Were German gangsters the most important audience The Beatles ever played to?
Sex, drugs, gangsters… and just a group of young boys from Liverpool trying to make it big. That’s the crux of The Beatles‘ story.
When the band packed up and went to Hamburg in 1960, to all intents and purposes, they were a bunch of naive dreamers who had never really experienced life anywhere outside the city and the docks. As such, heading to Germany at the dawn of the most hedonistic decade in history was an awakening for them, in every sense of the word.
Despite only three of the future Beatles making the trip, the experience of playing in Hamburg, let alone just taking in its culture, was something that plainly proved pivotal to the minds of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison. Even when Ringo Starr came later, the foundations they laid in Germany were able to be passed on like pearls of wisdom.
Yet in terms of throwing themselves in at the deep end, Hamburg represented far more than just first tastes of alcohol or getting intimate with girls. No, it was a lot worse than that. The club circuit there was famed for making bands and artists if they were good, as clearly shown in the case of The Beatles. But it also came perilously close to breaking them.
After all, despite the bright beacons of hope that the scene on the outside promised, there was a much darker underworld that swirled beneath this web of clubs. Mobs of German gangsters ran many of these venues, and while the evenings would start out well with a first set for younger audiences, it was the second performance where things would turn ugly.
With a convicted killer manning the doors and the bosses continually shouting “make play” in German to demand the future stars put on a show, the atmosphere was fractious and drunk with tension, to say the least. Fellow performer Cliff Bennett later recalled: “They used to send up trays of drinks with requests. It was a scary place, just off the Reeperbahn,” otherwise known as the city’s red light district.
All of this is to say that 1960s Hamburg was not exactly the place you should feel comfortable sending your teenager to on their first independent trip abroad. However, did it actually help The Beatles? You could argue, despite all the power trips and culture of fear, that it was this environment that told them they could survive anything.
Flash forward a few years, and when people had threats out to kill them, break into their hotel rooms, or hysterically scream their way into the Fabs’ manic lives, they could just think back to a time when a gangster would shout at them to sing their songs, and realise they could conquer anything. If you made it back out of Hamburg alive, you could take on the world.
In many ways, it spoke volumes about the speed at which The Beatles’ career moved from that point, in a trajectory that would have most modern artists breaking out in a cold sweat at the concept of playing local concert halls, and within a year taking on the biggest stadiums in the world. But with one hell of a lot of bravado, the band could just take it all in their stride.
Of course, it’s probably not advisable if people are looking to toughen their kids up a bit for the wider world that they put them in a band and ship them off to Hamburg for some life experience, as there’s a whole list of things that could go wrong. But then again, just look at The Beatles – it might be the making of them.
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