And, for a while, in a sense, they weren’t even Brian’s biggest act. In the wake of his success at getting the Beatles a record deal, he signed other Cavern stars. The first of his bands to score a no. 1 record was Gerry and the Pacemakers, an agreeable Merseybeat combo who gladly sopped up a record —‘How Do You Do It?’—that the Beatles, with the deep love of authentic American rock ‘n’ roll and their in-house songwriting duo of Lennon and McCartney, wouldn’t touch. Gerry and the lads followed that one up with ‘I Like It’, another no. 1, and that one with ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, which hit the top as well. That was their whole wad, but it was a hell of a run. Toss in – and why not? – another of Brian’s finds, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, who hit no. 1 with ‘Bad to Me’, and you get a total of 32 weeks in ‘63 in which Brian Epstein acts were at the absolute top of the British charts.
But there was nothing, truly, ever, like the Beatles: the personalities, the songwriting, the freshness of their look and sound, the palpable exuberance they radiated on stage, on record or simply talking off the cuff. Pop music had not known the like since the brief initial explosion of Elvis Presley. And no British act had ever come remotely close to generating the same degree of heat, hysteria and pan-cultural recognition.
They started out 1963 semi-obscure, with just one no. 17 record to their names, and then worked their asses off: 229 live appearances in three countries, 53 radio gigs, 37 performances for TV, plus recording two whole albums (the first of which was cut in one knock-out day) and three singles’ worth of entirely new material – a year-long testimonial to the efficacy of diet pills chased with Scotch-and-Cokes.
When the calendar turned, they’d been the subject of documentaries and stars of their own BBC radio show, Pop Go The Beatles. In The Times, a writer waxed lyrical, completely sober, about the group’s use of ‘pandiatonic clusters’ and ‘Aeolian cadences’. They’d virtually invented a market out of the teenage girls and boys whom the UK record industry had previously courted with only mixed results and were rewarded with the sorts of accolades and performance opportunities normally reserved for older-style performers: a Variety Club award, two appearances on Sunday Night at the London Palladium, a chance to perform before the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret (on a bill which included, among others, Marlene Dietrich and Buddy Greco), even their own Christmas pantomime—30 shows of music, comedy and traditional holiday sketches at the Astoria Cinema in Finsbury Park, London, in front of more than 100,000 seats total, all filled.
The papers could barely move quickly enough to keep up with the public demand for news about the band and the phenomenon dubbed ‘Beatlemania’: fans – mostly young girls – surrounding hotels and theatres, choking airports and lining motorcades to see their heroes come and go. There were accounts of the band’s concerted efforts to survive this frightening level of adoration: ‘Operation Beat-the-Beatlemania’, as the Daily Mirror called it: disguises and body doubles and false exits through vehicles that went nowhere while the boys sped off in second vehicles and so forth.
The timing of the Beatles’ rise was impeccable. England had been rocked with tabloid scandals throughout ‘63: the Argyll divorce, in which upper-class depravity and female sexual appetite emerged from the closet of gossip into the glare of a sensational, endless trial; and the Profumo scandal, a thrilling paella involving a Tory cabinet minister with a moviestar wife, a Russian spy, a couple of curvy floozies, Caribbean dope peddlers, common whores, a Polish gangster slumlord, the scion of one of England’s greatest families, gunshots, flights from justice, a two-way mirror and, in the middle, an osteopath and society portraitist with predilections for all sorts of deviant sexual delights and a client list that included Gandhi, Churchill and a galaxy of Hollywood stars.
The osteopath was named Stephen Ward, and his story came into the light just early enough in the swing of the decade for the old culture to bring its might crushing down on him in a mockery of a trial (the prosecutor was Mervyn Griffith-Jones, the same chap who botched the Chatterley business) that drove him, eventually, to suicide – a fistful of Nembutals down the hatch while the jury still debated which of the trumped-up, unproven charges of pandering, soliciting and acquiring abortions for his young victims he would be scapegoated for. Ward was snuffed out but the taint of the scandal helped bring down the government; in October, Harold Macmillan – SuperMac – resigned as prime minister, and the stripe of British propriety and pride his reign had embodied was forever swept away. ‘A generation was fading before our eyes,’ remembered journalist Ray Connolly. ‘Within nine months, England had changed out of recognition.’
With all this going on, it was no wonder that the Beat Boom seemed such a welcome respite, or that, with understandable shortsightedness, most grown-up observers in the media failed to distinguish between the Beatles, their Merseyside mates Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, and such second-tier hangers-on as Freddie and the Dreamers (from Manchester) or the Dave Clark Five, the North London group that had been assembled, it was whispered, by veteran Denmark Street moguls simultaneously frightened by the incoming wave of northern money-makers and eager to mop up anything stirred up by them or left in their wake. So hot were record companies for the next thing that they signed and suited-up anything they could find that was young and rhythmic and, to their ears anyhow, ‘pop’—even the Rolling Stones, then steeped in as pure a brand of Chicago blues as you could put out if you were from a London suburb and nobody’s idea of a cuddly Beat Boom act.
In the course of their breakout year, the Beatles expanded their horizons with travel, not only to gigs in France and Sweden but on holiday to Spain, Greece and, for George Harrison, the USA (where he visited a sister who’d emigrated to the Midwest). John became a father, and Paul turned twenty-one. The two started their own songwriting company, Northern Songs, and invented a bit of stage business that became their signature, shaking their heads and ‘wooooooooing’ into the same microphone. And Paul met a girl – Jane Asher, a gorgeous redhead from a well-to-do West End family then working as an actress, model and sometime journalist; before long, Paul moved into a spare bedroom in the attic of the Asher family’s endearingly eccentric Wimpole St ménage, and he and Jane would be one of London’s top scene-making couples for the next five years.
From 1963 on, everything that any of the Beatles would ever do would be news.
Hell, they’d even heard about them in America …
Talent was everywhere, spilling out of taxis, the streets teemed with it. You could bump one day into a random genius on a street corner and get a hand in launching a 40-year career: serendipity.
Take itchy Andrew Loog Oldham, who had talked his way into jobs at the city’s hottest boutique, nightclub and artist-management firm at the audacious age of nineteen. In ‘63, his latest adventure – embarked upon, as had been the others, with a characteristic melange of moxie, palaver and vim – was managing a rhythm and blues band that he was sure would rise above the sea of Beat Boom hopefuls who’d welled up in the wake of the Beatles’ stunning success. Enamoured of the flash style of American record producer and famed weirdo Phil Spector, Oldham, neither musically nor technologically literate, had anointed himself the band’s producer, but, bottom line, the band’s live sound—the frenetic, pulsing stuff on which they made their name – had eluded him at first go, resulting in a tinny, limp single that had failed to crack the Top 20. (As another survivor of his studio ministrations, Small Faces keyboardist Ian McLagen, would one day declare, This guy is not an engineer. He’s an idiot. He has no idea about sound. He couldn’t produce a burp after a glass of beer.’)
One September afternoon, Oldham was fretting in a West End basement jazz club as his band rehearsed: nothing in their current repertoire felt like the next single; the Beat Boom was happening without them. Discouraged,