Jimmie Nicol

• 1. Introduction

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  Jimmie Nicol was resting at home in West London in June 1964 when his telephone rang. He remembered it this way: "I was having a bit of a lie down after lunch when the phone rang." The voice on the line belonged to George Martin, the producer of the Beatles. Nicol was an English drummer, born James George Nicol on the 3rd of August 1939. Within days of that call he would be on stage with the Beatles at the height of Beatlemania. Why did a little-known session player get the call? What did a brief taste of that fame do to him? And where did he go once the crowds had moved on?

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• 2. Session Man

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  In 1957, the manager Larry Parnes spotted Nicol drumming with various bands at The 2i's Coffee Bar in London. Britain's skiffle-dominated music scene was giving way to rock and roll, which Teddy Boy youth were busy popularising. Parnes invited him to join Colin Hicks & The Cabin Boys, a group he co-managed with John Kennedy. Colin Hicks was the younger brother of the entertainer Tommy Steele, who was also managed by Parnes.

  Nicol stepped away briefly to join the original pit band for Lionel Bart's musical Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. He then rejoined Hicks for the 1958 Italian film documentary Europa Di Notte. The film broke the group in Italy, and they went on to tour there extensively.

  By the early 1960s, a well-known session fixer named Charlie Katz kept Nicol in regular work. He played for artists including Vince Eager, Oscar Rabin and Cyril Stapleton. Nicol named drummer Phil Seamen and saxophonist Julian "Cannonball" Adderley as his main influences.

  In 1964, Nicol helped form The Shubdubs with Bob Garner, a former bassist of the Merseybeats. Their jazz line-up resembled Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, with whom Nicol had sat in at London's Flamingo Jazz Club. The Flamingo was then the resident home of that band, and it has since closed. The other Shubdubs were Tony Allen on vocals, Johnny Harris on trumpet, Quincy Davis on tenor saxophone and Roger Coulam on organ. Coulam later went on to form Blue Mink. Harris also had a sideline arranging cheap hit-song imitations, and Nicol was often on the drums.

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• 3. The Call

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  On the 3rd of June 1964, Ringo Starr was taken to hospital with tonsillitis, one day before the Beatles began their Australasian tour. Their manager Brian Epstein and producer George Martin urgently weighed up using a stand-in drummer instead of cancelling part of the tour. Martin suggested Nicol, whom he had recently used on a recording session with Tommy Quickly.

  There was a second reason Nicol fitted. He already knew the Beatles songs, thanks to a budget label called Top Six, run by the Australian businessman Bill Wellings. Nicol belonged to its Ghost Squad, a pool of anonymous session musicians who turned out sound-alike versions of current chart hits. Top Six sold a cash-in album titled Beatlemania, with 12 Beatles songs, for just 14/11d.

  Nicol had also drummed on an extended play single of Beatles covers, marketed as Teenagers Choice and likewise titled Beatlemania. Johnny Harris, the Shubdubs trumpeter, arranged these records with the producer Bill Wellings. Harris explained that his task was to guess which six songs would top the charts a month ahead. He added that "we covered a lot of the Beatles' songs." The first of these EPs reached number 30 in the charts. Nicol was also versatile, able to play rock and roll, jazz, big band, ska and blue beat.

  The real obstacle was George Harrison. John Lennon and Paul McCartney readily accepted a temporary substitute, but Harrison threatened to pull out. He told Epstein and Martin: "If Ringo's not going, then neither am I. You can find two replacements." Martin later said that Harrison "is a very loyal person," and that it took all of Epstein's and his own persuasion to change his mind. Press officer Tony Barrow described Epstein's thinking as choosing the lesser of two evils: upset thousands of fans, or upset the Beatles.

  Starr, lying in hospital, felt the sting. He later said: "it was very strange, them going off without me. They'd taken Jimmie Nicol and I thought they didn't love me any more." Meanwhile everything for Nicol happened in a single day, from the phone call at his West London home to an audition and rehearsal at Abbey Road Studios and then packing his bags.

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• 4. Eight Shows

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  Nicol's first concert with the Beatles came just 27 hours later, on the 4th of June 1964, at the KB Hallen in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was given the distinctive Beatle moptop haircut and put on Starr's suit, which had been altered to fit him. The audience numbered 4,500 Beatles fans. McCartney recalled: "He was sitting up on this rostrum just eyeing up all the women. We'd start 'She Loves You': counting in 'one, two', nothing, 'one, two', and still nothing!" The set shrank from eleven songs to ten, dropping Starr's vocal spot on "I Wanna Be Your Man". McCartney teasingly telegrammed Starr: "Hurry up and get well Ringo, Jimmie is wearing out all your suits."

  At a press conference, a reporter mischievously asked Lennon why Pete Best was not rehired. Best had been the band's drummer for two years before the group dismissed him on the eve of stardom. Lennon replied: "He's got his own group Pete Best & the All Stars, and it might have looked as if we were taking him back, which is not good for him."

  Nicol saw how fickle celebrity could be. He said: "The day before I was a Beatle, girls weren't interested in me at all." After he got the suit and the Beatle cut and rode in the limousine with John and Paul, he recalled, they "were dying to get a touch of me." He called it "very strange and quite scary." He also admitted he had believed he could match the nightlife of the band until he caught up with them. In the Netherlands, he and Lennon allegedly spent an entire night out together.

  In Hong Kong, Nicol discovered he could slip away unnoticed. "I often went out alone," he said. He saw the thousands of people living on little boats in the harbour, met refugees in Kowloon and visited a nightclub. "A Beatle could never really do that," he observed.

  His run totalled eight shows. It ended on the 14th of June 1964, when Starr arrived in Melbourne and rejoined the group.

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• 5. The Fade

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  Early the next morning, Nicol left for Melbourne Airport without saying goodbye, as he did not want to disturb the Beatles' sleep. There Epstein handed him a cheque for £500, worth $14,638 in 2026 money. He also gave him a gold Eterna-matic wrist watch. The inscription thanked "Jimmy" on behalf of the Beatles and Epstein, with appreciation and gratitude.

  George Martin paid tribute, calling Nicol "a very good drummer who came along and learnt Ringo's parts very well." Martin added that he "did the job excellently, and faded into obscurity immediately afterwards." McCartney offered a sympathetic view too. "It wasn't an easy thing for Jimmy to stand in for Ringo, and have all that fame thrust upon him," he said. "And the minute his tenure was over, he wasn't famous any more."

  Nicol himself was bleaker, looking back several years later. "Standing in for Ringo was the worst thing that ever happened to me," he said. He had been "quite happy earning £30 or £40 a week" before it. "After the headlines died, I began dying too."

  In a rare 1987 interview, he explained why he never sold his story. "After the money ran low, I thought of cashing-in in some way or other. But the timing wasn't right. And I didn't want to step on the Beatles' toes. They had been damn good for me and to me." Over the following decades he shied further from media attention, and he never sought money from the connection.

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• 6. Life After

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  Back in England, Nicol reformed the Shubdubs under the name Jimmy Nicol and the Shubdubs. They released two singles: "Husky" backed with "Don't Come Back", and "Humpty Dumpty" backed with "Night Train". Neither sold well. Nicol again stood in for an ailing drummer when Dave Clark of The Dave Clark Five fell ill, and his band filled in for the Five in Blackpool, Lancashire.

  There he was reminded of his brief popularity when an Australian radio disc jockey passed on a bundle of 5,000 fan letters. Nicol sent back a message of thanks and promised that he would one day return to Australia permanently. On the 12th of July 1964, his band shared a bill with the Beatles and The Fourmost at the Hippodrome in Brighton.

  In 1965, Nicol declared bankruptcy with debts of £4,066, nine months after his stint as a temporary Beatle. Paul McCartney saw the news in the Daily Mirror and recommended him to Peter and Gordon, who hired him for a 1965 England tour. Later that year he joined the successful Swedish group the Spotnicks, recording with them and touring the world twice.

  Nicol left the Spotnicks in 1967 and spent time in Mexico. There he formed Los Nicolquinn with Eddie Quinn, and the duo released one album through RCA Records. He also scored the music for the film El Mes Más Cruel. In 1975 he returned to England, left the music business and became involved in housing renovations among other entrepreneurial ventures.

  In 1984, Nicol took part in a Beatles convention in Amsterdam, where he was interviewed. He said he was writing an autobiography, but it has never appeared.

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• 7. Disappearance

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  In 1988, rumours began circulating that Jimmie Nicol had died, and he was presumed dead at the age of 49. A newspaper published in 2005 reported that he was alive and well and living in London.

  In the mid 1990s, Nicol's son Howie became involved in the Beatles Anthology project, working in sound and video production. Howie Nicol is now a BAFTA award-winning sound engineer. Paul McCartney asked whether he might contact Jimmie, and Howie answered with a single word: "No".

  The last confirmed sighting of Nicol was outside his rented first-floor flat in Kentish Town, north London, in the early 2010s.

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• 8. Getting Better

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  During his nearly two weeks with the Beatles, both Lennon and McCartney often checked on Nicol, asking how he was feeling and whether he was coping. His reply was usually "It's getting better".

  In early 1967, McCartney was walking his dog, Martha, with Hunter Davies, who was then writing the only authorised biography of the Beatles. The sun broke through the overcast, and McCartney remarked that the weather was "getting better". He began to laugh, remembering Nicol. That moment inspired the song "Getting Better" on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released later that year.

  In January 1969, during the Let It Be sessions, McCartney mentioned Nicol again. "I think you'll find we're not going abroad 'cause Ringo just said he doesn't want to go abroad. And he put his foot down. So, us and Jimmie Nicol might go abroad."

  In April 2016, Tom Hanks appeared on the radio show Fresh Air, hosted by Terry Gross. He said Nicol's experience with the Beatles had at least partly influenced the script he wrote for the 1996 feature film That Thing You Do!

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