Derek Taylor
I first met Derek Taylor at the 1996 Q Awards. He was with mutual friends and we clicked immediately, diving deep into pop bitch mode. Peter Blake was receiving an award for his work on the Beatles’ “Sgt Pepper”, and he used the podium to launch yet another moan about his paltry fee for the original artwork. Taylor fixed the stage with a lethal stare and repeated, very loudly so that everybody got the message, ‘Pompous cunt!”. Fabulous!
This interview was done in the summer of 1997. With Anthony Wall of Arena, I was doing the preliminary legwork for “The Brian Epstein Story”. Taylor had ghost-written Epstein’s 1964 autobiography, “A Cellarful of Noise”. Quite apart from his knowledge of the Beatles’ manager, Taylor was our conduit into the Beatles’ management company, Apple, without whose OK there was no point in shooting an inch of tape.
Taylor was visibly unwell when we arrived at Brundon Mill, in deepest Suffolk. However he was generous with his time and his memories. The thing that fascinated me about him was the fact that he had grown up in the early 50′s – pre-rock – and had gone through the notoriously cynical Fleet Street (national newspaper) Mill yet, married and with children at the age of thirty two, he had heard the piper and left his previous life behind.
From that point on, he lived through the epicentre of the mid to late sixties: the Beatles’ world tour of 1964, the launch and success of the Byrds in 1965 and 1966, the Beach Boys, Monterey, Apple… the list goes on. His sleeve notes for “Beatles for Sale” and the Byrds’ “Turn Turn Turn” are masterpieces in that little reckoned genre: his memoirs “As Time Goes By” and “Fifty Years Adrift” are the best insider documents of those extraordinary times. Alone out of all the people close to the Beatles, he understood what was going on – not with hindsight, but at the time – and he wrote about it beautifully.
(Note: It is hoped to reprint “Fifty Years Adrift” within the immediate future.)
Interview by Jon Savage and Anthony Wall. (AW)
Can we begin by talking about Brian himself? When did you first meet him?
I first met him the day after Paul’s 21st birthday, in Whitechapel. The NEMS office. I’d seen them at the end of May, in Manchester, in concert with Gerry and Roy Orbison. So I went and did a formal and extremely pleasant main news section. That’s how it was in those days. A Daily Express interview with the man behind the Beatles. Svengali stuff.
Was it his first?
Well, he hadn’t done a lot. He certainly hadn’t done anything as ‘important’ as the Daily Express was in those days. It was a very great, popular paper. Sold more than the Mail I should think. It was towards the end of Beaverbrook, and it was a good time to be there, if you liked that sort of thing. And intellectually it was more for me… although I read the Guardian I didn’t feel that I was… Guardian standard. And when I went for an interview at the Guardian it was confirmed, I didn’t get through. So I’d reached the newspaper that I, and a lot of us wanted to be on. I’d now got the theatre job, and you could get in anywhere if you were on the Daily Express, anyone would see you. Journalists weren’t nasty about people in the theatre in those days. It was nearly all pleasant stuff. The worst anyone was called was a hell-raiser. Roderick Mann at the Sunday Express used to do that. He’d go round and round the hell-raisers: Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris, and they were always nursing a hangover and picking at prawns and spearing a cockle, and all of these horrible clichés. I did this with this amazing man, with his monogrammed shirt and his buckle shoes, and we got on awfully well, considering what a front he had. He was awfully remote, and people hadn’t asked him that before. People hadn’t been asking anything for very long. So he did like the interview, but also had this kind of sniffy front, but that didn’t fool me, cos I was from Liverpool, and I did sort of know that he was Jewish – although I wasn’t the sort of person to be out and about spotting Jews, but he wouldn’t tell me where he was from in Liverpool. I told him where I was from, I was from Aigburth. Eventually he said Queen’s Drive. I should have known, Brian Epstein would be Jewish. But I don’t know, I didn’t know Alfred Sherman [?], I don’t think I knew that Marjorie Proops or Claire Rayner or any of these people were Jewish… but he was most resistant to saying where he was from. he was a bit rum about being Jewish. We got such an easy relationship so quickly that he could say such awful things. I hate Jewish golf clubs, he said, they’re so noisy. You know how some Jewish people have a way of speaking that makes them sound anti-Semitic? But all they’re doing is being comical. He’d tell me almost anything, but he wouldn’t say where he was from. I didn’t ask him anything very cheeky anyway… I just wanted to be nice about him and about the Beatles, because I was truly stunned by how marvellous they’d been at that concert. I turned out much later that that day was the day after the party where John had knocked Bob Wood about, for making certain suggestions… so it could have been an anxious time for him, Liverpool being a very small town. It’s much smaller now, of course, there’s hardly anyone there… but about 800,000 people, it was very local, and although I was living in Manchester and although I seemed not to be Liverpool, I’d only left Liverpool in 1960, I’d been on the Echo there for years, he saw me as a Manchester man. But when I talked about coming from West Kirkby, where I was brought up, he had a furniture shop in Hoylake, Clarendon Furnishing, so we got more and more local by the end of the conversation, and it was, do you know old so-and-so? Basically, we impressed each other. I knew very little about that kind of music, because I was ten years older than they were, or more.
What was his physical presence like?
Probably slightly plump. A very soft appearance, he didn’t look as if he did any exercise, but then a lot of people did then. I certainly didn’t do any, and I was very thin. Cigarette smoking, so was he, nervy. Very well dressed, very good suit, lovely shirt, these were differences, what made people different, the buckled shoes, the monogrammed shirt. The detail. Good short haircut. When it was nearly over and the photographer moved in and it was, do you mind if I do a bit of this and that, and the photographer said he’d borrowed some instruments from a shop, and he said, let’s have a look at them, and he said, oh no, I’m not posing with those. I don’t think he really knew much about the subtleties of instruments, though he wasn’t ignorant…
I say I didn’t know a lot about the music, and I certainly didn’t know a lot about guitars, though I had started to write interesting things because I knew about pianos. I’d learned to play pianos as a child, everyone had one of those cheap Bechsteins in the corner, nice cheap upright pianos. John Lennon had the same model only more recent. we all had them. I’d done a piece about the disappearing piano and the number of guitars… I’d always been very good on trends, I knew this thing that was happening was something to write about. Though I say so myself, I had good taste, and this was for me. Although I was still on the Daily Express, something was definitely happening to me in the two or three weeks after seeing them. I was drawn to knowing an enormous amount more about them. Don’t let me ramble ahead, but we get to Bill Harry and he sent me to Hamburg. Said, if you want to really get into this, go to Hamburg, and I went around and saw all the parents. No newspaper man from Manchester on the Daily Express or the Mail should have been doing nearly as much as I was doing on the Beatles, in this depth, because you didn’t have to, to cover them. You could just cover the mania, and satisfy the public, but I wanted far more, beyond journalistic curiosity.
It meant also that I was able to go back to Liverpool a lot. The expenses were good, you see… I went around all the parents: George’s parents, then Paul’s father, after he got home from work, and Ringo’s mother, and Aunt Mimi one evening, towards the end of 1963. I did think that I was prepared to give up the Daily Express to get involved with these people. I still hadn’t met them, I never liked hanging around backstage or going to pester people without a reason. Or unless I had a guaranteed space. And I was nervous about people I’d heard were quite sharp and difficult, without a solid reason for a visit. I got that when the Daily Express sent me out to nail them for agreeing to do the Royal Show, betraying their young fans, selling out, and do you realise they’d had it? this was how the hierarchy of the news had it, they were quite prepared to plunder them and dispatch them at the end of 1963. The features department however saw them at a greater depth and got an understanding. By then London, after the Royal Show, and some good journalists, Adrian Mitchell had cottoned on, and now I was a very useful connection, cos although I still didn’t know them well, I had been backstage, on this knocking piece. Brian trusted me, and started phoning me up for my opinions about things that were going on. He’d ask what did I think of so-and-so as a journalist, and I took all this for granted. I just felt we had a closeness. I probably saw him two or three times in 1963, after the first interview, for dinner. We’d talk about the boys. One day he said he was worried about what they should do in the mid-term, and I’d recently met Ken Dodd, who was very hot then, and new, still northern himself, and he’d said, I like those lads, they’re very cheeky, and then he said they should learn to dance. So I said to Brian, they should learn to dance, that’s what Ken Dodd, said, Brian. I’ve never heard such nonsense, said Brian, how dare Ken Dodd offer such advice. What does he know about rock’n'roll? Well, this is what he says, and he does know a lot about show business. And he likes them, he wants to help.
Do you think he was quite isolated, that there were few people to whom he could turn for advice?
Oh, he had plenty of friends in Liverpool. yeah, all that gay community, although I didn’t know anything about him being gay then. That came much later when he told me during the book. He went to a very good bar called the Bastinet Bar, a really important place in the story. It’s gone, it was demolished, as was all that side of Bastinet Street in Liverpool, off Church Street, and one side was demolished to extend Marks and Spencers. They lost a lot of lovely little jewellry shops, and then George Henry Lee’s which had been the Bonne Marché, very good department store. But the Bastinet Bar was close to cotton Liverpool, trader’s Liverpool, I think there was a gay aspect, but without being a gay bar. It was very close to the Playhouse, so it was arty, and Joan and I used to go to the Royal Court, and we’d go to the Bastinet Bar, and if we went there on the way to the theatre we’d never get to the theatre in time. You were doomed, because it was so full of fun, and in that context, Brian Epstein would meet all kinds of wonderful people. Rough people, knockabout people, gay people, people in the trade he was in, which was the retail trade. Don’t forget although he was fancy and gay and theatrical and artistic, he was a shopkeeper. And there were a lot of shopkeepers in there. There were a lot of people who didn’t think that this was going to be it, they were going to go on to other things in life. The Bastinet Bar was almost a staging post between what you were doing in Liverpool, and the West End. It saw itself almost like a pub you might see in Chelsea. Six Bells, or the King and Queen. A long answer to the question of whether I thought he was isolated. No. But he would like a bit of input from a fellow from the national newspapers, because he liked journalists, they gave him a very easy ride in Liverpool. All that rough bunch of bastards from the Liverpool Press Club, packed with talent and energy and drunkenness. It was a hell of a city.
When you went around the Beatles’ parents, did you get any sense of how they regarded Brian?
They trusted him completely. It was a wonderful thing that had happened to the boys. Everyone knows that these were not easy people to please, they picked up on everything. Because you were with this person your accent had changed from when you were with that person. Particularly Paul. They were in their own little tiny world that had always been there, since school, which Ringo joined because he fitted just that tad or two more than Pete. So for his acceptance to be so total, being such a different type of bloke, and just sufficiently older to be too old, and that bit of extra posh thing. If you hear his accent now, it’s quite weird. An upper working class, lower middle class Liverpool accent, and anyone from up there will know that it isn’t a public school accent, but anyone from up there will know it’s what is called Liverpool posh. He was completely trusted with almost everything, apart from any of the famous stories about unwelcome comments about somebody singing flat, or songs not being suitable. Could you perhaps come up with something more commercial, Dick James is pestering us a bit, you know… they didn’t query anything for very long. In this early time, 63 and 64, even the big challenge of going to Australia without Ringo, there wasn’t much of a fight over that, he thought they should do it. By then there was a bit of show business in their lives, the show must go on, contracts must be met. And he behaved so well in honouring old, unprofitable contracts, that the large slice of decency that they all had, responded to that. They saw that he was a decent bloke, although they were chancers as well. Who knows whether they pinched albums from NEMS, but if they had it wouldn’t have been that out of order. When they were hanging around there as teenagers.
All the things he did were right for them. There was a lot of posthumous, and wise-after-the-event stuff like John saying he shouldn’t have put us in suits, that it was a big sell-out, etcetera. They didn’t mind at the time, they wee making more money that way, and they were starting to think that the leather was rather foolish anyway. Fashions can get to look very silly very quickly.
So, the lads were already making lots of money, and the lads were looking after their parents, so everybody was being looked after. He was the type that all the parents knew. The stratification of Liverpool society was plain to see, and everybody knew it. he was this Jewish chap from Queen’s Drive who had that nice shop in Whitechapel, NEMS, treated you well, you went in there and ordered a record and he got it in. And he’s got good manners and his father was well behaved, a nice mother, etcetera. Perfect.
Was there still anti-Semitism in England at that point, do you think?
Yes, there always has been and there always will be, but it wasn’t virulent. At its worst, you’d hear phrases like ‘Jew-boy’, from people of my father’s generation, Victorian to Edwardian childhood, that sort of thing, but it wasn’t that bad. There were an awful lot of Jews in Liverpool at various levels in show business, and trade, and perfectly assimilated. It was always cosmopolitan. Not a lot of racism either. there were a lot of people who were treasured because they were different. The Chinese were treasured, because they brought a lot of colour into Liverpool life. there were a lot of Chinese restaurants, opium dens and things that made it seem exciting. And it was then such a big port, much in decline, but still a lot of liners coming in and out. One of the best jobs on the Echo was going down to the port to see the liners coming in, and going aboard and getting a few drinks, and looking at the passenger list and who was on it…
I wish I could have gone to the Tower Ballroom. I’d just love to have seen it.
It was lovely, a great big Merseyside ballroom, full of fun. I’ve got a good picture of me and Brian, which was taken by the LIFE photographer, Terry Spenser…
[Brian] was impressive, he was undoubtedly very impressive. The sad figure… whatever you’ve read that he said, or read about him by close friends like Nat Weiss, who’s a very important person to see… it’s not for me to say that he didn’t have a lot of sadness, but he was much more optimistic and cheerful and happy than sad, lonely, isolated… and a lot of his troubles with being mucked about and blackmailed – if indeed he was really blackmailed… he was certainly mucked about and thrown around a few rooms – were a pattern repeat, which he brought on by living dangerously, and drinking too much probably, and there were quite a few pills knocking about then…
Do you think it was a result of the stress of the Beatles that when he let rip, because of all the pressure, that he wanted to let rip totally, so that he would get himself into dangerous situations?
I don’t know, because the separate life of his being gay, and actively gay, and living dangerously, was so separate, and not furtive… No questions were asked, and there was no nudgy, oh-what-a-night-I-had-last-night with him. He was entirely discreet, in his own way. The Queen’s Drive thing, you know, might just have been seen as prying, because he couldn’t stand prying, for other areas he didn’t want gone into. It was very illegal then. He had a lot of young men, in groups…
There would have been a huge scandal?
Well, once the lid had been lifted off, I think they would have found no… I don’t know, but I suspect they would have found no homosexual relationships among his professional contracts… I don’t think so. He was a terribly professional business man, terribly stuff, with all the Mr. Brian and Mr. Clive stuff, most interesting aspect. Bear in mind that he would be in his sixties, as I am, and there was a bit of the 1930s and 40s in him, his father was a Victorian, as mine was, and we carried a lot of rather stuffy old formalities, and he’d been in the army, as I was, we were not as free as the lot that came later. As you were in your way in your forties, with people who are in their fifties now, it just got easier and easier and looser and looser, in a way much less interesting, because a lot of the old snobberies and barriers vanished, and really I think they made life much more interesting, rather than everything hanging out. Some of us miss the naughtiness and rudeness of being vulgar and profane and badly behaved, now that everyone is. I was thinking this the other day, looking at a whole lot of very very rich and privileged people at a do, thinking how appallingly badly dressed they were. Horrible suits, if they were wearing suits, horrible shoes. They just looked a fucking mess. The idea when I was young was that once you got money, you would never ever look a mess again. And Brian always did, right up to the LSD time. Beautifully dressed.
{You’ve just described a dichotomy between some pretty heavy duty risky behaviour, especially for someone in his position, he knew what kind of tricks into needing to do that… do you think he was addicted to that?}
I think danger is an addiction, Martin Bell will tell you that. An addiction is something you put in the centre of your life…
{So he had these bands in the centre of his life, and he also had this becoming the person he felt he ought to be publicly, which comes out of your book – all that banging on about the failures… this sort of gentleman amateur thing is not something people now associate with the 60s at all…}
No, they don’t. He was so different from the others. I mean, Larry Parnes was not the toff that Brian was. They were both Jewish, they were both gay, but the resemblance ends there.
Did they ever meet, or get on?
I daresay they did. But Brian was also a frightful snob. One of the reasons he liked me was he could take me anywhere. I wasn’t a public schoolboy, but I knew about knives and forks. You could take me to the Adelphi or the Savoy Grill, and I’d be okay. He liked people who were nice looking, he didn’t mind whether they were heterosexual or gay. Like a lot of people who deal with young men, whether they be scout masters or choir masters, not to malign or anything, but you’ve got to not mind the company of boys and men. Maybe that’s what drew him in, and maybe explains why he had so few women artists, to the point of only having one. He had a lot of women on his staff, by the way. Vivian Moynihan, about whom there’s a lot in the clippings. He was very much into discovering people. He was a very Higgins, Svengali type of person. He loved making something out of people. don’t forget I discovered you, he said. Well, I was doing alright before we met, you know… I was flattered, to be discovered by this great man who discovered the Beatles.
{It was said that he was very good at displaying things. Is there some sense that he was very pragmatic in one sense, and a real dreamer in another…?}
Oh, the Savile Theatre, yes, he loved all that sort of thing.
{…and expressing himself in the transformations he could make in other people, to make them nicer and more elegant, and poised and presentable. But was he comfortable with these contradictions?}
Oh, he was comfortable with pretty well everything, except… I have to go to my own value to him, in the personal assistant period. He could have me around, that was one of the repeat fallings out, was that he’d say I was vanishing, but that was me going home. I had four children by then, and as a journalist I didn’t have a nine-to-five mentality, but I did want to get home. Also, and this has ramifications, I’d always worked for large companies, where you were entitled to skive, embezzle on expenses, pinch the stationary, do all the things that you do with big, anonymous corporate bosses all of whom had huge amounts of money. Now, I was with this very hands-on, one man band, who was frightfully punctilious about never doing anything wrong, never fiddling the books, and never allowing anyone anywhere near the Beatles’ money. Or get limos on the house, and here he was with this Fleet Street chancer, who’s frightfully into limos and taxis and all that sort of thing. You couldn’t do that then, because you knew it was dishonest. It was never dishonest to steal from the Sunday Dispatch. When I was on the Express we all did what you could to get into the John Junor column, or before that the John Gordon column. When you were told that one of the pieces you’d researched had got in, some little bit to make it more prejudiced and vicious, you’d get a memo [indistinct]… it was institutionalised dishonesty.
So there was that flash. He was at RADA, and he loved the West End, and when he did the shop he did those strange arrangements in the window, which are not that dramatic anymore…
Was his homosexuality ever an issue with any of the Beatles?
No, it wasn’t. I met him once at Cleveland airport, he would drop in and out of the tour, sometimes he would go off for two or three days, if you were in an industrial town, Philadelphia, or Cincinnati, Cleveland, not much interest to him, he’d show up again when we got to New Orleans, so he could have dinner at Antoine’s. He took me there once. Anyway I met him at the airport and he had a very dark mien, ooh, Christ, what has happened? And in the car: Derek, I have a bone to pick with you, and it can’t wait. You’ve been making off-colour jokes with John in so-and-so’s hearing (a man I could name but won’t) and it’s got back to me.
I said, it’s impossible because I wouldn’t, because I would never talk to any of them about each other, nor would I talk about you to them, nor would I talk about them to you. You can assume that I know things about them that I would never tell you. And vice versa. It’s trouble-making, and it’s familiar to me. This is a very inside world, and you’ve forgotten how inside it is, and how much viciousness there is around people who would like to be inside, and they’ll bad-mouth people. Those of us who are really on your side, and there’s Mal, Neil, Derek and one or two others, we can walk around without fear or favour. It hasn’t happened. But he was extremely angry, and rather disappointed I think, because I wasn’t homophobic, and I think he supposed that I was, and he’d heard this thing from quite a close-up agent who was involved with them, not known over here. They, on the other hand, did say terrible things about homosexuality, but to him. In front of him. If the joke fitted, he’d use anyone for a joke. If you want to get a laugh, anything will do. Eric Idle’s slogan for Rutland Weekend Television was, in Latin, fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke. they can’t start fucking about with, oh, who is this going to hurt? A lot of things we don’t say because we don’t want to hurt people’s feelings, or be disliked, or whatever.
One thing I didn’t finish, about that business of you keep vanishing when I need you. They did a whole Panorama on him, I think, Kenneth Harries, he wanted me there very badly, he had to address the camera for that Press Club, and he wanted me there. He did the week’s good cause, and he wanted me there on that. He did a thing for the Olympics, and he wanted me to go to that instead of him. A lot of times he wanted me to front it for him, or be there if you like holding his hand, so there were things where he needed a sidekick. he hadn’t really had a sidekick like me, but he’d had what the Americans called ‘hey-you’s’. As long as I knew my place, and not making any kind of arrangements, bookings, or anything to do with engagements. It was absolutely verboten, not to be touched, nothing to do with you at all, Derek.
Did he find it impossible to delegate, when the Beatles just became enormous?
He found it impossible to delegate all the time I knew him. He was a frightfully bossy man. he wasn’t malicious, he didn’t bear grudges. He was very tight with money, very punctilious, but if he thought he’d done anything that he shouldn’t have done – like, I had a good deal with the book I wrote, I got my money paid on time, but I think he gave me a poor percentage. And he took me out to lunch in Beverly Hills and said, that wasn’t good enough, that deal, I want to give you a thousand pounds, or two thousand dollars – just to cover any kind of… so he’d feel better. But in business, and as an employer, he was very stingy. He was the shopkeeper. If I didn’t go with him in the limo… he said I’m going with the boys tonight, on that occasion [Hard Day's Night], you make your own way, then I got the limo, and I got a bill for it.
You had a big falling out in 1964, didn’t you… was that you just disappearing too much, and having a life?
Oh no, it was the end of the tour, we were all tired, and again, it was the limo. He took my limo. I id have one that evening, it was the Paramount on Broadway and we all had them allocated, but I must have been in his. There was a big line of them outside, and the boys, the American crew… Ed Sullivan of course had his own… and he often lost it, and it was a terrible experience, because of the noise. I’m not having it! I’m absolutely not having it…
How long did they last? Up to an hour?
He could go for twenty minutes. And the regrets would follow pretty quickly. he hated having trouble with people he really liked. I got a letter under my door. this really is too bad, Derek, we must be friends… I thought he must be pissed. Not pissed off, pissed. the end of this final night of the first big American tour, and I wanted to go down to the bar with Neil and Al Aronowitz, Bob Freeman and, you know, just relax. Not have all this stress and pressure and Mr. Brian. The Beatles couldn’t go out of the room, of course. They were absolutely useless on social occasions, they were trapped.
{Who had to call him Mr. Brian?}
All the people in NEMS, in the retail end, for a start, then all the people who had been seconded from the retail end, like Alistair Taylor, to showbiz NEMS, where you allowed to call him Brian. But in the shop, people had to know their place. He didn’t like over-familiarity, and again I found that quite a Liverpool middle class characteristic. My father was very off if people who were too young called him by his first name. He should learn his way about socially before he calls me by his first name, he’s got a long way to go yet.
I cannot understand how he got top billing on the Ed Sullivan Show. Can you remember hearing anything about that?
No, I was in Paris when the news came through, about I Wanna Hold Your Hand, and he said, what could be bigger than this? And I in my old-fashioned way,, said, well, Carnegie Hall, the old Benny Goodman Show in 1938, because it was the transition of jazz into concert halls. And for rock’n'roll to go into Carnegie Hall would be a very big deal… and he said, well, they’re big enough now. I just don’t think it was questioned.
Paul has a recollection that he said, we must not go to America without a number one. We don’t want to go over there and get buried like Cliff or Adam Faith. But the counter-theory is that they were booked into the show, with billing and fee arranged long before I Wanna Hold Your Hand, after Sullivan was supposed to have seen them coming back from Sweden, wasn’t it? In 63…. Precht, his son-in-law, who must have been really doing all the work there, hands-on work, would be a good interviewee to talk about that. He was executive producer of all the shows around that time, he was keeper of the archives, and if he doesn’t know the answer, he will have a version. There might have been a bit of a to-and-fro over the fee, but if it was a case of doing it or not doing it, I don’t think that Brian would have done it without top billing. So if Sullivan wanted them for the ratings… it’s never occurred to me until this moment, though…
It’s extraordinary, really. What strikes us is how big Brian was thinking, so early…
I can give you a quote, which is a bit too neat and tidy to be entirely accurate, but: one day they will be bigger than Elvis Presley. Which did say, he did say that he said it…
I wonder now, even, what was so different about it, to American ears. I’m not sure. I understand what people felt when they first heard rock’n'roll in England. It was completely different to what had gone before, the rhythms were alien and everything. And for many people it wasn’t Elvis but Bill Haley. It got me, cos I was frightfully keen on jazz, and much keener, if the truth be known, on operetta.
But, thinking big. This was what bound Brian and the boys together, they all did think big. Very high notions of themselves, and very high expectations. George says in the new anthology transcript, we were very cocky, we didn’t know what we were going to do, but we knew we didn’t have to get any fucking ‘O’ Levels for what we wanted to do. In other words they always felt they were going to be okay. When he signed them up , when he had them in that office in Whitechapel he told them, I think I can help you. He actually believed he could, and he was prepared to sit it out with them, with all their cheek and impudence… in a way they had a lot in common, just the vernacular was different. And they always liked people who could teach them things, they were very willing to learn
That’s another thing, they were all autodidacts…
Very much so. All autodidacts, so am I. One of the things that helped me a lot, being that much older, and being bona fide Liverpool, I could fill them in on things they didn’t know about.
And the access that they had to another side of Liverpool must have been important to them, the sense that they were on the move…
He had a great style and a good car, and once he got his confidence, and got his bearings he was very very funny, very comical and upbeat and witty. It’s hard to get examples of it. When he’d had a few drinks with him, in a gambling club which is what a lot of clubs were in those days, or at lunch, or anywhere he was comfortable, he was very funny. He laughed easily, said amusing things, and he loved to use words like common. He loved to shock.
Did you tape Brian, and then transcribe it?
Yes, we went to Torquay… I’d applied for a job, and didn’t get a reply. I think Barry Leonard left, and I thought this might be what I wanted. So I wrote and said, would you like a personal assistant? No. then he got me through the publisher Ernest Hecht, to do A Cellarful of Noise, as second choice to Tony Stratton Smith, who has gone into print claiming to have made me, to have made it all possible for me to amount to something. If it hadn’t been for my turning it down. Poor Tony. I never crow over that, at least not any more.
I got this gig at Ready Steady Go, to see Billy J Kramer, I think doing Trains and Boats and Planes, or Little Children, and he introduced me to Andrew Oldham, who I liked. and that evening we had dinner with Norman Weiss who was the agent who put together the tour of America, and drove down in a car with electric windows, I’d never seen any such thing, down to Torquay, where I set about the taping, in a very big suite in a five star hotel. In the first lunch hour, he said, I’m going to have to tell you now, did you know I was queer? No, I said, I didn’t. Well, he said, I am, and if we’re going to do this book I’m going to have to stop buggering about, saying I was with this girl, when I would not be with a girl, when I was with a boy. Does that make any difference? No, I said, it does not make any difference, it’ll make it a lot easier. so you mustn’t worry any more, difficult as it may be to convince you perhaps, but I won’t ever let you down.
I don’t think people keep secrets any more. Frightful betrayals going on now, secrets being sold. All this came out long years afterwards, I mean, when did it first come out that Brian Epstein was gay?
Wasn’t it when he died?
It must have been before that. He died about a month after the Act. That’s right. It’ll be on the record. But it was pretty common knowledge, certainly it was common knowledge by the 70s. I’ve never talked about it to the daily press, because you can’t trust them with anything. No matter what you say, it’ll be so couched to be unpleasant.
Anyway, that lunch. He said what are you doing after lunch, I said I thought I’d stay around here, have a few drinks and go through the transcripts. he said he thought he’d go into the town on his own, and see what’s what. well, I think there was a bit of cottaging went on, because the next day at breakfast he said, I’m in the most terrible trouble. this is off the record. I met a boy last night… there was blackmail later on, I don’t know the details but I think it got very bad. After this business with the limo, there was this three months’ notice to be worked out, we’re jumping to the end of 64, and I had three months notice to work, but the following day on the plane coming back, he came through to Economy to get Mal and Neil and me out into first class. He was sent through by the Beatles, actually. What are they doing in there? We made a fucking fortune on the tour, get them in here. You go and get them. when we got in there, he called me over. I was still only just Beatles press officer, he still saw me as a P.A. and he had in his own head a jealous demarcation, and he said, about last night, I want it to be over and done with, I want you to be my friend. But I felt such freedom, having resigned – that was the note that went through the door, my resignation – and I got a bit weepy, I put my hand on his, and said, I am very fond of you, you know, it’s been a hell of a year, but I can’t take any more of this business. So I didn’t go back, and we got friends very quickly, but I didn’t go back, and I never did work for him again. By the time I came back to Apple in 1968, he’d died, in 1967.
We stayed friends, he used to come over to our house in LA and use it for events and parties. It was a good friendship, and the friendship with the Beatles had a real chance to deepen, without being on the payroll, from 65 to 68, so when Apple began, it was logical that they’d send for me again. Then again, it all got impossible with all the stress and strain of being in the middle of all that. This time I was much wiser, and more mad, too. With LSD and all that…
{When you got back with them, how long had Brain been gone?}
Brian died on August Bank Holiday weekend of 1967 and I cam back in April 1968, so less than a year. Brian’s death and my return were separated by the Magical Mystery Tour, the catharsis of doing that show. I think they did it to get active again. But of course it had many symbolic aspects. It wasn’t a success, although I liked it. A lot of people like us who did too.
…the kind of cocktails he was doing, he was taking stuff to get to sleep, that was the deadliest thing. I didn’t do barbiturates, at least, I don’t think I did.
{Was he doing the classic uppers and downers, prescription drugs?}
Yes. When we met, we were both doing purple hearts, and we both liked a drink and we both liked cigarettes, we had so much more in common than what divided us… it was astounding. Also we led the same cultural life, the Christmas pantomime at the Playhouse, both stage-struck. but anyway, back to Magical Mystery Tour, and all the things that happened, the opening of the shop, the closing of the shop, the disbandment of this, not making any more movies, being indecisive about the third movie. Had he lived, he might have been more decisive and more tenacious and helped them through, and taken over a lot of the things that no-one else could. John has a famous quote: we’ve fucking had it now… and to the extent that when they did break up, the logic is that this should have broken up. By the time they were thirty, they couldn’t go on doing that. And to be battered like that, old chaps in denim, which a lot of them are, I don’t wish to be disparaging, but I mean… they don’t look nice. I’m sure that’s why Tony Bennett’s fallen on his feet so much now, he wears nice old-fashioned suitable clothing. He dresses appropriately. But it was always difficult, a lot of the journalists writing now are of a similar age, and in a rather stuffy way they think that old rockers should settle down. that they should be accountants or something. Unfortunately that became almost all they could do.
You mentioned Peter Brown, who wrote that terrible book, which upset Mrs Epstein, Queenie, who is now dead…
What was she like?
She was a very respectable Jewish mother, daughter of a rich Sheffield business man, and I had a Sunday lunch there once, when I first met Brian, he took me there to show me the house, and meet his parents. They were very well-to-do, well-behaved, rather anxious parents. They must have been immensely proud. He’d been given this Clarendon furniture shop in Hoylake, and I’d seen it open, and it was unusual, in that it did have a lot of class, it wasn’t an ordinary furniture shop. they’d had to put up with him being dumped from the army. I read somewhere that he’d left the army because of homosexual behaviour, but I’m not at all sure that’s true. He never told me that. But there was some trouble at RADA too, and if you had to leave RADA for being gay. I’ll eat my hat. Come on, man. These must be just the boyfriends. I think he was expelled from a few schools. They weren’t expelled in those days, the parents may have been told he’d be better off elsewhere. He hadn’t settled, although what he did for his father, and in the shops, and NEMS with his cataloguing, and all that, he was very, very good. I think the thing about Brian that is often missed is that he was a success. In formal mainstream terms, as a business man, as a shopkeeper. Paul and George will always say that the business deals he did were not good ones. But John said, as you mentioned, Brian was a beautiful guy.
It’s easy to be wise after the event about business deals, and he couldn’t have known that this was going to happen, right through to the end, the Beatles were still breaking new ground…
Yes, and he put up with these arbitrary iconoclastic decisions, like, we’re not doing any more touring. That’s it. probably, in their own funny way, they were quite right. It’s said that the tickets weren’t selling quite how they had, although the records were. He found them other things to do, he was on the ball.
{… despite e the received wisdom that he wasn’t a good business man, he did it, the biggest thing of all time…}
Yes, he did do it, he kept them solvent, more than solvent. It’s a point worth examining, let’s look at the films, and Dick James, and George Martin and Vivian Moynihan. Muriel Young, of television, and Alan Freeman. And me. He tended to get people who wouldn’t let him down. Along the way some of those people would have done what came naturally to them, and done quite cruel business deals in which he did more badly than he should have done – without naming any names. Or when he hired me, he did not take into account the amount of drinking I did. He was a wild man, and he bought the full package. I was very good to have around during that year, and probably better for him than not. You could also say that anyone as wild and potentially erratic as he was, would have done better to have had a teetotaller, but he didn’t want that, he wanted someone who was a bit of fun, as well.
He did go on emotions, and he used to take people to meet other people, and he came round to see Joan and the children in Hampstead, and he thought it was all very wonderful. He liked to see where you were coming from, what were you on about, and what would my people think of this chap. Generally speaking, he got lucky. never mind the deals. Dick James was at that point a good workmanlike publisher who needed those kind of copyrights. He wasn’t so rich like Chappel, that he could lose them. He did work those copyrights like buggery. George Martin was a perfect bit of casting, a cloudless sky. George was a good interviewee, they were very close personally. They both liked horse racing, went to the races together. His agencies were good. The idea of linking up with Stigwood at that time was probably a good one, cos he’d far outreached himself with his signings. We all have to look out for the big blunder in our lives, and his was oversigning. He took on far too much. Colonel Tom Parker could not believe that he had more than one act.
{How did the relationship with the other bands work?
When I was with them, you would hear a bit of grumbling, and he used to send me round, I used to do it on Sundays, being banged off to Blackpool and places like that, just to check that Billy wasn’t unhappy. I always got on well with the bands, somehow. Billy would say, Brian’s not coming then? I’d say, no, he sent me. Because there was so much light coming off them, they were all reflected in it, there was plenty to spare. And the Beatles always were great democrats, which is one of the reasons why they got on well with most other acts. There were one or two other acts that they despised as useless…
{There’s a story I can now understand, which I didn’t get before, was the one about him being arrested for impersonating an officer…}
It was one of those Walter Mitty things that he just decided that that evening, he would be an officer. He would feel an officer, he looked like, and walked around like an officer. At the height of it all, in 1963/4/5, the waves did part as he came into a big throng, they would all peel back to let this man through. Brian Epstein was very, very famous. As close as I was to him, I would have spotted any self-aggrandisement, but there was none. All the offers came in, and an enormous amount of it was rejected, particularly if it was naff. He would do a Panorama, and an interview with Kenneth Harris, but there were a lot of crude things he would never dream of doing. But he would never ever try to compete with them. It was almost… you’d call it sad today, his humility. But a man of enormous personal vanity, liked to go and get his hair cut by a very special barber. Liked eating well. The high life, as it was called in those days. For us provincials, that was the seductive life.
{And conquering the capital?}
And living in Belgravia?
Yes, all of it. And the car with electric windows. There’s a lovely scene in that video of Brian putting a scarf on, which we all remember very well.
To have those four out there at the pinnacle, without any rehearsal, without any knowing how you have to be with them, and he’d seen them in their awful clothes with the swearing and the sandwiches and the cigarettes onstage, to be almost immediately acceptable, and to fit, it is extraordinary, and the only way that it could have worked is if it was absolutely right. It was on, in other words. It’s no good pretending it works if it doesn’t.
Towards the end of 1964 when I was getting quite crazed with the demands that were being made, [George Martin] asked, would you advise me to split away from what I’m doing and join Brian in a partnership, and I said most definitely not, you should always be friends. It’s important to both of you. My own experience is, once he’s got a grip on you, he’s so determined to have all of you. I believe these jobs are essentially for bachelors.
Going back to Cellarful of Noise for a moment – was there anything that you had to actively censor in the book?
Only when he was talking to Rita, whoever it was, this girl, who was a boy. He wouldn’t have had anything in there that implied or hinted at homosexuality, because of the dangers of jail. After the Lord Montague thing, which was a frightening, horrible witch hunt, which was only ten years before.
Do you think Brian was very troubled by that, that it really fucked Brian up? To a considerable degree, he was very easy about it, he was prepared to tell you when you were about to do the book.
After only a morning. And how well did he know me? Not well, but a bit. He didn’t really know me that well. It was a risk. I’m not sure whether he minded at all, if he wasn’t in the middle of a blackmail thing, or, where’s my watch? He had a great fondness for slim gold watches, and he must have lost half a dozen that I know of, in a short time… when there was nothing like that going on, I found him very busy and pressed to be completely relaxed and happy, and I didn’t find him troubled by it at all. He had a vast and successful group of homosexual friends. Including Nat Weiss, David Jacobs… that was a very dodgy business, it ended so badly, and I don’t know why he hanged himself.
Another thing which was the provincial aspect which ran through all these people, he had no innocence at all left, David Jacobs. I had lunch with Cecil Beaton, and I felt the same about him: hard, mean-spirited, ambitious, cruel and vindictive man. I never felt that about Noel Coward, who I never really knew, but was a nice chap from Teddington. Brian did have a lot of innocence.
So what went wrong, then? Why did he die?
He died, I’m perfectly certain, because his intake of drugs got out of control, a lot of people die in bed at that time of the morning, usually barbiturates involved in the story. And there was drinking in the picture too. I wasn’t around. Joan and I went to the house-warming in Sussex. Flown in by Brian, met by all the Beatles in their coloured Rolls Royces and all their finery and taken to be given LSD as a sort of ritual, to turn them on at this party. Brian was terribly happy that evening, all his friends were there, John Pritchard, Peter Brown and Nat Weiss and Terry Doran – a man you should try and get when he’s sober. he was a car salesman, the man from the motor trade. Bridor, what George called the Bridor of Frankepstein, a used car firm…
The housewarming was in May, Sgt Pepper was due, we had a very good party at his place in Chapel Street, he was a very happy man. Everything was good. Then whatever the date was, August Bank Holiday weekend, he died. He died on a bad night… not a bad weekend. He came back to London from Sussex, his social arrangements had gone wrong, people hadn’t turned up, I don’t know. By the time he got to London, anyone who was anyone in London had fled, to go to the country, and in that muddle, he died. It was an accidental death, as I insist on telling people. That was the verdict, and I think it was true, although I wasn’t around. I got a call from the Daily Express, in LA that this terrible thing had happened. It was really out of line with how he had seemed that year, and they were very quick to jump to the suicide, if there was pills in the story…
{had there not been a previous suicide attempt of some sort?}
Possibly, there may well have been. As a recovering alcoholic, I do forget things, but I do know that your life can become very unmanageable. Lots of things are attributed to other causes are actually just because you’re drunk all the time. A lot of what’s wrong with them would actually be cured in three weeks if they turned the drinking around. Once you get into AA you become unrecognisably tedious and organised. You’re not that person anymore. I would first blame John Barleycorn.
That rings true to me, because people didn’t know about drugs and drink in those days…
No. They still don’t know about drink…
{No, and this is what came to be this classic rock’n'roll death syndrome, this combination… drink, uppers and downers. Those pills, those doctor-type pills… it’s the second wave, isn’t it? A drug alters your perception, and if you’re taking certain kinds of drugs in absolute excess, it will alter your opinion about your own existence on a more regular basis… and then disappointments become more acute…}
Sure, and then you can’t handle them, and it’s the middle of the night… as John said in that memorable quote in the anthology: it’s because of that fucking tambourine that my life is in ruins. It’s the catalyst…