Читать книгу John Lennon: The Life - Philip Norman - Страница 16

The Germans liked it as long as it was loud.

What Liverpool had endured at the time of John’s birth, Hamburg had received back with interest. On the night of 24 July 1943, an Allied ’thousand bomber raid’, code name Operation Gomorrah, dropped 2,300 tons of bombs and incendiaries on this most crucial of Hitler’s ports and industrial centres, unleashing greater destruction in a few hours than Merseyside had known over weeks during the purgatory of 1940. Four nights later, Gomorrah’s cleansers returned, creating a 150-mph firestorm that reduced 8 square miles of the city to ashes and claimed 43,000 civilian lives, more than Britain had lost during the entire Blitz.

Now, only 15 years after the war’s end, with its scars still far from healed, young survivors from that bomb-battered British city were taking music to young survivors of that devastated German one. In its small, unwitting way, it was a notable act of reconciliation that was to bind Liverpool and Hamburg together forever afterward and foreshadow the apolitical youth culture soon to dominate the whole Western world. Though John never thought of it as such, he had embarked on his very first peace campaign.

To deliver Bruno Koschmider’s new employees as cheaply as possible—and being unable to resist any kind of lark—Allan Williams offered to drive them to Hamburg personally. In the end, a party of nine squeezed into Williams’s battered green-and-white Austin van outside the Jacaranda early on 15 August, 1960. Besides John, Paul, George, Stu and new drummer Pete Best, the Welshman took along his wife Beryl, his brother-in-law, Barry Chang, and his West Indian business partner, Lord Woodbine. In London, they picked up an additional passenger, a German waiter named Georg Steiner, who had also been hired by Koschmider. The van was not like a modern minibus with rows of seats, but a bare metal shell: those in its rear had nowhere to sit but on the piled-up stage equipment and baggage.

The two-day journey was fraught with problems that somehow only Liverpudlians could have created and only Liverpudlians had the resilience and humour to endure. At Harwich, whence they were to cross the North Sea to the Hook of Holland, dock workers initially refused to load the grotesquely overloaded vehicle aboard the ferry. According to Williams, it was mainly John who persuaded them to relent, striking up a rapport as easy as if he himself had spent a lifetime on the dockside.

In those days, when foreign package tours were still in their infancy, most Britons setting foot on mainland Europe underwent a profound culture shock. Now every European nation wears the same clothes, drives the same cars, listens to the same music, eats the same fast food. But for 19-year-old John, this first-ever trip abroad meant entering a totally alien landscape where not a single person or thing looked or sounded or smelled the same as at home, food and toilet arrangements were hideously unpredictable, and drinking water, bizarrely, came in bottles rather than from the tap. There was as much fear as fascination in that introductory whiff of continental coffee, disinfectant, drains and tobacco as darkly pungent as liquorice.

With customary disregard for detail, Williams had not obtained the work permits his charges needed in order to appear for six weeks in a West German club and be paid in West German currency. If challenged en route, he said, they should pretend to be students on holiday. Fortunately, this was an era of mild frontier controls when, with wartime shortages still lingering, the most serious contraband was not drugs but food. The recurring official challenge, Paul Mc-Cartney remembers, was whether they had any illicit coffee. As with the Harwich stevedores, it was usually John’s mixture of charm and cheek at checkpoints that got them waved on with friendly smiles.

He was not always such a ray of sunshine. In Holland, Williams insisted on making a patriotic detour to Arnhem, scene of the Allies’ disastrous Operation Market Garden airborne landings in 1944. There Barry Chang took what would become a famous snapshot of Paul, George, Pete, Stu, Williams, Beryl and Lord Woodbine around the casket-shaped memorial with its partially prophetic inscription THEIR NAMES LIVETH FOR EVERMORE. John, however, refused to leave the van. One can picture the scene in the bleary Dutch dawn—the big side door sliding back; the hunched and sleepy figure disinclined to move; the attempts to rouse him answered by a torrent of swear words.

He also took time for some shoplifting, finding the unsuspicious Netherland store owners absurdly easy victims after Woolton and Liverpool 8. The haul he later showed to Pete Best included jewellery, handkerchiefs, guitar strings and a harmonica. Years later, when every detail of his early life was pored over by millions, that harmonica thoughtlessly pocketed in a Dutch music shop would cause many of his admirers pangs of vicarious guilt. Finally, a group of them resolved to set the matter right. Travelling to the Arnhem area, they found the same shop still in business and, to its owner’s bewilderment, solemnly repaid the cost of the stolen instrument.

Though the term had still to be coined, Hamburg’s Reeperbahn was one of the world’s earliest experiments in sex therapy. The thinking—later to spread like wildfire through Europe, even unto Britain—was that being open about extreme or deviant sexual practices was healthier than being secretive. It was also a way to manage the problems of the harbour area, corralling pleasure-bent sailors all in one place and so saturating them with off-the-radar pornography that they would hopefully be less inclined to rape or other sexual crimes outside its boundaries. The district of St Pauli, which includes the Reeperbahn, was a perfect location, handily close to the dockside and well away from Hamburg’s swiftly rebuilt centre and many respectable suburbs. This supposedly untamed carnal frontier was in effect a department of City Hall, governed by a mass of surprisingly straitlaced rules and regulations and watched over by a large and zealous police force.

Dusk was falling on 16 August when Allan Williams’s van eventually found its way through Hamburg to St Pauli, and John, Paul, George, Stu and Pete received their first sight of their new workplace. After the almost seamless night-time blackout of Liverpool, the Reeperbahn was an eye-mugging spectacle. Continuous neon signs winked and shimmered in gold, silver and every suggestive colour of the rainbow, their voluptuous German script—Mehrer, Bar Monika, Mambo Schankey, Gretel and Alphons, Roxy Bar—making the entertainments on offer seem even more untranslatably wicked. Though it was still early, the whole strip teemed with people—or rather, with men—and had the lurching, anarchic feel of pub-closing time back home. As the arrivals would soon learn, this was a place where times of day meant nothing.

Their new employer, Bruno Koschmider, might have stepped straight from one of John’s more fanciful cartoons. Aged about 50, he was a tiny man with an outsized head and wooden-puppet face, topped off by an elaborate silver coiffure. Thanks to a war-disabled leg, he walked with a limp, thus instantly qualifying for the copious Lennon gallery of ‘cripples’.

A guided tour of Koschmider’s Kaiserkeller club, in the Reeper-bahn’s busiest and most garish sector, did much to compensate for his strange appearance. A teeming barn of a place, it had no obvious affinity with the Great War’s ‘Kaiser Bill’, being decorated on a nautical theme with ornamental life belts, brass binnacles, pipeclayed cording and booths shaped like rowboats. Only now did the newcomers learn that they were not to appear here, with Derry and the Seniors, as they’d been led to believe. In the nearby Grosse Freiheit (Great Freedom) Koschmider also operated a run-down strip club named the Indra. The Beatles’ job would be to make the Indra as big a teenage draw as Derry and his colleagues had the Kaiserkeller.

Worse followed when Koschmider led the way to the living quarters he had contracted to provide for them. A couple of streets away in Paul Roosen Strasse, he owned a small cinema named the Bambi, which showed a mixture of porn flicks and old Hollywood gangster movies and Westerns. The Beatles’ quarters were a filthy, windowless room and two glorified broom cupboards immediately behind the screen. The only washing facilities were the adjacent cinema toilets. ‘We were put in this pigsty,’ John remembered. ‘We were living in a toilet, like right next to the ladies’ toilet. We’d go to bed late and be woken up next day by the sound of the cinema show [and] old German fraus pissing next door.’

The working hours laid down by Koschmider were the biggest shock of all. Back in Liverpool, they had never been onstage longer than about 20 minutes. At the Indra club they would be expected to play for four-and-a-half hours each weeknight, in sets of an hour or an hour-and-a-half, with only three 30-minute breaks in between. On Saturdays and Sundays, the playing time increased to six hours.

The quintet made their debut the following night, 17 August, clad in matching lilac jackets that had been tailored for them by Paul McCartney’s next-door neighbour. It was far from a rip-roaring success. The thinnest sprinkle of customers watched from red-shaded tables, surprised not to see the club’s usual entertainment, a stripper named Conchita. Koschmider’s advance publicity, such as it was, had created some uncertainty as to the exact nature and purpose of the new attraction, ‘Beatle’ being easily confused with the German word peedle, or little boy’s willy. The room reeked of stale beer and wine and was lined in dusty velvet drapes that muffled already feeble amps and made Pete Best feel as if he was ‘drumming under the bedclothes’.

All five ‘Peedles’ were still wiped out by their journey, awed by their new surroundings and doubtful of their ability to connect with their new public. For the opening numbers, they stood as still and stiff-faced as lilac-tinted zombies. Dismayed by their lack of animation but unable to communicate in English, Koschmider shouted at them, ‘Mach schau!’—‘Make a show’—a command usually given to dilatory striptease artistes. ‘And of course whenever there was any pressure point, I had to get us out of it,’ John would remember. ‘The guys said, “Well okay John, you’re the leader.” When nothing was going on, they’d say, “Uh-oh, no leader, fuck it,” but if anything happened it was like “You’re the leader, you get up and do a show.”

‘We were scared by it all at first, being in the middle of the tough clubland. But we felt cocky, being from Liverpool, at least believing the myth about Liverpool producing cocky people. So I put my guitar down and did Gene Vincent all night, banging and lying on the floor and throwing the mike around and pretending I had a bad leg…We did mach schau-ing all the time from then on.’

According to myth, it was Hamburg that produced the first serious growth spurt in Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting partnership. Actually, the Beatles spent almost their whole time in West Germany as a ‘covers band’, although that underrates the ingenuity they were forced to employ. The repertoire of mainstream rock-’n’-roll hits they first brought with them from Liverpool were exhausted as quickly as their last few English cigarettes. To get through sets an hour-and-a-half-long, they had to delve deep into the creative hinterland of all their musical idols—Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers—seeking out littleknown B-sides and unregarded album tracks. They had to find other rock-’n’-roll songs by American artists, black and white, singular and plural, that had never crossed the Atlantic, let alone made the British Top 20, and also ransack the milky post-rock-’n’-roll charts for ballads they could play without nausea, like Bobby Vee’s ‘More Than I Can Say’. With the continuing popularity of Duane ‘Twangy Guitar’ Eddy, they had to be as much an instrumental as a vocal group, churning out bass-string psychodramas like Eddy’s ‘Rebel-Rouser’ or ‘Shazam’. When rock, pop, country and even skiffle could not fill out the time, they had to reach into the realm of standards and show tunes that Paul overtly loved—and John covertly did—with old wind-up gramophone favourites like ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’, ‘Besame Mucho’, ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, and ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’.

Performing nightly in their out-of-the-way, unalluring venue, they were somewhat like old-fashioned fairground barkers, first drawing in the patrons, then working like blazes to keep them there. The best come-on, they found, was a heavy, stomping beat, laid down by Pete Best’s blue bass drum, and perhaps not a million miles from the militaristic march tempo that had recently echoed across Europe. ‘We really had to hammer,’ John recalled. ‘We had to try anything that came into our heads. There was nobody to copy from. We played what we liked best, and the Germans liked it as long as it was loud.’

The most famous Reeperbahn story, told and retold in Liverpool dockside pubs, was that you could see a woman being mounted by a donkey with a washer around its penis to restrict penetration. Though this new concept of donkey work proved a myth, St Pauli had much else to shock and amaze. It had all the nudity it had been credited with and more—not coyly concealed by turned backs and crossed arms, as at home, but full-frontal, full-rear-al nudity, pulsing with youth and warmth and invitation. For all five teenage Beatles, sooner than they could ever have imagined, bouncing breasts and grinding, weaving G-strung bottoms became merely so much incidental furniture.

In some clubs, they could see men and women have full, unprotected sex in twos, threes or even fours, in every possible and improbable configuration, often in the taboo combination of white and black. In others, they could see nude women wrestling in a pit of mud, cheered on by plump businessmen tied into communal pinafores to guard against the splashes. In the numerous Schwülen laden (queer dives) like Bar Monika or the Roxy Bar, they could watch men give each other blow jobs or meet male transvestites as beautiful and elegant as Parisian models who only in the final stages of intimacy would unveil their gristly secret.

At the same time, Germanic bureaucracy, health regulation and anomalous concern for the moral welfare of the young were as omnipresent as neon tubing. To discourage organised crime, pimps were allowed to run only two prostitutes each, making their trade largely a spare-time one carried on by waiters and barmen. In some streets, club patrons were allowed to see female pubic hair, in others not. St Pauli’s pièce de résistance, the Herbertstrasse, where whores sat on display in shop windows, was screened from general view by a high wooden fence. Most relevant to the Beatles, a curfew came into force at 10 p.m., obliging all under-18s to leave the area. Each note that 17-year-old George Harrison played at the Indra after that time was a breach of the law.

Many places, like Koschmider’s Kaiserkeller, were straightforward bars, vastly bigger than any Liverpool pub, where seafaring men of all nations and personnel from American and British NATO bases congregated by the riotous thousand before and after hitting the nudie joints. Reeperbahn waiters were renowned for toughness and ruthlessness, Koschmider’s most of all. When fights broke out, which they did almost continuously, a squad of waiters would swoop on the culprits like a highly-trained SWAT team, pulling lead-weighted coshes from under their white jackets. Koschmider himself went about armed with the leg of an old German chair in knotty hardwood, which he kept concealed down one trouser leg. Sometimes, rather than merely ejecting a troublemaker, the Kaiserkeller waiters would carry him into their employer’s office for a prolonged workover. When the victim was pinned down and helpless, Koschmider would weigh in with his antique chair leg. ‘I’ve never seen such killers,’ John remembered.

Even by northern British standards, the German intake of beer was prodigious, and the Liverpool lads were soon competing with the best of them. This was not the tepid, woody ale they were used to, but chilled draft lager served in fluted, gold-rimmed glasses that, back home, still featured only in upmarket cocktail bars. After 90 minutes of mach schau on the Indra’s stage, their thirst for this frosted gold nectar was almost unlimited. Any customer for whom they played a request would show appreciation by sending them ein bier each; by the end of an average night, the stage front would be littered with empty and half-empty glasses.

Playing and drinking at these levels brought on fatigue such as none of them had ever known before. On the round-the-clock Reeperbahn, it was a common complaint, with its own well-tried remedy. Friendly Indra staff introduced them to Preludin (phenmetrazine), a weight-loss tablet available over the counter at any chemist’s, which made the metabolism work at roughly twice normal speed. A secondary effect was to make the eyes bulge like ping-pong balls, dry up the saliva, and so redouble the craving for cold beer.

None of the five except George was a virgin when they arrived in Hamburg. But, as soon became clear, even their best results with Liverpool girls had taught them next to nothing. Sex was the Reeperbahn’s main recreation as well as its currency. And five relatively innocent Liverpool lads were the freshest and tenderest of meat. As they built a following at the Indra, they found themselves besieged by invitations from female customers, barmaids and waitresses, or dancers and strippers who would drop by the club after a night’s work. It was done in a casual, no-nonsense style that antedated socalled sexual liberation in the rest of the world by a full decade. A woman who fancied a bit of boy-Scouser would indicate her choice by pointing, or sometimes reaching up in mid-song to fondle his leg. Many dispensed with even these slight formalities, going directly to the Beatles’ squalid quarters at the Bambi Kino, finding their way behind the screen and waiting in one or other of the ratty beds until their quarry arrived. As Pete Best later recalled, such encounters would often happen in pitch darkness, the girl not knowing which Beatle it was and he never seeing her face—hence the almost dehumanised term ‘muff-diving’ that the Liverpudlians coined for them.

Living at such close quarters meant fucking at close quarters also. When George did finally lose his virginity, John, Paul and Pete were all in the same room and, as he would recall, ‘clapped and cheered at the end’. Paul remembered that ‘I’d walk in on John and see a little bottom going up and down and a girl underneath. It was perfectly normal, you’d go “Oh shit, sorry…” and back out of the room.’ Pete Best, himself no mean sexual athlete, was amazed at John’s capacity, and that he still had enough libido left over to be a connoisseur of the Reeperbahn’s spectacular ‘wank mags’.

Freed at last from the long lead of Woolton and Mendips and the choke chain of his Aunt Mimi, John went wild. While the other four all recognised the need for some caution and self-control, he knocked back the cold yellow beer and gulped the tiny white Preludin tablets, never bothering to keep count. The lethal, eye-popping, thirst-inflaming mixture of pills and alcohol spurred him to ever wilder onstage antics in the name of mach schau. Limping and lurching around in his demented parody of Gene Vincent at the Liverpool boxing stadium was only the beginning. He would jump up onto Paul’s shoulders and cannon sideways into George or Stu, and leap off the stage to land among the dancers on his knees or in the splits. At unpredictable moments he would stop singing and taunt his audience as ‘fuckin’ Nazis’ and ‘Hitlerites’ or, with appropriate idiot grimaces and claw hands, as ‘German Spassies’ (spastics). Punk rock, 25 years into the future, would have nothing on this.

Though not the vicious and racially-torn gangland it would later become, St Pauli in 1960 was still a highly dangerous place. The Polizei might be scrupulous about checking papers and issuing medical certificates, but they paid little attention to the grievous bodily harm inflicted nightly throughout its neon wonderland by blackjacks, knives, brass knuckles and tear-gas pistols. Yet by an unwritten law, so long as they observed a few basic rules, Liverpool’s boy rock-’n’-rollers were immune from all harm. Friendly waiters advised them where to go and not go, to whom to be polite, and whose girlfriend never to muff-dive. Horrific fights would break out around them, leaving them unscathed like a scene from some Marx Brothers film. Most extraordinarily, in all the drunken mêlées through which they passed, not one person ever called them to account for the ruin and death their countrymen had so recently inflicted here. John’s ‘Nazi’ taunts were either not understood or taken in a spirit of badinage.

The few hours between playing and sleep they spent mostly out on the street, drifting from bar to café and doorway to doorway with the tide of sex tourists, and touts peddling anything from dirty books to diamonds. A short walk from the Reeperbahn was a music store named Steinway, which stocked an impressive range of imported American guitars and amps, and proved just as accommodating about hire-purchase agreements as Hessy’s back in Liverpool. Here John found the guitar of his dreams, a double-cutaway Rickenbacker Capri 325 whose shorter-than-usual neck gave it the look of a skirmish weapon as much as a songbox. Although still theoretically paying off Hessy’s for his Hofner Club 40, he put himself in hock a second time for a Rickenbacker with a ‘natural’ ivory white finish that was to be his faithful companion throughout all the tempests ahead.

Despite his countless new bedfellows, he suffered bouts of missing Cynthia and sent her regular, edited accounts of his Hamburg life, marking the envelopes SWALK (Sealed With a Loving Kiss) or ‘Postman, postman, don’t be slow / I’m in love with Cyn’ so go man go’ like any ardent young swain. Back in Liverpool, Cyn—and Paul’s girlfriend, Dot Rhone—kept rigorously to the code their lords and masters had laid down for them, refusing even the friendliest, nostrings offers of dates from other young men; regularly photographing one another as proof that their regulation Brigitte Bardot look was being kept up to scratch. If Dot was not around to take Cyn’s picture, she would squeeze into a Woolworth’s photo booth, wearing her sexiest outfit, with her hair newly done, and give sultry come-hither looks to an invisible John as the impatient light flashed. John responded with similar passport-size snaps of his most deformed hunchback poses and leering ‘spassie’ grimaces.

Like others before him, Pete Best saw how John’s fondness for mimicking deformity turned to horror and revulsion at any sight of the real thing. Once as the two sat in a restaurant, a badly maimed war veteran was helped to a nearby table. Though John had already ordered his meal, he jumped up and bolted.

Given their different personalities and very different levels of musical prowess, the five Hamburg Beatles shook down together remarkably well. At this point, it was hardly an issue that the lineup included John’s two closest friends, who had always pulled him in diametrically opposite directions.

Paul McCartney and Stu Sutcliffe were never going to be close, but both were civilised for their young years and thus got along tolerably enough. What chiefly concerned Paul was Stu’s commitment to the group: that he should apply himself fully to his bass playing and not distract John with impractical questions of art and aesthetics. And for a time, both those requirements seemed to be being met.

Stu saw the trip to Hamburg as a clean break from his life at art college, his home city’s predictable subject matter, and the ‘tricks’ he believed he had come to rely on in his work there. Despite the garish colours and teeming subject matter around him, he resisted all temptation to paint or draw, let alone to encourage John to do so. With the disillusionment that in youth can be actively pleasurable, he described himself as ‘a romantic gone sour…I have shrivelled like a sucked grape. I must dig deep and plant myself and grow.’

As even Paul conceded, Stu was a strong visual asset to the group, a James Dean movie in miniature, with his upswept hair and brooding shades, while the others played Groucho and Harpo. To relieve their Preludin-parched throats, he had to take a share of the vocals, doing not at all badly with slow Presley ballads like ‘Love Me Tender’. And his employer, at least, had no complaints about his playing. A few weeks after the Beatles opened at the Indra, Koschmider removed Stu from their ranks and put him into an ad hoc quartet that was to play in alternation with Derry and the Seniors at the Kaiserkeller. This hybrid group included Howie Casey, the Seniors’ much-respected sax player, who found no serious fault with Stu’s musicianship either. He thus became the first Beatle to get the gig that they all coveted.

Liverpool had not, in fact, provided the very first young Britons to rock the Reeperbahn. That distinction belonged to Tony Sheridan, who, with his backing band, the Jets, had come over via London’s Soho the previous June. Born Anthony Esmond Sheridan McGinnity, Sheridan, like John, was not yet 20 but already boasted an impressive pedigree: he was the first rock-’n’-roller ever to play an electric guitar on British television (in days when they were still considered a fire hazard), and had made regular appearances on Oh Boy! and in Larry Parnes’ touring revues, backing big American names like Eddie Cochran and Conway Twitty.

Sheridan both sang and played lead guitar—in those days still a highly unusual accomplishment—and had developed a technique that would influence John more than any, perhaps, since Elvis’. While performing, he planted his legs wide apart and leaned forward, with shoulders slightly hunched and head down, as if facing directly into a hurricane. Like other Reeperbahn ravers, he could not find enough pure rock ‘n’ roll to last through the long nights, so had to draw heavily on the ostensibly square world of ballads and standards. But when Sheridan played an oldie, it was always in a brand-new, often startling interpretation, with shades of mockery or innuendo its original composer never intended and chord changes no one else would have dared. Musically, as in life, he was a born subversive.

Sheridan had started out as resident act at the Kaiserkeller, watching Koschmider rough up customers and sleeping under threadbare Union Flags in the basement. When the Beatles finally met up with him, he was playing at a strip club named Studio X. ‘We were all acting tough, shut into our leather jackets and putting on a hard face that said “Don’t mess with me” even though we were all as soft as syrup inside,’ he recalls. ‘But John in those days seemed scary. Here was this guy in glasses who’d take his glasses off and stare at you in that blank, vacant way, as if he was willing trouble to happen. I sometimes used to think, “Is he like this back in Liverpool? And if so, why is he still alive?”

‘But as soon as you got to know him, you saw that underneath he was a mass of insecurities. He didn’t think he was a good singer—because, remember, his voice wasn’t like any of the other guys’ who were around at that time. And he didn’t rate himself as a guitarist, chugging along on three fingers the way he did. He saw himself as just the motor of the group, the mouth that said “We’re from Liverpool, and none of you bastards is gonna stop us.”

Sheridan widened John’s musical horizon in every direction, encouraging him to stray outside the three-finger chord style Julia had taught him and venture down the new Rickenbacker’s stubby fretboard into riskier high-register minors and sevenths. The inveterate jazz-hater was even persuaded that not everything from that genre could be written off as pretentious and ‘soft’. Sheridan’s current idol was Ray Charles, a jazz-reared singer-pianist whose genius embraced rock, soul and even country, and whose instant classic ‘What’d I Say’ was a godsend to any group in need of time-consuming material. ‘Almost all of my conversations with John were about music. He wanted to learn everything he possibly could. But even if he was asking for help, it came out in a typical sort of sarcastic Lennon quip, like “Come on, Sheridan. You’re supposed to know all about this stuff.”’

With his four months’ greater experience, Sheridan was an ideal guide to the Reeperbahn’s more exotic diversions, like the Schwülen laden. Stu Sutcliffe later wrote home in amazement that the transvestites were ‘all harmless and very young’ and it was actually possible to speak to one ‘without shuddering’. Though raised amid the same homophobia as his companions, John seemed totally unshocked by St Pauli’s abundant drag scene; indeed, he often seemed actively to seek it out. ‘There was one particular club he used to like,’ Tony Sheridan remembers, ‘full of these big guys with hairy hands, deep voices—and breasts. But they used to make an effort to talk English. There was something about the place that seemed to make John feel at home.’

Sheridan also brought with him a crucial friend and ally from within the St Pauli community. Horst Fascher was a pocket-sized 24-year-old of fearsome reputation: trained at the Reeperbahn’s own boxing academy, he was an ex-featherweight champion with a prison record for accidentally killing a sailor in a street brawl. He was at the same time a hopeless romantic, besotted by rock ‘n’ roll and fascinated by the humour and speech patterns of the young Englishmen who were spraying it over his home turf. He had become Sheridan’s unofficial protector at the Kaiserkeller and now called himself his manager, though the role had little to do with taking bookings or collecting fees. ‘There were always drunks in the place who thought they could sing better than the musicians and would jump on the stage and try to grab the mike. I would always be there to stop these guys from bothering Tony.’