2 - Let’s Go Down The Cavern

Episode 1 – Violent Playground The title comes from a 1958 film which was shot around the council flats in Gerard Gardens in Liverpool. The cast included a young Freddie Starr. This episode sets up the background to Merseybeat. It opens with Ken Dodd likening the racial mix in Liverpool to a packet of Smarties: how times change as that was intended as a witty, innocuous comment. Hank Walters and John McNally talk about the popularity of country music in Liverpool; Jim Gretty talks of selling instruments at Frank Hessy’s and we hear how Gerry and the Pacemakers, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, Rikki and the Red Streaks and the Four Jays got started. An awkward dance manoeuvre could start a fight. Adrian Henri and Bill Harry talk about Stu Sutcliffe as an artist and Dave May of the Silhouettes reveals that he taught Stu the bass and that, contrary to Beatle books, he was okay. Norman Chapman describes drumming for the Beatles. There is hardly any jazz in the programme: I should have spoken to the Merseysippi Jazz Band, but we hear a test pressing of the Swinging Blue Jeans, then the Bluegenes, as a jazz band with ‘I’m Shy, Mary Ellen, I’m Shy’, recorded for Oriole Records in 1962. The scoop of the programme was in unearthing a whole album by Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes which had been recorded in Cambridge Road, Crosby in 1958. The recording had been made by Bernard Whitty who owned Lambda Records and to get the balance right, he put the drummer Dave Lovelady at the top of the stairs. At the time of the series, no one knew of the Quarrymen’s 1958 recording for Percy Phillips, so this was an extraordinary find: a Merseybeat group a couple of years before anything happened. I play two tracks in full: ‘Shortnin’ Bread’ and Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’. Kingsize Taylor, then an 18-year-old butcher’s boy, sounds like he means business. I was presenting the series without hindsight and hopefully anyone listening to it would get a feeling that something was building up in Liverpool but nobody was quite sure what. There is talk of records coming from the Cunard Yanks. I have demonstrated elsewhere that this effect was exaggerated, but I accepted it at the time. All the cover versions that the Liverpool groups performed had been released in the UK and the NEMS store, managed by Brian Epstein, stocked them all.

Episode 10 – Ticket To Ride The groups are going to America and Tony Barrow talks of how the dangers were multiplied. After John had made his misquoted “bigger than Jesus” comment, Barrow heard a firecracker go off at a show and immediately thought someone had shot him. George Harrison hated touring America so much that after playing the final gig of the Beatles’ 1966 tour, he got on the plane and said, “That’s it, I’m not a Beatle anymore.” On a lighter note, Derek Leckenby describes the wackiest of 21st parties for Keith Moon while Derek Quinn tells how Freddie and the Dreamers thought they would be making $90,000 in three weeks but ended up with individual bills for $1,400.

Episode 11 – Don’t Make Me Over Fame isn’t all it is cracked up to be. Chris Curtis is sacked from the Searchers, believing that he was the genius of the band. Billy J Kramer balloons up to 16 stone; Rory Storm may have committed suicide; and Brian Epstein dies unexpectedly. The Beatles lead the way with psychedelia but the other Liverpool bands are too grounded in reality to join them. There are two demos played: ‘Keep Me Warm Til The Sun Shines’ (an outstanding Swinging Blue Jeans record but EMI told them they had to stick with their producer) and ‘Sorrow’ (the first session in which the Merseys were backed by the musicians who became Led Zeppelin). Scaffold are on the road, playing silly food in motorway cafés with the Bonzo Dog Band. If you ordered cod with custard and jam, you had to eat it. Roger McGough reads a poem about being on the road in Birmingham.

Episode 12 – Will You Love Me Tomorrow? As the Merseybeat boom subsides, a number of musicians go into cabaret and maybe if you look at the titles that the Beatles recorded for Decca in 1962, none of them were far away from that. The Fourmost settle comfortably to the chicken-in-a-basket routine and Tony Marsh of the Coasters claims to be one of the first solo singer/guitarists in the north-west. At the time of recording, Brian Jones was happy to be part of Gary Glitter’s band. Some musicians had had enough and took day jobs but some ached to be at the top. With bitterness and regret, Lee Curtis says, “I envy those people who made it, every day I envy them.” “I’d soon live on dry bread than leave Liverpool,” says Hank Walters and the series ends with the redevelopment of the Cavern.

Episode 2 – Germany Calling I’m not sure of my thinking here. This was a speech and music series and yet it is 19 minutes before I get to a record. I must have thought that the tales of the Liverpool lads in Hamburg were so colourful that I didn’t want to cut them. Allan Williams who took the Beatles to Hamburg was a splendid raconteur and the group members had many stories of “drunken insanity”. Dave Lovelady, then with the Dominoes, hated the place but then the first thing he saw was somebody getting shot. The actor Lewis Collins, who played with the Mojos, ends the show by saying “My god, I went there a greenhorn, still a virgin at 18, and I came back an old man, having experienced everything in the book.” The Beatles were transformed through playing Hamburg and they shocked Liverpool audiences with their rawness when they returned in December 1960 and played Litherland Town Hall. It was an even more radical transformation for the Swinging Blue Jeans as they had gone to the Star-Club as a jazz band and found that the audiences didn’t want that: they changed overnight into a rock band. A bonus was in discovering that Les Maguire had married one of his German fans and Brigitte offers a different perspective on Liverpool groups in Hamburg. Later, I did go to Hamburg and I interviewed some German musicians and promoters for a series, Germany Calling (2002).

Episode 3 – Luncheon Beat This episode concentrates on the Cavern in the beat years. Many opinions on the Beatles in the Cavern and how rough it could be for guest artists (Shadows, Tornados). The Cavern should be praised for the originality of its lunchtime sessions and for having such a distinctive DJ and booker in Bob Wooler. Cilla Black worked in the cloakroom and she was amused by US books which call her “a hatcheck girl” – “Who in Liverpool wore a hat, and certainly not at the Cavern?” Lewis Collins reveals that he owns Paul McCartney’s leather jacket, or at least he did in 1981. Bill Harry created a local newspaper for musicians, Mersey Beat, which was a great idea and he says it was because “Liverpool was becoming like New Orleans at the turn of the century”. Unissued demo of ‘Lend Me Your Comb’ from Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.

Episode 4 - Drummed Out The sacking of Pete Best is a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie and I’ve milked it more than most but I do wonder if there is anything there. Brian Epstein told Pete Best that he wasn’t good enough and maybe there is no more to it than that. Pete says that he was never told the reason why he was sacked: maybe he was but he didn’t believe it. Pete, sadly, sounds at his most mournful when discussing his dismissal but maybe that says a lot. Pete is fond of saying “Somebody turned around and said…” There is a clip near the start of Episode 4 where various people turn round three times in one sentence; you end up wondering who’s facing who. Anyway, this programme looks at the pros and cons of Pete Best in some detail and comments on other possible reasons for the dismissal. For example, was he too good-looking for the Beatles and were the others jealous? It considers Paul McCartney as a bass player and the importance of George Martin as a producer, even in the early years. At the time nothing from the Beatles’ Decca audition had been released officially. I played a minute of ‘Money’ from a bootleg, but that was chancing my arm.

Episode 6 – Scooping The Pool Away from the tension of the two previous episodes, I’m looking at the records that came out from the Liverpool bands in that surge of Merseybeat: in Episode 6 the hit-makers and in Episode 7 the also-rans. Billy J Kramer discusses his hits but he turned down ‘Yesterday’, telling McCartney that he was “tired of nicey-nicey songs and wanted a real head-banger”. Cilla defends Bobby Willis’ B-sides and Les Maguire tells how Gerry and the Pacemakers decided against ‘Hello Little Girl’ and the song went to the Fourmost. The advantage of interviewing someone in their home is that they may go off and find something – in this case, the demo of the Beatles they were given for ‘Hello Little Girl’. Gerry talks about how ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ became a Kop anthem. Following on from Cilla Black in the previous episode, Freddie Garrity says he was shocked to hear Cilla describe ‘You Were Made For Me’ as sounding more like Freda and the Dreamers. George Martin admits that Brian Epstein “brought me a lot of people I didn’t want” and Glen Campbell and George Hamilton IV sing the praises of Gerry and the Pacemakers. George said that ‘Ferry Cross The Mersey’ conjured up beautiful images of Liverpool and a ferry trip”.

Episode 7 – Some Other Guys The previous episode was about the hit-makers and this one looks at successful bands who didn’t quite make it, sometimes because there were gremlins with the personnel. The raucous Big Three were belligerent and regarded commercial success as a sign of weakness. The Undertakers were too eccentric and certainly smuggling Monopoly money into East Germany to promote ‘If You Don’t Come Back’ was a lunatic idea, though it did bring them front-page publicity if not a hit single. Rory Storm and the Hurricanes should never have attempted a singalong version of ‘America’ from West Side Story even though it was produced by Brian Epstein. On the other hand, the Chants were unlucky to miss out on their doo-wop revival of ‘I Could write a Book’. The TTs found chart success but only by backing Eden Kane. There is a demo of ‘Back Again To Me’, an original song by Earl Preston and the TTs which was never released. It sounds like a checklist of Merseybeat ingredients.

Episode 8 – A-Sides And Backsides This episode is largely based around the recording studies, but with a few tales of Freddie Starr’s outrageousness, hence the ‘Backsides’. Starr himself had trouble with the record producer Joe Meek, who wanted him singing at the top of his range. Similarly, Tommy Quickly never had the right songs and yet gave dynamic performances. Lee Curtis’s suggestions were turned down by Decca and yet others were going to have hits with them. When recording ‘Rosetta’, the Fourmost asked Dave Lovelady to play the piano badly, so that Paul McCartney would feel obliged to take over. There are stories of backing Gene Vincent and Chuck Berry on tour and how Vincent would hide razor blades in pieces of soap to extract revenge. There was some discussion as to whether such a nasty trick should be broadcast on radio in case somebody followed it. Cliff Hall of the Spinners finds himself on a major hit, ‘Game Of Love’, when Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders needed a deep voice and borrowed him for 10 minutes. It’s back to Germany for Kingsize Taylor overturning a bar Clint Eastwood-fashion and Freddie Starr impersonating Lee Curtis doing ‘Jezebel’.

Episode 9 – Tour De Force This is Derek Quinn’s star turn. He has unsurpassable tales of touring with Freddie and the Dreamers. The Swinging Blue Jeans wondered whether they should worn swinging blue jeans but suits were the order of the day. After entertaining an audience, they put on a show for residents in the hotel and we hear their theme song, ‘We’re Here Again’, which has never been released. There are so many variations on telling US performers that they need passports to get into Scotland, the one here concerning Roy Orbison, that you would think these stars would have passed notes. The technical side of Gerry’s Christmas Cracker got the better of the groups and the Undertakers travelled with their coffin. There are tales of being mobbed in the street and the most poignant observation comes from NEMS press officer Tony Barrow talking about Billy J Kramer’s insecurity: “Every success meant that he had even more to live up to.”