Bill Harry

• 1. Introduction

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  Bill Harry was born on the 17th of September 1938 at Smithdown Road Hospital in Liverpool, and by the time he was in his early twenties he had done something no one else had managed: he gave the Liverpool music scene a voice. That voice reached 75,000 readers a fortnight and helped introduce the Beatles to the person who would change their lives forever. But the story of how a boy from the docklands became the man who connected John Lennon to Brian Epstein is not a simple rise-to-fame tale. It runs through a torpedoed merchant ship in the Atlantic Ocean, a candlelit house with no electricity, a fanzine printed on a borrowed machine, and a tiny attic office above a wine merchant's shop on Renshaw Street. Who was Bill Harry, and how did a local newspaper nobody wanted to fund end up reshaping British music?

• 2. A Liverpool Childhood

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  Harry's father, John Jelicoe Harry, died on the 14th of December 1940, aged 25, when the SS Kyleglen, a British Steam Merchant ship, was torpedoed in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean by a German U-boat. None of the crew survived. Harry was two years old.

  With his father gone, Harry grew up poor in a rough neighbourhood near Liverpool's dockyards. At St. Vincent's Institute, he had to endure regular corporal punishment from priests. Because of his small stature, he was beaten by classmates, once kicked in the appendix and, in his own account, left for dead. His mother moved him to another school.

  With no electricity in the house, Harry read comics by candlelight. He developed a passion for science fiction and joined the Liverpool Science Fiction Society. At 13, he produced a science fiction fanzine called Biped, printing 60 copies on a Gestetner machine. His pen friend at the time was Michael Moorcock, who would go on to become a noted writer of science fiction and fantasy. A scholarship then took Harry to the Junior School of Art in Gambier Terrace, where he started his first school newspaper, Premier. The boy who had been left for dead in a schoolyard was already building a publishing habit.

• 3. Art College and Lennon

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  At 16, Harry obtained a place at Liverpool's College of Art at 68 Hope Street. He studied typography and page layouts, and in 1958 he borrowed the college's duplicating machine to publish a newspaper called Jazz, which covered concerts at the Liverpool Jazz Society club, the Temple Jazz Club and the Cavern Club.

  At the art college, one teacher and artist, Arthur Ballard, later said that Harry and Stuart Sutcliffe both overshadowed John Lennon at college, describing both of them as extremely well educated and very eager for information. Lennon dressed like a Teddy boy and was a disruptive influence, which initially shocked Harry. Despite his misgivings, Harry introduced Lennon to Sutcliffe, a small, softly-spoken and shy student who had already painted a portrait of Harry. The three often spent time together at the Cracke pub in Rice Street.

  Harry organised a students' film society where he screened Orphee by Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dali, and Luis Bunuel's L'Age d'Or. He eventually received a National Diploma in design and became the first student enrolled in the new Graphic Design course, winning a Senior City Art Scholarship. He also worked as assistant editor on the University of Liverpool's charity magazine, Pantosphinx, and produced a music newsletter for Frank Hessy's musical instruments store, a title that the owner, Frank Hesselberg, called Frank Comments as a play on his own name, though it was abandoned after a few issues. In June 1960, Harry, Lennon, Sutcliffe and Rod Murray attended a poetry reading by Royston Ellis at Liverpool University. Disappointed with the performance, Harry proposed that the four of them call themselves the Dissenters and make Liverpool famous: Sutcliffe and Murray through painting, Harry through writing, and Lennon through music.

• 4. Finding the Beat

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  A fellow student, John Ashcroft, introduced Harry to rock and roll records and to members of local groups including Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and Cass and the Cassanovas. Harry began carrying notebooks everywhere, collecting information on the local groups. He wrote to the Daily Mail comparing Liverpool to New Orleans at the turn of the century, and to the Liverpool Echo about the emerging music scene. Neither paper was interested.

  The Liverpool Echo ran classified ads for local groups under the heading of Jazz and refused to change that policy despite repeated pressure from promoters and groups who paid for those ads. Harry planned a jazz newspaper called Storyville/52nd Street and approached Sam Leach, the owner of a club called Storyville, who promised funding but failed to show up for three successive meetings. With that avenue closed, Harry settled on a different idea: a fortnightly newspaper devoted entirely to Liverpool's rock and roll scene, something that would differ from national titles like the New Musical Express and the Melody Maker, which he felt only covered chart acts.

  Harry also met his future wife, Virginia Sowry, at the Jacaranda club, which was managed by Allan Williams, the first manager of the Beatles. Virginia was 16 at the time. She agreed to help him start the newspaper, and that partnership would prove as important to Mersey Beat as any journalistic decision Harry made.

• 5. Building Mersey Beat

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  Photographer Dick Matthews, a friend from the Jacaranda, heard about Harry's failed negotiations with Leach and introduced him to a local civil servant named Jim Anderson, who lent Harry £50. On the 6th of July 1961, the first issue of Mersey Beat appeared. All 5,000 copies sold out within a short time.

  Virginia gave up her accountancy and comptometer operator job at Woolworth's and worked full-time for £2.10 a week, contributing a column called Mersey Roundabout. Harry lived on his Senior City Art Scholarship funding. Anderson found a small attic office for £5 a week above David Land's wine merchant's shop at 81a Renshaw Street, supplying a desk, a chair and an Olivetti typewriter. Because photographic printing blocks were too expensive, Harry borrowed them from printer James E. James, from the Widnes Weekly News, from Pantosphinx and from local cinemas. He personally delivered copies to more than 20 newsagents as well as to venues, instrument shops and record stores including Cramer and Lea, Rushworth and Draper and Cranes. Three major wholesalers, W.H. Smith, Blackburn's and Conlan's, also distributed the paper.

  After taking Virginia home to Bowring Park in the evenings, Harry would often return to the office and work through the night, pausing only to go to the Pier Head at four in the morning for a cup of tea and a hot pie. As circulation grew to 75,000, the paper became known as the Teenagers Bible. Local groups started being called beat groups, and venues advertised concerts as Beat Sessions. Harry later described Mersey Beat as a paper crammed with photos and information about groups that young readers cared about, at a time when newspapers, television, theatres and radio were all run by people of a different generation who had no idea what youngsters wanted.

• 6. The Groups and the Poll

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  Between 1958 and 1964, the Merseyside area had around 500 different groups forming and breaking up, with an average of about 350 playing concerts regularly. In 1961, Harry and the Cavern Club's DJ, Bob Wooler, compiled a list of groups they had personally heard of, which ran to almost 300 names.

  In 1962, Mersey Beat held a poll to find the most popular Merseyside group. When counting the postal votes, Harry noticed that forty of them were written in green ink, in the same handwriting, and from the same area of Liverpool. He declared those votes void. The suspicion fell on Rory Storm himself, who had initially led the count. What Harry did not know at the time was that the Beatles and other groups had done exactly the same thing.

  The results were announced on the 4th of January 1962, with the Beatles taking first place. Issue 13 of Mersey Beat carried the front page headline: Beatles Top Poll! The popularity of the results reached Rushworth's music store, whose manager, Bob Hobbs, presented Lennon and George Harrison with new guitars.

  Harry also played an unplanned role in naming one of the most famous British performers of that era. He asked a local singer, Priscilla White, to contribute a fashion column after he had written an article called Swinging Cilla. In the piece, he wrote that Cilla Black was a Liverpool girl starting out on the road to fame. He had confused her surname, knowing only that it was a colour. White chose to keep the stage name Harry had accidentally given her. Two years later Harry arranged for her to sing for Epstein at the Blue Angel club, which led to a management contract.

• 7. Harry, Lennon and Epstein

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  Lennon asked Harry to write a short history of the Beatles for the first issue of Mersey Beat. Harry published it under the title Being a Short Diversion on the Dubious Origins of Beatles, Translated From the John Lennon. The piece began: Many people ask what are Beatles? Why Beatles? Ugh, Beatles? How did the name arrive? So we will tell you. It came in a vision, a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them, From this day on you are Beatles with an 'A'. Thank you Mister Man, they said, thanking him. And so they were Beatles. Lennon was grateful that Harry printed the piece unedited. He later gave Harry a collection of approximately 250 drawings, poems and stories, telling Harry he could publish whatever he liked, under the pseudonym Beatcomber, a name taken from a Daily Express column called Beachcomber.

  Harry was the person who introduced Brian Epstein to Mersey Beat. He persuaded Epstein to stock 12 copies of the first issue at his North End Music Stores, which sold out in a single day. After selling 144 copies of the second issue, Epstein invited Harry for a glass of sherry and proposed writing a record review column. It appeared in the third issue on the 3rd of August 1961, under the title Stop the World, And Listen To Everything in It: Brian Epstein of NEMS.

  When the Beatles were due to perform a lunchtime concert at the Cavern Club on the 9th of November 1961, Harry arranged for Epstein and his assistant Alistair Taylor to enter without queuing. Harry phoned the club's owner, Ray McFall, who instructed doorman Pat Delaney to let them in. The Cavern's DJ, Bob Wooler, announced Epstein's presence over the public-address system that afternoon. Harry and Paul McCartney later disputed the popular account that it was a single customer's request that had made Epstein curious about the group, with McCartney pointing out that the Beatles had appeared on the front page of the second issue of Mersey Beat.

  Once Epstein secured a recording contract with EMI, he sent Harry a telegram from London to announce the news at the Mersey Beat office.

• 8. After Mersey Beat

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  On the 13th of September 1964, Epstein approached Harry about creating a national music paper. Harry coined the name Music Echo and began merging Mersey Beat into it. Epstein had promised full editorial control, but then hired a female press officer in London to write a fashion column and a DJ to write a gossip column without telling Harry. Harry resigned. The paper ran into financial problems and was eventually merged with another publication, becoming the Disc and Music Echo.

  When Harry and Virginia moved to London in 1966, he was already writing a column for the magazine Weekend and for the teen magazines Marilyn and Valentine. He became feature writer, news editor and columnist for Record Mirror, writing under pseudonyms including Brenda Tarry and David Berglas, and contributed to Music Now under the name Nick Blaine for Record Retailer. He was hired by Rediffusion as programme assistant for the documentary Beat City, and worked in the same capacity for the BBC's Everyman documentary about Lennon, A Day in the Life, and for The Story of Mersey Beat.

  Over the following 18 years Harry worked as a public relations officer for a wide range of artists, among them Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Procol Harum, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, the Beach Boys, Mott the Hoople, Supertramp, Hot Chocolate, Suzi Quatro and Kim Wilde. He started a monthly magazine called Tracks covering album releases and another called Idols: 20th Century Legends, which ran for 37 issues between 1988 and 1991. In 1994, the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors presented him with a gold award for a Lifetime Achievement in Music. By that point he had written or co-written books ranging from Mersey Beat: The Beginnings of the Beatles in 1978 to The Ultimate Beatles Encyclopedia, published by Hyperion Books in 1994, and he would continue adding to that catalogue with encyclopedias devoted to Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Ringo Starr through the early 2000s. Mersey Beat itself returned to publication in August 2009 with a 24-page special issue to celebrate Liverpool International Beatle Week.