Portrait of The Beatles: Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and John Lennon (1940 – 1980)
Photo: Getty Images, Central Press. All rights reserved.
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Hard to imagine today. Similar to the several times in the evening sets to the left and right of Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, the Beatles also played in their hometown of Liverpool in front of a lunchtime and an evening audience.
The barrel-shaped brick vault in the “Cavern Club” made for a “hot” and correspondingly stuffy atmosphere in the truest sense of the word. Images from this era that have never been seen before have now surfaced. One of the rediscovered photos shows the band in July 1961, more than a year before the debut single “Love Me Do”. Sort of like the Pre-Beatles.
You can see John Lennon and Paul McCartney on the microphone, George Harrison on the guitar and – partially hidden – the original drummer at the time, Pete Best.
Beatles historian and author Mark Lewisohn is delighted with the “just back from Hamburg” recordings, which, with their coarse-grained pixelation, congenially reflect the atmosphere in the rough port city of the time. As is well known, the four had put the hard slog behind them at the Waterkant: 500 hours on stage in 90 days – the musicians as spindle-thin, malnourished boys between 20 years (John), 19 (Paul and Pete) and 18 (George).
“A marathon that has made you so ‘slim’ that your head and body have become alien to you,” said the expert. “This impression is reinforced by the offbeat clothing – leather trousers and sturdy cotton shirts. No other photos show her dressed like this.” You can see the pictures here.
Three months after recording, John and Paul traveled to Paris and returned with a haircut that became known as the “Beatle haircut,” according to Lewisohn. According to sources, this is attributed to the Hamburg photographer Astrid Kirchherr. The so-called “mop top” or “mushroom head”, according to the fashion magazine “Vogue”, “is a French-inspired cut with medium-length, shaggy fringes over the forehead. This was popular in the German art and avant-garde scene. This was very different from what was hot shit back then in England.”
Beatles researcher Lewisohn adds: “Days later, Brian Epstein saw the Beatles at the Cavern, offered to be their manager and put them on a course that would change our world!” Pete Best was replaced by Ringo Starr in 1962.
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