How The Beatles sparked the life of Frank Sidebottom: “We wouldn’t budge”
We have The Beatles to thank for many things within the music world, but the emergence of an anarchic ball of energy from Timperley, with a papier-mâché head and some very big shorts, is among the most unexpected entries on that list. Nevertheless, without the Fab Four, the world would never have met Frank Sidebottom.
As a child of the 1960s, it was only natural that Chris Sievey – the man behind the head – become a devotee of The Beatles, with the band sparking a musical obsession within Sievey that never really subsided.
With the inspiration that the ‘mop tops’ provided to him, the budding young musician soon began writing his own songs, recording his own demos, and experimenting with cassette tapes and recording techniques in a way that evoked a distinctly more lo-fi version of the band’s Revolver era production innovations.
Along with his brother, Martin Sievey, Chris soon hatched a plan to follow in the footsteps of his musical heroes by scoring a record deal with Apple. What he didn’t consider, however, was that signing a deal with Apple during the early 1970s wasn’t a door that was open to many budding young artists, particularly those from obscure places like Timperley. “We had two acoustic guitars, so we hitched down,” he recalled in the documentary film Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story.
Hitching down to Apple’s London headquarters was only half the battle, of course. “We got there at nine o’clock in the morning, and we went in and sat down in reception and said, ‘We’re not going ‘til you sign us up,’” Sievey shared. “I mean, they tried to throw us out and everything, but we wouldn’t budge.”
“In the end, a bloke came down, and he had a listen to us, and he liked the stuff. So they took us in a studio there a couple of days later, and we did 11 tracks for them.”
Chris Sievey
Ultimately, though, Sievey’s Apple success was not to be. According to his brother, Martin, “The advice from Apple was go home, get a band together, and gradually work our way up into show business.” So, that is exactly what Sievey did.
In the shadow of the punk revolution, Sievey formed The Freshies in 1978; the culmination of the countless songs and recordings he had been making for years by that point. Although the band amassed a cult audience in and around Manchester, providing a much-needed upbeat antidote to the deliberate misery of the city’s punk movement, The Freshies never truly took off. They did, however, conjure up Frank Sidebottom as their support act.
Eventually, The Freshies began to take a backseat to their papier-mâché superfan until Sievey decided to focus all his attention on building the Frank Sidebottom character, abandoning The Freshies in 1982. With the advice of Apple still presumably rattling around inside his now comically large head, Sidebottom quickly set his sights on show business.
Via tireless pub performances, support slots, comic strip appearances, and a plethora of parody songs, Frank Sidebottom managed to break into the entertainment industry, infiltrating television, the pop charts, and becoming Britain’s most unlikely stalwart of pop culture.
Throughout it all, Sievey never lost his adoration for The Beatles, either. In fact, he spent many of his later days, while suffering from the cancer diagnosis that eventually claimed his life, consuming every piece of Beatles media possible. After all, without them, there would be no Frank.
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