2 - Episode 2 – Germany Calling

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2 - Episode 2 – Germany Calling

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).

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2 - Episode 2 – Germany Calling

AP_780-LEI-1-2-2_s1_f01_v1