The Beatles 101: A Pocket Guide in 101 Moments, Songs, People and Places

INTRODUCTION

I can’t remember the first time I heard The Beatles but I do remember rummaging through my mum and dad’s small album collection – shelved in the cabinet under the defunct record player – and in amongst the Billy Connolly, Gilbert O’Sullivan and ABBA’s greatest hits was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The cover disturbed me; the collage of serious faces, the drooping doll and the stern stone bust made more of an impression on me than the flowers and colourful uniforms. I also remember being dragged away, protesting, from watching Yellow Submarine to go to a family party, just as Fred and Ringo had got John, Paul and George on board to save Pepperland. Still, it wasn’t until I started investigating The Beatles as a teenager that I realised how familiar their music already was to me. Thanks to my family’s habit of playing the radio all day every Sunday, their songs had been with me all along.

In the summer holiday of 1992, when I was thirteen, a friend told me that her big brother had been playing her Beatles songs. I asked her to make me a mixtape, and she came back to me with a C90. I still have it, the tape sleeve covered in doodles of creepy crawlies and VW cars. The tracklist, which she didn’t write down, was a bit haphazard; it was made up of Sgt. Pepper songs and a random collection of album tracks and some of the well-known singles. It didn’t matter to me; I didn’t know any better. All I know is that I was hooked. My Beatles education continued with another mixtape made by a schoolfriend after I’d been evangelising about my new discovery. Raiding her parents’ record collection, she gave me another strange, unlisted compilation – I still sometimes refer to Beatles songs by their first line rather than their title – from Revolver, Beatles for Sale and the Love Songs compilation. Everything crackled and skipped (it would be another couple of years before I heard the full second verse of ‘I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party’), but I loved it anyway.

On my way to becoming Ms Ringo Starr in the local church hall, the only place I was allowed to practice. You may recognise our band name on the drum.

I was never in a hurry to buy all the Beatles albums. I was happy to wait for Christmas and birthdays to add to my collection, which means that their music has always meant celebration to me. But like all teenage girls with their favourite bands, my friends, my sister and I fell hard for the Fabs, and we would go round shops and flea markets searching for posters, postcards, badges, stickers and old magazines to cut up (sacrilege!) to adorn our bedroom walls, coats, bags and school jotters. We subscribed to The Beatles Book monthly magazine, and I even started a Ringo Starr fan club, making pen pals across the world. We hunted down pirate videos and CDs of interviews and their Christmas records, we visited Liverpool, bought tickets for Beatles tribute acts, searched for the old Edinburgh home of John Lennon’s aunt and uncle, read all the books, watched all the films, got excited by the Anthology project (new releases!) and always, always listened to the music. We got guitars, I got a drum kit, and we tried to perfect every harmony in every song. Sometimes we cracked them, sometimes we could only marvel at the way John, Paul and George’s voices blended together. We busked the streets of Edinburgh, and my favourite memory is of singing in Rose Street when a guy and his girlfriend walked past us. ‘Can you do Helter Skelter?’ he asked sarcastically. Of course we could; we played the opening guitar line and screamed at the tops of our voices. He had the grace to walk back to us and give us a couple of quid.

What do I love most about The Beatles? Their audacity. Now, in 2020, The Beatles are part of our cultural fabric, beloved yet often taken for granted, seen as safe, and, if you’re really cynical, just a billion-dollar industry. No. It still blows my mind after all this time as a fan, watching the Anthology documentary for the ninetieth time, to see just how explosive, how daring, how new they were. Four Northern lads so effortlessly themselves – honest, cheeky, irrepressible, boundlessly curious, funny, charming, challenging, unpredictable, utterly confident in their abilities – in a world that didn’t know how much they needed them. Cosy? Never – not if you’re really paying attention.

So, of course, there is the music, their joyous music. But it’s their story too that is so unrivalled; it’s a near perfect narrative. There are humble beginnings, global triumphs, heroes, villains, momentous shifts, drama, adventure, twists, turns and tragedy, and there are plenty of books out there that delve deep into their life and work. You should read them. (Have a look at the bibliography at the back where I’ve included some of my favourites.) What I hope to do here with Beatles 101 is to give you a taster of their amazing story, to encourage you to join the legion of Beatlemaniacs. Dip your toe in here and then dive in – the water’s FAB.

V.R.

Edinburgh, 2020

1

AND IN THE BEGINNING . . .

John Winston Lennon

Born: Wednesday, 9 October 1940

James Paul McCartney

Born: Thursday, 18 June 1942

George Harrison

Born: Thursday, 25 February 1943

Richard Starkey (Ringo Starr)

Born: Sunday, 7 July 1940

RINGO STARR was the first Beatle born and the last member to join the group, so he can claim to be both the oldest and youngest of the Fab Four. He was born to Elsie and Richard Starkey in the Dingle, one of Liverpool’s roughest, most depressed areas, and just as he was born, the air raid sirens blared. At the time, there was no local shelter ready, so the family rushed into the coal hole to hide. According to Elsie, baby Ringo screamed all the way, and it wasn’t until she had settled in that she realised she had been carrying her newborn upside down. She calmed him down and he slept through the rest of the air raid.

Ringo was plagued by illness throughout his childhood, suffering from peritonitis aged six, which resulted in a year’s hospitalisation, including some time in a coma, and later, at thirteen, tuberculosis. This took two years to recover from, and he never returned to school.

His dad worked at a bakery and confectioners. He left the family when Ringo was only three years old. To keep house and home together Elsie took on work as a barmaid, working as many shifts as she could get. She later married Harry Graves, a painter and decorator from Romford, when Ringo was thirteen.

While no bombs were dropped on Liverpool the actual night JOHN LENNON was born, he too came into the world as the Luftwaffe were attacking the area. This probably accounts for John’s parents giving him the middle name of Winston, after Churchill, in a gesture of momentary patriotism.

Alfred Lennon and Julia Stanley first met in 1927 in Liverpool’s Sefton Park. He was dressed to impress the ladies – bowler-hatted and brandishing a cigarette holder – and when he spotted Julia, whom he’d seen before in a local dance hall, he decided to approach her. When Julia told him he looked silly, he told her she looked lovely and threw his hat into the pond. He was a cheeky, happy-go-lucky chancer, and she the rebellious, carefree daughter of a respectable family. Alfred was a waiter in the Merchant Navy, which meant he spent a lot of time away at sea, so they kept in touch through letters, meeting up when he was home on leave. Her family did not approve of the relationship. The couple married in 1938 on impulse, both returning to their respective family homes after the ceremony and their honeymoon at the cinema.

John Lennon as a young boy. Alamy

Baby John’s home life was less than stable in his early years, and when Alfred and Julia finally split when John was four years old, Julia’s big sister, Mary ‘Mimi’ Smith, was awarded custody. Mimi and her husband George, who had no children of their own, raised John. Sadly, George died when John was only fifteen. His mother Julia began visiting him again when he was in his early teens, and bought him his first guitar when he was sixteen. She was knocked over by a car and killed two years later, leaving John devastated.

PAUL McCARTNEY’s mum and dad settled down later than was usual at the time when they married in April 1941. Mary Mohin, thirty-two, had concentrated on her career as a nurse and midwife, and Jim McCartney, thirty-nine, was a cotton salesman and bandleader. When war broke out, Jim was deemed exempt from service due to a hearing impairment. Instead, he volunteered to be a home front fireman, which meant he was not present for Paul’s birth at Walton hospital.

Young Paul McCartney and his brother, Michael. Getty Images

Paul’s younger brother, Michael, was born in 1944, and though Mary now had two young children she carried on working. As Liverpool’s cotton industry fell on hard times she became the main breadwinner. The McCartney family moved around frequently during Paul’s childhood due to his mother’s job taking her to different areas of Liverpool. In 1956, when Paul was fourteen, Mary died after breast cancer surgery, leaving Jim to bring up his teenage boys.

GEORGE HARRISON had the least dramatic birth and early childhood of The Beatles. He was born the youngest of four children to shop assistant Louise and Harold Harrison. George’s father had started out in the Merchant Navy, lying about his age to be accepted, before becoming a bus driver. His mum was a music fan who used to sing at home, sometimes so loudly she rattled the windows, and his dad bought him his first guitar in 1956. His independent outlook started from a young age: he would happily go on errands, alone, for his family as a boy, and he insisted on walking to school himself when he started attending Dovedale Primary School.

2

AND THE FABS BEGIN TO PLAY

In reminiscences about his earliest musical memories John often contradicts himself. So, while it is pretty certain that the first instrument he taught himself to play was the harmonica, there are different stories about who it was that introduced him to the instrument. After her husband’s death Mimi rented out rooms to local university students, and it is most likely that one of the lodgers gave John his first harmonica.

In John’s early teens he re-established a relationship with his mother, who lived with a new partner in a nearby neighbourhood. It was Julia who taught John how to play the banjo, first teaching him the Fats Domino classic ‘Ain’t That A Shame’.

Though Paul’s dad had left his band days behind him, he would often play the piano and sing standards such as ‘Stairway To Paradise’ and ‘Lullaby Of Leaves’ in the evening and at family parties. Paul would lie on the carpet, taking it all in. His dad encouraged him to take piano lessons, but Paul wasn’t interested in the discipline of learning scales and reading music, preferring to teach himself by ear and instinct.

When Paul turned thirteen, his dad bought him a trumpet. Paul was enthusiastic, teaching himself ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’, but he soon realised he couldn’t sing with a trumpet in his mouth, so he traded it in for a guitar. In the beginning, he couldn’t get anything out of the instrument. The guitar strings had to be adjusted because he was left-handed. He practised obsessively, sometimes singing harmonies with his brother Michael, but most of the time with his friend Ian James, an avid record collector who fortunately knew more chords than Paul.

George grew up in a home with a gregarious, supportive mother who loved to play the radio all day; he was always surrounded by the latest, and sometimes the most esoteric, sounds. His first musical memory that stuck was listening to one of country music’s first stars, Jimmie Rodgers.

George as a child playing guitar. Alamy

Ringo (second from left) with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes at Butlin’s Holiday Camp. Alamy

When George was twelve he was hospitalised with nephritis, a kidney disorder. At school he had started to draw guitars in his exercise books rather than pay attention to his teachers, so while in the hospital, he asked his mother for a guitar. She and George’s dad scrimped and saved to grant him his wish, and once back home he would practise into the early hours until his fingers bled. Louise, ever encouraging, would stay up with him, cheering him on and bringing him cups of tea.

Like George, Ringo’s first musical memory came from country music – hearing Gene Autry singing ‘South Of The Border’.

When in hospital recovering from pleurisy and tuberculosis, his ward was visited by a music teacher, who would bring percussion instruments for the patients. Ringo would only join in if he was given the drum.

Healthy again, Ringo managed to get a thirty-bob bass drum, and he made a snare drum out of a biscuit tin and metal wires. In 1956, for Christmas, his stepdad Harry gave Ringo a drum kit. After much enthusiastic practising in the house – and a lot of complaining from the neighbours – Ringo realised he would have to join a band to be able to play.

3

FROM ‘HEARTBREAK HOTEL’ TO THE PEEL STREET LABOUR CLUB

Hearing Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ for the first time changed everything. Then Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran . . . John switched his allegiance from the banjo to the guitar – though he used banjo tuning and played banjo chords – and decided to start a band.

In the UK at the time, the other big music craze was skiffle, spearheaded by Glasgow-born Lonnie Donegan who had massive chart success with songs such as Leadbelly’s ‘Rock Island Line’ and ‘Cumberland Gap’. With its appealing DIY ethic and improvised instruments, including the tea chest bass, washboard and kazoo, skiffle was popping up everywhere, including Liverpool. John gathered together a gang of friends from Quarry Bank High School to form a band, and each was given a role to play. John was the frontman and leader. They called themselves The Quarrymen after their school. Though the line-up often changed, the original line-up consisted of John on guitar and lead vocals, his best friend Pete Shotton on washboard, Eric Griffiths also on guitar, Bill Smith on the tea chest bass and Colin Hanton on drums.

Their first official engagement was an audition for Carroll Levis, ‘Mr Star-Maker’, who ran talent contests across the country to find acts for television variety shows. The Quarrymen failed to qualify.

Paul’s first public performance was with his brother, at the Butlin’s holiday camp in Filey Bay, Yorkshire. They sang ‘Bye Bye Love’ by The Everly Brothers, Michael in a sling as he had broken his arm at scout camp just before the holiday. After the duet, Paul treated the audience to his Little Richard routine. They didn’t progress to the next round.

George, ever the independently minded individual he’d been since childhood, managed to get himself a booking before he even had a band. So, due to play the British Legion