Allan Williams

• 1. Introduction

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  Allan Richard Williams was the man who drove the Beatles to Hamburg. On the 15th of August 1960, he loaded a Morris J2 van with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Pete Best, and Stuart Sutcliffe, added his wife Beryl, her brother Berry Chang, and a musician named Lord Woodbine, and pointed the vehicle toward West Germany. When Brian Epstein later came asking about the band, Williams delivered one of the most quoted lines in rock history: "Brian, don't touch them with a fucking bargepole." Epstein ignored the advice, and the rest is well-known. Williams's own story, though, is less familiar. Who was the man behind that van? What brought a Bootle-born coffee-bar owner into the orbit of the most famous band in history? And what happened to him after he stepped away from the group that made everyone else's fortune?

• 2. From Bootle to the Boards

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  Williams was born on the 21st of February 1930 on Knowsley Road in Bootle. His father, Richard Edward Williams, worked as a local council building inspector and also promoted dances, a combination that planted seeds of both practicality and showmanship in the household. His mother Annie Cheetham died when Williams was very young, and his father remarried a woman named Millie Twigg. The family grew to include a half-sister, Olwyn, born in 1937, and a half-brother, Graham, born in 1938.

  Williams traced a strand of his ancestry back to Owen Williams, known in Welsh as Owain Gwyrfai, a Caernarfonshire millwright who was also a poet and a pioneer lexicographer in the Welsh language. That lineage of people who worked with their hands and also cared about words sits, in retrospect, as a quiet irony for a man who would become both a venue operator and a memoirist.

  In his mid-teens, Williams left home to sing with Joe Loss in the Isle of Man. He later performed with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. At some point he also tried to sell Blackpool rock in Spain, a venture that hints at a restless appetite for opportunity wherever it might be found.

  In 1955, Williams married Beryl Chang, a schoolteacher born in Liverpool to Chinese immigrants. The mixed-race marriage attracted verbal abuse from people in the area, a hostility the couple absorbed without retreating from the city they both called home.

• 3. The Jacaranda and Its Circle

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  Inspired by London's 2i's Coffee Bar, Williams leased a former watch-repair shop at 21-23 Slater Street in Liverpool in 1958 and converted it into a venue he called the Jacaranda. Its position near Liverpool Art College and a local art supplies shop drew in the city's young beatniks and art students, and the place quickly became a gathering point for a particular generation of Liverpudlians.

  Williams commissioned two art students, Stuart Sutcliffe and Rod Murray, to paint murals in the club's basement. Their classmate John Lennon began attending regularly. Paul McCartney and George Harrison came through less frequently, but all three future Beatles found their way there. Williams offered live music from the start, booking Lord Woodbine's Royal Caribbean Steel Band and, later, local rock and roll acts such as Cass and the Cassanovas.

  In 1960, Williams expanded his ambitions. He backed Lord Woodbine's strip club, the Cabaret Artists Social Club, in Liverpool. He and Woodbine traveled to Hamburg in late January 1960 and met Bruno Koschmider, the owner of the Kaiserkeller Club. That meeting proved consequential. By coincidence, Williams and Koschmider ran into each other again in July at the very London coffee bar that had first inspired the Jacaranda. They arranged on the spot for Derry and the Seniors to perform in Hamburg, opening a pipeline between Liverpool and the German port city that would soon carry the Beatles.

  On the 1st of December 1960, Williams opened the Top Ten Club on Liverpool's Soho Street, borrowing the name from a Hamburg venue that Liverpool acts had made their own. He installed Bob Wooler as the DJ. The club burned down a week later due to an electricity overload. The Blue Angel, a nightclub Williams had been planning since spring 1960, eventually opened in March 1962, but these competing projects kept him perpetually stretched.

• 4. Larry Parnes and the Liverpool Stage

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  In March 1960, Williams attended a Liverpool Empire concert featuring Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. The show galvanized him. He approached promoter Larry Parnes and they agreed to co-host an event on the 3rd of May featuring both American stars alongside a lineup of Liverpool rock acts, including Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, which at that time included a drummer named Ringo Starr, and Gerry and the Pacemakers.

  Eddie Cochran died in a car crash less than three weeks before the concert. Vincent and the Liverpool acts performed as planned, and the show became a landmark moment for the local scene. It also locked in a working relationship between Williams and Parnes that ran for several productive months.

  The partnership gave Williams a new function: supplying Parnes with backing groups for solo singers. It was in this capacity that the Beatles, already regulars at the Jacaranda, pressed Williams for opportunities in May 1960. He helped them find a temporary drummer in Tommy Moore and booked them for an audition with Parnes. Parnes liked them well enough to ask the band to back a singer named Johnny Gentle on a tour of Scotland in late May 1960.

  Between May and August 1960, Williams kept the bookings coming. Rod Murray, the art student who had painted murals at the Jacaranda, later reflected that without Williams, the Beatles would not have got anywhere. One booking stands out for its absurdity: the group was hired to back a local stripper named Janice, but when she discovered they did not know the "Gypsy Fire Dance", they substituted a rendition of the Harry Lime theme tune. Williams also booked Jerry Lee Lewis in May 1962 to perform with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes at New Brighton Tower Ballroom, showing that his reach extended well beyond any single act.

• 5. Hamburg and Its Consequences

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  Around the 8th of August 1960, Bruno Koschmider contacted Williams asking for another Liverpool act to fill his Indra Club. Williams approached several other groups first, and only then turned to the Beatles. They agreed. The band was still without a permanent drummer, and on the 13th of August they held an audition at one of Williams's clubs, recruiting Pete Best that same day.

  Two days later, Williams began the road and ferry journey in his Morris J2 van. By the early morning hours of the 17th of August, the party arrived in Hamburg. The Hamburg residency gave the Beatles the extended live performance experience they needed. Williams earned a 10% commission on the groups' payments from Koschmider, a modest share of what the arrangement was generating.

  In late September, Williams and Koschmider arranged for the Beatles and Rory Storm and the Hurricanes to perform together at the Kaiserkeller. The two Liverpool groups were sharing the same stage in Hamburg at the same moment, a concentration of talent that the city's audiences received without any sense of the history being made.

  The Beatles returned from Hamburg in December 1960 just as Williams's own world was collapsing around him. The Top Ten Club had burned down. The Blue Angel was still months from opening. Williams stepped back from rock management and asked Bob Wooler to take over the Beatles' day-to-day affairs. He still helped McCartney and Pete Best fight deportation orders from the German government so the band could return for a spring 1961 residency, a detail that tends to get lost in the larger story.

• 6. The Break and the Bargepole

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  When the band returned to Hamburg in late March 1961 for their Top Ten Club residency, Stuart Sutcliffe stayed behind. The remaining Beatles refused to pay Williams his 10% commission. They cited unhappiness with German tax deductions from their weekly pay. Williams threatened to have the residency terminated and to report their conduct to the Agency Members Association, which could have cut them off from professional management in the UK. He acted on neither threat.

  By July 1961, Williams escalated to a legal threat, seeking 104 pounds from the band. The Beatles hired a solicitor. Williams let the action lapse by December without pursuing it further. The financial falling-out left a sour note on an otherwise formative relationship.

  In December 1961, Brian Epstein came to Williams asking about the Beatles. Williams told him, with memorable directness, "Brian, don't touch them with a fucking bargepole." He eventually lifted the ban he had placed on the Beatles entering the Blue Angel, and years later the two sides spoke warmly about each other. Paul McCartney described Williams in The Beatles Anthology as "a great guy".

  Williams never managed a group that matched the Beatles' trajectory. But the city that grew up around the music they helped create remained his home, and the conventions and festivals that sprang from that legacy gave him a continuing platform for decades.

• 7. A Life Alongside the Legend

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  In the 1970s, Williams played a central role in producing the first Beatles conventions to be staged in Liverpool, events that grew into the annual Beatle Week Festivals where he became a perennial VIP guest. In 1975, he published a memoir titled The Man Who Gave the Beatles Away, and John Lennon endorsed it. Williams recovered a tape of the Beatles performing in Hamburg on New Year's Eve of 1962-63, which was released in 1977 as Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany; 1962. The tapes were rereleased and bootlegged multiple times under different titles on budget labels.

  In 1999, a micro-budget film called All Those Years Ago, produced by Shotmaker Productions and largely based on Williams's own recollections, was released. Williams was initially sympathetic to the project. By the time he wrote his second book, A Fool on the Hill, his view had reversed entirely. He described the filmmakers as deceitful and the film itself as "utter rubbish".

  An Irish playwright named Ronan Wilmot adapted Williams's story into a musical also titled The Man Who Gave the Beatles Away, performed at the New Theatre in Dublin in 2002. Williams gave an extended interview in the 1982 documentary The Compleat Beatles. He carried on speaking at Beatles conventions from Liverpool to Singapore and South America.

  In the early to mid 1980s, Williams ran a stall at the entrance to Camden Market in London, selling old brassware including taps and accessories. The Jacaranda, the coffee bar where it had all begun, reopened under new management in the mid-1990s and hosted gigs for Liverpool's Sound City music festival in the years that followed.

  On the 9th of May 2016, Liverpool City Council made Williams a Citizen of Honour of the City of Liverpool at a ceremony in Liverpool Town Hall, recognising his services to the local music scene. He died in Liverpool on the 30th of December 2016, at the age of 86. In 2024, the British biographical film Midas Man, about Brian Epstein's life, cast Eddie Izzard in the role of Williams.