned around and gone home to Liverpool, but with the tolerance of youth the boys unpacked and made the best of it, beginning their Indra residency almost immediately.

The regime at the Indra was punishing, even slightly mad. The Beatles were contracted to play every night, starting in the early evening, a total of four and a half hours in the week and six on Saturdays and Sundays, which meant they worked into the early hours of the following morning. Even with 15-minute breaks between sets these were musical marathons. Essentially the Beatles were playing to attract customers who would spend money on drink, but the Indra’s patrons seemed disappointed at first that the strippers had been replaced by five amateurish English boys – more or less fresh out of school – dressed in silly, lilac-coloured jackets (made by Paul’s neighbour), performing a limited repertoire of songs with the tentativeness of beginners. ‘When the Beatles came they knew about 15 songs,’ recalls Rosi Haitmann, one of Koschmider’s barmaids. It was hardly enough to fill half an hour, let alone four and a half hours, yet the Beatles somehow managed to play nightly at the Indra for the next seven weeks, during which time they enlarged their set. Then, after 48 nights of this apprenticeship, Koschmider closed the Indra, because of complaints from neighbours about noise, and moved the Beatles down to the Kaiserkeller to replace Derry and the Seniors.

In a bigger room, the Beatles’ lack of experience became more apparent. Koschmider grumbled to Allan Williams, who wrote to the boys advising them to put on more of a show. Koschmider picked up on this advice, barking encouragement in German: ‘Mach Schau! Mach Schau!’

Over-worked, over-tired, and now taunted by their German boss, the Beatles turned Koschmider’s order into a joke, yelling ‘Mach Schau!’ in parody of the impresario as they threw themselves into an increasingly madcap performance at the Kaiserkeller. Paul hollered in uninhibited imitation of Little Richard, while John became a character from the Goons, singing comic songs, using funny voices, saying any outrageous thing that popped into his head, sometimes pretending to fight the others on stage. The crazier John became, the more the crowd liked it. Lennon went further, wearing a toilet seat round his neck, also Nazi insignia he’d bought from an antique shop, even shrieking ‘Sieg Heil!’ at the audience, which was forbidden in post-war Germany. The audiences loved it all, sending up beer and cheap champagne, which the boys guzzled greedily, though their favourite drink was Scotch and Coke, which remains Paul’s tipple.

To stay awake during these seemingly endless gigs, the boys started taking Preludin, an over-the-counter slimming aid which had an effect similar to that of amphetamines. They consumed the pills recklessly, quickly building up a tolerance. ‘I took half of one once,’ says former Kaiserkeller barmaid Ruth Lallemann. ‘I know they put like ten in a bottle, smashed them all up with Coke, and then they share it between them. So they were right away! That’s why John Lennon got sometimes so wild.’ Drunk on beer and speeding on pills, the boys played on hour after hour, taking requests from their audience, telling jokes, Lennon lying down under the piano for a nap when he became too exhausted, the others playing on with bemused smiles, pausing to smoke cigarettes, drink and even eat on stage. Pleased with the Beatles’ schau, Koschmider extended their contract.

In the wee small hours of the morning, after most of the patrons had left, the Beatles slowed into a semi-somnolent blues jam, playing for themselves and their friends, that is musicians from other visiting bands and club workers like Rosi and Ruth, the girls coming round from behind the bar to jive. Despite being engaged to one of the waiters, and even though Paul had Dot waiting for him in Liverpool, Ruth Lallemann says she began to date Paul, and continued to do so throughout his time in Hamburg, though they never actually had sex: ‘I never slept with him. Just kissing.’ There were, however, other German girlfriends.

At first the barmaids struggled to communicate with the boys. Paul spoke a little German, having studied the language at the Liverpool Institute, but it was English they mostly all spoke, the girls’ stilted questions met by the Beatles’ outrageous cheek, which the barmaids gradually began to understand and laugh at, copying their Scouse phrases and swear-words. Soon they were bantering back and forth in cheerful obscenity. ‘We were all fucking this, fucking that,’ laughs Ruth. ‘We asked them to write the song lyrics down, and they wrote really dirty words, and they were singing them on stage.’ After work the friends sometimes shared a cab to the beach, where they spent the last days of summer together, returning to Hamburg for work in the evening. It was a happy time. Then the Beatles found a new set of German friends.

THE EXIS

There was a breath of autumn in the air when a fey young graphic artist named Klaus Voormann descended to the Kaiserkeller, taking a seat in one of the quaint half-boats arranged in front of the stage. He looked up to see the Beatles performing ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’. Delighted by this exuberant music, Klaus rushed home to tell his sweetheart, Astrid, with whom he had just had a fight. They patched up their differences and returned the following evening with their friend, Jürgen Vollmer.

Klaus Voormann and Astrid Kirchherr, both 22, had known each other since art school in Hamburg, where they also met Jürgen. Klaus made exquisite line drawings in the style of Aubrey Beardsley, whose androgynous figures he and Jürgen resembled. Astrid was striking in her own way, a slim woman in black with cropped blonde hair, a wide mouth and a chilly Teutonic manner. One could imagine her barking ‘Sieg Heil!’ and indeed she had done so at school during the Second World War, thinking it meant something like ‘How do you do?’ As with many Germans who were children during the war, Astrid, Klaus and Jürgen had little understanding of the politics of the recent conflict, though it had affected all their lives profoundly: Jürgen’s father was an army officer killed during the Siege of Stalingrad, for example; Astrid’s brother died of dysentery as the family fled the invading Soviet army in 1945. After the madness of the war, the adult survivors rebuilt a Germany that was subdued and conservative, where everything worked efficiently, and where to say something was in ordnung (in proper order) was to give high praise, but where there was precious little excitement. Germany had had enough excitement. To younger people coming to adulthood, the generation of Astrid, Jürgen and Klaus, this new Germany seemed dull. ‘Like every teenager, we wanted to have fun,’ notes Jürgen. They looked to neighbouring France, especially Paris, where Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Genet led the existentialist movement, and styled themselves Exis in honour of these free-living French intellectuals, though they understood little of existentialist philosophy. It was more a shorthand for dressing in black and adopting bohemian ways.

So it was that three young, self-conscious, middle-class Germans sat in a half-boat watching the crazy Englishmen at the Kaiserkeller. As Astrid recalls, Paul was the most animated that first night:

He was jumping up and down, and pulling faces when he was singing, and shook his head … The others were just standing there. Stuart didn’t move at all. John only moved a little bit, when he sang. And George just tapped his foot … The only one who was a professional entertainer was Paul.

During a set break, Klaus introduced himself and his friends shyly in broken English. The musicians admired their clothes. Jürgen said he bought all his clothes at the Paris flea markets. Detecting pomposity, John plucked an imaginary flea off Jürgen’s coat and pretended to flick it at Paul, who flinched.

John noted Jürgen’s floppy haircut, asking if he had it done in Paris. ‘No, I cut it myself.’

‘Funny looking, ain’t it, George?’

‘It is.’

‘Would look good on Paul, though,’ said John, putting a comb under Paul’s nose to make a Hitler face.

Despite the bad-taste jokes and sarcasm, which was John’s stock in trade, the Exis and the Beatles liked each other immediately. Astrid, Klaus and Jürgen were bright, arty middle-class young people of the type John and Stu had mixed with at college in Liverpool, while grammar school boys Paul and George could also relate to them. Deep down they also sensed a mutual insecurity here in the red light district of a tough port city, and henceforth took comfort in each others’ company, meeting in the cafés and bars of St Pauli during the day and nightly in the club, where the Beatles’ other, more down-to-earth German friends, Horsti the pimp and bar girls Rosi and Ruth looked askance at the interlopers. ‘We didn’t like them, because they were always very posh,’ says barmaid Rosi Haitmann, though she had to admit Astrid had charisma. When Astrid walked into the Kaiserkeller, it was like ‘the Queen came, with her entourage’. Staff buzzed around the Exis because they had money, but mocked them behind their backs. ‘I thought, “Oh my God, you fucking cunt!”’ recalls Rosi, laughing at their pretentious conversation. Pete Best was also excluded from this new friendship, not being quite as sophisticated as the other Beatles, while Stu stood apart from the boys for his lack of musical ability, having failed to improve as their bassist. This was a source of growing frustration to Paul in particular. ‘Paul and George occasionally gave Stuart an angry look, because he must have played some wrong chord,’ recalls Jürgen. ‘Stuart was always an outsider, that didn’t really fit in. But [we] liked Stuart a lot. He was more like us: he was not a rock ’n’ roll musician, he was a talented artist.’

Klaus was the only real artist among the Germans. Astrid and Jürgen had been to art college, but now worked as assistants to a Hamburg photographer. Astrid took pictures herself and told the Beatles she wanted to conduct a photo session with them. The boys were flattered, Paul discussing with Klaus what he should wear. He chose a dark sports jacket with pinstripes, his hair combed back rocker-style. Astrid posed the five English boys against fairground machinery in the nearby park, the Heiligengeistfeld. Lacking much English, she manipulated the lads with her hands, like mannequins, tilting their heads this way and that. As she touched Stuart’s face, Astrid felt a frisson of excitement. She resolved to learn English as soon as possible so she could communicate properly with this boy.

In emulation of their new Exi friends, the Beatles started to dress differently, acquiring black leather jackets and leather trousers to replace their lilac stage jackets, which they’d already worn to destruction, the leathers giving them a new, macho look. Underneath the leather the Beatles were still nicely-brought-up young men who craved home comforts, so they were all grateful when Astrid took them home to meet Mummy in the suburb of Altona. ‘They loved mashed potatoes and peas and steak and things like that. So Mummy did all that for them, and a nice cup of tea, which they couldn’t hardly get in Hamburg.’ The Beatles were on their best behaviour during these Altona visits, not least Paul, in whom Jim and Mary McCartney had instilled good manners. ‘Paul was very, very polite to my mummy.’ The Beatles were slightly surprised to discover that Astrid lived in a self-contained studio flat at the top of her mother’s house, her penthouse decorated mostly in black, with one wall gold and another covered in silver foil. Here she slept with Klaus, which would have been unusual for an unmarried couple in Liverpool. The Germans were so much more relaxed about sex, with the Kirchherrs sophisticated in other ways, too. They had an extensive collection of classical music albums, which Paul spent time looking through. He picked out and played Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, as Astrid recalls, the first example of Paul’s interest in such music. Meanwhile Astrid was falling in love with Stuart Sutcliffe. Within two weeks of their meeting, she had ended her relationship with Klaus and taken Stu as her new lover, a turn of events Klaus took with laudable maturity. Everybody remained friends.

Paul found that there were many girls in St Pauli eager to sleep with him and his band mates. ‘We were kids let off the leash,’ he later reminisced,

and we were used to these little Liverpool girls, but by the time you got to Hamburg if you got a girlfriend there she’s likely to be a stripper* … for someone who’d not really had too much sex in their lives before, which none of us really had, to be suddenly involved in these hardcore striptease artists, who obviously knew a thing or two about sex, was quite an eye-opener.

By all accounts there was a virtual nightly orgy at the Bambi Kino, George losing his virginity in their squalid digs while the others lay in their cots nearby: ‘… after I’d finished they all applauded and cheered. At least they kept quiet whilst I was doing it.’ In his memoirs, Pete Best boasted: ‘The most memorable night of love in our dowdy billet was when eight birds gathered there to do the Beatles a favour. We managed to swap all four of us – twice!’ One of the girls who supposedly slept with Paul McCartney during his first visit to Hamburg was a teenager named Erika Wohlers. ‘I got to know Paul and the four others in 1960,’ claims Erika.

We always sat beside the stage, me and my girlfriends. Back then I was 17 years old, and turned 18 on 22 November 1960. Thus I was still underage. During the breaks, the group would sit at our table. Paul and I got close to each other [and] had sex for the first time at some point in 1960 … We regularly had sex.

Erika later claimed that Paul made her pregnant, a story we shall come to.

The Beatles’ popularity at the Kaiserkeller was making Bruno Koschmider’s cash tills ring, demonstrating to other Hamburg club owners that there was money to be made from rock ’n’ roll. In October a new club, the Top Ten, opened on the Reeperbahn, showcasing a British singer named Tony Sheridan (who dated and later married Rosi Haitmann). The boys went to see Tony’s show and sometimes got up on stage with him, playing together with a passion that was partly due to their belief that rock ’n’ roll wouldn’t last, that this was a moment to be seized and enjoyed before the public lost interest in the music.

Says Sheridan, explaining the passion with which they performed:

In those days it was, There’s going to be one more year of rock ’n’ roll. After that the real music was coming, the real songs. We all believed it. We had about six months to do it in, then forget it. This was the attitude. It was like burning houses. Do it and get out as quickly as possible.

The owner of the Top Ten, Peter Eckhorn, was so impressed by what he saw of the Beatles that he offered to hire the band after they finished at the Kaiserkeller. Koschmider was furious and banned the boys from visiting the Top Ten. They defied Koschmider, going to the Top Ten as often as they liked, which ruined their relationship with Koschmider. As the Beatles played out their contract, the Führer resolved to get his own back. The law stated that anybody under 18 had to leave St Pauli by 10:00 p.m., a rule the Beatles flouted nightly because George was under age. The police now enforced this law, presumably because of a tip-off from the vengeful Koschmider, deporting Harrison on 21 November 1960. The others carried on as best they could at the Kaiserkeller, moving their things over to the Top Ten, where Eckhorn had offered them digs. As they prepared to depart the Bambi Kino, Paul and Pete set a fire in the corridor. In a contemporaneous letter Paul stated that they set fire to ‘a piece of cord nailed to the wall’. Subsequently he and Pete said it was a condom. Either way, it was a tiny fire of no consequence, but Koschmider reported them for arson. The police arrested Paul and Pete at the Top Ten the following morning – the first but not the last time Paul McCartney would have his collar felt. The lads were taken to the neighbourhood police station, the Davidwache, then to jail for a few hours, before being deported from Germany by air.