150 glimpses of the beatles review7/4/2023 ![]() Working alongside Brian Epstein, Alistair Taylor observed the different ways the Beatles dealt with their earnings. He knew that if he or the others had caught ’flu, there’d be no filming. Paul opened the door an inch, asked, “Is it catching?” “Yes,” I said, on which he shut the door and I never saw him again.’ Paul was being the pragmatist, as usual. Mummy bear, Daddy bear and Baby bear.” And then he left. Ringo then came in, sat down by the bed, picked up the hotel menu and read out loud, as if to a child, “Once upon a time there were three bears. John Lennon came in next and marched up and down barking “Sieg heil, Schweinhund! The doctors are here. Whenever anyone’s ill in bed they have to have their pillows plumped.” He then plumped my pillows and left. He knocked, came in and said, “I’ve come to plump your pillows. ‘The Beatles came to my hotel room to visit. While filming Help! in Salzburg, he caught ’flu and was confined to bed. The actor Victor Spinetti once told this story about them. Carolyn See noted how, in A Hard Day’s Night, they enacted their given personas: ‘winsome Paul, witty John, thoughtful George, goofy Ringo’. Even their friends liked to paint them in primary colours, with sharply contrasting characters, like one of those jokes about the Englishman, the Welshman, the Irishman and the Scotsman. Each personified a different element: John fire, Paul water, George air, Ringo earth. As a fan, you expressed yourself by picking one over the others. Paul was cute, and George, with velvet brown eyes and dark chestnut hair, was the best-looking man I’d ever seen.’ Unlike millions of other fans, Pattie was able to take her choice a stage further. ‘On first impressions, John seemed more cynical and brash than the others, Ringo the most endearing. Pattie Boyd met the four Beatles after being chosen to play one of the schoolgirls in Hard Day’s Night. Ringo was the quiet one.’įor New Widow, ‘Horrible Days.’ Then More Help Arrived. He would occasionally talk about what he was going to do when he was rich, and try to pick my brains about the financial side of things. ‘John was married but nobody knew about it at the time so along with a few thousand other girls I had a crush on him … George was the most serious. Like any other girl, she had her favourite. ![]() Helen Shapiro was only sixteen but already a major star when the Beatles toured as one of her supporting acts at the start of 1963. So it was probably just a contrarian position to choose Ringo Starr.’ ![]() Paul McCartney was far and away the favorite. He was not, of course, the favorite in my school among the girls. “Oh, I like Ringo,”’ remembered Fran Lebowitz, who grew up in New Jersey. ‘If someone asked who my favorite was I always said, It went without saying that the others were already taken, but you might just stand an outside chance with the drummer. Picking him as your favourite suggested a touch of realism. Ringo was the Beatle for girls who lacked ambition. John seemed off-limits, too intimidating.’ There was, she recalls, ‘a real goody-two-shoes at school who liked Paul. In Liverpool, the twelve-year-old Linda Grant favoured Ringo ‘for reasons that are beyond me’. For their American fan Carolyn See, there was ‘Paul, for those who preferred androgynous beauty John, for those who prized intellect and wit George because he possessed that ineffable something we would later recognize as spiritual life and Ringo, patron saint of fuckups the world over.’ No one would ever pick Hank Marvin over Cliff Richard, say, or Mike Smith over Dave Clark.īut with the Beatles there was a choice, so you had to pick a favourite, and the one you picked said a lot about who you were. Other groups had a front man your favourite was pre-selected for you. ![]() George is the first of the Beatlesto spot the man from the record shop approaching. Taylor himself is undergoing one of the most shocking experiences of his life – ‘like someone thumping you’ – and he is pretty sure Brian feels the same.Īfter the show, Taylor says, ‘They’re just AWFUL.’ Taylor notices Brian’s eyes widen with amazement. Brian recognises them from the family record shop he manages: they are the ones who lounge around in the booths, listening to the latest discs and chatting to the girls, with absolutely no intention whatsoever of buying a record.īetween songs, the three yobs with guitars start yelling and swearing, turning their backs on the audience and pretending to hit one another. Four young musicians saunter onto the stage. Both he and Taylor would prefer to be attending a classical concert at the Philharmonic, but curiosity got the better of them.
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