Tony Sheridan

• 1. Introduction

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  Tony Sheridan was born Anthony Esmond Sheridan McGinnity on the 21st of May 1940 in Norwich, Norfolk, and he holds a distinction that even most devoted Beatles fans overlook. Of all the musicians who ever appeared on a record alongside John, Paul, George, and the rotating cast of early Beatles drummers, only two non-Beatles ever received label performance credit on a Beatles record. One was Billy Preston. The other was Tony Sheridan. And Sheridan goes further: he is the only non-Beatle to appear as lead singer on a Beatles recording that charted as a single. That record nearly wasn't released at all. The man who produced it thought Sheridan was the star, not the band backing him. Who was the English guitarist who spent most of his adult life in Germany, earned an honorary captaincy in the United States Army, survived shellings in Vietnam, and once co-wrote a song with Paul McCartney that would not see its first studio recording for more than four decades?

• 2. Norfolk to Soho

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  Sheridan grew up at 2 Hansell Road in Thorpe St Andrew, a suburb of Norwich, and his earliest musical influence was not rock and roll. His parents, Alphonsus McGinnity and Audrey Mann, had an interest in classical music, and by age seven Sheridan was playing violin. He had a leading role in the school production of The Mikado in 1951 and played in the orchestra. Guitar came later, and in 1956 he formed his first skiffle band and played at the Red Lion pub in Norwich. By 1958, only two years after picking up the skiffle style, Sheridan and Kenny Packwood were appearing live on the Oh Boy! television show made by ABC.

  His time at The 2i's Coffee Bar in London's Soho placed him at the centre of British rock and roll. Backing singers such as Gene Vincent and Conway Twitty while they toured England, Sheridan was good enough that Johnny Foster tried to recruit him for Cliff Richard's backing band, the group that would soon become the Shadows. Foster couldn't find Sheridan at the 2i's that day, so he hired another guitarist who happened to be there: Hank Marvin. In 1959, Sheridan played the guitar solo on Cherry Wainer's studio recording of "The Happy Organ". The following year he toured the UK with Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. On the 16th of April, Vincent and Cochran turned down Sheridan's request to share their car; that car later crashed, killing Cochran.

• 3. Hamburg and the Beatles

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  Sheridan had a reputation for showing up late and without his guitar, and his professional standing in England fell. When Bruno Koschmider's Kaiserkeller club in Hamburg, West Germany, sent out an offer for an English group, Sheridan joined an ad hoc band called the Jets and crossed the Channel. Between 1960 and 1963, he worked with a series of pickup bands in Hamburg, drawing on whatever musicians were available rather than holding a fixed lineup.

  The Beatles met Sheridan during their first Hamburg visit in 1960, and the relationship deepened during their second. By 1961, the Beatles, then comprising John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe, and Pete Best, were backing Sheridan on some nights while Sheridan returned the favour by joining their sets on guitar. Ringo Starr played briefly in Sheridan's backing band in early 1962 before returning to Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Starr was reportedly dissatisfied with Sheridan's habit of performing songs without having rehearsed them with the band, a complaint other musicians also made, along with objections to Sheridan's penchant for fist-fights. The Beatles visited Sheridan's home in Norwich on the 17th of May 1963, holding jam sessions in the back garden.

• 4. The Polydor Sessions

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  German Polydor producer and A&R man Bert Kaempfert had his eye on Sheridan, not the Beatles. When a colleague of Kaempfert's saw Sheridan and the Beatles on stage together, the suggestion came to record them. Kaempfert's production company signed the Beatles to play on Sheridan's records, with a contractual guarantee that Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Best would play on a minimum of two songs. The sessions ran over two days in June 1961, producing nine tracks in total. Seven were for Sheridan: "My Bonnie", "The Saints", "Why", "Nobody's Child", "If You Love Me, Baby (Take Out Some Insurance on Me Baby)", "Sweet Georgia Brown", and "Swanee River". The Beatles recorded two tracks without Sheridan: "Ain't She Sweet" and "Cry for a Shadow", formerly titled "Beatle Bop".

  At various points during those sessions, the band backing Sheridan was reduced to only two Beatles, McCartney and Best. Lennon's rhythm guitar appears only on the two Beatles tracks, though his handclaps and background vocals are audible on Sheridan's material. The session produced the observation that Sheridan lacked much originality and that his performances mostly channelled Elvis. Kaempfert's confidence in Sheridan's star potential was strong enough that Polydor deliberately held back the two Beatles-only tracks for release much later.

  The first single, "My Bonnie" backed with "The Saints", reached number 5 in the German chart in 1962. Polydor chose not to credit the Beatles by name on the album My Bonnie, which was released across West Germany that same year. The word "Beatles" was judged to sound too similar to the Hamburg dialect word "Pidels", a slang term for penis, so the record was credited to "Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers". After the Beatles became famous, a UK re-release corrected the credit to "Tony Sheridan and the Beatles". In America, the record appeared on Decca in both a black label pressing and a pink demo label. The black label version in mint condition sold for $15,000 in 2007; the pink label for $3,000.

• 5. Vietnam and Its Aftermath

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  By 1967, Sheridan had grown disillusioned with the fame his Beatle connection brought him. His concerns had shifted toward the Vietnam War, and he agreed to perform for Allied troops. While in Vietnam, the band he had assembled came under fire, and one member was killed. For his work entertaining the troops, Sheridan was made an honorary Captain of the United States Army. The repeated shellings he endured left him with a lasting sensitivity to the sound of explosions.

  The experience reshaped him personally and musically. A drift away from rock and roll had already been signalled before Vietnam: liner notes for his 1964 album Just a Little Bit of Tony Sheridan listed his preferences as "jazz and classical" rather than rock, and expressed his desire to travel to the southern United States to hear blues and spiritual music at first hand. Polydor continued releasing singles with German producer Jimmy Bowien through 1967 but only ever put out two albums by Sheridan. His song "Indochina", recorded at the Opus 3 Studio in Sweden in 2007, directly addressed his experience performing for US soldiers in Vietnam.

• 6. Later Life and Legacies

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  With his Polydor contract finished, Sheridan moved through several chapters. In the early 1970s, he recorded as a pop duo with Carole Bell and the two toured Europe together. The mid-1970s saw him hosting a West German radio programme devoted to blues, which was well received. He recorded a live album of early rock classics that had been part of his and the young Beatles' live repertoire but had never appeared on record.

  In 1978, a US record producer heard Sheridan's early Polydor recordings and flew him to Los Angeles to cut a studio album. Elvis Presley's TCB Band was hired for the sessions, along with bassist Klaus Voormann, a former Hamburg friend. The album mixed rock classics and country tunes but landed no major label deal, going instead to direct TV sales. That same year, the Star Club in Hamburg reopened and Sheridan performed there again with the TCB Band. The prospect of a Las Vegas career came and went.

  In 2002, the Argentine rock musician Charly Garcia recorded Sheridan singing and playing guitar on the song "I'm Not in Love" for the album Influencia. On the 13th of August 2002, Bear Family Records released Vagabond, a set of mostly original, reflective ballads that sat far from his Hamburg rock and roll. The song "Tell Me If You Can", co-written with Paul McCartney during their time together in Hamburg, finally received its first studio recording in 2005, at Abbey Road Studios, more than four decades after it was written. Sheridan travelled to the Opus 3 Studio in Sweden in 2007 to record three sung tracks, which were held and released posthumously as part of the album Tony Sheridan and Opus 3 Artists in 2018.

  In a 2010 radio documentary, Sheridan spoke about his mother leaving him in an orphanage as a child without explanation, describing the moment of watching her walk away while he held onto the crib railings: "In those five minutes, I lost my mother forever, definitely, definitely, definitely. Not just my mum, she was taking the love with her as well." He traced the pattern of failed relationships throughout his adult life back to that rupture. He became a devotee of the guru Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh and lived at the Rajneeshpuram commune in Oregon in the 1980s. In the last years of his life, he lived in Seestermühe, a village north of Hamburg, where he pursued a secondary interest in heraldry and designed coats of arms. Tony Sheridan died on the 16th of February 2013 in Hamburg, following heart surgery. A biography titled The Teacher, written by his childhood friend and Norfolk author Alan Mann, was published that same year.