John Lennon: The Life

THIS IS THE BEATNIK HORROR screamed a double-page spread in the People on Sunday, 24 July. A purportedly nationwide survey gave harrowing details of the ‘unsavoury cult’ that was said (without any evidence) to have turned young Americans by the thousand into ‘drug addicts and peddlers, degenerates who specialise in obscene orgies…and outright thugs and hoodlums’. As an instance of the ‘unbelievable squalor that surrounds these well-educated youngsters,’ the report described a three-room flat in ‘decaying Gambier Terrace in the heart of Liverpool’. The accompanying photograph showed several of the tenants in what was called the living room, but was actually John’s and Stu’s bedroom. No squalid detail was left unlisted, from its broken armchairs and debris-strewn table to the floor ‘littered with newspapers, milk bottles, beer and spirits bottles, bits of orange-peel, paint-tubes and lumps of cement and plaster of Paris.’

Of the figures shown in the picture, Allan Williams alone was recognisable, by his black beard—his journalist pals taking pains to make clear he was just a visitor who’d dropped in to Beatnik Hell to ‘listen to some jazz’. The only tenants mentioned by name were Rod Murray and Rod Jones. Mid-July being holiday time, John was probably not even in residence, but back enjoying the home comforts and steak pies of Mendips. This very first time that the media searchlight shone into his life, it missed him completely.

Before August 1960, everything that John, Paul, George and Stu knew about Hamburg between them could have been written comfortably on the back of a postage stamp. They knew it vaguely as a northern port in the then Federal Republic of West Germany, whose name often appeared on the sterns of ships tying up in the Mersey. They knew of it even more vaguely as the one city on mainland Europe whose sexual daring surpassed even that of Paris. For years, Liverpool mariners had brought home lurid tales about its red-light district, the Reeperbahn, where female nudity was said to flourish on a scale as yet undreamed of in Britain and the cabarets to feature barely imaginable acts with whips, mud, live snakes or even donkeys. The tarts of Lime Street seemed like maiden aunts by comparison.

Unlike London’s Soho or New York’s 42nd Street, the Reeperbahn had no history of fostering music alongside the sex. But by the late fifties, thanks mainly to West Germany’s American military occupiers (who, of course, included Elvis Presley) rock-’n’-roll culture was seeping in even there. To attract the younger customers, a club owner named Bruno Koschmider hit on the idea of presenting live beat groups at his establishment rather than simply relying on a jukebox like his competitors. The requisite live sound being still beyond West German musicians, or Belgian or French ones, Koschmider had no option but to recruit his groups from Britain. Through a convoluted chapter of accidents that would need a chapter of its own to relate, the place from which he ended up recruiting them was Liverpool, and the person who became his main supplier was Allan Williams.

Williams’s first export to Herr Koschmider and the Reeperbahn had been the highly professional and versatile Derry and the Seniors. So powerful a draw did they prove at Koschmider’s club, the Kaiserkeller, that he sent an enthusiastic request for more of the same. Despite protests from the Seniors, that such a ‘bum group’ would spoil the scene for everyone else, Williams decided to offer the gig to the Beatles.

The engagement was for six weeks, beginning on 16 August; it could not be slotted in among other commitments like the Johnny Gentle tour, but would require all of them to abandon their various respectable courses in life for the precarious existence of fulltime musicians. They would be working for an unknown employer in a foreign city hundreds of miles away, among a people who, not many years previously, had tried to bomb their country into extinction. Nonetheless, the response to Williams’s offer was an instant, resounding affirmative.

To the 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 (#ulink_a8a7b2a6-a4f3-51af-89d8-1c3ef709d220)

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 not always such a ray of sunshine. In Holland, Williams insisted on making a patriotic detour to Arnhem, scene of the Allies’ disastrous Operation Market Garden airborne landings in 1944. There 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 liked best, and the Germans liked it as long as it was loud.’

The most famous Reeperbahn story, told and retold in Liverpool dockside pubs, was that you could see a woman being mounted by a donkey with a washer around its penis to restrict penetration. Though this new concept of donkey work proved a myth, St Pauli had much else to shock and amaze. It had all the nudity it had been credited with and more—not coyly concealed by turned backs and crossed arms, as at home, but full-frontal, full-rear-al nudity, pulsing with youth and warmth and invitation. For all five teenage Beatles, sooner than they could ever have imagined, bouncing breasts and grinding, weaving G-strung bottoms became merely so much incidental furniture.

In some clubs, they could see men and women have full, unprotected sex in twos, threes or even fours, in every possible and improbable configuration, often in the taboo combination of white and black. In others, they could see nude women wrestling in a pit of mud, cheered on by plump businessmen tied into communal pinafores to guard against the splashes. In the numerous Schwülen laden (queer dives) like Bar Monika or the Roxy Bar, they could watch men give each other blow jobs or meet male transvestites as beautiful and elegant as Parisian models who only in the final stages of intimacy would unveil their gristly secret.

At the same time, Germanic bureaucracy, health regulation and anomalous concern for the moral welfare of the young were as omnipresent as neon tubing. To discourage organised crime, pimps were allowed to run only two prostitutes each, making their trade largely a spare-time one carried on by waiters and barmen. In some streets, club patrons were allowed to see female pubic hair, in others not. St Pauli’s pièce de résistance, the Herbertstrasse, where whores sat on display in shop windows, was screened from general view by a high wooden fence. Most relevant to the Beatles, a curfew came into force at 10 p.m., obliging all under-18s to leave the area. Each note that 17-year-old George Harrison played at the Indra after that time was a breach of the law.

Many places, like Koschmider’s Kaiserkeller, were straightforward bars, vastly bigger than any Liverpool pub, where seafaring men of all nations and personnel from American and British NATO bases congregated by the riotous thousand before and after hitting the nudie joints. Reeperbahn waiters were renowned for toughness and ruthlessness, Koschmider’s most of all. When fights broke out, which they did almost continuously, a squad of waiters would swoop on the culprits like a highly-trained SWAT team, pulling lead-weighted coshes from under their white jackets. Koschmider himself went about armed with the leg of an old German chair in knotty hardwood, which he kept concealed down one trouser leg. Sometimes, rather than merely ejecting a troublemaker, the Kaiserkeller waiters would carry him into their employer’s office for a prolonged workover. When the victim was pinned down and helpless, Koschmider would weigh in with his antique chair leg. ‘I’ve never seen such killers,’ John remembered.

Even by northern British standards, the German intake of beer was prodigious, and the Liverpool lads were soon competing with the best of them. This was not the tepid, woody ale they were used to, but chilled draft lager served in fluted, gold-rimmed glasses that, back home, still featured only in upmarket cocktail bars. After 90 minutes of mach schau on the Indra’s stage, their thirst for this frosted gold nectar was almost unlimited. Any customer for whom they played a request would show appreciation by sending them ein bier each; by the end of an average night, the stage front would be littered with empty and half-empty glasses.

Playing and drinking at these levels brought on fatigue such as none of them had ever known before. On the round-the-clock Reeperbahn, it was a common complaint, with its own well-tried remedy. Friendly Indra staff introduced them to Preludin (phenmetrazine), a weight-loss tablet available over the counter at any chemist’s, which made the metabolism work at roughly twice normal speed. A secondary effect was to make the eyes bulge like ping-pong balls, dry up the saliva, and so redouble the craving for cold beer.

None of the five except George was a virgin when they arrived in Hamburg. But, as soon became clear, even their best results with Liverpool girls had taught them next to nothing. Sex was the Reeperbahn’s main recreation as well as its currency. And five relatively innocent Liverpool lads were the freshest and tenderest of meat. As they built a following at the Indra, they found themselves besieged by invitations from female customers, barmaids and waitresses, or dancers and strippers who would drop by the club after a night’s work. It was done in a casual, no-nonsense style that antedated socalled sexual liberation in the rest of the world by a full decade. A woman who fancied a bit of boy-Scouser would indicate her choice by pointing, or sometimes reaching up in mid-song to fondle his leg. Many dispensed with even these slight formalities, going directly to the Beatles’ squalid quarters at the Bambi Kino, finding their way behind the screen and waiting in one or other of the ratty beds until their quarry arrived. As Pete Best later recalled, such encounters would often happen in pitch darkness, the girl not knowing which Beatle it was and he never seeing her face—hence the almost dehumanised term ‘muff-diving’ that the Liverpudlians coined for them.

Living at such close quarters meant fucking at close quarters also. When George did finally lose his virginity, John, Paul and Pete were all in the same room and, as he would recall, ‘clapped and cheered at the end’. Paul remembered that ‘I’d walk in on John and see a little bottom going up and down and a girl underneath. It was perfectly normal, you’d go “Oh shit, sorry…” and back out of the room.’ Pete Best, himself no mean sexual athlete, was amazed at John’s capacity, and that he still had enough libido left over to be a connoisseur of the Reeperbahn’s spectacular ‘wank mags’.

Freed at last from the long lead of Woolton and Mendips and the choke chain of his Aunt Mimi, John went wild. While the other four all recognised the need for some caution and self-control, he knocked back the cold yellow beer and gulped the tiny white Preludin tablets, never bothering to keep count. The lethal, eye-popping, thirst-inflaming mixture of pills and alcohol spurred him to ever wilder onstage antics in the name of mach schau. Limping and lurching around in his demented parody of Gene Vincent at the Liverpool boxing stadium was only the beginning. He would jump up onto Paul’s shoulders and cannon sideways into George or Stu, and leap off the stage to land among the dancers on his knees or in the splits. At unpredictable moments he would stop singing and taunt his audience as ‘fuckin’ Nazis’ and ‘Hitlerites’ or, with appropriate idiot grimaces and claw hands, as ‘German Spassies’ (spastics). Punk rock, 25 years into the future, would have nothing on this.

Though not the vicious and racially-torn gangland it would later become, St Pauli in 1960 was still a highly dangerous place. The Polizei might be scrupulous about checking papers and issuing medical certificates, but they paid little attention to the grievous bodily harm inflicted nightly throughout its neon wonderland by blackjacks, knives, brass knuckles and tear-gas pistols. Yet by an unwritten law, so long as they observed a few basic rules, Liverpool’s boy rock-’n’-rollers were immune from all harm. Friendly waiters advised them where to go and not go, to whom to be polite, and whose girlfriend never to muff-dive. Horrific fights would break out around them, leaving them unscathed like a scene from some Marx Brothers film. Most extraordinarily, in all the drunken mêlées through which they passed, not one person ever called them to account for the ruin and death their countrymen had so recently inflicted here. John’s ‘Nazi’ taunts were either not understood or taken in a spirit of badinage.

The few hours between playing and sleep they spent mostly out on the street, drifting from bar to café and doorway to doorway with the tide of sex tourists, and touts peddling anything from dirty books to diamonds. A short walk from the Reeperbahn was a music store named Steinway, which stocked an impressive range of imported American guitars and amps, and proved just as accommodating about hire-purchase agreements as Hessy’s back in Liverpool. Here John found the guitar of his dreams, a double-cutaway Rickenbacker Capri 325 whose shorter-than-usual neck gave it the look of a skirmish weapon as much as a songbox. Although still theoretically paying off Hessy’s for his Hofner Club 40, he put himself in hock a second time for a Rickenbacker with a ‘natural’ ivory white finish that was to be his faithful companion throughout all the tempests ahead.

Despite his countless new bedfellows, he suffered bouts of missing Cynthia and sent her regular, edited accounts of his Hamburg life, marking the envelopes SWALK (Sealed With a Loving Kiss) or ‘Postman, postman, don’t be slow / I’m in love with Cyn’ so go man go’ like any ardent young swain. Back in Liverpool, Cyn—and Paul’s girlfriend, Dot Rhone—kept rigorously to the code their lords and masters had laid down for them, refusing even the friendliest, nostrings offers of dates from other young men; regularly photographing one another as proof that their regulation Brigitte Bardot look was being kept up to scratch. If Dot was not around to take Cyn’s picture, she would squeeze into a Woolworth’s photo booth, wearing her sexiest outfit, with her hair newly done, and give sultry come-hither looks to an invisible John as the impatient light flashed. John responded with similar passport-size snaps of his most deformed hunchback poses and leering ‘spassie’ grimaces.

Like others before him, Pete Best saw how John’s fondness for mimicking deformity turned to horror and revulsion at any sight of the real thing. Once as the two sat in a restaurant, a badly maimed war veteran was helped to a nearby table. Though John had already ordered his meal, he jumped up and bolted.