Original subtitles

Liverpool

That's better, Johnny

The Wild One Released 1954 You know I missed you. Ever since the club split up I missed you

We all missed you. Do you miss him?

Yeah! All the Beetles missed you

Let's go back and get 'em, eh? - I'm game

To the temple. A man's got to do what he's got to do

Let's go back, back, back, back, back...

My mother used to say because I was born the Second World War started

Richard Starkey Born Liverpool 7th July 1940

I was with mother until about four, then my father split

He was a merchant seaman. It was 1940 and the war and all that

John Winston Lennon Born Liverpool 9th October 1940

My mum was a Catholic, dad was a Protestant

They got married quite late. I think they had me when they were 40

James Paul McCartney Born Liverpool 18th June 1942

At the time I was born my father's job was driving a bus

I lived in a two-up and two-down, 12 Arnold Grove

George Harrison Born Liverpool 25th February 1943

My mum was a nurse

She was a midwife as well

My dad was a cotton salesman

My father and my mother split when I was about four

I was with mother up to then, then I was brought up by an aunty

Dad was a... he made cakes

so we always had sugar through the war

She ended up doing a lot of jobs as he left when I was three

He decided that was enough of that

She did any job she could get to feed and clothe me

My mother was from an Irish family called French

She had lots of brothers and sisters

My grandmother lived in Albert Grove, which was next to Arnold Grove

I was terrible at school. I wasn't there much as I was often sick

I had peritonitis when I was six and a half - a burst appendix

They told my mother that I'd be dead three times - but I'm still here

My dad was an amateur musician who played piano

I've memories of lying on the floor, hearing him play

When my parents were younger they listened on an old crystal radio

John really loved his mother. I loved her too

She played the ukelele. To this day...

if I meet grown-ups who play ukeleles, I love them

Everybody has their party piece in Liverpool

My mother's was Little Drummer Boy. She sang it to me

I'd sing Nobody's Child to her and she'd always cry

Rock'n'roll meant it was real, everything else was unreal

It was the only thing to get through to me, at 15, of all the things happening

You can't imagine a time when rock'n'roll was only one of the musics

Whatever record was being played, you'd try and listen to it

You couldn't even get a cup of sugar, let alone a rock'n'roll record

There was no such thing as an English record

The first English record that was anything was Move It by Cliff Richard

Before that there'd been nothing

You'd listen to whatever was on the radio in those days

I listened to a lot of country and western - skiffle was coming through

There were lots of people coming up and one of them was Buddy Holly

We loved his vocal sound and we loved his guitar playing

But most of all was the fact that he actually wrote the stuff himself

That's what turned us on

I was at art school for five years

They'd only allow jazz to be played - no rock'n'roll in those days

We conned them into letting us play rock'n'roll by calling it blues

As I became a teenager

I was 12 or 13 when I first heard Fats Domino, I'm in Love Again

That was the first what I would call rock'n'roll record I ever heard

Even Bill Haley was around then

I remember being in school when I was a kid

Somebody had a picture in one of the musical papers... of Elvis

It was an advert for Heartbreak Hotel

I just looked at it and thought, he's just so good looking, just perfect

When I was 16, Elvis was what was happening

A guy with long greasy hair wiggling his ass and singing Hound Dog

That's Alright Mama and those early Sun Records - his great period

That's him - the guru we've been waiting for - the messiah has arrived

One of our favourite records was Searchin'by the Coasters

We heard people like Big Bill Broonzy. I think he did a tour of England

I was a big fan of his and Frankie Laine

All those train songs, Rock Island Line and all that stuff

Lonnie Donegan

Suddenly here was a rock'n'roll hero who had glasses

Buddy Holly and The Crickets

The first music I can remember hearing as guitar-oriented music

was Jimmie Rodgers, "The Singing Brakeman"

I had no idea about doing music as a way of life...

until rock'n'roll hit me and that changed my whole life

Drums were the only thing I wanted. I never looked at guitars or anything

My dad used to be a trumpet player and for my birthday

he bought me a trumpet from Rushworth and Drapers' music store in Liverpool

At 16 I re-established a relationship with my mother for about 4 years

She taught me music, first the banjo, then I progressed to guitar

My first song was Ain't That A Shame, an old rock hit, Fats Domino

When I was 13, 14, I used to be at the back of the class, drawing

Trying to draw guitars, big cello cut-away guitars with 'F' holes

Little solid ones with pointy or rounded cut-aways

I was totally into guitars

I heard about a kid who had a guitar and it was �3.10s

Just a little acoustic, round hole guitar

I got the �3.10s from my mother, a lot of money in those days

I suddenly figured out I couldn't sing with this thing in my mouth

so I went back to the shop and traded it in for a guitar

That was a Zenith, the first guitar I ever had

I was about 16

I bought a thirty-bob bass drum - thirty shillings

Just a huge one-sided bass drum

It's a family joke now - "The guitar's OK for a hobby but won't earn you any money"

We'd travel the whole of Liverpool to see someone who knew a new chord

I remember once hearing about a bloke who knew B7

We knew E and A - those are quite easy - but we didn't know B7

That was the missing link. The other chord. The lost chord

We trooped across Liverpool, changed a couple of buses, found this fella

He showed us dum, dum dum - B7

We learned it from him, went home to our mates and went...

Got it!

Paul and I used to just kind of get together, play it a bit

We were just schoolboys. There were no groups till a bit later

In those days we were desperate to get anything

Whatever film came, you'd try and see it

The Girl Can't Help it Released 1956

You went to those movies with Elvis or somebody in them in Liverpool

Everybody was waiting to see him - I'd be waiting there too

They'd all scream when he came on the screen

So we thought, that's a good job!

When The Girl Can't Help It came along

Instead of us looking at old black and white movies and thinking

"There's Clyde McPhatter, there's Fats Domino"

people we loved, who were being treated quite shabbily

suddenly this was in colour and in widescreen

At the start of Girl Can't Help lt, Tom Ewell comes on and says...

Widescreen

Colour!

Gorgeous, life-like colour by Deluxe

Sometimes you wonder who's minding the store

You cut to Jayne Mansfield and that's it - the game's over

I went to see Rock Around The Clock in the Isle of Man

My grandparents took me and it was sensational

They ripped up the cinema and this was good for me to see

Bill Haley and The Comets

I went to grammar school with Paul

We started in the same class, then we went into different streams

But basically I knew him since I was about eleven

I didn't really know him like a friend until a number of years later

I met George at the Liverpool Institute as well

He was a year younger than Paul and I

Neil Aspinall Schoolfriend I met George - we used to smoke behind the air-raid shelters

George and I lived near each other in Liverpool, just a bus stop away

I'd get on the bus and then the stop afterwards George would get on

Being close in age, we'd sit together and we'd talk about stuff and that

In fact he was, I think, about one and a half years younger than me

A big age difference at that time so I suppose I talked down to him a bit

as you do to a kid one and a half years younger than you

When he's sort of 14 and a half and I'm sort of 16

Perhaps I talked down to him because I'd known him as a younger kid

He was always nine months older

Even now, he's still nine months older

Paul met me the first day I did Be Bop A Lu La live on stage

A mutual friend brought him to see my group, The Quarry Men

I had a mate at school called lvan Vaughan

We were born on the same day so we were great mates

One day he said do you want to come to the Woolton Village Fete?

We went along one Saturday afternoon to the field where they had the fete

There was a wagon, and on the back of this a little stage

On stage were a few lads

One particular guy I noticed at the front had a checked shirt

Blondish hair, a bit curly, sideboards, looking pretty cool

He was playing guitar, not a very good one

But he was making a good job of it and I remember being impressed

He was doing a song by the Del Vikings called Come Go With Me

He obviously didn't know the words

He was pulling in lyrics from blues songs, so instead of going

"Come, little darling, come go with me" which is right

he'd got "Down down down to the Penitentiary"

He'd be doing the sort of stuff he'd heard on Big Bill Broonzy records

I thought, that's clever, he's pretty good. That was John

We met and talked after the show and I saw he had talent

He was playing backstage, doing Twenty Flight Rock by Eddie Cochran

The thing that impressed him most was I knew all the words

I was the singer and the leader, I made the decision to have him in the group

Was it better to have a guy who was better than the people I had, or not?

That decision was to let Paul in and make the group stronger

I asked him on our first meeting "Do you want to join the group?"

I think he said yes the next day

George came through Paul

"I've got this friend who's really good, you know"

He said well yeah, like what, and I said he plays Raunchy perfectly

We all loved that song so we said well, got to try him out

We ended up on the top deck of an empty late night bus, just us

and we said "Go on, George, get your guitar out, you show him"

Sure enough - note perfect - Raunchy. "You're in"

The first thing we ever recorded was That'll Be The Day, a Buddy Holly song

and one of Paul's, called In Spite of All The Danger

That record, the first we ever made, is in Liverpool somewhere

First Recordings 1958

Everybody hung around at the Jacaranda Club near the art school

and near Paul and George's school in the centre of Liverpool

This was before we really formed a band, just me, Paul and George

We used to show up for gigs with just three guitars

The person booking us would say "Where's the drums then?"

To cover this eventuality we'd say "The rhythm's in the guitars"

We once tried to do this audition for Carol Levis Discoveries

Everybody would go on and audition

Then they'd pick out somebody and go "OK, you, you and you"

They'd pick out about 20 different acts

They'd have a clapometer and the winner would go on to the final

It just kept on going. We went in for one of those

We were on the train to Manchester, rehearsing our act

Only me and George had our guitars. John must have sold his or bust it

OK, there's just the two of us with guitars

As it happened it looked good. Paul was left-handed

I was right-handed - still am -

John was in the middle, standing with a hand on each shoulder

"Think it over, what you just said"

Me and George - John did the lead and we were also going to do Rave On

We did it, he put his arms around us and it was OK. We didn't win, as usual

but I believe that day some unfortunate person in the theatre

was relieved of his guitar

Stuart Sutcliffe Stuart was John's friend from art college. He was a very good painter

We were jealous of John's friendship, John being a bit older than us

He was a little bit, you know...

You wanted to sit next to him on a bus - he was the older fella

So when Stuart came in he was taking a bit of that position away from us

We had to take a little bit of a back seat

The story was that he sold his painting to a John Moore exhibition

So the question was what do you do with 75 quid?

We said "That happens to be the exact amount it takes to buy a Hofner bass"

That would be a great thing to spend the money on

He said "No, I'm a painter, I've got to spend it on paints"

We said "No, Stuart, really" and John and I gave him a persuasive argument

that the best thing to do, obviously, was to buy this Hofner bass

Which he did. The only trouble was, he couldn't play it

But it was better to have a bass player who couldn't play

than to not have a bass player at all

Early Recordings Made in Liverpool - 1960

Ringo was a professional drummer who sang and performed

in one of the top groups in Liverpool before we even had a drummer

Rory and the Hurricanes were the first who wanted to get into rock'n'roll

We were playing skiffle before that

and he had this rock'n'roll blonde hair attitude

Johnny Guitar was just, for me, Liverpool's Jimi Hendrix at the time

The one good story about Rory and the Hurricanes, of which I was a member...

We were playing the Cavern and Johnny Guitar had a radio

He plugged his guitar into the radio so we could be a bit more rock'n'roll

They threw us off for being rock'n'roll. He plugged in the radio - get OFF!

John thought of the name Beatles and he'll tell you about it now

I had a vision when I was 12

I saw a man on a flaming pie and he said "You are Beatles with an A", and we are

John put this thing in Mersey Beat

which was also started by Bill Harry who went to art college with John

just saying that this little guy appeared on a flaming pie -

you know, in the sky - and said "Let there be Beatles - with an A"

John got the name Beatles ages ago

Everybody was thinking of a name and he thought of Beatles

I was looking for a name like the Crickets, that meant two things

and from Crickets I got to Beatles

When you said it, it was crawly things; when you read it, it was beat music

That's better, Johnny

You know I missed you. Ever since the club split up I missed you

We all missed you. Do you miss him?

Yeah! All the Beetles missed you

When we started off we had a manager in Liverpool called Allan Williams

He was a small bloke, with a high voice, little Welsh accent

He was a great motivator, he was very good for us at the time

He eventually got us an audition at one of his clubs, the Blue Angel

It was for Larry Parnes

who had a big stable, so-called, of rock stars in London

so this was a big opening to get this audition

We showed up there

I think half the groups in Liverpool showed up that day

Photos were taken - this is us at the audition

Something for Larry to look at

We always had to ask Stuart to turn away from the camera

As he couldn't play that well. We might be in A and he might be in A flat

Someone might spot this - we always noticed where people were on the guitars

So there are a few photos of Stuart with his back to the camera

That was the reason

We got the audition - Larry picked up quite a few Liverpool groups

Our only disappointment was that all the people in his stable

were like... Marty Wilde

They all had very furious names, Billy Fury, somebody Tempest,

Storm, Hurricane - they were all tempestuous names, you know

There's Ron Whitcherley, 17, known to his fans as Billy Fury

Guaranteed �1000 in his first year

Roy Taylor, 18, alias Vince Eager, �5000 by his fifth year

We thought this would be great, but we ended up with Johnny Gentle

Slight disappointment in the name department there

John Askew - or Johnny Gentle - 22, from Merseyside

Duffy Power, real name Raymond Howard, 17

All - Eager, Power, Gentle, Fury - in the lucrative business, as someone said

of putting teenage growing pains to music

Do you re-christen all your boys?

Larry Parnes Oh yes, I think this is terribly important

Otherwise they would go on the stage with unsuitable names

They wanted a more imaginative name than The Beatles

They came up with Long John Silver and the Beetles and we thought no

It ended up as Long John and the Silver Beetles

We became the Silver Beetles for this tour of Scotland

So we thought, if the name of the group's been changed and he's Long John

We all changed our names but people thought that John didn't - John was cool -

but he was Long John for that tour. He was quite happy to be Long John too

I thought, if he's changing it maybe we all should

We all fancied it, our first foray into professional entertainment

Well, that's what you do, isn't it? You change your name

I became Paul Ramon, for some reason

I thought it was a very exotic French-sounding name

And I was Carl Harrison

It doesn't sound like a stage name now, it's just that I loved Carl Perkins

Stuart became Stuart de Stael

He liked Nicholas de Stael, an abstract expressionist painter

Anyway, that was a pretty pathetic tour. By the end of it we were broke

We had no money, we were all cold, freezing, and just miserable

That was it. We came back to Liverpool and nothing happened really

I felt really sad - we were like orphans or something

Our shoes were full of holes, our trousers were a mess...

Larry Parnes' fella, Johnny Gentle, had this posh suit and stuff

I remember trying to play Won't You Wear My Ring

That's what he was doing - one of those Elvis tunes

And we were crummy, we were really an embarrassment

We didn't have amplifiers or anything

And so I would say to the others when we were all depressed

thinking the group was going nowhere and this is a shitty deal

I'd say "Where are we going, fellas?"

They'd go "To the top, Johnny" in pseudo American voices

I'd say "Where's that, fellas?" "To the toppermost of the poppermost"

I'd say "Right", then we'd all cheer up

Derry and the Seniors got offered a job in London

Give up your jobs and come to London and you're going with Larry, right?

They gave up their jobs and then didn't get a gig

so they were a bit pissed off

They said "We're going to London, we'll get Parnsey and beat him up"

Allan Williams, the club owner who did the audition...

probably the first big groupie of Liverpool, drove them to London

He said bring your instruments, lads, you might get a gig

So he got them a gig in the Two I's in London

This fella, Bruno Koschmider, from a club in Hamburg...

I think it was him, he saw them and booked them to go to Germany

Later he said he wanted another band - we were probably cheap

Allan Williams said OK, lads, you can have this job in Germany

The only problem is he's asked for a 5-piece band

At that point Paul was the drummer because all the drummers didn't show up

So that's where I said "OK, I remember this guy..." and we went up to this club

Pete Best - he had a drum kit for Christmas

He was known on Merseyside as mean, moody and magnificent

We had all sorts of different drummers

Few people owned drum kits. They're expensive

And they were usually idiots

We got Pete Best because we needed a drummer to go to Hamburg

He came down to the Jacaranda Club

We did a quick audition, jumped in the van and went to Hamburg

We ended up in Hamburg very late one night

There was no one there to meet us, but we could find Hamburg off the map

But St Pauli district and the Reeperbahn... but everyone knew

We found the street and the club but it was all closed

We had no hotel or anything and it was now bedtime

We managed to shake up someone from a neighbouring club

They opened the club and we slept in the alcoves on the red leather seats

The second night we moved into the Bambi Kino for 2 or 3 months

I remember Rory Storm and his group coming with Ringo to see us

They arrived a bit later and came to see how the groups were living

They were really shocked

One of us had a Union Jack over us to keep warm

Rory and I were staying in one room in the German Seamen's Mission

That was luxury - absoloute bloody luxury

Before we got to the club, the Kaiserkeller

Howie Casey, sax player from Liverpool

who also played a lot with Paul McCartney later on

They were sleeping for a while in the back of the club

I'll never forget when we arrived they said:

"This is where you live"

Just a couple of old settees and Union Jacks for sheets

We don't want this, we've got suits, we're leaving, blah, blah, blah

So we went to this life of luxury in the German Seamen's Mission

Everything else was such a buzz

In the middle of the naughtiest city in the world at 17 years old

It was exciting

And learning about the gangsters, the transvestites

You know, it was like that - there's the hookers...

We were just kids let off the leash, straight from Liverpool to Hamburg

We were used to little Liverpool girls

but in Hamburg if you got a girlfriend she's likely to be a stripper

The only kind of people who were around late at night there

For someone who'd not really had much sex before, which we hadn't

to be suddenly involved with the sort of hard-core striptease artist

who obviously knew a thing or two about sex, was quite an eye-opener

That was also a point of our lives where we found Dexedrine

Uppers, you know, pills

The only way we could continue was to be on Preludin, they were called

We bought them over the counter so didn't think we were doing anything

But you'd get really wired and go on for days

So with beer and Preludin, that's how we survived

We used to just be up there frothing at the mouth, just stomping away

Those were the days

In Hamburg, 'cos we had to work 6 or 7 hours a night -

on stage, with no rest -

the waiters always had these pills called Preludin

When they saw the musicians falling over with tiredness or drink

they'd give you the pill

You'd take the pill and you'd be talking, you'd sober up

You'd work until the pill wore off, then you'd have to have another

I think that's where we found our style

We developed our style because of this fella who used to say:

"You've got to make a show for the people. Mach Schau"

so we used to Mach Schau and John used to dance round like a gorilla

We'd all knock our heads together and things like that

When we met in Germany, they played one club, we played another

They were just great by then

I used to like... we'd do 12 hours at a weekend between two bands

when we ended up at the same club

If they had the last set, I'd be semi-drunk, demanding slow songs

He used to like the sort of blues feel of the late night sessions

There was hardly anybody there. I could see what he liked about it

We were playing a bit more for ourselves by that time of night

because there was no one in

This was all sort of bluesey - B sides and lesser known tracks

His particular favourite - he always used to request it - was 3.30 Blues

We made friends with a lot of people

Our real friends were the ones known now...

Klaus Voormann

Jurgen Vollmer

and Astrid, who took all the famous photographs of us at that period

They liked all the rock'n'roll stuff, the quiffed back hairdos...

the leather outfits, the shades

They weren't really rockers or mods, they were something in the middle

They called themselves 'exies' - existentialists

They were art students really

Our best work was never recorded

We were performers in Liverpool, Hamburg and round the dance halls

What we generated was fantastic

I was 17 when we first went out there and went to the Indra Club

and then got moved to the Kaiserkeller

That ended up with us getting the gig to go to the Top Ten Club

Right before that happened, I got busted for being under age

They had this situation in Germany I'd never come across before

which was a curfew

After 10 o'clock at night anybody under 18 had to get out

I was only 17, I was in the band and I started getting worried

Eventually somebody found out we didn't have any work permits or visas

so they started closing in on us

The Police came one day and they just booted me out

That was at a critical time because we'd decided -

we'd been offered a job to go to this other club

The Top Ten was the club we were ambitious to play at

It was a slightly better club, it was on the main Reeperbahn

As we were leaving, me and Pete Best were packing up - the last to leave

He found a condom in his luggage

What we did, just for a laugh, outside in the corrider -

concrete, nothing could have caught fire at all -

we pinned it up on the wall and for a boyish prank we set fire to it

So it left a little sort of black rubber stain on the wall

That was like "Right, we're going, hey hey, on to better things"

The fella wasn't pleased we were going to the new club anyway

because we were taking all our business, all his business

So he rang the police and we were just walking down the Reeperbahn

We were put in jail for about 3 hours - first time in our lives

Bloody hell, a German jail!

The new club owners where we were going to

gave them a bottle of scotch or something and got us out

Well, Paul and Pete got deported

for burning the condom on the wall

So they were back before me, and John got back about two days later

I was really happy, thinking, oh great! That's the supportive nature you see

Stuart stayed there 'cos he decided to get verheiratet with Astrid

We went back when I was 18, we were backing up Tony Sheridan

At that point this fella came into the club

They said he's a famous producer and musician, Bert Kaempfert

His claim to fame was he had a number 1 hit in America

Not only was he a record producer

but he had a hit in America called Wonderland by Night

It turned out to be a trumpet solo

He came in and this buzz went around "We've got to be really good

"We may get a chance to record" - which we did

He came back and asked us to come in the studio with Sheridan and record

We were all pleased with ourselves

But he just wanted us to back up Sheridan

I remember feeling depressed but we did get to do My Bonnie

While we were out there, we started to see other groups

and started to get a little bit dissatisfied with Pete

I remember him not turning up for gigs and we kept getting Ringo in

Ringo Starr, who changed his name before all of us

He had a beard and was grown up and had a Zephyr Zodiac

which was a very big car in those days

Nobody had this, it was a knock-off probably

Fell off the back of a showroom

Ringo kept sitting in with the band and it seemed like this was it

This happened 3 or 4 times and then that was the end, we were just pals

We'd have a drink after it and then I'd be back with Rory

Around this time Stuart and I got a little bit fraught too

I claim that I was trying to make sure we were musically very good

but this did create a couple of rifts

I could have been more sensitive but who's sensitive at that age

When we first met him he couldn't play at all - when he first got a bass

He learned a few tunes - occasionally it was a bit embarrassing

If it had a lot of changes to it he was... but he knew that too

That's why he was never really at ease being in the band

That's why he left after the gig in Hamburg - to go back to art college

At that point Paul was still playing guitar

I remember saying "One of us is going to be the bass player"

I said I'm not doing it and John wasn't doing it either

He went for it

He became the bass player so then we were a four-piece band

In Liverpool we got quite a few bookings - they thought we were German

They billed us from Hamburg and said "You speak good English"

We went back to Germany. We had a bit more money so bought leather pants

We looked like 4 Gene Vincents, only a bit younger, I think

Back in Liverpool, all the groups were doing this Shadows stuff

The Shadows

That's why we became popular because they couldn't believe it

There were all these dum de dum de dum...

and then suddenly we come on - wild men in leather suits

I think Pete Best said to them

that I'd drive them to the gigs and stuff

I think I got a pound a night, or a pound a gig

Five bob off each of them

They needed transport to get to the Cavern and wherever

We played the Cavern before we ever went to Hamburg, I believe,

in the days when it was a jazz and folk club

I remember playing there and them handing us notes saying:

"Stop playing this music, this is a jazz club"

We were saying "We'd like to do this tune by Leadbelly

"It's called Long Tall Sally"

We'd do it... and finally they kicked us off

The Cavern is their home

Cathy - A Fan from the Cavern Club It's where they first started and where they've played most

I've had a couple of requests to do Kansas City so we'd like to do it

We did well at the Cavern and attracted some big audiences

And the word got around

A kid had gone into Brian's record store and had asked for My Bonnie

He found out that the Beatles were supposed to be a Liverpool band

and were playing the Cavern so he came down to check us out

I remember Bob Wooler, the disc jockey, saying:

"We have a Mr Epstein who owns NEMS Enterprises in here"

Everybody was going "Ooh, wow, big, big deal"

This was quite a new world for me

I was amazed by this sort of dark, smoky...

dank atmosphere with this beat music playing away

Brian Epstein The Beatles were then just four lads on that rather dimly lit stage

somewhat ill-clad

Their presentation left a little to be desired as far as I was concerned

I'd been interested in the theatre and acting for a long time

but amongst all that, something tremendous came over

I was immediately struck by their music

their beat and sense of humour on stage

Even when I met them I was struck again by their personal charm

It was there that really it all started

Brian had this shop. And it was good - we used to pick up records

He wanted to manage us and we weren't going anywhere anyway

We said you might as well. He got us jobs, he got us a bit more money

then started getting us radio shows and things like that

Then we got into our suits - he talked us out of the leather suits

It was a bit old hat anyway, all wearing leather gear

and we decided we didn't want to look ridiculous

Often people would laugh

and we didn't want to appear as a gang of idiots

Brian suggested that we just wore ordinary suits

It was later put around that I'd betrayed our heavy leather image

and I wanted us to get suits

but I seem to recall that we all went quite happily

I didn't drag anyone to the tailors, they all went quite happily

We gladly switched into suits

if we were going to get more money, get some more gigs

Brian was a beautiful guy - Brian Epstein

An intuitive, theatrical guy

He knew we had something and he presented us well

I remember we had to drive to London on New Year's Eve

and we did a session for Decca, an audition for Decca

Decca Audition Tape Recorded New Year's Day 1962

When you hear the tape, it's pretty good

It's not great but it's certainly good for then

Dick Rowe, the man who didn't sign us - the head of Decca -

said "Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr Epstein"

So Brian then had this tape which he hawked around

I think somebody in the HMV shop on Oxford Street

knew George Martin and told Brian to go and play the tape to him

and he gave us the audition at Abbey Road

George hadn't done rock'n'roll and we'd never been in a studio

So we learnt a lot together

He had a great musical knowledge and background

They were fairly irreverent, even in those days, which I loved

I like a bit of rebel in people and I liked their sense of humour

After all, that was my main stock-in-trade too

They liked what I'd been doing with Peter Sellers and the Goons

George Martin Record Producer I thought they had tremendous charisma

I knew that that alone would sell them

We did a reasonable audition but he didn't like our drummer

I said to Brian Epstein if... when we do the next session

I won't interfere with you and the Beatles but I'll provide the drummer

We really started to think we needed "the great drummer" in Liverpool

Historically it may look like we did something nasty to Pete

It may have been we could have done it better but the thing was -

as history also shows - Ringo was the member of the band

It's just that he didn't enter the film until that particular scene

It was a Wednesday and Brian called

I don't remember John calling, although it's in somebody's book

"Would you join the band?"

I said "What do you mean?" and he said "Really join the band"

I said "Sure, yeah, when?" and he said now

I said "No, I can't do that - we've got these other four guys here

"We'd got a gig for months and I can't just pull out now"

So I said "I'll join you Saturday"

We used to have Saturday off. That's when they changed the campers

So I gave Rory until Saturday to bring someone in for Sunday

which I thought was giving him a hell of a lot of time, and that was it

We played the Cavern - there was a lot of fighting and shouting

Half of them hated me, half of them loved me

A few people shouted "Ringo never, Pete Best for ever"

After about half an hour I said "Oh, bugger off", and stepped out...

The Cavern had three tunnels

We stepped out of what was the dressing room into this dark tunnel

and some guy butted me right in the eye

That was a bad day - and then I got hit by a bus

George fought for me

At this midday session at the Cavern we proudly present the Beatles

The Cavern Club 22nd August 1962

We want Pete!

When Ringo came to the session for the first time

nobody told me he was coming

I'd booked Andy White and told Brian Epstein I was doing this

I said I just want the three others

Ringo expected to play and I said, "No, I've been bitten once

"I don't even know who you are. We're having Andy White"

I was devastated. I came down ready to roll

and..."We've got Andy White, the professional drummer"

But he's apologised several times since, has old George Martin

But it was devastating and then we did that, which Andy plays on

Then we did the album, which I play on

So Andy wasn't doing anything so great

Well, nothing I couldn't copy when we did the album

Ringo bears those scars to this day

He says "You didn't let me play, did you?"

Their first record, Love Me Do sold 100000 copies

It came to the charts in two days and everybody thought it was a fiddle

because our Manager's stores send in these record returns

Everybody down south thought he was buying them himself

or fiddling the charts - but he wasn't

It was bought by the kids. We had a big following

Who'd had a record? Arthur Askey was the last, I think, from Liverpool

It got to 17 within the following weeks

I don't recall what happened to it then, it probably just died off

but the next time we went to EMI they were really more friendly

"Oh, hello lads, come in"

It was quite normal in those days to find material for artists

by going to Tin Pan Alley and listening to all the publishers' wares

That was a regular part of my life. I'd spend ages looking for songs

And for the Beatles I was really looking for a hit song

It didn't matter so long as it suited the group

Love Me Do was the best one they were able to offer

I found the kind of song I was looking for - one by Mitch Murray

called How Do You Do lt? and I was convinced this was a hit song

It wasn't the most marvellous song I'd ever heard in my life

but it had that essential element to appeal to a lot of people

and we did record it - John took the lead

George said "If you want a number 1 song, this is it"

We said "Yeah, but we can't go back to Liverpool singing that

"We cannot be seen with that song"

So we never issued it

I gave it to Gerry and the Pacemakers and it did become number 1

George Martin asked if we'd anything we'd like to do

We'd got a song called Please Please Me

John had just written it, a slow Roy Orbison kind of thing

"Come on, please please me." Big note at the end, just like Orbison

I'd heard him doing Only The Lonely and I was trying to..."Please Me"

and I was always intrigued by the words of...

"Please lend your little ears to my pleas," a Bing Crosby song

I was always intrigued by the double use of the word 'please'

And I said, OK. Let's try your song, let's see if it works

At the end of the session I was able to say to them:

"You've got your first number 1. Great!"

Bob Wooler got on the stage, telegram in hand: "I've got news for you"

He looked terrible, we thought something disastrous had happened

"Please Please Me has reached number 1 in the national charts"

The lads themselves just stopped and looked at him

They thought he was joking - he must have been

Lots of people who didn't know the Beatles started cheering and clapping

Three rows of girls at the front all started crying

It was a terrible night

We knew then, they'll get famous and go away

They won't belong to us no more

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