It's been a Hard Day's Hamburg
One German city is trying to relive the The Beatles' glory days, but the sleazy clubs are left in the past, writes John Costello
The stench of stale urine crowds the cramped storeroom. Cold water from the toilet bowl is all that's available to wash and shave with. Prostitutes, pimps, gangsters and sleazy sex parlours fill the local streets. This is home. This is Hamburg 1960.
This is The Beatles before they were fab.
"I was born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg," John Lennon said of his time in the grubby city where the band lived in squalor, performing gruelling sets lasting up to six hours in the tough local clubs of the Reeperbahn.
Now Hamburg, hit by dwindling tourism figures and hoping to revive memories of the Fab Four, has branded itself Beatles City, renamed one of its squares Beatles Platz and opened a five-storey museum to pay homage to John, Paul, George and Ringo. But it is doubtful that a truthful recreation of the band's time on the Reeperbahn would attract your average tourist.
It was the summer of 1960, they were called the Silver Beatles, and there were five of them, not four. The line-up included John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe on bass and Pete Best on drums. When they arrived in Hamburg they found a city where violence, vice and crime had flourished from the rubble of World War II.
Bruno Koschmider, a club owner with a Bond villain limp, had contracted the band to entertain punters at his low-end strip joint, the Indra Club.
Its shabby, cheap interior was nothing compared to the cinema storeroom where the band that had just changed its name to The Beatles was told it had to sleep.
"We lived backstage in the Bambi Kino, next to the toilets, and you could always smell them," Paul McCartney recalled. "The room had been an old storeroom, and there were just concrete walls and nothing else. No heat, no wallpaper, not a lick of paint; and two sets of bunk beds, with not very much covers -- Union Jack flags -- we were frozen."
Lennon added a little more colour to the imagery -- "We were put in this pigsty. We were living in a toilet, like right next to the ladies' toilet. We'd go to bed late and be woken up next day by the sound of the cinema show and old German fraus pissing next door."
Life on stage was little better. They performed seven days a week, playing four-and-a-half-hour sets on weekdays and six-hour sets on weekends. Every night Koschmider stood in front of the band and screamed "Mach Schau!" ("Make a show of it!"), forcing the five boys from Liverpool to put more energy into their performances.
The Indra run of gigs was cut short due to noise complaints and The Beatles were relocated to Kaiserkeller, where they alternated sets with Rory Storm and The Hurricanes, whose drummer happened to be one Ringo Starr.
The stage was a simple affair, planks of wood balanced on beer crates, and the two groups made a bet to see who could be the first to break it. That honour went to Storm, who fell through the impromptu stage after leaping off the top of an upright piano mid song.
Koschmider, who had to replace the live music with a jukebox, was furious and sent his doormen armed with coshes to teach the two bands a lesson.
Although they were popular with the excitement-hungry crowds made up of drunken sailors, prostitutes and small-time gangsters, a group of students and artists also frequented the clubs to hear the boys grind out hours of Little Richard, Fats Domino and Everly Brothers hits.
One of them, Astrid Kirchherr (who would later fall in love with Sutcliffe), introduced the boys to Preludin, a slimming pill and 'upper' that would help them get through their long, chaotic sets. It had the desired affect.
Lennon would often greet audiences by pulling a black comb from his pocket, pretending it was a moustache, give a Nazi salute and shouting: "Heil Hitler!" One night, after he failed to arrive on stage, he was found in the toilet with a woman.
The lustful liaison was promptly broken up with a cold bucket of water and Lennon ran on stage to perform, soaking wet, in his underpants with a toilet seat around his neck. The endless hours of gigs saw the band not only improve, but begin to attract other bands to witness the high energy and bawdy brilliance of their shows.
In late October, The Beatles left the Kaiserkeller after the Top Ten Club offered more money and slightly better living conditions. However, Koschmider was fuming and had Harrison deported after reporting him for working under the legal age limit. When Best and McCartney went to the Bambi Kino to get the remainder of their belongings, they decided to show Koschmider what they thought of him by nailing a condom to the wall of the room and setting it on fire.
While there was no damage, Koschmider reported the pair for attempted arson and, after a short stint in Davidwache Police Station, they too were forced to return to Liverpool.
However, once Harrison turned 18 and the owner of the Top Ten Club paid the German Authorities the 158DM that the deportations had cost, The Beatles were allowed return to play in the club on April 1, 1961.
A few months later, McCartney was forced to take over bass playing duties when Sutcliffe announced he was leaving the band to concentrate on art. By mid 1962 the Beatles' legendary line-up was complete after Ringo Starr replaced Best.
During their second stint in Hamburg, The Beatles experienced their first hit record. However, it was as the backing band to German popstar Tony Sheridan, whose hit My Bonnie actually billed the Liverpudlians as the "Beat Brothers".
This apparently was because Beatles was considered too close to peedles, which means small penises in German.When the Fab Four returned to Liverpool the wild musical excitement that had fuelled their performances in Hamburg saw them explode on to the local scene.
Their stagecraft and musicianship had been forged in their baptism of fire in Hamburg and local bands could simply not compete.
Now that the Reeperbahn is no longer a haven for sado-masochists, and respectable hotels have begun replacing many of the district's brothels, Hamburg wants us to relive the nostalgia of the city's Beatles era.
With a life-sized Yellow Submarine, mop-top wigs and an array of Beatles kitsch taking centre place in Hamburg's Beatles museum, it's no surprise the Germans seem content to leave the squalid debauchery of The Beatles' early years in the past.
So tourists are unlikely to truly understand what George Harrison meant when, aged only 17, he called Hamburg "the naughtiest city in the world".
