Читать книгу Ready, Steady, Go!: Swinging London and the Invention of Cool - Shawn Levy - Страница 10

In 1962, businessmen commuting between Liverpool and London didn’t fly or drive but plumped themselves into British Rail carriages at Lime Street or Euston station and spent several hours incommunicado, gazing at the countryside, catching up on paperwork, browsing through newspapers, sampling the dodgy railway cuisine. The 200-mile journey was literally a trip between worlds: the prestige, power, wealth and sophistication of the capital at the southern end; a provincial port city with a queer local dialect and as many cultural and sentimental ties to Ireland as England at the northern. To the extent that there was any notion of a flow of traffic between the two cities, it was a given that one left Liverpool in search of more, more work, more money, more opportunity. Londoners didn’t even go to Liverpool on holiday; if they went there at all, it was to conduct business or see family.

On the evening of 7 February 1962, Brian Epstein, the 27-year-old manager of central Liverpool’s best record store, boarded the northbound train at Euston in a state of gloom and disappointment. He had recently become a semi-regular among the hopeful southbound travellers from his home town, but now he was heading home, tail between his legs, his dreams of more dissolving in front of him.

The day before, he had lunched with executives of Decca, one of England’s largest and most prestigious record labels, to discuss a new business venture on which he had embarked and staked his name and reputation, such as they were. Epstein prided himself on his ability to predict the public appetite for pop music: record company sales reps dined out on stories of his gargantuan orders for little-heralded discs – some of which they themselves had tried to talk him out of – which then became massive hits. Now he thought he could apply the same instincts to managing a pop group; he had just the month before contracted to represent an unknown musical quartet from his home town. Leveraging his standing as a big account, he had stuck a foot in the door at Decca and insisted that their top artist and repertoire men get a load of his new discoveries.

Decca’s chief of A&R at the time was Dick Rowe, a somewhat sourpuss music industry veteran who had risen during the era of smooth ‘50s pop and gotten a foot into the youth market with such acts as Tommy Steel and Billy Fury. He liked to boast that he knew nothing about music except that he knew what he liked. And one thing he didn’t, he admitted some years later, was Brian Epstein: ‘It’s very difficult for me to say a nice word about Epstein. I just didn’t like him. He was too conscious of the fact that he’d been well educated and fancied himself as a gent.’ At the time he made those remarks, Rowe had become world famous for the cost of his aversion to Epstein: ‘It’s unfortunate,’ he admitted, ‘that I didn’t get on with the person I should have got on with the most.’ But in the winter of 1962, nobody knew that Epstein’s act would go on to do just what the presumptuous Liverpool record merchant said they would – become ‘bigger than Elvis’.

For all his personal distaste for the man, Rowe didn’t show Epstein the door immediately; he knew how much his custom meant to Decca. He had the Liverpool band record an hour’s worth of material for him and then spent a month sitting on it, ignoring Epstein’s pleas for a reaction. Then, he and an assistant got Epstein over to the executive restaurant in the company’s Albert Embankment office tower to discuss the band during lunch. They made small talk about business and then, over coffee, the kiss-off: ‘Not to mince words,’ Rowe said, ‘we don’t like your boys. Groups are out; four-piece groups with guitars particularly are finished.’ Epstein protested; Rowe cut him dead: 'The boys won’t go … We know these things. You have a good record business in Liverpool. Stick to that.’ (Asked later about Decca’s dismissal, Paul McCartney said of Rowe, ‘He must be kicking himself now,’ to which John Lennon responded flatly, ‘I hope he kicks himself to death!’)

The next evening, after a final rebuff, Epstein phoned Liverpool to ask the members of the band to meet his train. He had been their manager for a matter of weeks, and nothing he’d tried had worked: they’d been rejected by EMI, Pye, Phillips, Columbia, HMV, Oriole and now Decca, which had showed the most interest in them (or, rather, the least willingness to say ‘no’ to Epstein) to date. It would be hard news for the band to hear. And it would be even harder, perhaps, for Epstein to deliver it. In so doing, after all, he would be admitting that, as in school, in the military, in an acting career and even in romance, he was once again a failure.

The pity of it was, Brian Epstein wasn’t some scruff whose catalogue of failures represented an inability to reach goals that lay beyond his grasp. He was rather the sort, who, by the long-standing rules of English society, ought to have done well enough at something.

He had been born into middle-class comfort and privilege, the eldest son of a respected Jewish merchant family in Child-wall, a well-appointed, leafy suburb of Liverpool. His father, Harry, worked in his own father’s successful furniture store; his mother, Queenie, came from a family that produced a popular line of furniture that the Epsteins sold. By the time Brian arrived on 19 September 1934 (Yom Kippur, auspiciously), the little family – which would grow only by one more son – was installed in a five-bedroom, two-bathroom house. Save for a wartime evacuation to a northern seaside community during the German air assault on Liverpool’s ports, it was the only family home Brian would ever know.

As the first-born son of a well-off Jewish family, Brian was naturally presumed to be destined for great things: scholastic excellence, perfect manners, social standing. He would have a career, make a name, sire a family. In all of this, for years, he would disappoint Harry and Queenie. ‘I was not,’ he would one day admit, ‘the best of sons.’

Once Brian began attending school, his presumed future began to dissolve. He had no particular scholastic aptitude. He disliked sports (though he did, schoolmates recall, like wearing dashing sporting uniforms). He was, by his own confession, something less than a people person: ‘With little to offer in the way of brilliance and nothing in the way of acceptable personality I was not a very popular individual … I was not very good at forming friendships.’

Partly due to the family’s needs to evacuate Liverpool, partly due to his own slovenly school habits and petulant manner, partly due to the fact that he failed to forge one single, enduring bond with any classmate or institution, he attended five grammar schools and two colleges before removing himself altogether from academe and the hopes of a profession in letters, law, medicine or science. Just before his sixteenth birthday, he went to work for Harry; it would have to be business for him—and the family business at that.

At the time, I. Epstein and Sons, the store run by Harry with his Polish immigrant father Isaac, was sufficiently respected and popular to prosper even in the lingering shadow of rationing and economic stagnation that smothered English confidence in the early ‘50s. Everyone shopped there for furniture, musical instruments and the like, even families who had to count their pennies like the James McCartneys of Speke; wee little Paul first played ‘Chopsticks’ on a piano sold to his father by Harry Epstein. Brian, maturing into something of a proper young man, with a new, becoming fussiness about his dress and manner, took to the responsibility of being a third-generation furniture peddler. At last something seemed to engage his attention and maybe even his ambition.

He began, too, to socialise, dating some of the daughters of Liverpool’s most prominent Jewish families and slipping – with caution but undeniable engagement – into the city’s world of closeted homosexuals. There would long be a side of Brian that was drawn sexually to women – at least one local lass whom he chatted up at a boozy soirée in the early ‘60s remembered him as ‘a better necker than anyone else at that party’. But increasingly he found himself attracted to men in a fashion more profound and lasting than the groping, bonding, transitional stereotype of English public school life; he had even matured and grown sufficiently sure to confess his bent to his parents and brother who, though disappointed, nevertheless stood by him.

Now, with a bit of money and his blossoming poshness and the taste of success at something, finally on his tongue, he was building a complete life for himself. And then came the letter: 9 December 1952: an able-bodied 18-year-old man, Brian Epstein was conscripted into His Majesty’s armed forces. It’s a measure of how much Epstein had absorbed Harry’s and Queenie’s notions of what sort of man he should be that his immediate inclination was to join the RAF, the most elite corps he could think of (and, he somehow surmised, the easiest). Instead, he was assigned to the army and sent to train at Aldershot, 40 or so miles south-west of London.

Brian hated Aldershot: ‘If there is a more depressing place than this in all Europe, then I would not be interested to know of it.’ And he hated the army as much as he had hated any of the colleges he had struggled through: ‘If I had been a poor schoolboy, I was surely the lousiest soldier in the world.’ Agreeing with Brian’s self-assessment, his commanders assigned him as a clerk to the staff of the Royal Army Service Corps and stationed him in Regent’s Park.

If conscription had seemed a prison sentence, then this specific station was the most hoped-for of reprieves. Brian had relatives in West London – and now he had the whole capital as his furlough ground. He immersed himself in the city’s pleasures – the restaurants, the coffee bars, the theatres and nightclubs, the gay demi-monde—with ready ease. A little too ready, actually. He rolled back to his barracks one night in a large hired car, dressed like a City gent: bowler, pinstripe suit, brolly – the works. The guards and several others took him for an officer, and he accepted their salutes; the next morning, a testy superior charged him with impersonating an officer. He lost his liberty privileges and, with them, his equilibrium. Before long, he was seeing a psychiatrist and, less than a year after showing up for induction, he was given a medical discharge. ‘I ran like a hare for the Euston train,’ was how he remembered his release.

Back to the furniture racket then, and the Liverpool social whirl. Brian and his chums—similarly elegant young homosexual sons of comfortable families—became gourmets and night owls, now driving out to sample the fare at country inns, frequenting the city’s discreet gay bars, perhaps taking in a performance of the Liverpool Playhouse repertory company and afterwards lounging with the players in a pub or coffee bar. It was in this latter setting that the next unlikely fancy popped into Brian’s head: surely nature had bred him so grandly for the stage. With the help of a few friends connected to the theatre, he would enrol in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art – he would be an actor.

As with school and soldiering, it made a poor fit: ‘Brian was not a natural mover,’ recalled the actress Helen Lindsay, who helped him prepare for his RADA audition. ‘He had no flow in his movements. His movement was completely unrelated to his speech.’ Nevertheless he applied himself and on his twenty-second birthday he passed the audition and was accepted into the most prestigious acting school in the world.

Once again, he had London available to him, and he took to it with Epicurean zeal. There were concerts and parties and restaurants and liaisons with both men and women. His teachers weren’t overwhelmed by him, but they recognised that he projected a palpable presence and might yet learn to be an artist. But he was miserable, drinking too much, lonely for all his apparent company and antipathetic to the actorly personality he was meant to be cultivating in himself: ‘The narcissism appalled me.’ Before the first academic year had ended, he had resolved to leave.

And this wouldn’t be the worst news he would bring home. On a Wednesday night just after Easter 1957, Brian stepped off a tube train at Swiss Cottage, en route to his Hampstead bedsit. He used the station men’s room and, when he emerged, noticed a young man eyeballing him. The look they exchanged hit a nerve in Brian immediately: this was a gay man, he reckoned, and although he had recently turned his mind to quelling his homosexual inclinations he was undeniably excited. He walked around the tube station a few times, continuing to return the other man’s gaze, and then, agitated and a little scared, stepped out into the street. When he saw that he was being followed, he exchanged a few words with the fellow, a conversation that was entirely innocent in the strictest sense but utterly explicit in another. Brian broke away, and a minute or three later saw the man again, this time in the company of another man; both were watching him. He walked away; he loitered; he agonised: What did they want?

They wanted to arrest him. ‘Persistently importuning for immoral purposes’ they called it, claiming that it wasn’t just a single undercover officer but four (and then, the next day in Marylebone Magistrates Court, seven) men with whom Brian had conducted this tremulous, abortive courtship dance. Lies, of course, but he pleaded guilty – heeding the suggestion of the investigating detective – so as not to endure the ignominy of an open hearing in which his life and inclinations would be bared. The court, piteously, merely fined him. Once again, it was back to Harry and Queenie, another failure stuck to the sole of his shoes, and a horrifying shame on top of it.

In his diary, recounting these days, he wrote of his deep self-loathing: ‘Through the wreckage of my life by society, my being will stain and bring the deepest distress to all my devoted family and few friends.’ Yet still he was drawn, again and again, to the same sort of furtive, dangerous sexual encounter the very prospect of which had got him framed and convicted in London. Cottaging at a public lavatory in Derby, he was attacked and beaten by a man dressed as a construction worker (Brian always, according to everyone who ever cruised with him, preferred the rough types); bloodied and robbed of his wallet, he made his way to a friend’s house in Liverpool to recuperate. A few days later, his assailant showed up at his home, threatening public exposure unless Brian paid him off. On the advice of his parents, Brian brought in the police; using Brian as bait, they caught the man and put him away for three years.

This was, seemingly, bottom: ashamed and humiliated, a bust at everything his parents might reasonably have hoped for him, Brian submitted without struggle to the business of selling furniture to Liverpool’s families. Now, for once, luck was with him. At the end of the ‘50s, the British economy had finally reawakened from its tedious post-war lethargy. The Epstein business was expanding into central Liverpool, first with an outlet on Charlotte Street and then into the heart of the shopping district, Whitechapel Street. For this move downtown, a new name was adopted: North End Music Stores, or NEMS.

It wasn’t so much the fact that there were more shops to manage that formed the basis of Brian’s good fortune but that the nature of the business was changing. Whereas the original I. Epstein and Sons forsook decoration for functionality and location, the central Liverpool NEMS stores would require a bit more dash to stand out. Brian, the creative, theatrical son with the nice way about him, made a neat fit with the new image. He was given a responsible position first at Charlotte Street, where he indulged in revolutionary – and very successful – experiments in window design (he displayed chairs with their backs facing out, for instance, in an effort to approximate how they’d look in a real sitting-room), and then at Whitechapel Street, where NEMS had planned to augment its booming business in phonographic equipment with a record department. It was like the invention of a new medium. And in it Brian would express something like genius.

NEMS Whitechapel was, by all accounts, a great record store: It stocked everything: imports, jazz, classical, pop, you name it – and if you did and it wasn’t in stock they would knock themselves out to get it. Typically for the time, it was stocked with listening booths in which shoppers could sample various records; the pre-Epstein Beatles whiled away many idle afternoons there listening to American records they had no intention of actually buying. Like Rick’s Café in Casablanca, everybody went to NEMS and everybody knew the enigmatic, elegant proprietor, the posh, cool number known to his staff as Mr Brian.

Mr Brian had his moods and his sometimes snobbish attitudes, but he was seen as a fair boss and nobody on his staff questioned his knowledge of how to run the business, his uncanny ability to forecast smash hits where everyone else saw nice little tunes, or his encyclopaedic knowledge of the records he sold. 'We used to have a game with Brian,’ Ringo Starr remembered, ‘where we’d say to him, “OK, ‘C’mon Everybody’ – what was the B side?” and he’d tell us. So we’d say, “What number did it reach?” and he’d know. It was thrilling.’

So it must have been with at least a slight sense of perturbation that Brian began to sense that something musically important was going on right under his nose—right there in central Liverpool—without his knowledge. A local act, the Beatles, had gone to Hamburg, in Germany, and cut a record with a third-rank Cliff Richard named Tony Sheridan, and a handful of excitable kids – girls mainly – were asking for it at NEMS. For reasons that have never been made clear, Brian hadn’t ordered the record, and his assistant, Alistair Taylor, contrived to invent a fictional customer, one Raymond Jones, and put his name in the order book as requesting the disc. It arrived from Germany and sold out lickety split. Brian, antennae twitching, sensed that something was up. He found that the Beatles played in a basement club, the Cavern, a few streets away from his shop, and he got his secretary to call to let the management know he’d be dropping in for one of the band’s lunchtime sessions.

On 9 November 1961, Brian, wearing his usual natty businessman’s attire, descended into the sticky, humid air of the Cavern and stood among the Coke-and-sandwich-snarfling teenage clerks and schoolskippers who watched in a rapt frenzy as the Beatles, four handsome young toughs in black leather, pounded through their repertoire. So parochial was the little world of Liverpool – and the even littler world of fans and players of what would come to be called Merseybeat – that Brian was actually announced by house manager/DJ Bob Wooler as a celebrity guest to the audience.

Brian was electrified – in fact, he was overcome with another of his whims. He turned to Alistair Taylor, secret instigator of this bizarre mission, who had come along to satisfy his own curiosity: ‘They are awful,’ he admitted, ‘but I think they’re fabulous. What do you think about me managing them?’

In a short life dotted with suspicious enthusiasms and pipe dreams, this may have been the most absurd yet. Brian knew absolutely nothing about showbiz management. Not only were the intricacies of running a pop musician’s career beyond his experience and, perhaps, abilities, but the racket was strictly a London affair. Even more than being gay or Jewish, being a Liverpudlian, however well bred, would be a massive obstacle.

But Brian’s question was rhetorical anyway. He was once again in the throes of fancy. He introduced himself to the band after their set, then returned several times over the coming weeks to see if his initial excitement had abated. He asked around town about the band: What sort of boys were they? Were they reliable? Were they, you know? Everyone told him not to waste his time. Nevertheless, on 30 November, after another lunchtime session, he asked the band if they would drop into NEMS Whitechapel to talk something over with him the following Sunday. They shrugged their agreement.

When they were sitting in his office at the otherwise empty store, Brian put his proposition to them bluntly: ‘Quite simply, you need a manager. Would you like me to do it?’

There was some talking about it among the four of them, and they, as Brian had done, asked around town about Brian. Paul McCartney’s dad, who remembered Harry Epstein, thought a Jewish manager would be a real boost: ‘He thought Jewish people were very good with money,’ his son remembered. But essentially the thing was agreed to there and then, terms pending. Brian Epstein had acquired the Beatles as artistes, and the Beatles had, on that Advent Sunday, acquired their John the Baptist.

If it seemed an unusual partnership – the 27-year-old classical music and show-tune fan with the refined air and the secretive private life, and the quartet of (mostly) teenage, roughneck, pill-popping rockers with laddish tastes and rooms in their parents’ houses – it was also an instance of absolute kismet.

In the Beatles, Brian had found a medium to express his sense of daring and flamboyance while still maintaining his discretion and reserve. ‘Brian wanted to be a star himself,’ said Beatles producer George Martin, ‘and he couldn’t do it as an actor, so he did it as a man who was a manipulator, a puppeteer.’ The Beatles were smart-ass, sexy, rough-and-tumble and extrovert – everything, in short, that Brian wished for himself (and, it can’t be avoided saying, that he sought in sexual partners). Too, his proximity to them gave him, in time, something that life had all but denied him thus far – friends.

For their part, the Beatles found in Brian someone with class – his own car, nice clothes and manners, a prestigious job – who made a dignified impression, took them seriously, recognised them as a cut above the motley Merseybeat fray and was willing to pitch them to the London pop music elite. Brian taught them about food, clothes, social niceties, the larger world, and instilled in them a sense of their right due. And he had a wild-eyed, messianic faith in them, swearing to one and all that they would be the biggest act that England – nay, the world – had ever seen.

It was an ideal partnership: an extraordinarily talented group with no career path to follow and a man of eclectic, impetuous tastes and dubiously founded but substantial self-belief. Brian would lead the way, would help create the Beatles, would prepare the world to receive them. As at least one cool-eyed observer of the Liverpool scene noted, he was arguably the most uniquely qualified prophet they might have found. ‘An ordinary person couldn’t do it,’ declared Yankel Feather, owner of one of the city’s very few gay nightclubs. ‘If it had been a young married man with two children, would his wife let him out to spend time with four unruly boys? No, it couldn’t have happened. For the Beatles to make it, they had to have somebody as strange as him.’

Strange, no doubt, but managing the Beatles – a contender for first place in the litany of foolish chimeras that had constituted his life to now – would be the purest form of self-expression Brian would ever find. His need for amiable companionship, his eye for rough young men, his sense of the done thing and the clothes and style in which to do it, his egoistic ambition, his unfounded yet enormous self-confidence, his ability to spot what people liked just before they realised they liked it: it all came together in a single job – impresario. In concert with the accident that a band of musical geniuses happened to be playing around the corner from his office, it all seems like a divine plan. There couldn’t have been three people on earth who could bring just the right mix of attitude, dedication, taste and assuredness to proctoring the Beatles. The odds that one of them happened to be in Liverpool and looking for a way to make his mark on the world – well, they wouldn’t even be worth computing.

It could also be argued that landing Brian as a manager was the Beatles’ first important break: for all the rough moments awaiting them in the coming months, his interest was the first real sign they had had from outside their own world that they meant something. And, as it involved a posh fellow like Brian, it boosted their morale. Subconsciously, at least, in the eyes of one observer, the band knew they had it made as soon as they’d linked up with him: ‘Four tough, working-class lads had come to accept the benefits of acting coquettishly for a wealthy middle-class homosexual,’ observed Simon Napier-Bell, one of the posh young hotshots who followed Brian into the pop management game. ‘People said their image was that of a boy next door, but it wasn’t. To anyone who’d seen it before, their image was instantly identifiable. It was the cool, cocky brashness of a kid who’s found a sugar-daddy and got himself set up in Mayfair.’

Beguiling proof of this can be found in the mythic tale of Brian’s spring 1963 trip to Barcelona with John Lennon. Brian was mad for Iberia: he holidayed there whenever he could and became such an aficionado of the corrida that he would eventually spend some time managing the English toreador Henry Higgins (known in Spain as Enrique Canadas) and have his private bathroom decorated with a gigantic photographic image of El Cordobés, the flamboyant bullfighter known as ‘the Spanish Beatle’. (He had the opportunity once to dine with the great Mexican bullfighter Dominguin and considered it one of the great moments of his life; the torero, on the other hand, seemed not quite sure whom he had met.) At a time when the English culinary palate was expanding to accommodate new and foreign tastes, Brian regularly had his Spanish housekeepers prepare him gazpacho. And, inevitably perhaps, he went to Spain in search of sexual gratification; like Morocco, it was a famous destination for English gays seeking the ready company of young men.

With that in mind, perhaps, Brian asked John to travel there with him in April ‘63, a mysterious trip during which, depending on whose version you believe, John took advantage of a free vacation to make it clear to Brian that the Beatles were his band (the McCartney surmise); John quizzed Brian about what it was like to be a gay man (the account John repeated throughout his life); John granted Brian, who was head over heels for him, a sexual encounter (the much-surmised theory around Liverpool, reported several times by Lennon’s boyhood chum Pete Shotton and, at Paul’s 21st birthday party in his Auntie Jin’s garden, to Lennon’s face by Cavern Club DJ Bob Wooler, who got walloped by John – using fists and a shovel – in return). Bolstering the nastiest whispers was the fact that John had always liked to cover his middle-class upbringing with an insolence and toughness he’d adapted from the examples of more hardluck Liverpudlians. His leather gear, his cocky, chin-out posture, his neverending stream of verbal abuse – he was the picture of Scouse rough trade – just the sort, by all accounts, for which Brian was weakest.

But if sexuality factored into Brian’s private relations with the band (and it would always be a big ‘if), it was explicitly absent from Brian’s two-pronged strategy for turning the Beatles into stars: he would smarten them up, give them a more professional aspect, and he would assail the London record and concert industry with news of his brilliant discovery. Gone were the Beatles’ leather jackets and blue jeans; gone were such stage antics as swearing and chatting up the girls and drinking, smoking and eating between numbers; gone were their cheap cigarettes (filter tips only) and the curly ends of guitar strings sticking out on their pegboards. Henceforth, the Beatles would perform in smart suits and boots and would evince the most professional sort of stage manner, including a full bow from the waist – straight out of Brian’s RADA days – after each number. They wore suits from Dougie Millings, the Soho tailor who fitted out Cliff Richard and other eager-to-please boy popstars; they wore zip-up, wedge-heeled Cuban boots which would quickly come to be known as Beatle boots (though, in fact, David Bailey had beat them to the look).

Some in Liverpool saw these new bits of polish as a dilution of the band’s essence, a sell-out, in short, that had nothing to do with music and everything to do with image. But that wasn’t how the Beatles themselves felt. As John Lennon said, ‘It was a choice of making it or still eating chicken on stage.’ And the suits? ‘Yeah man, all right, I’ll wear a suit – I’ll wear a balloon if somebody’s gonna pay me. I’m not in love with leather that much!’

‘He wasn’t trying to clean our image,’ Lennon went on. ‘He said our look wasn’t right, we’d never get past the door at a good place.’ Paul concurred: ‘We knew Brian had good flair, and, when you’re on stage, you can’t see yourself, so it’s often very important to have someone sitting in the stalls to tell you how you looked. Brian’s memos used to reflect that: “You’re playing Neston tonight. I’m looking for a re-booking here, please wear the shirts and ties.”' And, said Ringo, ‘He really was instrumental in bending our attitude this much so that the public would bend theirs that much to accept us.’

All that remained, then, was to convince the world. Thus began Brian’s fruitless trips to London: no, no, no, no and no. Always a little knot of Beatles would be waiting for him at the Punch and Judy coffee shop in Lime Street station; always he would descend dejected from the train with the sorry news. ‘By then,’ remembered John, ‘we were close to him, and he’d really be hurt. He’d be terrified to tell us that we hadn’t made it again.’

Yet he had this faith, this zealous, intangible belief in them and his vision of their potential. To some, like aspiring young music scenester Andrew Loog Oldham, Epstein’s certainty was contagious: ‘You knew you were dealing with a man who had a vision for the Beatles and nobody was going to get in the way of that vision. He was convinced that eventually everybody was going to agree with him. That gave him the power to make people listen.’

But by May ‘62, just five months into his tenure as manager, Brian had run out of people to buttonhole and cajole. He had gone door to door, virtually, with the tapes of the Decca sessions and, tired of schlepping the reels with him, decided to cut an acetate demo record of them during yet another bleak trip to London. The engineer at the HMV record store on Oxford Street listened to the band and liked them, suggesting that Brian talk to his boss. That meeting led to a call to EMI, where there was one last A&R man, a chap who’d been on holiday when Brian first came around a few months earlier.

His name was George Martin and he was, in all practicality, the last hope: he would simply have to say yes.

From Brian’s mouth to God’s ear: he did.

The Beatles were signed to EMI on the mere strength of Martin’s having listened to the audition tapes that Decca had recorded; in September they flew – flew! – to London and cut their first record, ‘Love Me Do’.

The result was a tsunami: within 18 months of that first recording session, they had released five singles – a no. 17 in the charts (‘Love Me Do’), a no. 2 (‘Please, Please Me’) and three no. Is (‘From Me to You’, ‘She Loves You’, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’), for a total of 109 weeks in the top twenty – and two albums (Please, Please Me and With the Beatles), both of which reached no. 1, the first one holding the spot for 30 weeks only to be supplanted by the next, which held it for 21 weeks, making for a solid year at the top.

And, for a while, in a sense, they weren’t even Brian’s biggest act. In the wake of his success at getting the Beatles a record deal, he signed other Cavern stars. The first of his bands to score a no. 1 record was Gerry and the Pacemakers, an agreeable Merseybeat combo who gladly sopped up a record —‘How Do You Do It?’—that the Beatles, with the deep love of authentic American rock ‘n’ roll and their in-house songwriting duo of Lennon and McCartney, wouldn’t touch. Gerry and the lads followed that one up with ‘I Like It’, another no. 1, and that one with ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, which hit the top as well. That was their whole wad, but it was a hell of a run. Toss in – and why not? – another of Brian’s finds, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, who hit no. 1 with ‘Bad to Me’, and you get a total of 32 weeks in ‘63 in which Brian Epstein acts were at the absolute top of the British charts.

But there was nothing, truly, ever, like the Beatles: the personalities, the songwriting, the freshness of their look and sound, the palpable exuberance they radiated on stage, on record or simply talking off the cuff. Pop music had not known the like since the brief initial explosion of Elvis Presley. And no British act had ever come remotely close to generating the same degree of heat, hysteria and pan-cultural recognition.

They started out 1963 semi-obscure, with just one no. 17 record to their names, and then worked their asses off: 229 live appearances in three countries, 53 radio gigs, 37 performances for TV, plus recording two whole albums (the first of which was cut in one knock-out day) and three singles’ worth of entirely new material – a year-long testimonial to the efficacy of diet pills chased with Scotch-and-Cokes.

When the calendar turned, they’d been the subject of documentaries and stars of their own BBC radio show, Pop Go The Beatles. In The Times, a writer waxed lyrical, completely sober, about the group’s use of ‘pandiatonic clusters’ and ‘Aeolian cadences’. They’d virtually invented a market out of the teenage girls and boys whom the UK record industry had previously courted with only mixed results and were rewarded with the sorts of accolades and performance opportunities normally reserved for older-style performers: a Variety Club award, two appearances on Sunday Night at the London Palladium, a chance to perform before the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret (on a bill which included, among others, Marlene Dietrich and Buddy Greco), even their own Christmas pantomime—30 shows of music, comedy and traditional holiday sketches at the Astoria Cinema in Finsbury Park, London, in front of more than 100,000 seats total, all filled.

The papers could barely move quickly enough to keep up with the public demand for news about the band and the phenomenon dubbed ‘Beatlemania’: fans – mostly young girls – surrounding hotels and theatres, choking airports and lining motorcades to see their heroes come and go. There were accounts of the band’s concerted efforts to survive this frightening level of adoration: ‘Operation Beat-the-Beatlemania’, as the Daily Mirror called it: disguises and body doubles and false exits through vehicles that went nowhere while the boys sped off in second vehicles and so forth.

The timing of the Beatles’ rise was impeccable. England had been rocked with tabloid scandals throughout ‘63: the Argyll divorce, in which upper-class depravity and female sexual appetite emerged from the closet of gossip into the glare of a sensational, endless trial; and the Profumo scandal, a thrilling paella involving a Tory cabinet minister with a moviestar wife, a Russian spy, a couple of curvy floozies, Caribbean dope peddlers, common whores, a Polish gangster slumlord, the scion of one of England’s greatest families, gunshots, flights from justice, a two-way mirror and, in the middle, an osteopath and society portraitist with predilections for all sorts of deviant sexual delights and a client list that included Gandhi, Churchill and a galaxy of Hollywood stars.

The osteopath was named Stephen Ward, and his story came into the light just early enough in the swing of the decade for the old culture to bring its might crushing down on him in a mockery of a trial (the prosecutor was Mervyn Griffith-Jones, the same chap who botched the Chatterley business) that drove him, eventually, to suicide – a fistful of Nembutals down the hatch while the jury still debated which of the trumped-up, unproven charges of pandering, soliciting and acquiring abortions for his young victims he would be scapegoated for. Ward was snuffed out but the taint of the scandal helped bring down the government; in October, Harold Macmillan – SuperMac – resigned as prime minister, and the stripe of British propriety and pride his reign had embodied was forever swept away. ‘A generation was fading before our eyes,’ remembered journalist Ray Connolly. ‘Within nine months, England had changed out of recognition.’

With all this going on, it was no wonder that the Beat Boom seemed such a welcome respite, or that, with understandable shortsightedness, most grown-up observers in the media failed to distinguish between the Beatles, their Merseyside mates Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, and such second-tier hangers-on as Freddie and the Dreamers (from Manchester) or the Dave Clark Five, the North London group that had been assembled, it was whispered, by veteran Denmark Street moguls simultaneously frightened by the incoming wave of northern money-makers and eager to mop up anything stirred up by them or left in their wake. So hot were record companies for the next thing that they signed and suited-up anything they could find that was young and rhythmic and, to their ears anyhow, ‘pop’—even the Rolling Stones, then steeped in as pure a brand of Chicago blues as you could put out if you were from a London suburb and nobody’s idea of a cuddly Beat Boom act.

In the course of their breakout year, the Beatles expanded their horizons with travel, not only to gigs in France and Sweden but on holiday to Spain, Greece and, for George Harrison, the USA (where he visited a sister who’d emigrated to the Midwest). John became a father, and Paul turned twenty-one. The two started their own songwriting company, Northern Songs, and invented a bit of stage business that became their signature, shaking their heads and ‘wooooooooing’ into the same microphone. And Paul met a girl – Jane Asher, a gorgeous redhead from a well-to-do West End family then working as an actress, model and sometime journalist; before long, Paul moved into a spare bedroom in the attic of the Asher family’s endearingly eccentric Wimpole St ménage, and he and Jane would be one of London’s top scene-making couples for the next five years.

From 1963 on, everything that any of the Beatles would ever do would be news.

Hell, they’d even heard about them in America …