The Beatles in Hamburg

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Beatles in Hamburg is a story that begins not with fame, but with a storeroom next to a cinema toilet, a bucket of cold water, and a Nazi salute delivered for laughs to an audience that barely spoke English. John Lennon later said, "I might have been born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg." That single line tells you everything about what these years meant. From August 1960 to December 1962, the original five-piece lineup of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe, and Pete Best played clubs in Hamburg, West Germany, that no one with good sense would voluntarily enter. What did they find there? A city rebuilt from wartime rubble, still raw and violent, where the only way to survive on stage was to play so well the gangsters liked you. How did a booking in a Hamburg strip-club district turn five Liverpool teenagers into the band that would change popular music? That is what this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The City They Arrived In

  ›

  Hamburg in 1943 had half its buildings reduced to rubble by American and British bombing raids. By 1960, when the Beatles arrived, the city had rebuilt itself into something prosperous but brutal. It was wealthy compared to the economically depressed Liverpool the group had left behind. But it was also a city with a reputation throughout Europe for vice and criminal activity.

  Tony Sheridan, a British musician already working the Hamburg clubs, described what those early years felt like for outsiders arriving in Germany so soon after the war. His parents, he recalled, "went wild" when they heard he was going. "I broke my mother's heart by coming to Germany... to the enemy... to play rock and roll music." Only fifteen years had passed since England and Germany had been at war with each other. The young people filling the Hamburg nightclubs carried that weight in their bones.

  Sheridan described the clientele bluntly. The wartime children, he said, had psychological problems and were "very aggressive". He recalled standing on the Kaiserkeller stage one night while somebody was being killed on the floor below him. He covered his eyes and kept playing. His explanation for why musicians survived such environments was direct: "Even the bad people like music, even the gangsters they like music, so we had everybody on our side."

  The district at the centre of all this was the Reeperbahn and the Grosse Freiheit, lit up with neon signs advertising the clubs. Harrison, who was only 17 when he first arrived, called Hamburg "the naughtiest city in the world". He also called it "our apprenticeship, learning how to play in front of people."

• 3. Getting There

  ›

  Allan Williams, a 29-year-old Liverpool businessman and promoter, had already sent one group to Hamburg. Derry and the Seniors were doing well there, and Williams wanted to send another act. He tried Rory Storm and the Hurricanes first, but they were committed to a Butlins holiday camp. Gerry and the Pacemakers turned him down too. Williams had begun promoting concerts for the Beatles in May 1960, after they played his Jacaranda club in Liverpool, and he offered them the Hamburg bookings.

  The group had no permanent drummer, so McCartney went looking for one. Lennon later explained the difficulty: a set of drums was expensive, and drummers were "few and far between". Harrison had seen Pete Best playing with the Black Jacks at the Casbah Coffee Club, which was run by Best's mother, Mona Best. Best was regarded as a steady drummer, and was known among female fans at the time as being "mean, moody, and magnificent". McCartney asked Best to join, offering him £15 per week. Best had passed his school exams and had the option of teacher-training college, unlike Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison, who had failed most of theirs. He decided Hamburg was the better career move.

  Best auditioned at the Jacaranda on the 15th of August 1960. Williams later admitted the audition was a formality; they had found no other drummer willing to travel to Germany. He did not tell Best this, in case Best asked for more money. The following day, Best travelled to Hamburg as a member of the group.

  The entire party set off in Williams' Austin J4 minibus: all five Beatles, Williams and his wife Beryl, her brother Barry Chang, a figure known as "Lord Woodbine", and Koschmider's translator Georg Sterner. Ten people in a minivan. Williams had not obtained German work permits, so they were detained at Harwich for five hours. He convinced the authorities they were students on holiday. The van was loaded by crane onto a ferry at Harwich on the 16th of August 1960, landing at Hook of Holland.

• 4. The Indra and the Kaiserkeller

  ›

  The Beatles arrived in Hamburg very early in the morning of the 17th of August 1960. The Indra Club at 64 Grosse Freiheit was closed when they got there, so a manager from a neighbouring club found someone to open it. The group slept on the red leather seats in the alcoves and played their first show that same night.

  Their accommodation was a storeroom at the Bambi Kino cinema at 33 Paul-Roosen-Strasse, next to the ladies' toilet. McCartney recalled: "We lived backstage in the Bambi Kino, next to the toilets, and you could always smell them. The room had been an old storeroom, and there were just concrete walls and nothing else. No heat, no wallpaper, not a lick of paint; and two sets of bunk beds, with not very much covers - Union Jack flags - we were frozen." Lennon's description was more direct: "We were put in this pigsty. We were living in a toilet." The group used cold water from the urinals for washing and shaving. They were paid £2.50 each a day, seven days a week.

  After complaints about the noise forced the Indra to close, the Beatles moved to the Kaiserkeller at 36 Grosse Freiheit, starting on the 4th of October 1960. There, the club's owner, Bruno Koschmider, would march to the front of the stage and shout "Mach Schau, mach Schau!" - make a show. Harrison recalled this prompted Lennon to "dance around like a gorilla" while the others knocked their heads together. The playing schedule remained the same: hours on end, every night.

  The club's bouncer was Horst Fascher, born in Hamburg in 1936, who had been the 1959 West German featherweight boxing champion until he unintentionally killed a sailor in a street fight. Fascher became a friend and protector of the Beatles, shielding them from drunken audience members who occasionally threw beer bottles at the stage. His brother, Fred Fascher, sang "Be Bop A Lula" with the group, while Horst sang "Hallelujah I Love Her So" with them.

• 5. Preludin and the Long Hours

  ›

  Playing eight hours a night, seven nights a week, required stamina the Beatles did not naturally possess. Their introduction to Preludin, a stimulant drug also known as "Prellies", came through Tony Sheridan, who offered them the tablets with a simple explanation: "Here's something to keep you awake."

  Preludin was a successor to the wartime stimulant Pervitin. Taken with beer, it produced euphoria and kept users awake until the early hours of the morning. Harrison later said the whole group would be "frothing at the mouth" and sometimes stayed awake for days. Lennon described the routine calmly: "The waiters always had these pills, so when they saw the musicians falling over with tiredness or drink, they'd give you the pill. You could work almost endlessly until the pill wore off, and then you'd have another." McCartney said he usually took one. Lennon often took four or five.

  Astrid Kirchherr also supplied Sutcliffe and the other Beatles with Preludin. Legitimate use required a doctor's prescription, but Kirchherr's mother obtained the drug from a local chemist who supplied it without asking questions. The supply was not limited to Preludin alone: Ringo Starr later explained that Dexedrine was also widely available in Hamburg, valued for producing wakefulness and focus while reducing fatigue and appetite.

  Brian Epstein later asked the Star-Club owner, Manfred Weissleder, not to publish photographs showing the group playing with tubes of Preludin. Epstein also asked Liverpool journalist Bill Harry not to publish photos showing Lennon walking along the Reeperbahn in his underpants, an incident that arose when Fascher discovered Lennon had gone missing from a performance and was found in the toilet with a woman. Fascher drenched them both with cold water and ordered Lennon onto the stage. Lennon walked out wearing only underpants, with a toilet seat around his neck, and the audience roared.

• 6. Astrid and Stuart

  ›

  Astrid Kirchherr, Klaus Voormann, and Jurgen Vollmer first heard the Beatles play at the Kaiserkeller. Voormann had stumbled upon the club alone; Kirchherr, then 22 years old, was initially horrified at the idea of going to such a district. Voormann kept returning on his own until he finally persuaded her to come. The three had previously listened to trad jazz, the Platters, and Nat King Cole. Rock and roll was entirely new to them.

  Kirchherr later described her first sight of the group: "It was like a merry-go-round in my head, they looked absolutely astonishing. My whole life changed in a couple of minutes." Sutcliffe, described by McCartney as a "typical art student" with bad skin and pimples, had gained a reputation on stage by wearing tight trousers and dark Ray-Ban sunglasses. His best moment on stage was singing "Love Me Tender". According to journalist Bill Harry, when Kirchherr walked into a room, every head turned her way. Sutcliffe wrote to a friend that he could hardly take his eyes off her when she first walked into the club. She and Sutcliffe were engaged in November 1960.

  Kirchherr is widely credited with creating the Beatles' moptop haircut, though she personally disputed this. In 1995, she told BBC Radio Merseyside that the hairstyle had belonged to her boyfriend Klaus Voormann first. Sutcliffe was the first Beatle to adopt it, asking Kirchherr to cut his hair for him. Pete Best's very curly hair meant, as Kirchherr noted, "it doesn't work" for him.

  Sutcliffe left the Beatles to continue his art studies and stay with Kirchherr, and enrolled at the Hamburg College of Art under the artist Eduardo Paolozzi. After suffering blackouts and intense headaches, he was taken to hospital on the 10th of April 1962; Kirchherr rode with him in the ambulance. He died before the ambulance reached the hospital. Three days later, Kirchherr met the Beatles at Hamburg airport and told them Sutcliffe had died of a brain haemorrhage. The group had arrived to open the Star-Club.

• 7. The Recording and Brian Epstein

  ›

  On the 22nd of June 1961, Tony Sheridan and the Beatles drove roughly thirty minutes south of Hamburg to the Friedrich-Ebert-Halle in Hamburg-Harburg. The session was organised by Bert Kaempfert, a bandleader who signed the group to a one-year Polydor contract that day. They were paid 330 Deutschmarks, which was approximately $75, for the recording. Further sessions followed on the 23rd of June and in May 1962.

  On the 31st of October 1961, Polydor released the single "My Bonnie" in West Germany. It appeared on the charts under the name "Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers", a generic label Polydor applied to whoever made up Sheridan's backing group. McCartney later explained: "They didn't like our name and said, 'Change to the Beat Brothers, this is more understandable for the German audience.' We went along with it... it was a record." The song was released in the UK on the 5th of January 1962.

  It was this recording that brought the Beatles to the attention of Brian Epstein. The session that would eventually reach Epstein began, notably, with a slightly different lineup: Best was away buying drumsticks when Williams arranged a recording session on the 15th of October 1960 at the Akustik Studio in the Klockmann-House at 57 Kirchenallee. Ringo Starr, then drumming with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, filled in. Three songs were recorded: "Fever", "September Song", and "Summertime". It was the first time Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr recorded together.

• 8. What Hamburg Made

  ›

  Sutcliffe wrote a letter to his mother from Hamburg saying the group had "improved a thousand-fold" since arriving, and that Allan Williams had told them there was no group in Liverpool to touch them. Chas Newby, who substituted for Sutcliffe at a Casbah Coffee Club show on the 17th of December 1960, was struck by how powerful the group sounded after the Hamburg residency. He was particularly struck by Best's drumming, which McCartney had encouraged by repeatedly telling Best to "crank it up" during their time there.

  Tony Sheridan offered a close observer's explanation of what the Hamburg experience actually produced. The musicians had started by copying records, reproducing songs exactly. A few of them, including Sheridan, wanted something different. They began inserting unexpected chords, and deliberately played every song a different way each night. A song like "What'd I Say" could run for fifteen minutes, with room for invention inside it. Sheridan put it plainly: "We discovered that you can make something original and authentic out of an old song by doing your own thing." The Beatles played "What'd I Say" once for ninety minutes non-stop, with group members walking off stage to wash and drink before returning.

  McCartney recalled the shift in how other musicians regarded them: "We got better and better and other groups started coming to watch us. The accolade of accolades was when Tony Sheridan would come in from the Top Ten, or when Rory Storm or Ringo Starr would hang around to watch us."

  Portions of the Beatles' final Hamburg performances at the Star-Club in late 1962 were captured on a portable recorder by an associate of Ted "King Size" Taylor of the Dominoes. Those tapes were released on West Germany's Bellaphon label in 1977 as The Beatles: Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany; 1962. In 2008, Hamburg opened Beatles-Platz at the junction of Reeperbahn and Grosse Freiheit, a memorial square containing five stainless steel sculptures of the group, with construction costs of €550,000. Because the band members are shown only in outline, the drummer figure could be either Pete Best or Ringo Starr.