There will come a time, not so far off, when there will be only one person left who saw the Beatles play live. Although no one event is surely any more cosmically significant than any other, the death of this last witness will still be a disarmingly poignant moment.
There must’ve been a day that saw the extinguishing of the last memory of Gershwin in Paris in the 1920s or the last punter at the premiere of The Rite of Spring ten years before that. There must surely be people still alive who saw Charlie Parker play but, when the witnesses to the great events die, some part of the cumulative memory disappears forever. When the last Beatles witness goes, we will still have the music and the pictures and the stories, but the collective consciousness will have shrunk and the world will surely be a little poorer.
As I write, there are still plenty of Beatles witnesses but the numbers are shrinking. I know three people who were ‘there’ and, with this new Beatles film getting so much hoopla, I was prompted to speak to them, record their memories, and make sure they are saved for posterity.
Memories from 1963
Viv Griffiths, my distinguished colleague at Sussex Bylines, saw The Beatles in June 1963 at a South London cinema, either in Tooting or Woolwich. She was 14 and this was very early on in the story, before the release of the world-changing ‘She Loves You’ single and before the press adopted the term “Beatlemania” to describe the scenes of adulation that attended the band wherever they went.
It was what in those days was called a package tour and Viv remembers: “Gerry & the Pacemakers opened, with the Beatles following. Roy Orbison was on the bill as well but I don’t remember hearing him.” Her main recollections are: “The audience was largely teenage girls and they all seemed to be screaming apart from me. The group still had their pudding-basin haircuts with smart suits and were very choreographed, with John, Paul and George all moving in unison.” It seems the setlist was no more than seven songs, all of them from their first album, and they finished with ‘Twist and Shout’.
1964 – Lothian Road
By the time my brother-in-law, Ian Smith, saw the group, 10 months later, in Edinburgh on 29 April 1964 at the ABC Cinema on Lothian Road, the runaway train was accelerating. Their second album had been released five months before, and ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ had just come out, number one with a bullet. ‘The boys’ had just returned from the USA and their ground-breaking appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, which had been viewed by 73 million people.
Ian had queued for tickets on an earlier day, with his older brother and hordes of others, many with sleeping bags, blankets and thermos flasks. He was 17 and he doesn’t remember much about the concert except: “I sat about two-thirds of the way back and the place was mostly full of girls. They were dancing in the aisles, which was not at all allowed in those days. The screaming was hysterical.” Ian was alarmed. He remembers being shocked as girls threw their knickers at the stage. “They were making so much noise you couldn’t hear the band.”
Research tells us the set list included ‘I Should Have Known Better’ and that the gig finished with ‘She Loves You’ which sent the whole place into delirium. When you watch the clips you can see why. The opening drum roll was like a giant boot kicking the door in.
1965 – Hammersmith Odeon
It was a full 18 months later, 10 December 1965, when Hazel Douglas saw them at the Hammersmith Odeon. The new single, ‘Day Tripper’ had (as usual) gone straight to the top of the charts and if you look at the contemporary footage you can see that the black-and-white world was starting to get coloured in (even if the video is still in black and white). Hammersmith was among the last performances the Beatles played in the UK. The craziness was getting too much for them.
They had played at Shea Stadium to an audience of 55,000 and were travelling to concerts by armoured car. Lennon was calling for Help. The new album, Rubber Soul, sounded distinctly weird and I myself can recall people quoting Plato: “When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake.”
Hazel was only 13 at the time and unaware of any undercurrents. She remembers being with a group of six friends, the mother of one of them having finagled the exceptionally hard-to-get tickets. “We came in a minibus and were as high as kites even before we went in.” She recalls a palpable frenzy. “We couldn’t hear the music because everyone was screaming so I just screamed as well as loud as I could.” Reports suggest more noise than a 747 at take-off. “Paul did a solo bit on ‘Yesterday’ which brought a brief lull but when they played ‘Day Tripper’ the floor was shaking, it seemed like an earthquake.”
Not everyone’s cup of tea
History suggests everyone was in thrall but not all the witnesses saw it that way. Viv was already aware of the backlash which came when the boys were just TOO popular. She had friends who “wouldn’t have been seen dead at a Beatles gig”. Ian was more of a Cliff man, having a picture of the Peter Pan of Pop taped to the ceiling in his bedroom.
For myself, I remember another (totally reliable) witness, Dr Timothy Leary, writing, way back before your mother was born: “I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.” I struggle to find anything there to argue with. I recall that, not long after Hazel’s epiphany in Hammersmith, I myself would spend many dreamy afternoons genuinely mesmerised by the picture on the back of Revolver, all the evidence I needed for the emergence of a new human species.
Many years later, when the madness had passed, a friend of mine, Alex, was window shopping with his wife in the Lanes in Brighton. He was looking through the glass of the jewellery shop on Meeting House Lane and was aware there was another couple there too, like him rubbernecking at the display of necklaces. He didn’t pay them much attention but, turning to go, looked up, straight into the face of Paul McCartney. Taken aback, struggling to compute, Alex managed a “Oh, hi.” Paul was cool. “Hi”, he said back, perfectly nicely. My friends then tiptoed off, or so it felt, down towards the sea. But what else was there to say?
CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO OUR CROWDFUNDER
HELP US BECOME STRONGER SO THAT WE CAN CONTINUE TO DELIVER POWERFUL CITIZEN JOURNALISM!
