Howard Sounes - Fab - An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney

*When James approached retirement in 2006, and his pension fund wasn’t as healthy as he’d hoped, he asked Paul to authenticate the Rex as the guitar he’d learned on, and with that endorsement he sold the instrument at auction for an astonishing £333,000 ($509,490).

*Julia later had other children by other men.

CHAPTER 3 HAMBURG

MACH SCHAU!

The 760-mile drive from Liverpool to Hamburg took Paul and his friends more than 24 hours, driving south through England, catching a ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland, then travelling east to the border of what was then the Federal Republic of West Germany, where the boys had to pretend to be students, because they didn’t have work permits, before pushing on to their final destination.

Like Liverpool, Hamburg is a northern port on a river, the Elbe, which flows into the North Sea; and, like Liverpool again, Hamburg was bombed heavily during the Second World War, worse hit than Merseyside in fact, one devastating night of British bombing killing 42,000 people. Bearing in mind the history it is surprising how well treated the Beatles were in Hamburg only 15 years after the war. Equally remarkable is the fact that, despite being on the losing side in that recent war, Hamburg had been almost completely rebuilt by 1960, part of the Wirtschaftswunder , or economic miracle, that saw a defeated Germany rise again as the richest nation in Europe. Indeed, Hamburg already presented a more prosperous face than Liverpool.

The boys arrived after dark on Wednesday 17 August 1960, leaning out of the windows of Allan Williams’s van to ask directions to the Reeperbahn, a road which everybody could point them towards. This most infamous of Hamburg streets lies a couple of miles east of the Hauptbahnhof, parallel with the docks in St Pauli, a neighbourhood renowned for uninhibited night-time entertainment. Men flocked here then as now to drink, eat and have sex, sex being treated more candidly in Germany than in England. Indeed, much that was and remains illegal in the UK, notably prostitution, was and remains legitimate in the red light district of Hamburg. Regulated and sanctioned by the authorities, whorehouses, sex cinemas, pornographic bookshops and lewd clubs lined the Reeperbahn and its tributary streets, such as Herbertstrasse, where hookers sat in brothel windows touting for trade. Amazing sights though these were for the boys, there was also a familiar vulgarity to St Pauli, putting Paul in mind of the Lancashire resort of Blackpool, ‘but with strip clubs’.

Their van turned off the Reeperbahn into Grosse Freiheit, a side street the name of which translates as the Big Freedom. The street was lit up with lurid signs advertising sex, beer and music. They parked outside the Kaiserkeller, Bruno Koschmider’s underground club: a big old joint fitted out with a nautical theme, like an underwater world. Derry and the Seniors were on stage, blasting out rhythm and blues to an audience of enthusiastic Germans, including Horst Fascher, a former featherweight boxer who’d served time for accidentally killing a man in a fight and now worked as a pimp. Horst spent much of his free time in the Kaiserkeller listening to rock ’n’ roll. Hearing that a new group had just arrived from England, Horst rushed upstairs to greet them, finding ‘five tired guys’ in a van, rubbing the grime from the windows with their elbows as they peered out at this new world. Horst, or Horsti as Paul called him, became firm friends with the boys, a pal and protector in the rough-and-tumble world of St Pauli.

The reality of their engagement came home to the Beatles the next day when Koschmider informed the band that they weren’t playing the Kaiserkeller, but a smaller place he owned up the street, a former strip joint named the Indra which he wanted to turn into a club catering to the new rock ’n’ roll craze. The Indra had the dimensions and charm of a large shoebox, closed in by a low ceiling and fitted out with whorehouse-red booths. Further disappointment came when the boys were shown their digs. Further up the same road, on the corner of Paul-Roosen-Strasse, was the Bambi Kino, a fleapit cinema also owned by Koschmider. The Beatles were to be accommodated in the windowless back rooms, without proper toilet facilities or even hooks to hang up their clothes. They might have been forgiven if they had turned around and gone home to Liverpool, but with the tolerance of youth the boys unpacked and made the best of it, beginning their Indra residency almost immediately.

The regime at the Indra was punishing, even slightly mad. The Beatles were contracted to play every night, starting in the early evening, a total of four and a half hours in the week and six on Saturdays and Sundays, which meant they worked into the early hours of the following morning. Even with 15-minute breaks between sets these were musical marathons. Essentially the Beatles were playing to attract customers who would spend money on drink, but the Indra’s patrons seemed disappointed at first that the strippers had been replaced by five amateurish English boys – more or less fresh out of school – dressed in silly, lilac-coloured jackets (made by Paul’s neighbour), performing a limited repertoire of songs with the tentativeness of beginners. ‘When the Beatles came they knew about 15 songs,’ recalls Rosi Haitmann, one of Koschmider’s barmaids. It was hardly enough to fill half an hour, let alone four and a half hours, yet the Beatles somehow managed to play nightly at the Indra for the next seven weeks, during which time they enlarged their set. Then, after 48 nights of this apprenticeship, Koschmider closed the Indra, because of complaints from neighbours about noise, and moved the Beatles down to the Kaiserkeller to replace Derry and the Seniors.

In a bigger room, the Beatles’ lack of experience became more apparent. Koschmider grumbled to Allan Williams, who wrote to the boys advising them to put on more of a show. Koschmider picked up on this advice, barking encouragement in German: ‘Mach Schau! Mach Schau!’

Over-worked, over-tired, and now taunted by their German boss, the Beatles turned Koschmider’s order into a joke, yelling ‘Mach Schau!’ in parody of the impresario as they threw themselves into an increasingly madcap performance at the Kaiserkeller. Paul hollered in uninhibited imitation of Little Richard, while John became a character from the Goons , singing comic songs, using funny voices, saying any outrageous thing that popped into his head, sometimes pretending to fight the others on stage. The crazier John became, the more the crowd liked it. Lennon went further, wearing a toilet seat round his neck, also Nazi insignia he’d bought from an antique shop, even shrieking ‘Sieg Heil!’ at the audience, which was forbidden in post-war Germany. The audiences loved it all, sending up beer and cheap champagne, which the boys guzzled greedily, though their favourite drink was Scotch and Coke, which remains Paul’s tipple.

To stay awake during these seemingly endless gigs, the boys started taking Preludin, an over-the-counter slimming aid which had an effect similar to that of amphetamines. They consumed the pills recklessly, quickly building up a tolerance. ‘I took half of one once,’ says former Kaiserkeller barmaid Ruth Lallemann. ‘I know they put like ten in a bottle, smashed them all up with Coke, and then they share it between them. So they were right away! That’s why John Lennon got sometimes so wild.’ Drunk on beer and speeding on pills, the boys played on hour after hour, taking requests from their audience, telling jokes, Lennon lying down under the piano for a nap when he became too exhausted, the others playing on with bemused smiles, pausing to smoke cigarettes, drink and even eat on stage. Pleased with the Beatles’ schau , Koschmider extended their contract.