Preparation

Summary

When the Beatles formally began their recording career on 6 June 1962, Lennon and McCartney had been playing together intermittently for five years, while Harrison (then aged only fifteen) had joined what was ‘John's group’ a year later, in 1958. That long apprenticeship began with various gigs in Liverpool, but it was in the summer of 1960, and the first long trip to play all-nighters in Hamburg, that the band acquired the professionalism ‘to play as if their lives depended on it’. Their return to Liverpool, and in particular a live show in December 1960 which provided the first inklings of ‘Beatlemania’, saw them settled in as regulars at the city's Cavern Club to immense local enthusiasm. The record business, however, was not a provincial phenomenon, and it saw two further stints in Hamburg, in the springs of 1961 and 1962, and gigs all around north-west England before manager Brian Epstein, in a last-ditch effort, managed to secure an audition with George Martin, head of the tiny Parlophone label. The rest is well known, of course, but what may not be sufficiently appreciated is how different the Beatles appeared from their competitors in 1963. The cosmopolitan, street-hardened clientèle of the Hamburg clubs was not there to listen to the music: the rock ‘n’ roll material with which all members of the band had been infatuated since their school days of the mid-1950s, and which could be shouted and thrown about, was far more suitable to such an audience than the pop standards of the time.