Klaus Voormann

• 1. Introduction

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  Klaus Voormann was standing in a Hamburg doorway on an ordinary evening in the early 1960s when the course of his life changed entirely. He had just walked away from an argument, wandered down the Reeperbahn in the St. Pauli district, and heard music drifting from the Kaiserkeller club. Inside, a band called Rory Storm and the Hurricanes was performing. Then the next group took the stage, and Voormann was left, by his own account, speechless. He had never heard rock 'n' roll before. He had grown up on traditional jazz, Nat King Cole, and the Platters. What he heard that night was the Beatles.

  The questions that first night raises are the ones this documentary will follow. How did a Berlin-born graphic artist become so embedded in the inner circle of the most celebrated band of the twentieth century that John Lennon once told an interviewer he would be the man to play with the former Beatles if they ever performed live again? How did the same person design the cover art for Revolver, the Grammy-winning sleeve that is still studied in art schools, while also playing bass on albums by Lennon, Harrison, and Starr across the better part of a decade? And what drew Lennon, in his very first moments of meeting this stranger with a crumpled record sleeve, to point him toward Stu Sutcliffe as a kindred spirit?

• 2. Berlin to Hamburg

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  Klaus Otto Wilhelm Voormann was born in Berlin on the 29th of April 1938, the son of a physician, and grew up in the suburbs of north Berlin as one of six brothers. The family had strong currents of art, classical music, and books running through it, alongside what Voormann would later describe as a feeling for history and tradition. His parents decided that instead of pursuing music formally, Klaus should train in commercial art.

  He enrolled at the Meisterschule fur Grafik und Buchgewerbe in Berlin, then relocated to Hamburg to continue at the Meisterschule fur Gestaltung. Before he finished that course, however, he had already left formal education behind and spent eight months working in Dusseldorf as a commercial artist and illustrator for magazines. He later discussed his dyslexia in an interview for the programme Talking Germany, broadcast in July 2010, a candid admission that added context to a career built entirely on images and sound rather than words.

  In Hamburg, Voormann met Astrid Kirchherr, and the two entered a relationship. He lived around the corner from her family's upper-class home in the Altona district. Kirchherr's bedroom, furnished entirely in black including the walls and furniture, had been decorated specifically for him. That detail alone gives a measure of how seriously they took each other before the Beatles entered the picture.

• 3. The Kaiserkeller Night

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  St. Pauli was not a comfortable place for people who looked unusual. The district was known for prostitution and illicit behavior, and anyone whose appearance marked them as outsiders risked violence from the regulars. When Voormann, Kirchherr, and their friend Jurgen Vollmer appeared at the Kaiserkeller in suede coats, wool sweaters, jeans, and round-toed shoes, they stood apart sharply from the Teddy boys around them in greased-back hair and black leather.

  During a break in the music, Voormann approached John Lennon and pressed into his hands a crumpled record sleeve he had designed himself. Lennon barely glanced at it, and directed him instead to Stu Sutcliffe, saying Sutcliffe was the artist around there. Sutcliffe found the trio fascinating, describing them privately as looking like real bohemians. He wrote that he had barely been able to take his eyes off them and had wanted to speak during the next break, but they had already gone. When Sutcliffe eventually met them, he learned that all three had attended the Meisterschule fur Mode, Hamburg's equivalent of the Liverpool art college he and Lennon had themselves attended. Lennon coined a nickname for the trio: the Exies, a joke at their expense about their enthusiasm for existentialism.

  Voormann and Kirchherr's romantic relationship became platonic after Kirchherr began seeing Sutcliffe, who was drawn to her. She remained, as Voormann has said, a close friend throughout. The three art students had arrived as outsiders and left as part of the Beatles' circle.

• 4. Living With the Beatles

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  When Voormann decided to leave Germany and move to London in the early 1960s, George Harrison invited him to take a room in the Green Street flat in Mayfair that all four Beatles had previously shared. Lennon had moved out to live with his wife Cynthia, and McCartney had taken the attic room in the home of the parents of his girlfriend Jane Asher. Voormann moved in and lived alongside Harrison and Ringo Starr before eventually finding his own apartment.

  He returned to Hamburg in 1963 and founded a band called Paddy, Klaus and Gibson, with Paddy Chambers on guitar and vocals, Voormann on bass and vocals, and Gibson Kemp on drums. Then in 1965 he was back in London, and Lennon asked him to design the sleeve for the upcoming Beatles album. Voormann had in mind what he called a scrapbook collage approach. The resulting cover for Revolver won the Grammy Award for Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts. Years later, in 2016, Voormann created a graphic novel based on his experiences working on that design, titled Revolver 50: Birth of an Icon.

  On the 29th of November 1965, Voormann secretly married his first wife, Christine Hargreaves, a British actress, at Hampstead Register Office in London. The marriage lasted five years before the couple separated in 1971. While not yet legally separated, he moved out of their home to live at George and Olivia Harrison's Friar Park estate in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire.

• 5. Bass for the Former Beatles

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  After the Beatles disbanded, rumours circulated that they might reform under the name the Ladders, with Voormann taking Paul McCartney's place on bass. The plan came to nothing, but the lineup of Voormann, Lennon, Harrison, and Starr, joined by Billy Preston, did come together to record Starr's 1973 song "I'm the Greatest".

  In 1971, Lennon told an interviewer directly that if any of the former Beatles had ideas about playing a live show, Klaus would be their man. That endorsement matched what actually happened across the early-to-mid 1970s. Voormann played bass on Lennon's albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band in 1970, Imagine in 1971, Some Time in New York City in 1972, Walls and Bridges in 1974, and Rock 'n' Roll in 1975. He appeared on Harrison's All Things Must Pass in 1970, Living in the Material World in 1973, Dark Horse in 1974, and Extra Texture in 1975. With Starr, he played on Ringo in 1973, Goodnight Vienna in 1974, and Ringo's Rotogravure in 1976, also designing the album sleeve and booklet artwork for Ringo.

  He had already been part of the Plastic Ono Band with Lennon, Yoko Ono, Alan White, and Eric Clapton, playing on Live Peace in Toronto 1969, recorded in Toronto on the 13th of September that year. At Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh in August 1971, Harrison introduced him to the audience by saying: "There's somebody on bass who many people have heard about, but they've never actually seen him - Klaus Voormann."

• 6. Manfred Mann and Session Work

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  In 1966, Voormann joined Manfred Mann, having turned down offers from the Hollies and the Moody Blues, though he did substitute for Eric Haydock on a couple of television appearances with the Hollies. He played bass and flutes for Manfred Mann from 1966 to 1969, appearing on all their UK hits from "Just Like a Woman" in July 1966 through to their final single "Ragamuffin Man" in April 1969, including the 1968 international hit "The Mighty Quinn". His own account of the negotiations with these groups is in his autobiography, titled in German Warum spielst Du Imagine nicht auf dem weißen Klavier, John? and in English Why Don't You Play "Imagine" on the White Piano, John?

  After leaving Manfred Mann, Voormann moved to Los Angeles in 1971 and established himself as a session bassist. His credits from that period include Lou Reed's Transformer in 1972, multiple albums with Carly Simon including No Secrets that same year, and numerous albums with Harry Nilsson across the 1970s. He also contributed bass to Joe Yamanaka's 1977 album To the New World. The breadth of that session work, spanning rock, pop, and singer-songwriter recordings across a wide range of labels, explains why Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh introduction landed as it did: many listeners had heard Voormann's playing without knowing his name or face.

  During his time designing album art alongside the music, Voormann also created the cover for the Bee Gees' 1967 debut album Bee Gees 1st, featuring a colourful psychedelic collage with all five group members above it, and the cover for the American edition of their 1968 album Idea.

• 7. Return, Trio, and Later Work

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  Voormann moved back to Germany in 1979, and the following year had a cameo role as Von Schnitzel the Conductor in the 1980 film adaptation of Popeye. He then produced three studio albums and a live album for the German band Trio, along with their worldwide hit single "Da Da Da". After Trio broke up in 1986, he produced the first solo album by their singer Stephan Remmler and played bass on some of its tracks, and the year after that produced a single by former Trio drummer Peter Behrens.

  Voormann retired from the music business in 1989 and settled at Lake Starnberg, near Munich, with his second wife Christina Harrison and their two children, born in 1989 and 1991. Six years later, in 1995, Apple Records asked him to design the covers for The Beatles Anthology albums. He painted those covers alongside fellow artist Alfons Kiefer.

  On the 29th of November 2002, Voormann played bass on "All Things Must Pass" at the Concert for George at London's Royal Albert Hall. In an interview with author Simon Leng, he described Harrison as not only a really great guitarist but the best friend he ever had. In 2009, he released his debut solo album A Sideman's Journey, credited to Voormann and Friends, featuring McCartney, Starr, Yusuf Islam, Dr. John, Van Dyke Parks, Joe Walsh, and Jim Keltner, among others. The album came available in audio CDs, vinyl LPs, and deluxe box sets with original signed graphics by Voormann, and included new versions of songs including "My Sweet Lord", "All Things Must Pass", and Bob Dylan's "Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)". A 90-minute documentary about the sessions, All You Need is Klaus, was released on the Franco-German network ARTE on the 30th of June 2010.