Strange, no doubt, but managing the Beatles – a contender for first place in the litany of foolish chimeras that had constituted his life to now – would be the purest form of self-expression Brian would ever find. His need for amiable companionship, his eye for rough young men, his sense of the done thing and the clothes and style in which to do it, his egoistic ambition, his unfounded yet enormous self-confidence, his ability to spot what people liked just before they realised they liked it: it all came together in a single job – impresario. In concert with the accident that a band of musical geniuses happened to be playing around the corner from his office, it all seems like a divine plan. There couldn’t have been three people on earth who could bring just the right mix of attitude, dedication, taste and assuredness to proctoring the Beatles. The odds that one of them happened to be in Liverpool and looking for a way to make his mark on the world – well, they wouldn’t even be worth computing.
It could also be argued that landing Brian as a manager was the Beatles’ first important break: for all the rough moments awaiting them in the coming months, his interest was the first real sign they had had from outside their own world that they meant something. And, as it involved a posh fellow like Brian, it boosted their morale. Subconsciously, at least, in the eyes of one observer, the band knew they had it made as soon as they’d linked up with him: ‘Four tough, working-class lads had come to accept the benefits of acting coquettishly for a wealthy middle-class homosexual,’ observed Simon Napier-Bell, one of the posh young hotshots who followed Brian into the pop management game. ‘People said their image was that of a boy next door, but it wasn’t. To anyone who’d seen it before, their image was instantly identifiable. It was the cool, cocky brashness of a kid who’s found a sugar-daddy and got himself set up in Mayfair.’
Beguiling proof of this can be found in the mythic tale of Brian’s spring 1963 trip to Barcelona with John Lennon. Brian was mad for Iberia: he holidayed there whenever he could and became such an aficionado of the corrida that he would eventually spend some time managing the English toreador Henry Higgins (known in Spain as Enrique Canadas) and have his private bathroom decorated with a gigantic photographic image of El Cordobés, the flamboyant bullfighter known as ‘the Spanish Beatle’. (He had the opportunity once to dine with the great Mexican bullfighter Dominguin and considered it one of the great moments of his life; the torero, on the other hand, seemed not quite sure whom he had met.) At a time when the English culinary palate was expanding to accommodate new and foreign tastes, Brian regularly had his Spanish housekeepers prepare him gazpacho. And, inevitably perhaps, he went to Spain in search of sexual gratification; like Morocco, it was a famous destination for English gays seeking the ready company of young men.
With that in mind, perhaps, Brian asked John to travel there with him in April ‘63, a mysterious trip during which, depending on whose version you believe, John took advantage of a free vacation to make it clear to Brian that the Beatles were his band (the McCartney surmise); John quizzed Brian about what it was like to be a gay man (the account John repeated throughout his life); John granted Brian, who was head over heels for him, a sexual encounter (the much-surmised theory around Liverpool, reported several times by Lennon’s boyhood chum Pete Shotton and, at Paul’s 21st birthday party in his Auntie Jin’s garden, to Lennon’s face by Cavern Club DJ Bob Wooler, who got walloped by John – using fists and a shovel – in return). Bolstering the nastiest whispers was the fact that John had always liked to cover his middle-class upbringing with an insolence and toughness he’d adapted from the examples of more hardluck Liverpudlians. His leather gear, his cocky, chin-out posture, his neverending stream of verbal abuse – he was the picture of Scouse rough trade – just the sort, by all accounts, for which Brian was weakest.
But if sexuality factored into Brian’s private relations with the band (and it would always be a big ‘if), it was explicitly absent from Brian’s two-pronged strategy for turning the Beatles into stars: he would smarten them up, give them a more professional aspect, and he would assail the London record and concert industry with news of his brilliant discovery. Gone were the Beatles’ leather jackets and blue jeans; gone were such stage antics as swearing and chatting up the girls and drinking, smoking and eating between numbers; gone were their cheap cigarettes (filter tips only) and the curly ends of guitar strings sticking out on their pegboards. Henceforth, the Beatles would perform in smart suits and boots and would evince the most professional sort of stage manner, including a full bow from the waist – straight out of Brian’s RADA days – after each number. They wore suits from Dougie Millings, the Soho tailor who fitted out Cliff Richard and other eager-to-please boy popstars; they wore zip-up, wedge-heeled Cuban boots which would quickly come to be known as Beatle boots (though, in fact, David Bailey had beat them to the look).
Some in Liverpool saw these new bits of polish as a dilution of the band’s essence, a sell-out, in short, that had nothing to do with music and everything to do with image. But that wasn’t how the Beatles themselves felt. As John Lennon said, ‘It was a choice of making it or still eating chicken on stage.’ And the suits? ‘Yeah man, all right, I’ll wear a suit – I’ll wear a balloon if somebody’s gonna pay me. I’m not in love with leather that much!’
‘He wasn’t trying to clean our image,’ Lennon went on. ‘He said our look wasn’t right, we’d never get past the door at a good place.’ Paul concurred: ‘We knew Brian had good flair, and, when you’re on stage, you can’t see yourself, so it’s often very important to have someone sitting in the stalls to tell you how you looked. Brian’s memos used to reflect that: “You’re playing Neston tonight. I’m looking for a re-booking here, please wear the shirts and ties.”' And, said Ringo, ‘He really was instrumental in bending our attitude this much so that the public would bend theirs that much to accept us.’
All that remained, then, was to convince the world. Thus began Brian’s fruitless trips to London: no, no, no, no and no. Always a little knot of Beatles would be waiting for him at the Punch and Judy coffee shop in Lime Street station; always he would descend dejected from the train with the sorry news. ‘By then,’ remembered John, ‘we were close to him, and he’d really be hurt. He’d be terrified to tell us that we hadn’t made it again.’
Yet he had this faith, this zealous, intangible belief in them and his vision of their potential. To some, like aspiring young music scenester Andrew Loog Oldham, Epstein’s certainty was contagious: ‘You knew you were dealing with a man who had a vision for the Beatles and nobody was going to get in the way of that vision. He was convinced that eventually everybody was going to agree with him. That gave him the power to make people listen.’
But by May ‘62, just five months into his tenure as manager, Brian had run out of people to buttonhole and cajole. He had gone door to door, virtually, with the tapes of the Decca sessions and, tired of schlepping the reels with him, decided to cut an acetate demo record of them during yet another bleak trip to London. The engineer at the HMV record store on Oxford Street listened to the band and liked them, suggesting that Brian talk to his boss. That meeting led to a call to EMI, where there was one last A&R man, a chap who’d been on holiday when Brian first came around a few months earlier.
His name was George Martin and he was, in all practicality, the last hope: he would simply have to say yes.
From Brian’s mouth to God’s ear: he did.
The Beatles were signed to EMI on the mere strength of Martin’s having listened to the audition tapes that Decca had recorded; in September they flew – flew! – to London and cut their first record, ‘Love Me Do’.
The result was a tsunami: within 18 months of that first recording session, they had released