After about two days of his holiday, Brian rang me and said, ‘You silly bugger. What do I need tonight? I’ve had to hire a dinner jacket.’
We both laughed.
Lots of people can say they slept with him and some of them have, but I honestly don’t feel there was anyone closer during our time together. He could turn to me when things were rough and know he was going to get 100 per cent help.
He always wore a suit and a white shirt. He was just nine months older than me. When we first met, he somehow assumed that I was older than him and it wasn’t until later that he realised. He laughed, ‘I’ve always treated you with such respect, because I thought you were one of my elders.’ It became a running joke between us.
He wasn’t a hard task-master, but he wasn’t easy. He could be awkward and he was a real stickler that everything had to be right. After all, he was running the best record store in the north-west of England. Then it became the north of England. Then it became the whole of England. He was the first man to stock the whole of the Blue Note jazz catalogue. Because he knew I loved jazz, he invited me to share a box at the Royal Philharmonic Hall to hear Art Blakey and Thelonius Monk.
When I first met Brian, he drove a Hillman Minx and lived at home with his mum and dad, Harry and Queenie. He and his brother Clive always called them Mummy and Daddy. They lived in a large detached house on Queen’s Drive in Childwall, a very prestigious address. I went there a couple of times. Harry was a lovely, kind man. He used to come into the shop and take a look around and you could tell by his manner if there was going to be trouble, if he didn’t think things were being run properly.
Brian was very inventive. When he was running the furniture store, he used to turn the furniture with its back to the shop window so shoppers could see the other side. Harry went mad, but it was unique for its time.
There was a period in the early ’60s when cocktail piano music became the big thing. Brian wouldn’t just put record sleeves in the window. He made a display. He would have the white cloth on the table with two glasses, two chairs and the record album sleeves. Pow, what’s that? It had the desired impact, and people would stop to have a closer look.
The story of how Brian Epstein became the Beatles’ manager has now passed into Beatles legend, which sadly often means that the facts of the matter go straight out of the window. My memory is as fallible as the next man’s, but I was there when it happened and, in spite of what you might have read or heard to the contrary in the avalanche of Beatles books and articles, this is the truth.
I got so fed up with people asking if we had a record of ‘My Bonnie’ by the Beatles and having to say No that I put through an order for it myself under a name I simply dreamed up. Brian refused to order records unless there was a firm order. Once there was an order, Brian’s claim was that if the record existed, anywhere in the world, we could get it.
The famous story is that a guy called Raymond Jones came into the shop and asked for a record by the Beatles. I know that I invented the name and put it into the order book. But now Liverpool people claim to know ‘the real’ Raymond Jones and a chap with that name can miraculously recall placing the order. Rubbish. It was a name I picked at random because I wanted to get this bloody Beatles record that people kept asking about. But it wasn’t by the Beatles.
I researched for weeks and found out that ‘My Bonnie’ was not by the Beatles. It was by Tony Sheridan and the backing group was called the Beat Brothers.
It turned out that the Beat Brothers were the Beatles. But we had to order it from Polydor in Germany. The minimum was 25 copies, which I ordered and had them shipped over. I bought one myself and Brian stuck his own handwritten notice up in the window saying ‘Beatles Records for Sale’. And they were gone inside a couple of hours.
We played it and Brian and I both thought it was garbage, but the reaction it inspired among Liverpool record-buyers was exciting and impossible to ignore. It was a great, noisy, wonderful record. I ordered another box of 25 and they went just as quickly. We sold thousands of them and we rang Polydor and tried to tell them that something remarkable was happening here but they couldn’t have been less interested. They didn’t want to know about a bizarre sales flurry in an obscure provincial record shop.
But that was what kindled Brian’s interest in the Beatles. Several weeks later, Brian walked into the shop and asked, ‘Do you remember that record we sold by those people the Beatles? Well, they are playing over here at The Cavern. Do you know where The Cavern is?’
It was only 200 yards from where we were standing! I used to go often when it was a jazz club, in the days before the groups took over the music scene. Yet Brian was blissfully unaware of its existence. He suggested we took a look at this strangely popular group of musicians called the Beatles on our way to lunch. Brian had seen a poster advertising the Beatles ‘direct from Hamburg’. People insist today that we must have known they were a Liverpool group by then. Well, maybe we should have known. But the truth is, we didn’t.
One of the many Beatles myths is that Brian Epstein’s arrival at The Cavern was announced by disc jockey Bob Wooller. Another is that he rang the day before and demanded VIP treatment. They are just not true. It was much more casual than that. It was almost on a whim that Brian first saw the Beatles. He was simply intrigued by this unknown group that inspired such devotion at his tills and wanted to take a quick look at them for himself. It came at a time in his life when he was bored. What inspired him to suggest we checked out the Beatles in The Cavern was curiosity, pure and simple.
It was 9 November 1961, and it took us only a few minutes to walk up Mathew Street to The Cavern. I paid at the door with two half crowns Brian had discreetly passed to me as we approached the door, which was guarded by a single, aged, snoozing bouncer. We sat right at the back. Some accounts have us nursing our briefcases. Not true. We didn’t go with any intention of doing business. We were on our way to lunch.
The Cavern was a complete dump. It seemed to have gone downhill since its days as a jazz venue. There was condensation dripping down the walls. It was an old vegetable warehouse and it still stank of its former occupants. It was really hot and airless and packed with kids trying to get near the stage. The place was bursting at the seams. The girls had their beehive haircuts and the boys just tried to look cool. There was no proper bar there and Coke was the drink of the day. The noise hit you at the same time as the smell and it was hard to tell which was more upsetting.
My first reaction was ‘Let’s get out of here,’ because on stage were four dreadful young men making the most appalling racket. They looked like typical, unpleasant youths to me. Neither Brian nor I liked pop music. It was loud. It was physical. There was so much noise you could feel the sound. And even sitting at the back, it hit us like a thump in the chest. We felt desperately out of place in our suits among all these casually dressed kids. It was an extraordinary experience. People recognised Brian and he felt increasingly uncomfortable. But we just sat there with this amazing noise and energy blasting at us.
The four Beatles were dressed in black leather jeans and bomber jackets and black T-shirts and they just looked completely out of control. I could see Brian’s eyes widen with amazement as they yelled and swore at their audience between songs. They were swigging back Coke and they were smoking on stage. They were just awful. We just sat there like a pair of lemons wondering what planet we had landed on. It was one of the most shocking experiences of my life and I know Brian felt the same.
But then I suddenly found that my foot was tapping in time to the music. In spite of my job, I didn’t like pop music in the least. And I certainly didn’t feel drawn to this