Paul and John’s Liverpool girlfriends, Dot and Cynthia, came over to Hamburg for a visit. John was willing to bed down with Cyn in the band’s communal room above the Top Ten, along with Paul and Dot, Tony Sheridan and his girlfriend Rosi, but Paul didn’t want to bring Dot into this overcrowded den. ‘Paul thought it’s not good for Dot,’ recalls Rosi. The boys were friendly with an older woman who looked after the toilets at the club, and she kindly allowed Paul and Dot to sleep together alone on her houseboat on the Elbe, a happy and romantic visit culminating in Paul giving Dot an engagement ring.
It was while Dot was in town that the problem of Stuart Sutcliffe came to a head. Paul’s relationship with Stu was increasingly strained. While being an enviable young man in many ways, Stu was a useless musician who had failed to improve. Paul was now not only proficient on lead guitar, but could turn his hand to playing bass, piano and drums. Stu couldn’t even master the simplest of rock instruments. The Beatles were carrying Stu, who was only in the band because he was John’s mate. ‘Very much later I understood that Paul sometimes was very angry with [Stuart], because he never practised. And when Paul moaned about it, John said, “It doesn’t matter. He looks good.” That was John’s answer,’ notes Stu’s lover Astrid Kirchherr. ‘Paul was a professional, [so] it was hard for him to [put] up with a guy who just looked cool, and his best mate John protected him all the time.’
Paul had recently dropped and broken his cheap Rosetti guitar. Having decided the guitar was a write-off, the boys enjoyed stomping it to pieces, after which Paul had little choice but to play the Top Ten piano during their set. One night when he was at the keyboard, Paul made a rude remark about Astrid. Nobody remembers exactly what he said, but it was bad enough to cause Stu to lose his temper. Slightly built though he was, Stu swung a punch at Paul. ‘Don’t you ever say anything about Astrid again!’ he said, defending his sweetheart.
‘I’ll say what I like!’
This altercation is often presented as the only time Paul and Stu came to blows. In fact, ‘they were always fighting,’ says Ruth Lallemann, who remembers the boys regularly pushing and shoving each other. ‘You didn’t talk about things. You fought.’ George Harrison said he had ‘a lot of fist fights with Stuart’ to establish a pecking order. Tony Sheridan adds: ‘Paul didn’t get on with [Stu]. There was animosity. There was open fighting on stage … Some ugly stuff went on.’ This particular fight over Astrid was bad enough to signal the end of Stuart’s tenure as a Beatle. He quit the band soon afterwards to live with Astrid and study art in Hamburg, remaining friendly with the boys. Indeed, as soon as Stuart left the band Paul seemed better inclined towards him. As a musician, Stu held them back; now he could just be a mate. As neither John nor George wanted to take up Stuart’s bass – the least glamorous instrument in a band – this job fell to Paul, who needed a new instrument. To get him started, Stu generously leant him his expensive Höfner. Later Paul bought the smaller, cheaper Höfner violin bass, which became his signature instrument. It is a mark of Paul’s talent, and strength of personality, that despite being on a backline instrument he remained an equal front man with John.
Soon after Stu’s departure the boys were talent-spotted by a German music publisher, who hired them to back Tony Sheridan on a recording session for Polydor. The result was a single, ‘My Bonnie’, released locally in August 1961. Credited to Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers, the track is a lively cover of the traditional song ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’, starting quietly, then breaking into a rave-up, Paul hollering with joy in the background. It made number 32 in the German singles chart that year, and remains a very engaging record.
The band returned to Liverpool before ‘My Bonnie’ was released, finding themselves increasingly in demand on Merseyside where there were now scores if not hundreds of similar ‘beat bands’. The stock in trade of nearly all these groups was American songs, often learned from discs brought into Liverpool by sailors, becoming proprietorial about tunes they considered their own, though bands would swap songs. ‘I remember swapping with George “Roll Over Beethoven”; and I let him do “Jambalaya”,’ recalls Gerry Marsden, leader of Gerry and the Pacemakers. Bands were rivals – for gigs, exposure and the El Dorado of a record contract – but also mates. One memorable night at Litherland Town Hall the Beatles and the Pacemakers joined forces. ‘We said, “Let’s have one band for tonight.” And we called it the Beatmakers: the Pacemakers and the Beats [sic],’ remembers Marsden. The musicians swapped instruments. Paul played the town hall piano, the Pacemakers’ pianist played sax. ‘We had a ball.’
THE MOP-TOP
When John turned 21 in October 1961 he received £100 ($153) as a gift from a well-to-do aunt, an act of such munificence Paul never forgot it, often remarking that nobody had ever given him a hundred quid. The gift highlighted a subtle but significant class difference between the friends. ‘To us John was upper class,’ Paul commented for the Beatles’ multi-media documentary project, the Anthology. ‘His relatives were teachers, dentists, even someone up in Edinburgh in the BBC. It’s ironic, he was always very “fuck you!” and he wrote the song “Working Class Hero” – in fact he wasn’t at all working-class.’ Still, John generously used his birthday money to treat him and Paul to a trip to Paris which, despite having money to spend, they decided to see on the cheap, hitch-hiking from Liverpool to the French capital where they arrived dressed in rocker gear, their hair in long, greasy quiffs.
One of the first things John and Paul did when they got into Paris was look up their Exi friend Jürgen Vollmer, who was now working in the city as an assistant to the American photographer William Klein. Jürgen met the boys outside the church of St Germain-des-Prés. Having established that they had no place to stay, he took them to his digs in the nearby Hotel de Beaune. As Jürgen tried to sneak the boys up the stairs of this cheap hotel, he was discovered by his landlady, who threw the Englishmen out. ‘We didn’t like the service here, anyway,’ Lennon told the biddy, with mocking hauteur.
‘Shall we try the Ritz?’ Paul asked his friend, readily falling into a double act.
Jürgen met up with John and Paul the next day, and started showing them around Paris. The English boys were full of fun and good humour, picking Jürgen up and running with him past L’Opéra singing nonsense arias, and generally behaving like a couple of Marx Brothers. Jürgen decided they should meet his girlfriend, Alice, arranging a rendezvous. But Alice was horrified by the English boys, whom Jürgen now saw, through her eyes, as scruffy, even dangerous-looking rockers. ‘She didn’t even sit down.’ John and Paul weren’t going to pull any Parisian birds the way they were dressed. So Jürgen took them to the flea market at Porte de Clignancourt, where they bought beatnik-type outfits. Next they wanted their hair cut like Jürgen’s – combed forward over their eyes and cut in a fringe.
‘They asked me, “We like that funny haircut, Jürgen, can you cut ours?” Because they knew that I always cut my hair myself.’ Jürgen took John and Paul back to his hotel, managing to sneak them up to his room this time. He sat Paul down first in front of the mirror, draped a towel over his shoulders, and snipped away at his rocker quiff, changing it into a softer, floppy Left Bank mop-top. For years the Beatle mop-top was credited to Astrid Kirchherr, who said she first styled the boys’ hair this way in Hamburg, a claim that infuriates Vollmer, who asserts he was the true originator of the hairstyle, and indeed Paul has backed him up in this. A trivial enough matter, one might have thought, but for a man to wear his hair like this in 1961 was rebellious. ‘Very difficult for people to imagine that there was a time like that,’ says Jürgen.
BRIAN
John and Paul were soon back in Liverpool where they now met one of the most important characters in the Beatles story. A short stroll from the Cavern, in Whitechapel, was a branch of NEMS, a local chain of family-owned electrical stores that also sold records. NEMS was originally a furniture shop founded in 1901 by a Jewish-Polish immigrant named Isaac Epstein, the business carried on by his son, Harry, who lived with his wife Queenie in a large, detached house in Queens Drive, Childwall.