Later, Pete did write a book. I hope he made a few bob from it. After all, he was a Beatle, at a vital time, as opposed to those temporary secretaries and chauffeurs who have rushed into print, despite knowing them only a few weeks, long after the real Beatle days were over.
Hamburg was very hard — I thought I’d never manage to get clear in my mind what had happened there. The Beatles were totally contradictory in their memories of how many times they went there, which order they played the various clubs, and which events had occurred at which time.
I had very long sessions with each of the Beatles and I realized what an important stage Hamburg had been, how it brought them together as a group, developed their personalities, gave them their own sound, and of course their new look. Nobody had tried to write about this vital period in their life, or been back to try and check what happened. I did not quite appreciate, till I got out there, that they were full of pills for so much of the time, trying to keep themselves awake for twelve-hour playing sessions. No wonder they had such hazy ideas about dates and places and people.
I went out to Hamburg in 1967 and visited all the clubs they played at and talked to as many people as I could find who remembered them. I even got a copy of the record contract they made with Bert Kaempfert Production. This was clearly dated 5.12.1961, which was useful when I started to get the sequence of events straight. It showed, for a start, that Stu Sutcliffe had left the Beatles by then. (He was the Beatle who died in Hamburg in April 1962.)
In the eight-page contract, it gave them, in clause 4, the opportunity of ‘listening to their recordings immediately after completion thereof and of raising any possible objections on the spot’. That was a very fair clause, for an unknown foreign backing group, producing a few quick numbers in 1961. It was stated, in clause 7, that ‘Mr John W. Lennon is authorized as the Group’s representative to receive the payments’.
Armed with documents such as these, and by looking at the record books of the various clubs, I decided that the Beatles had done three Hamburg tours. (John said two — Paul thought four. George wasn’t sure.) I felt all the time that I might have the order wrong and that people would appear with proof that I had put the Beatles in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I am still prepared to admit errors in some of the Hamburg dates. Does it matter? Well, at the time I wasn’t too worried, thinking that nobody else apart from me would ever be bothered with such apparently minor details. Since then, of course, scores of researchers have been back to Hamburg, digging over the old embers, including a Dr Tony Waine of Lancaster University, who has made a special study of the Beatles in Hamburg, writing about them for academic magazines, in Britain and Germany. Beatle students never cease to amaze me.
The highlight of my Hamburg trip was meeting Astrid Kirchherr. She helped so much with facts and memories of their Hamburg days and was also the first person I had met who had a clear insight into their different personalities and talents.
Astrid, and her little group of Hamburg art school friends, were the Beatles’ earliest intellectual fans. Until then, and for many years later, they were mainly appreciated by shop girls and hairdressers, or taken up briefly by low-grade would-be managers, hoping to make some quick money out of getting them a few bookings. Astrid saw something else in them, during 1960–62, which until then no one else had seen, though it was of course Stuart Sutcliffe who she admired most of all and to whom she got engaged.
I was rather shocked by the life she was now leading in 1967. For a start, her room in the house she still shared with her mother was almost a shrine. Like Miss Haversham in Great Expectations, she kept it untouched, as it had been in the last few months of Stu’s life. Everything was black, the bed, the soft furnishings, the furniture, and the only light came from some candles. It was very eerie and strange, though she herself was calm and controlled, able to talk about Stu and the Beatles without pathos or melodrama.
In 1963, when Beatlemania first began, she gave some interviews to the German press and others. ‘I was so happy they were doing well that I wanted to help them. I did my best to see the newspapers got the right facts. The papers at first were full of them being four scruffy blokes who lived in a dirty attic in Liverpool. I wanted them to know how intelligent and talented they were. It never came out the way I told them. Over and over again in all the interviews there were the same questions; did you really invent the Beatle hairstyle?’
Now, she’d stopped giving any interviews. She’d also refused offers to do her life story, although the German magazines had been asking her for years. She’d also turned down a lot of money for a tape recording she has, which Stu gave her, of Stu and John and the others playing in the Art School in Liverpool. (Done on the tape recorder that John persuaded the college to buy, for his own personal use.)
‘One record company offered me 30,000 marks for it and I said no. Then they said 50,000. I said no, not for 100,000 or any money. They wanted to put the name Beatles on it and make a lot of money. It wouldn’t have done them any good. They were having a laugh, playing around.’
She said she had never made a penny from all the Beatle photographs she took, even the one of the five of them taken in the Hamburg railway station, which went round the world. She gave that and others to them, long before they were famous. In turn, while they were still un-famous, the Beatles gave them to someone who gave them to an agency. Not only did her photographs make a lot of money for others, she set a style in taking their photographs — half in the shadows — which was copied by other photographers and other groups.
‘The trouble is I never kept the negatives, so I can’t really prove they were mine. Oh, I did get some money once from Brian, for a pile I had given to the boys. He paid me £30.’
She did, of course, get many commissions, on the strength of having taken the Beatle photographs. One famous German magazine commissioned her to take the boys, when they were refusing everyone else, if she could also take along one of their photographers, just to help. ‘John said I should agree. I might as well make some money out of it for a change. This other photographer took some nasty pictures of them, when he shouldn’t have done. They used all his.’
In 1967, when I met her, she was still in contact with the Beatles and John had come to see her when he was in Germany filming How I Won the War.
‘John is an original. New ideas just come to him. Paul has great originality, but he’s also an arranger. He can get things done, which John can’t, or can’t be bothered trying.
‘They do need, and they don’t need, each other. Either is true. Paul is as talented a composer as John. They would easily have done well on their own.
‘The most amazing thing about them is that by coming together they haven’t become the same, they haven’t been influenced by each other. They’re each still different, each is still himself. Paul still does sweet music, like “Michelle”, that sort of melody. John writes bumpy music. Working so long together hasn’t rubbed out the differences, which I think is amazing.
‘Now and again at first I did used to wonder if they really cared about people’s feelings and people’s friendship. They would say awful things in front of people — “I wish that Kraut would go away,” that sort of thing. They can still be cruel to people they don’t like, tell them to go away, we don’t like you. But that isn’t too bad. It’s worse to pretend you do like someone.
‘After Stu died, they were so kind and lovely. I knew then they weren’t cruel. It showed me they did know when they went too far and knew when to stop.’