The Beatles in Hamburg: 60 years on from the band's wild German adventure

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Jochan Embley17 August 2020

On the morning of August 17, 1960, the Beatles emerged from a cramped minibus and tumbled out into a seedy enclave of Hamburg. Arriving after a drive on the long and winding road from Liverpool, they were there to play a series of gigs at a club in the West German city. Little more than three months later, they were being deported back to the UK, chiefly thanks to an incident involving a flaming condom.

It sounds ridiculous and, in many ways, it was. But it was also an “apprenticeship”, as George Harrison later put it — an education in performance, drugs, sex and, as would soon prove itself rather important, moptop haircuts.

When they set off for Germany, only three of the Fab Four were in place: Harrison, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Joined by Stuart Sutcliffe on bass and Pete Best on drums, they were taken abroad by booking agent Allan Williams, who had previously enjoyed success in Hamburg with other groups.

They settled at the Indra, a club just a few hundred yards off the Reeperbahn, a notorious stretch of road unaffectionately nicknamed by locals as “die sündigste Meile”, or “the most sinful mile”. It was Hamburg’s red light district, a haunt of the ne’er-do-wells, and the kind of place that the respective parents of each Beatle had to be persuaded by Williams to let their teenage sons travel to.

It was all thoroughly unglamorous. Accommodation was sourced in the dingy storeroom of a nearby cinema, with the band sleeping on tiny bunk beds and regularly ingesting wafts of urine from the adjacent toilet. The pay was almost decent — £2.50 each per night, roughly £40 in today’s money — but the work was back-breaking. They would be forced to play for hours every evening, seven nights a week, with performances stretching into the early morning. Songs would stagger onwards for 20 minutes or more, with solo after solo. It was herculean, and it soon became aided by phenmetrazine, a stimulant drug that would sometimes keep the band “awake for days”.

"Mach schau!": John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison perfrom in Hamburg in 1962 
Redferns

The crowds were tough, too. Violence often broke out, with bouncers hardly averse to the odd scrap, and some punters were amused by the band’s name, which shared a similar sound to “Piedel”, a word for “penis” in the local dialect. The extra incentive to impress forced the band to up their showmanship — as regularly reminded by club owner Bruno Koschmider, who would yell “mach schau!”, or “put on a show!” in front of the stage — and turned them into the seemingly ready-made rock ‘n’ roll stars that would appear on TVs around the world just a couple of years later.

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In late October, lured by the promise of a less sordid sleeping arrangement and better pay, the band accepted a booking at another Reeperbahn venue, the Top Ten Club. It enraged Koschmider, who claimed a breach of contract. In retaliation, he reported the 17-year-old Harrison for working underage. He was deported the following month.

When McCartney and Best went back to the cinema to get their belongings, they found it dark and without electricity. A condom was pinned to the wall and set alight as a makeshift lamp. When Koschmider found out about it, he again made a criminal complaint, this time for the trumped up charge of attempted arson. And it worked — the pair were sent home in December, and Lennon followed soon after.

Undeterred, and with their immigration woes settled, the group returned to Hamburg and the Top Ten Club in March the following year. This second stint was defined by fate, chance meetings and happenings that would define the band’s future success.

For one, Sutcliffe decided to return home to pursue a career as a painter, which forced McCartney onto bass. A year later, Sutcliffe had tragically succumbed to a brain haemorrhage.

It was in Hamburg, too, that the band first met Ringo Starr, who was the drummer of another group playing around the city, and who filled in on drums at a recording session when Best was otherwise engaged. And it was in Hamburg that they recorded their first ever single, My Bonnie, as Tony Sheridan’s backing band. The song piqued the interest of Brian Epstein, who would later become the band’s manager and the so-called “fifth Beatle”.

A young photographer, Astrid Kirchherr, attended some of the gigs and became obsessed with the band. She asked to take photos of them — one of the first snappers to ever do so — and played a peculiar role in influencing a key aspect of Beatles iconography: the moptop. Her boyfriend at the time had the haircut, as did many of their art school friends, which persuaded Sutcliffe to do likewise. The rest is history.

Today, remnants of the Beatles’ formative stay in Hamburg are dotted around the city. Towards the eastern end of Reeperbahn, there’s Beatles-Platz, a small square with steel silhouette sculptures of the group performing. Various scraps of memorabilia are housed inside some museums. Largely, though, Hamburg’s role in the Beatles' career remains an understated one. But as Lennon once put it: “I might have been born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg”.

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