Pete Best

• 1. Introduction

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  Pete Best was the drummer for the Beatles from 1960 to 1962, fired ten weeks after the group's first EMI recording session, just before the band became famous across the world. He is one of several people known as a fifth Beatle. The questions that follow are not simple ones. Was he a bad drummer or a convenient scapegoat? Was jealousy involved? And how does a man rebuild a life after being cut loose from one of the most consequential bands in history, without warning, by a manager who could not bring himself to say the real reason why?

• 2. The House at Haymans Green

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  Pete Best was born on the 24th of November 1941 in Madras, then part of British India. His biological father, marine engineer Donald Peter Scanland, died during World War II. His mother, Mona, had been training to become a doctor in the service of the Red Cross when she met Johnny Best, a commissioned officer and the Army's middleweight boxing champion, serving in India. The family sailed for four weeks to Liverpool on the Georgic, the last troop ship to leave India, docking on the 25th of December 1945.

  In 1957, Mona's son Rory spotted a large Victorian house for sale at 8 Haymans Green. Family lore holds that Mona had pawned all her jewellery to bet on Never Say Die, ridden by Lester Piggott in the 1954 Epsom Derby, and the horse won at 33-1. She saved the winnings and bought the house. Built around 1860, it had 15 bedrooms and an acre of land, with all rooms painted dark green or brown and a large overgrown garden.

  Mona converted the cellar into the Casbah Coffee Club, an idea that came from Pete himself, who asked his mother for somewhere his friends could meet and listen to popular music. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ken Brown played there as the Quarrymen after helping Mona finish painting the walls. The club was where the Beatles first encountered Pete Best as a drummer, watching him play with his own group, the Black Jacks, pushing the rhythm with a steady bass drum on all four beats in the bar.

• 3. Hamburg and the Making of a Beatle

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  On the 12th of August 1960, the Beatles invited Best to join them on the eve of their first Hamburg season. The booking was arranged by manager Allan Williams, starting on the 17th of August 1960. McCartney persuaded Best to make the trip by promising each member would earn £15 a week. Best had passed his school exams, unlike Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison, who had failed most of theirs, and had a genuine choice between Hamburg and teacher-training college. Williams later admitted that the audition at the Jacaranda Club was unnecessary, since no other drummer had agreed to travel, but he kept that from Best in case Best asked for more money.

  The Beatles played their first complete show with Best on the 17th of August 1960 at the Indra Club. Best remembered it as a depressing venue, patronised by a few tourists and hung with heavy red curtains. The group slept in a small, cold room behind the cinema screen at the Bambi Kino. While Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Stuart Sutcliffe were introduced to Preludin to stay awake through hours of playing, Best always refused. Lennon sometimes took four or five pills. Best preferred to play in short sleeves rather than the leather jackets the others adopted, a small but noted divergence from the group's look.

  Things soured with club owner Bruno Koschmider in October 1960, when the group left to play at the Top Ten Club for better pay and better sleeping conditions, breaking their contract. McCartney found a condom in the darkened Bambi Kino, lit it against the wall as a parting gesture, and Koschmider reported both McCartney and Best for attempted arson. They spent three hours in a local jail and were deported on the 30th of November 1960, alongside Harrison, for working under the legal age limit.

  Back in Liverpool, Neil Aspinall hand-painted the first physical Beatles logo on a 22-inch bass drum skin for Best's kit. It never made it onto the stage because it did not fit Best's 20-inch Premier bass drum. The skin sat undiscovered for over 25 years, eventually found by his brother Roag, and is now displayed at the Liverpool Beatles Museum.

• 4. The Recording Question

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  On New Year's Day 1962, Brian Epstein, who had been unofficially managing the Beatles for less than a month, arranged a recording audition at Decca Records in London. The group recorded 15 songs, mostly covers plus three Lennon-McCartney originals. Decca rejected the group a month later, and, notably, all band members except Best were told. Epstein officially became the Beatles' manager on the 24th of January 1962, with the contract signed in Best's house.

  EMI producer George Martin met Epstein on the 9th of May 1962 at the Abbey Road studios and agreed to sign the Beatles based on the Decca audition tape alone, having never seen them perform. On the 6th of June 1962, the Beatles performed a commercial evaluation in Studio Two. Martin found Best's timing inadequate. EMI engineer Norman Smith said, in a 2006 video interview, that the problem was "mainly down to what he was playing and not how he was playing" when "Love Me Do" was first recorded. Martin told Epstein plainly that he would use a session drummer for the recordings, a common practice at the time. He said, in his own words: "I decided that the drums, which are really the backbone of a good rock group, didn't give the boys enough support. They needed a good solid beat."

• 5. The Dismissal

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  Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison could not bring themselves to fire Best directly. They asked Epstein to do it. Epstein was not convinced Martin's assessment was the real issue. In his autobiography, A Cellarful of Noise, he wrote that he "wasn't sure" about Martin's view and "was not anxious to change the membership of the Beatles at a time when they were developing as personalities." Liverpool DJ Bob Wooler, whom Epstein consulted, advised against the dismissal, noting that Best was extremely popular with fans. Part of Epstein's dilemma was that Best was a draw at live shows, ensuring venues would have solid audiences. Epstein had also kept Best in the dark about the EMI recording contract, which had been orally agreed since June 1962 and signed in writing at the end of July.

  Best played his last two gigs with the Beatles on the 15th of August at the Cavern Club, Liverpool. Epstein summoned him and dismissed him on Thursday the 16th of August, ten weeks and a day after the first recording session. Epstein asked Best to play gigs on the 16th and the 17th of August at the Riverpark Ballroom in Chester. Best agreed and then changed his mind and did not turn up. Johnny Hutchinson of the Big Three was brought in as a substitute.

  Neil Aspinall was waiting for Best downstairs in Epstein's NEMS record shop after the meeting. The two went to the Grapes pub on Mathew Street, the same street as the Cavern. Aspinall was furious and insisted he would resign from the Beatles. Best strongly advised him to stay with the group. At the Riverpark Ballroom, Aspinall asked Lennon directly why they had fired Best. Lennon replied, "It's got nothing to do with you; you're only the driver."

  Fans were not quiet about their feelings. Some shouted, "Pete forever, Ringo never." One agitated fan headbutted Harrison at the Cavern, giving him a black eye. When Ringo Starr joined the band for his second EMI session on the 11th of September 1962, Martin brought in session drummer Andy White for the whole session regardless, having already booked White after the first session with Best. Starr played the tambourine while White played the drums. Starr recalled later thinking, "That's the end. They're pulling a Pete Best on me."

• 6. Why He Was Really Fired

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  The drumming critique was only one explanation for Best's departure, and his bandmates offered multiple others. Lennon was blunt in retrospect: "We were pretty sick of Pete Best, too, because he was a lousy drummer, you know? He never improved." McCartney described Best as "good, but a bit limited" and said that when Martin raised the issue, the group's private reaction was that "Pete had never quite been like the rest of us. We were the wacky trio, and Pete was perhaps a little more sensible."

  Astrid Kirchherr, the German photographer who befriended the group in Hamburg, documented the separation more concretely. When she photographed the Beatles at the Heiligengeistfeld, Best chose not to attend the session at her mother's house in Altona in the afternoon. McCartney's then-girlfriend, Dot Rhone, described Best as very quiet and disengaged from group conversations. Harrison later admitted, "I was quite responsible for stirring things up. I conspired to get Ringo in for good; I talked to Paul and John until they came round to the idea."

  Best's popularity was itself a source of friction. In a Mersey Beat issue dated the 31st of August 1961, journalist Bob Wooler singled Best out for praise, calling him "mean, moody magnificence" and comparing him to actor Jeff Chandler. During a Teenagers' Turn showcase in Manchester, the other three members walked onstage to applause, but when Best appeared, the girls screamed. Afterwards, female fans surrounded Best at the stage door while the others were ignored after signing a few autographs. McCartney's father, Jim, admonished Best directly: "Why did you have to attract all the attention? Why didn't you call the other lads back? I think that was very selfish of you."

  Biographer Mark Lewisohn put it plainly: "Despite his alleged shortcomings, it was still shabby treatment for Pete... The Beatles had had two years in which to dismiss him but hadn't done so, and now he was out." Best himself, on Late Night with David Letterman, said the real reason was "jealousy."

• 7. Life After the Band

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  Best did not land softly. Epstein offered him a spot as drummer with the Mersey Beats; Best, distraught, turned it down. He sat at home for two weeks, not wanting to face anyone. On the 25th of September 1962, Best's solicitor sent a demand letter threatening to sue for wrongful dismissal. Epstein's response argued that Best had lacked the necessary talent and had left voluntarily. The next management contract, signed by Starr, included a provision allowing dismissal at the request of Epstein and at least two other members. It was never invoked.

  In 1965, a Playboy interview published in February included Lennon saying, "Ringo used to fill in sometimes if our drummer was ill. With his periodic illness." Starr added, "He took little pills to make him ill." Best sued for defamation of character and settled out of court for far less than the $18 million he had originally sought. He attempted suicide in the 1960s; his mother Mona and his brother Rory stopped him.

  Best married Kathy, a Woolworths sales clerk he met at an early Beatles show, in 1963. They have two daughters and four grandchildren and have remained married. He did shift work loading bread into delivery vans, earning £8 a week, before using his education qualifications to become a civil servant at the Garston Jobcentre in Liverpool, eventually rising to training manager for the Northwest of England. He spent 20 years in that role. Later he served as a technical advisor for the television film Birth of the Beatles and began giving interviews about his time with the group.

  In 1995, the surviving Beatles released Anthology 1, which featured ten tracks with Best on drums, including songs from the Decca and Parlophone auditions. Best received between £1 million and £4 million from sales. According to writer Philip Norman, the first time Best knew about the royalties was a phone call he received from Paul McCartney, the first time the two had spoken since the dismissal. McCartney told him, "Some wrongs need to be righted. There's some money here that's owing to you and you can take it or leave it." Best took it. Though Best himself disputes who actually made the call, telling The Irish Times that it was Neil Aspinall, not McCartney. The Anthology 1 cover collage included an early group photo featuring Best, but his head was replaced with a cropped image of Ringo Starr. A small photograph of Best remains visible on the left side of the cover.

• 8. Return and Recognition

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  In 1988, after 20 years of refusing all requests to play drums in public, Best performed at a Beatles convention in Liverpool alongside his brother Roag. His wife and mother both told him afterwards, "You don't know it, but you're going to go back into show business." The Pete Best Band's album Haymans Green, composed entirely of original material, was released on the 16th of September 2008 in the United States, the 24th of October 2008 worldwide, and the 27th of October 2008 in the United Kingdom.

  On the 6th of July 2007, Best was inducted into the All You Need Is Liverpool Music Hall of Fame as the debut Charter Member. On the 25th of July 2011, Liverpool announced that two new streets would be named Pete Best Drive and Casbah Close. On the 3rd of November 2025, a main belt asteroid was named in his honour.

  On the 5th of April 2025, Best abruptly announced his retirement from public appearances and performing, citing personal circumstances, ending a run with the Pete Best Band that had stretched from 1988 to 2025. His brother Roag, who shared drumming duties with him, was born in 1962 to Mona and Neil Aspinall, the same road manager whom Best had urged to stay with the Beatles on the day he was fired.