McCartney Times

IT’S hard to believe given that their music still gets daily global airplay, but it’s 60 years this month since the Beatles were formed.

The Fab Four took to the stage for the very first time on August 17 in Hamburg’s Indra-Club.

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It was the first of 218 gigs and 1,200 performance hours in the city, amounting to more stage time there than anywhere else in the world.

In fact, the German music hub played such a huge role in the band’s development that John Lennon once famously remarked that they “grew up in Hamburg, not Liverpool”.

On Monday, the city will pay tribute to its adopted sons with a two-hour event streamed live from the Indra-Club.

Here, we take a closer look at the German connection that shaped the world’s biggest band.

WHILE the musical genius of John Lennon and Paul McCartney first collided when they founded The Quarrymen in Liverpool in 1957, it wasn’t until 1960 that the iconic Fab Four first performed together.

A 14-year-old George Harrison joined the group in 1958 and two years later they changed their name to The Beetles while recruiting bass player Stu Sutcliffe.

When their part-time manager Allan Williams decided to send them to Germany for a club residency, the legendary band quickly began to take shape.

NAME CHANGE

Changing their name to The Beatles, the group recruited drummer Pete Best and headed to Hamburg for a gruelling 48-night series, where they were first introduced to Ringo Starr.

At the time, Starr was a member of a rival and more successful group The Hurricanes, but he dipped his toes into Beatles life as a stand-in drummer.

The two years spent in Hamburg laid the foundations for the band’s unique success story, transforming them from amateur musicians into a professional live-band.

SHAPED IMAGE

The city also helped shape their image as they adopted the mop top hairstyle that was fashionable in the German college scene.

However, the time spent in Hamburg wasn’t all work and no play.

The Indra-Club was located in a seedy, downmarket area of Hamburg, where drugs were easily available.

With such a gruelling schedule of gigs, they were encouraged to keep their energy up with Preludin, an amphetamine similar to LSD.

Their habit might in some way explain why Lennon was once found walking down the street in his underpants, and why he once took to the stage wearing a toilet seat around his neck.

HEDONISTIC LIFESTYLE

They didn’t know it at the time, but the four lads were enjoying a hedonistic lifestyle that laid the blueprint for a generation of bands indulging in sex, drugs and rock n’roll.

Unfortunately, their early days didn’t hold much glamour.

They spent their first few months in dingy lodgings, a windowless room at the back of a cinema run by Bruno Koschmider who offered them gigs in his club.

Yet, the relationship turned sour when the band took on gigs in a rival venue.

Koschmider was so annoyed at this perceived lack of loyalty that he reported Harrison for working under the legal age limit of 18, even though he had been instrumental in the law-breaking.

Touchingly, Harrison stayed up all night before the deportation, teaching John Lennon his guitar parts so that the band would continue without him.

ALTERNATIVE ACCOMMODATION

The rest of the band then found alternative accommodation, but everything went spectacularly wrong when McCartney and Best returned to Koschmider’s cinema to collect their belongings.

The jury’s out as to whether they nailed a condom to a wall and set it alight in order to see in the dark – or to get their own back on Koschmider – but it resulted in a small burn mark.

A furious Koschmider decided it was a deliberate act and reported the two who were then arrested for arson.

After spending a night in a jail cell, they too were deported.

That should have been the end of the Beatles’ time in Hamburg, but once Harrison turned 18 and the other misdemeanours were quietly ironed out, the group were free to return to Germany.

And they did so many times, spending almost as much time there as in Liverpool during their formative years.

April 1961 saw them complete a 13-week residency at the Top 10 Club, after which Sutcliffe left the band and McCartney assumed the role of bass.

But Hamburg’s greatest gift was yet to come, as it was there they were introduced to Brian Epstein, the man who would become their manager.

Under the influence of the “fifth Beatle”, the group began their evolution into the greatest – and most enduring – band of all time.

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Source: The Beatles ‘German link’ which shaped world’s biggest band explored as 60th anniversary approaches