The new album went to number one, ‘She Loves You’ only relinquishing the top spot on the singles charts when the Beatles released ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. Suddenly everybody wanted to meet the Beatles. They were invited into the EMI boardroom for lunch with the chairman, Sir Joseph Lockwood, posing with Sir Joe for a photo under the iconic painting of His Master’s Voice. The band was also being inundated with requests to invest in projects or lend their name to good causes. In Liverpool, Brian Epstein introduced the boys to two beady-eyed Oxford University students, Jeffrey Archer and Nicholas Lloyd, who persuaded the boys to back a fundraising drive for the charity Oxfam. ‘I thought Paul and John were very bright, though I found John a little cynical, whereas Paul was enthusiastic, and what clearly struck me – both in the case of John and Paul – was that if they’d wanted to go to Oxford themselves they so clearly had good enough brains to go,’ recalls Archer, later Lord Archer, novelist and disgraced Tory peer.*
A week later the Beatles were presented with further evidence of their fame when they met 3,000 fan club members at a ballroom in Wimbledon, South London. First the Beatles greeted their excited admirers in person, the boys sheltering behind the theatre bar for their own safety as they signed autographs. ‘They shook hands with all the fans,’ noted Neil Aspinall, ‘about 10,000 of them, actually, because they kept going back to the end of the queue and coming round again.’ The band then performed in a cage for their protection, which was a first. ‘It was like being in a zoo, on stage! It felt dangerous. The kids were out of hand,’ commented Ringo. As if being in a cage wasn’t strange enough, as they performed the boys were pelted with jelly babies. John had mentioned in an interview that he’d recently been sent a present of the sugary sweets but George had eaten them all, a casual remark that caused girls to inundate the band with what they now presumed were the Beatles’ favourite treats. Unable to deliver the jelly babies personally, they threw them. George stalked off stage in protest, already irritated by ‘the mania’, as he pointedly described it, emphasising the real madness at the heart of what was happening to them. Paul kept on smiling, showing a greater tolerance for all aspects of their burgeoning success, as he always would.
* The final show was a ticket-only event.
* John soon moved out to take a flat with his wife and son in nearby Kensington.
* In the early years of his career the guitarist went by the name Richard, later reverting to his given name of Richards, which I have used throughout.
* Jailed in 2001 for perjury.
NEW YORK, BEATLE TIME
For Christmas 1963, Beatles fan club members received the first of what became an annual yuletide gift, a giveaway record on which Paul and the boys thanked everybody for their support and sang seasonal songs in silly voices. Then came a London Christmas show in which the boys and other NEMS acts performed songs and took part in pantomime-style skits before sold-out audiences of screaming, jelly-baby-hurling young ladies. The screaming had become ridiculous. These were not screams of anguish, but girls enjoying the catharsis of yelling until their faces went red and tears streamed down their cheeks, some screaming until they wet themselves, or fainted, or both. Girls had screamed at music acts before the Beatles, and acts contemporaneous with them, Gerry and the Pacemakers for one, but it was more pronounced and on a bigger scale with the Beatles, who entertained 100,000 fans in this hysterical fashion by mid-January 1964, when their run of London Christmas shows ended.
After the briefest of breaks, the group flew to France for a three-week residency at L’Olympia, a Parisian music hall associated with the can-can and Edith Piaf. Les Beatles shared the bill with nine acts including the Texan singer Trini Lopez, who’d scored a hit with ‘If I Had a Hammer’, and local ‘yé-yé’ chanteuse Sylvie Vartan. The Beatles fared badly. Their amplifiers failed on the first night, and audience reaction was muted. The boys grumbled about the screamers back home, but at least English audiences were enthusiastic. Olympia drew an older, more laid-back crowd, who clapped politely at the end. There were some fans at the stage door, but sur le continent the lads attracted the attention of effeminate boys, rather than over-excited girls. On top of which, the reviews were bad. Not that the Beatles seemed to care. ‘They were not upset that the reception in Paris was a little bit cool. They were still just young kids out there having fun,’ says Trini Lopez drummer Mickey Jones, who hung out with the boys at the luxurious Georges V hotel, a sign of how much money was suddenly flowing their way. ‘They were having parties [with] girls from the Lido [club].’
The Lido girls were ushered away when Jane Asher visited from England, along with Paul’s father and brother, Mike McCartney noting that Paul was listening to Bob Dylan’s new LP, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, in his suite, having previously dismissed folk music as ‘rubbish’. Dylan would become an increasingly important influence. George Martin also came to Paris to record the boys singing German-language versions of ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, a chore they didn’t want to fulfil. When they failed to make their appointment at the studio in Rue de Sèvres, Martin called the Georges V to be told by Neil Aspinall that the band had decided not to do the German record – the first time they’d defied their producer so directly, and an intimation of trouble ahead. ‘You just tell them I’m coming right over to let them know exactly what I think of them!’ stormed Martin. He arrived at the Georges V shortly thereafter to find a scene akin to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland.
Around a long table sat John, Paul, George, Ringo, Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans, his assistant. In the centre, pouring tea, was Jane Asher, a beautiful Alice with long golden [sic] hair. At my appearance the whole tableau exploded. Beatles ran in all directions, hiding behind sofas, cushions, the piano – anything that gave them cover.
‘You bastards,’ Martin yelled at the boys, who emerged one by one to apologise to their producer and invite him to join them for tea. They did the German-language recordings on 29 January.
These high jinks were as nothing compared to the excitement in the Georges V caused by a telegram from the USA. ‘One night we arrived back at the hotel from the Olympia when a telegram came through to Brian from Capitol Records of America,’ Paul recalled. ‘He came running into the room saying, “Hey, look. You are number one in America!” “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had gone to number one.’ Ecstatic, the boys rode the obliging Mal Evans around the suite like cowboys yelling: Ya-hoo! America, here we come!
A few days later, on 7 February 1964, the Beatles flew to New York, with a large entourage that included Brian Epstein, Cynthia Lennon, Neil Aspinall and the photographer Robert Freeman. The American record producer Phil Spector also latched onto the party, which was trailed by a contingent of Fleet Street reporters and cameramen. The mood on the long, time-cheating flight across the Atlantic was apprehensive. ‘They’ve got everything over there, will they want us, too?’ Ringo asked the pressmen rhetorically.
The drummer’s gloom reflected what a struggle it had been to generate interest in the band in the USA. Despite the fact Capitol Records was owned by EMI, the American label declined repeated suggestions from George Martin that they should release the Beatles’ early singles, Americans having little interest in foreign practitioners of what was, after all, their music. Martin recalls a curt message from Alan Livingston, President of Capitol: