Inside The Beatles’ Brutal Hamburg Nights That Forged The Band

The Liverpool teen John Lennon formed the Quarrymen, a skiffle group. Skiffle was the British version of folk/pop, done on inexpensive homemade instruments. Paul McCartney joined less than a year later, and George Harrison soon after. By 1960 Lennon’s friend from art school, Stuart Sutcliffe, joined the band on bass, though he didn’t know much about playing it. They tried a few different names before becoming the Beatles.

Pete Best, a 21-year-old Liverpool drummer, joined the Beatles on August 12, 1960, largely because he had a complete drum set and was ready to hit the road immediately. Liverpool promoter Allan Williams, who booked shows for the Beatles for a cut of their performance fees but did not manage them, had made arrangements with Bruno Koschmider, a Hamburg club owner, for a series of performances there that required a five-piece band. Best’s audition came at the last minute.

On August 16, 1960, the day the Beatles departed Liverpool for Hamburg, there were nine occupants in the minibus: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, bass player Stuart Sutcliffe, drummer Pete Best, their promoter Allan Williams, Williams’ wife, her brother, and a Trinidadian musician named Harold Phillips, who went by Lord Woodbine and helped arrange the tour. The group picked up a tenth passenger, a translator, in London before taking a ferry to Holland and then arriving in Hamburg’s St. Pauli neighborhood on August 17, 1960.

The Beatles made their first appearance at the Indra Club on August 17, 1960. The Indra Club was one of several venues in St. Pauli, the red-light district of Hamburg, that Bruno Koschmider, a former circus clown turned club owner, ran. St. Pauli had been rebuilt following the devastation of World War II and was filled with strip clubs, bars, and criminal activity. The band played long sets each night over the course of 48 consecutive nights for only a few pounds each day.

Bruno Koschmider, the Hamburg club owner who booked the Beatles, further economized by housing all five band members, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best, in an empty, unheated storeroom without windows at the Bambi cinema. The storeroom was adjacent to the ladies’ lavatory. The boys would sleep on camp cots and wash with cold water from the urinals. This was their home throughout the entire duration of their Indra and Kaiserkeller engagements.

To entice passersby from Hamburg’s famous party street, the Reeperbahn, club owner Bruno Koschmider was constantly yelling one refrain at the Beatles: “Mach Schau” (German for “make a show”). He wanted them to be theatrical rather than just stand there and play. So Lennon would jump up and down on stage, taunting the audience, doing pranks such as wearing a toilet seat around his neck or stripping down to his underwear just to elicit a reaction.

The Beatles were playing as much as eight hours a night, so club waiters brought them Preludin, a legal over-the-counter diet pill that could be bought without a prescription in West German drugstores in 1960. The band members called them “prellies” and would take them in order to remain awake and continue to perform. John Lennon in particular mixed his Preludin with beer to push through exhaustion while in Hamburg.

On October 4, 1960, Bruno Koschmider relocated the Beatles to his larger venue, the Kaiserkeller. There they shared the stage with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, a group from Liverpool that featured 20-year-old drummer Richard Starkey (known as Ringo Starr). Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison became friendly with Starkey. On October 15, 1960, the four of them played together for the first time, backing singer Lu Walters on an acetate.

Klaus Voormann was a German art student who brought his girlfriend, photographer Astrid Kirchherr, and friend Jürgen Vollmer to the Kaiserkeller in October 1960 to see the Beatles. All were members of a bohemian circle known as the Exis. Kirchherr shot some amazing photographs of them. She was attracted to bass player Stuart Sutcliffe, and combed his hair forward to create the fringe that became famous. John Lennon and Paul McCartney made fun of him for his new look, but neither of them had adopted the hairstyle yet.

George Harrison, the Beatles’ guitarist, was only 17 at the time of their initial Hamburg residency, too young to work past closing time in a club. When the band attempted to make a covert exit to a competing venue, Koschmider alerted the authorities to Harrison’s illegal employment. The lone Beatle was expelled on November 21, 1960. He was forced to return to England while his fellow band members remained in Germany.

After Koschmider evicted them from the cinema storeroom, Paul McCartney and Pete Best packed their belongings in the dark on the night of November 29, 1960, and stuck a condom to a wall and lit it to use as a torch. A small burn mark remained, and Koschmider charged them with attempted arson. The pair spent three hours in custody before being deported the following day. Lennon subsequently returned to Liverpool by train, leaving the group split between two nations.

The Beatles returned to Hamburg in the spring of 1961 to play at the Top Ten Club. The club was owned by Peter Eckhorn, and it was their secret plan to join his lineup that had triggered Koschmider’s retaliation and McCartney and Best’s arrest in late November 1960. After Williams cleared up the matter with the police, they played a 13-week gig from April to July. They received 35 Deutschmarks per day each, were given good rooms over the Top Ten, and used proper amplification. They also played from seven to eight hours per night with Tony Sheridan, a British singer.

In June of 1961, the German record producer Bert Kaempfert saw the Beatles backing a British singer called Tony Sheridan at the Top Ten Club, and he signed the band to Polydor Records. That June, they cut a number of songs with Sheridan, including “My Bonnie” over two days (McCartney played bass because Sutcliffe was not playing). Polydor released the single in October under the name “Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers,” because Polydor felt the name “The Beatles” was too suggestive of the German word for penis.

By the time the Beatles’ Top Ten Club engagement concluded in July 1961, Stuart Sutcliffe had quit the group to learn to paint from the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi at the Hamburg College of Art, living there with his fiancée, the photographer Astrid Kirchherr. Paul McCartney, who had only sat in as bass player during the My Bonnie recording, stayed on to play bass from then on, rounding out the band’s four-person line-up.

According to Brian Epstein’s version of events, a customer named Raymond Jones came into NEMS, his Liverpool record shop, in October 1961 asking for a copy of “My Bonnie.” Epstein wanted to find out more about the local band that had recorded the song, so he paid a visit to the Cavern Club shortly thereafter. A few months later, he entered into a written management agreement with the Beatles.

Stuart Sutcliffe, the Beatles’ original bass player, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage due to a ruptured aneurysm, a burst weak spot in a blood vessel in the brain, and died in an ambulance in Hamburg on April 10, 1962, at the age of 21. His fiancée, Astrid Kirchherr, met the returning Beatles at the Hamburg airport the following day to tell them the news, which devastated John Lennon and the rest of the band.

On April 13, 1962, Hamburg businessman Manfred Weissleder unveiled the Star-Club, a modern venue boasting advanced sound equipment and a capacity of 2,000. During the spring of that year, the Beatles played an astounding 48 nights at the Star-Club, alongside fellow rock-and-roll performers Gene Vincent and Little Richard. No longer were they the foreign band filling a club owner’s schedule; instead, they had become the attraction.

During a session in June 1962, George Martin, the Beatles’ record producer, suggested to Brian Epstein, their manager, that Pete Best’s rhythmic sense was not right for studio recording. Since John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison had gotten close to Ringo Starr during their shared Hamburg residencies, they decided it was time to make a change. Epstein fired Best on August 16, 1962, and two days later, Ringo Starr became the official member of the Beatles as their drummer.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers,” he cited the Beatles to make his point about how it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve mastery, saying that the band had played those hours in Hamburg. Mark Lewisohn, the Beatles biographer, did the research to find the actual number, which turned out to be closer to 1,100 or 1,200 hours of stage time during a few trips to Hamburg in the early 1960s. That’s about one-tenth of what Gladwell cited, but it’s more stage time than most bands get in their careers.

Musician Ted “Kingsize” Taylor and sound engineer Adrian Barber managed to connect just one home tape recorder to record the Beatles playing, with Ringo Starr on drums for the final Star-Club residency. These crude, one-mic recordings were released commercially years later as Live at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany, 1962. McCartney paid the band’s bill at the pub where they drank most nights, managed by the landlady Gretel Hüsler. It’s the last documented sound of the band Hamburg built.

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