The story of The Beatles

Liverpool beginnings

The story starts in Liverpool in November 1956, when a sixteen year old John Lennon put together a skiffle group with friends from Quarry Bank High School. They called themselves the Quarrymen, borrowing a line from the school song. Skiffle was the craze of the day, led by Lonnie Donegan, and it suited kids with cheap guitars and a washboard. John had been raised by his Aunt Mimi at her house on Menlove Avenue, but his mother Julia lived nearby. She taught him banjo chords and played him Elvis records, and in 1956 she helped him buy his first guitar. Mimi was less keen. She famously told him the guitar was all very well, but he would never make a living out of it.[1] [2] [3]

On the sixth of July 1957 the Quarrymen played a church garden fete in Woolton. A friend named Ivan Vaughan brought along a fifteen year old called Paul McCartney. Between sets, Paul showed John how he tuned his guitar and ran through Eddie Cochran's Twenty Flight Rock, and a few weeks later he was invited to join. The two boys shared more than music. Paul's mother Mary had died in October 1956, when he was fourteen. In July 1958 John's mother Julia was struck and killed by a car, when he was seventeen. That shared loss became part of the bond between them, and they soon began writing songs together, inspired above all by Buddy Holly.[1] [2] [3]

Paul had a school friend, a year younger, whom he had met on the bus to the Liverpool Institute. His name was George Harrison. In early 1958 George auditioned for John, who thought he was too young. Paul arranged a second meeting on the top deck of a Liverpool bus, where George played the guitar instrumental Raunchy note for note, and he was in. That summer the group paid to make a record at a small studio in a Liverpool house. They cut Buddy Holly's That'll Be the Day and In Spite of All the Danger, a song Paul wrote with George. By late 1958 the other school friends had drifted away, leaving three guitarists who liked to say the rhythm was in the guitars.[1] [2] [3]

In January 1960 John's art school friend Stuart Sutcliffe joined on bass. Stuart was a gifted painter, and one of his canvases had just been bought by the businessman John Moores for 65 pounds. Stuart and John liked band names with double meanings, like Buddy Holly's Crickets, and they came up with Beatals, a nod to the beat. The name shifted to the Silver Beetles in May 1960, when they backed the singer Johnny Gentle on a short tour of Scotland. It became the Silver Beatles in July, and by the middle of August they were simply the Beatles. They were still missing one thing that every band needs, a steady drummer.[1] [2]

The drummer they found was Pete Best, whose mother Mona ran the Casbah Coffee Club in the cellar of the family home, where the band had often played. The timing was urgent. Their unofficial manager Allan Williams had lined up a residency in Hamburg, West Germany, and they needed someone behind the kit. Pete joined in mid August 1960, just days before the trip. Williams later admitted the audition was a formality, because no other drummer had been willing to go. So a five piece band, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Sutcliffe and Best, climbed into Williams's minibus and headed for Germany.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Hamburg nights

The Beatles rolled into Hamburg on the seventeenth of August 1960 and headed for St. Pauli, the city's red light district. Their first stage was the Indra, a small club run by Bruno Koschmider. Their lodgings were worse. They slept in a bare storeroom behind a cinema called the Bambi Kino, next to the toilets, with no heating. The hours were brutal, with several sets a night, seven nights a week. Nobody had time to be shy. George Harrison later called Hamburg their apprenticeship, the place where they learned how to play in front of people.[1] [2]

When the Indra closed over noise complaints, Koschmider moved them to his bigger club, the Kaiserkeller, in October 1960. He would stand at the front shouting Mach Schau, meaning put on a show, and the band learned to stretch songs out and play to a rowdy crowd. John said they sometimes played one song for twenty minutes. Sharing the bill was another Liverpool band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, whose drummer was Ringo Starr. On the fifteenth of October 1960, John, Paul and George backed Hurricanes singer Lu Walters on a private recording of Summertime, with Ringo on drums. It was the first time the four future Beatles recorded together.[1] [2] [3]

That first trip ended badly. The band started playing at a rival venue, the Top Ten Club, and an angry Koschmider hit back. George, still only seventeen, was reported for working in a nightclub under age and deported in November. Soon after, Paul and Pete went to collect their things from the dark cinema storeroom and lit a condom on a nail for light. Koschmider reported them for arson, and they were deported too. Back in Liverpool, people noticed the change straight away. A stand in bassist at a December show at the Casbah was shocked at how much tighter and louder they had become.[1] [2]

In Hamburg the band had found a circle of art student friends, among them Klaus Voormann, Jurgen Vollmer and the photographer Astrid Kirchherr. Astrid took some of the first serious photos of the group, fell in love with Stuart Sutcliffe, and they became engaged. She cut Stuart's hair in a style that the others later adopted. During a second residency at the Top Ten in 1961, Stuart decided to leave music and study art in Hamburg, and Paul took over on bass. That June they backed the singer Tony Sheridan on My Bonnie for Polydor. It came out credited to Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers, but it was their first commercial release.[1] [2] [3]

In April 1962 the Beatles flew back to Hamburg to open a big new venue, the Star Club. Astrid met them at the airport with terrible news. Stuart Sutcliffe had been suffering severe headaches for months, and in February he had collapsed during an art class. On the tenth of April he collapsed again and died in the ambulance on the way to hospital. The cause was a brain haemorrhage. He was twenty one. The band played on, and returned twice more at the end of the year, now with Ringo on drums. Their final Hamburg residency ended in December 1962. John Lennon later summed up those years by saying he might have been born in Liverpool, but he grew up in Hamburg.[1] [2] [3]

Epstein, Martin and Ringo

Brian Epstein ran the record department of his family's NEMS store in Liverpool and wrote a column for the local music paper Mersey Beat. On the ninth of November 1961 he went down to a lunchtime show at the Cavern Club and was struck by the band's presence. At their first business meeting in December, Paul turned up late because he was having a bath. George smoothed things over by saying he might be late, but he would be very clean. The Beatles signed with Epstein in January 1962. He smartened them up with suits, and told them to stop eating, smoking and swearing on stage.[1] [2]

Getting a record deal was harder. On New Year's Day 1962 the band auditioned for Decca in London and were turned down. Decca told Epstein that guitar groups were on the way out. Other labels passed too. The break came through EMI, where a music publishing arm was keen on the Lennon and McCartney songs. The contract went through George Martin, who ran EMI's small Parlophone label and was best known for comedy records with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan. In May 1962 Martin offered a standard deal. The royalty was one penny for each record sold, to be split among the whole group.[1] [2] [3]

The first session at EMI's studios on Abbey Road took place on the sixth of June 1962. It did not go smoothly. George Martin was unhappy with Pete Best's drumming and felt the songs were not strong enough. At the end of the night he asked the band if there was anything they did not like. George Harrison looked at him and said, I don't like your tie. The room broke into laughter, the jokes started flowing, and Martin found himself charmed by their wit. He had no idea yet what they could write, but he liked them, and that was a start.[1] [2] [3]

The Beatles had already been thinking about a new drummer, and Martin's doubts settled it. On the sixteenth of August 1962 Brian Epstein told Pete Best he was out. His replacement was Ringo Starr, born Richard Starkey in the Dingle area of Liverpool. As a child Ringo spent long spells in hospital, and it was in a hospital band that he first started drumming. His stage name came from the rings he wore. He played his first show as a Beatle on the eighteenth of August. Some Best fans were furious, chanting that Pete was forever and Ringo never, and George got a black eye in the Cavern.[1] [2] [3] [4]

At Ringo's first EMI session in September, Martin still booked a session drummer, Andy White, for a remake a week later. Ringo played tambourine and wondered if he was about to go the same way as Pete. Love Me Do came out in October 1962 and reached number seventeen. Then Martin had them speed up Please Please Me, and told them they had just made their first number one. He was right on most British charts. On the eleventh of February 1963 they recorded ten songs in a single day to complete their first album, also called Please Please Me.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Beatlemania

In 1963 everything accelerated. From Me to You began a run of British number one singles, and She Loves You became the fastest selling record the country had ever seen. In October the band played Sunday Night at the London Palladium to fifteen million television viewers, and newspapers started calling the screaming frenzy Beatlemania. In November they played the Royal Variety Performance. John asked the people in the cheap seats to clap, and told the rest to just rattle their jewellery. Their second album, With the Beatles, knocked Please Please Me off the top of the chart after thirty weeks. In its sleeve notes, press officer Tony Barrow called them the fabulous foursome, and the Fab Four nickname stuck.[1] [2] [3]

America was slower. EMI's American label Capitol at first declined to release their records, and early singles on smaller labels went nowhere. Then a disc jockey in Washington, Carroll James of WWDC, got hold of I Want to Hold Your Hand and started playing it. Tapes spread to other stations, and Capitol rushed the single out on Boxing Day 1963. It sold a million copies and hit number one in the United States in January 1964, just before the band arrived. On the seventh of February 1964 they landed at New York's newly renamed John F. Kennedy Airport to a crowd of thousands of screaming fans.[1] [2]

Two days later, on the ninth of February 1964, the Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show. CBS had about fifty thousand ticket requests for a theatre with 728 seats. Around seventy three million Americans watched, a record audience for a television programme at the time. When they sang Till There Was You, a caption under John's face read, sorry girls, he's married. The country was still grieving President Kennedy, and many young viewers found a burst of joy in those four long haired Liverpudlians. By early April the Beatles held twelve places on the Billboard Hot 100, including all of the top five.[1] [2] [3]

The rest of 1964 was a whirlwind. They filmed A Hard Day's Night with director Richard Lester, a comedy in which they played themselves. George's twelve string Rickenbacker gave the soundtrack its ringing sound. A world tour took them to Europe, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. In Adelaide an estimated three hundred thousand people turned out to greet them. Back in the United States that autumn, they refused to play a segregated show at the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida. City officials gave way, and later tour contracts insisted that audiences be integrated.[1] [2]

In June 1965 all four were made Members of the Order of the British Empire, and some older recipients sent back their medals in protest. Their second film, Help!, arrived that summer. Its soundtrack included Yesterday, a McCartney song sung with a string quartet and no other Beatle playing on it. It has been covered more than almost any song in history. In August they opened a United States tour at New York's Shea Stadium in front of about fifty five thousand six hundred people, a world record for a concert crowd. On that trip they also visited Elvis Presley at his home in California.[1] [2]

The studio years

In late 1965 the Beatles had something new, time in the studio without a film or tour hanging over them. The result was Rubber Soul. Its title played on the phrase plastic soul, their joking admission that they could not match the American soul singers they loved. George played sitar on Norwegian Wood, and the lyrics grew deeper. George Martin said this was when they started thinking of albums as works of art in their own right. Even the cover broke ground. It was their first without the band's name on the front, and the stretched photo came from a happy accident when a projection card tipped backwards.[1] [2] [3]

1966 was the year Beatlemania turned dangerous. In Tokyo they needed heavy security after death threats from traditionalists who objected to rock music at the Budokan hall. In Manila, Brian Epstein turned down a palace breakfast with the first lady, Imelda Marcos. The perceived snub sparked hostility and riots, and the band escaped the Philippines with difficulty. Then an old interview in which John said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus was reprinted in an American teen magazine. Radio stations banned their records, fans burned albums on bonfires, and the Ku Klux Klan picketed concerts. In Memphis someone threw a firecracker onto the stage, and the band feared it was gunfire. John apologised, but the pressure pushed them towards quitting the road.[1] [2] [3]

In the middle of all that came Revolver, released in August 1966. A twenty year old engineer, Geoff Emerick, was now working the desk. For Tomorrow Never Knows they used tape loops fed in from machines around the building, and Emerick put John's voice through a revolving Leslie speaker. EMI engineer Ken Townsend invented automatic double tracking for these sessions, partly because John hated singing every vocal twice. George had three songs on the album, including the opener Taxman. Paul's Eleanor Rigby used a string octet. The album was nearly called Abracadabra, until they learned another act had used the name.[1] [2] [3]

On stage, though, the band could barely hear themselves. The fans screamed so loudly that the music hardly mattered, and the new studio songs were impossible to reproduce with four players. They did not play a single song from Revolver on their final tour. On the twenty ninth of August 1966, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, the Beatles played their last commercial concert. It closed four years of almost nonstop touring, with well over a thousand concert appearances around the world. From now on, the studio would be their stage.[1] [2]

Freed from touring, they began work in November 1966. The first fruits were Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane, released together in February 1967. Paul then suggested the album be performed by an imaginary band, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, so the Beatles could step outside their own image. A Day in the Life used a forty piece orchestra and ended on one huge piano chord, played on three pianos at once. The cover collage by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth cost nearly three thousand pounds when most covers cost about fifty. Released in May 1967, it spent twenty three weeks at number one in Britain and became the first rock album to win the Grammy for Album of the Year.[1] [2]

Apple, India and the last albums

On the twenty fifth of June 1967 the Beatles sang All You Need Is Love on Our World, the first live global television link, to an estimated three hundred and fifty million people. In August they travelled to Bangor in Wales for a meditation retreat with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. There, on the twenty seventh of August, they learned that Brian Epstein had been found dead at his London home. He was thirty two. Epstein had struggled with insomnia and drug dependence. The coroner ruled that he died from an accidental overdose of sleeping medication combined with alcohol. John later said that was the moment he knew the band was in trouble. Paul pushed them on with the television film Magical Mystery Tour, their first real flop with British critics.[1] [2]

In February 1968 the band went to the Maharishi's ashram in Rishikesh, India. Ringo left after about ten days, and Paul after about a month. John and George left in April, disillusioned. Still, it was a hugely creative stretch, and dozens of songs were written there. The singer Donovan taught John a fingerpicking style he used on Dear Prudence and Julia. That spring they also launched Apple Corps, a company whose name was a pun on apple core. Its record label released music by Mary Hopkin, James Taylor, Badfinger and Billy Preston. Much of the rest of Apple lost money fast. George later summed it up as chaos.[1] [2] [3]

From May to October 1968 they made the double album The Beatles, known as the White Album for its plain cover by the artist Richard Hamilton. Every early copy carried its own serial number. The sessions were tense. Ringo walked out for two weeks, and Paul played drums on Back in the U.S.S.R. John brought Yoko Ono into the studio, breaking an unspoken rule. George invited his friend Eric Clapton to play the lead guitar on While My Guitar Gently Weeps. The same sessions produced Hey Jude, which began as a song Paul wrote to comfort John's young son Julian during his parents' divorce.[1] [2] [3]

In January 1969 the band began filming rehearsals for a planned television special at Twickenham Film Studios. Tempers frayed, and George walked out for five days. He came back on condition that the big live show was dropped and work moved to the new Apple studio in Savile Row. He also brought in keyboard player Billy Preston, which lifted the mood. On the thirtieth of January 1969 they carried their gear up to the Apple roof and played for about forty two minutes until the police arrived. It was their last public performance. John signed off by hoping they had passed the audition.[1] [2] [3]

George Martin assumed it was all over, so he was surprised when Paul asked him to produce one more album. Sessions for Abbey Road started in July 1969. Side two became a long medley stitched together by Paul and Martin. In The End, Paul, George and John traded guitar solos, and Ringo played his only drum solo on a Beatles record. George wrote two of its best loved songs, Something and Here Comes the Sun. On the twentieth of August 1969 all four Beatles were in the studio together for the last time. The cover shot of the four walking over the zebra crossing outside the studio was taken in about ten minutes from a stepladder.[1] [2] [3]

Coming apart

With Epstein gone, the Beatles needed someone to run their business. John, George and Ringo wanted Allen Klein, who had managed the Rolling Stones. Paul wanted Lee and John Eastman, the father and brother of Linda Eastman, whom he married on the twelfth of March 1969. Eight days later John married Yoko Ono in Gibraltar. In May, Klein was named the band's manager, and Paul was outvoted three to one. John was also battling heroin addiction at this time, and his withdrawal became the subject of his solo single Cold Turkey. Biographers count his heroin use among the pressures that split the band. That summer John released Give Peace a Chance with the Plastic Ono Band, the first solo single by a Beatle.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twentieth of September 1969 John told the others in private that he was leaving the group. He agreed to keep quiet so as not to hurt the new album. Abbey Road came out six days later and sold four million copies in three months. There were other strains too. George was writing more and more, yet usually got only two or three songs on each album. By the break up he had a large stockpile of unreleased material. Still, nobody told the public. For months the Beatles were over in private but not in name.[1] [2] [3]

The unfinished Get Back tapes were handed by Klein to the American producer Phil Spector, who added orchestra and choir to several songs. Paul was particularly unhappy with the lavish strings on The Long and Winding Road. On the tenth of April 1970, in the press material for his first solo album, Paul said he was no longer working with the group, and the news broke around the world. John was irritated that Paul had made the announcement first. Let It Be was released on the eighth of May 1970, and the documentary that followed later won an Academy Award for its music.[1] [2] [3]

The legal end took years. On the last day of 1970 Paul filed a lawsuit to dissolve the Beatles' partnership. The case dragged on until the twenty ninth of December 1974, when John finally signed the papers while on holiday with his family at Walt Disney World in Florida. Offers for a reunion kept coming. In 1976 the Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels jokingly offered them three thousand dollars to play on his show. John and Paul happened to be watching together at John's apartment in New York, and briefly thought about taking a cab to the studio. They decided not to.[1] [2]

After the Beatles

All four released solo albums in 1970. George's triple album All Things Must Pass gave him the hit My Sweet Lord, and in 1971 he organised the Concert for Bangladesh with Ravi Shankar, with Ringo on drums. Paul formed Wings with Linda and Denny Laine, one of the most successful bands of the decade. John released Imagine, and Ringo scored hits with Photograph and You're Sixteen. The decade also brought loss. On the fourth of January 1976, their loyal road manager Mal Evans, depressed and sedated, picked up a rifle at his home in Los Angeles. When he pointed it at police officers, they shot him dead. It turned out to be an air rifle. He was forty.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

After his son Sean was born in October 1975, John stepped back from music to look after him. He returned in 1980 with Double Fantasy, made with Yoko Ono. On the eighth of December 1980, a twenty five year old former security guard named Mark David Chapman shot John outside his home at the Dakota building in New York. Earlier that same day John had signed a copy of Double Fantasy for him. John was pronounced dead at Roosevelt Hospital. He was forty. Chapman pleaded guilty and was sentenced to twenty years to life. Yoko asked the world for ten minutes of silence. George rewrote All Those Years Ago as a tribute, with Ringo and Paul joining in, and Paul wrote Here Today.[1] [2] [3]

The remaining three kept busy. George helped found HandMade Films, originally to rescue Monty Python's Life of Brian, and in 1988 formed the Traveling Wilburys with Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne. Ringo narrated the first two series of Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends, and since 1989 has toured with his All Starr Band. In 1994 Paul, George and Ringo came together for the Anthology project. With Jeff Lynne producing, they added new parts to two Lennon home demos, Free as a Bird and Real Love, released as new Beatles singles. Paul was knighted in 1997, George Martin in 1996, and Ringo in 2018.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Linda McCartney died of breast cancer in April 1998. On the thirtieth of December 1999, a man named Michael Abram, who was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, broke into George Harrison's home at Friar Park and stabbed him repeatedly, puncturing a lung. George's wife Olivia fought the attacker off with a fireplace poker and a lamp until police arrived. George recovered, and even joked that the intruder was not auditioning for the Traveling Wilburys. But cancer, which he had beaten once, returned. He died on the twenty ninth of November 2001 in Los Angeles, at fifty eight, and his ashes were scattered in India's Ganges and Yamuna rivers. A year later Eric Clapton and Olivia staged the Concert for George, with Paul and Ringo on stage.[1] [2] [3]

There was one more Beatles song to come. Now and Then was a Lennon piano demo from around 1977. The three surviving Beatles tried it in 1995, but the recording was too noisy and George disliked it, so it was shelved. Decades later, software developed for Peter Jackson's documentary Get Back separated John's voice from the piano. Paul and Ringo finished the song, keeping guitar George had played in 1995. Released in November 2023, it went to number one in Britain, the band's first chart topper there since 1969. It later won a Grammy. In November 2025 a restored Anthology series and a new Anthology 4 album followed.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around The Beatles

John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They met at a church fete in 1957 and were soon writing together, sharing the credit on every song whoever wrote most of it. Their styles differed, with Paul the natural melodist and John drawn to wordplay and harder edges, and by the White Album the rivalry had turned sour. The split brought public bitterness, yet in 1976 they were watching television together in New York, and John called Hey Jude Paul's best song.[1] [2] [3]

John Lennon and Yoko Ono. John met the artist Yoko Ono at London's Indica Gallery in November 1966, when he offered to hammer an imaginary nail into one of her works. By 1968 they were inseparable, and she joined him in the studio. They married in Gibraltar in March 1969, staged bed ins for peace in Amsterdam and Montreal, and later made Double Fantasy together.[1] [2]

George Harrison and Pattie Boyd and Eric Clapton. Model Pattie Boyd met George on the set of A Hard Day's Night, where she played a schoolgirl. They married in 1966 and she inspired his songs I Need You and Something. George's close friend Eric Clapton also fell for her, and wrote Layla about her. She divorced George in 1977 and married Clapton in 1979, inspiring Wonderful Tonight, and that marriage ended in 1989.[1] [2]

Paul McCartney and Linda McCartney. Linda Eastman was an American rock photographer, the first woman to have a photo on the cover of Rolling Stone. She met Paul at a London club in May 1967, and they married in March 1969. She played keyboards and sang in Wings, and championed vegetarian food. She died of breast cancer in 1998, after almost thirty years of marriage.[1] [2]

The Beatles and Brian Epstein. A Liverpool record shop manager with no management experience, Epstein signed the band in 1962 and polished their image. He believed they would be bigger than Elvis and fought for a record deal after many rejections. Paul later said that if anyone was the fifth Beatle, it was Brian. His death in 1967 left the group adrift.[1] [2]

The Beatles and George Martin. Martin was unimpressed by their first demos but charmed by their humour. A classically trained musician, he became a kind of teacher, suggesting the string quartet on Yesterday, writing orchestral arrangements and playing piano. He translated their wildest ideas into sound, and he is the person most often called the fifth Beatle.[1] [2]

The Beatles and Pete Best. Pete Best drummed through the Hamburg years, but the others felt he held them back, and George Martin wanted a session drummer on record. In August 1962 Epstein fired him and Ringo joined. Best later spent twenty years working as a civil servant. When Anthology 1 featured his early drumming in 1995, he finally received a substantial payment.[1] [2]

George Harrison and Lennon and McCartney. Two years younger than John and overshadowed by the main songwriting team, George got his first writing credit with Don't Bother Me in 1963. He grew fast, from Taxman and his Indian influenced songs to While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Something became his first A side, and Frank Sinatra called it a great love song. Limited to a few songs per album, George left with a stockpile of material.[1] [2]

John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe. Stuart was John's closest friend at art college, and John moved into his flat in 1960. John and Paul persuaded him to buy a bass, even though he was mainly a painter. Paul later admitted he was jealous of the friendship. Stuart left the band to study art in Hamburg and died in April 1962, and his photo appears on the Sgt. Pepper cover.[1] [2]

The Beatles and Billy Preston. The Beatles first met keyboardist Billy Preston in Hamburg in 1962, when he was playing in Little Richard's band. George invited him to the tense Get Back sessions in January 1969, and his playing lifted the mood. The Get Back single was credited to the Beatles with Billy Preston, an honour no other musician received.[1] [2]

The Beatles and Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans. Neil Aspinall, a school friend of Paul and George, drove the band to gigs in an old van and later ran Apple Corps until 2007, starting the Anthology project in 1970. Mal Evans, a gentle giant who had been a bouncer at the Cavern, became their road manager and studio helper, and was one of four people sounding the final piano chord of A Day in the Life.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about The Beatles

• On the fifteenth of October 1960, the four future Beatles recorded together for the first time, backing another band's singer. In Hamburg, John, Paul and George joined Ringo, then with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, to back singer Lu Walters on Summertime. It was cut at a small booth where people recorded messages onto discs. No copy is known to survive.[1] [2]
• Paul learned to play guitar left handed after seeing a poster of the country singer Slim Whitman. Paul struggled to play right handed on his first guitar. When he noticed that Slim Whitman played left handed, he simply reversed the order of his strings.[1]
• On the band's 1960 tour of Scotland, George Harrison used the stage name Carl Harrison. Backing the singer Johnny Gentle in 1960, George performed as Carl Harrison. It was a tribute to one of his guitar heroes, the rockabilly star Carl Perkins.[1]
• The Quarrymen's 1958 home made record vanished for over twenty years before a former member found it. The group paid for one fragile disc of That'll Be the Day and In Spite of All the Danger, and passed it around. Pianist John Duff Lowe rediscovered it in 1981 and sold it to Paul. The songs later appeared on Anthology 1.[1]
• Stuart Sutcliffe sold a painting to the Liverpool businessman John Moores for 65 pounds in 1960. One of Stuart's paintings was shown in the John Moores exhibition at Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery. Moores bought it for 65 pounds, which was then several weeks' wages for an average worker.[1]
• During their first Hamburg stint, the Beatles slept in a storeroom behind a cinema, next to the toilets. Their lodging at the Bambi Kino had bare concrete walls, bunk beds and no heating. Paul remembered that you could always smell the toilets next door.[1]
• Paul bought his famous violin shaped Hofner bass in Hamburg because a Fender was too expensive. When Paul took over bass in 1961, he bought a Hofner violin bass at a Hamburg music store for about 30 pounds. A Fender would have cost around 100.[1]
• At their first meeting with Brian Epstein, Paul turned up late because he was in the bath. Epstein was annoyed at the delay. George calmed him by joking that Paul might be late, but he would be very clean.[1]
• Brian Epstein never signed the band's first management contract himself. The Beatles signed with Epstein in January 1962, but he left his own signature off. He later told his assistant that if they ever wanted to tear it up, he did not want to hold them to it.[1]
• The Beatles' first EMI deal paid one penny per record sold, split among the whole group. Under the 1962 contract, each Beatle earned a tiny fraction of a penny per record, and even less abroad. Epstein renegotiated the terms in 1967.[1] [2]
• Brian Epstein was best man at John Lennon's first wedding, and a pneumatic drill drowned out the vows. John married Cynthia Powell in Liverpool on the twenty third of August 1962. Paul and George attended, but no parents did. A workman drilling next door made the ceremony almost impossible to hear.[1]
• Ringo first played drums in a hospital band while recovering from tuberculosis as a boy. Ringo spent about two years in a sanatorium as a teenager. Staff encouraged patients to join a hospital band, and he started hitting cabinets with a makeshift mallet. After that, he only wanted drums.[1]
• CBS received around fifty thousand ticket requests for the Beatles' first Ed Sullivan Show, in a 728 seat theatre. The demand dwarfed the seven thousand requests for Elvis Presley's debut on the show in 1956. Among the lucky audience were Richard Nixon's daughters.[1] [2]
• On Ed Sullivan, a caption under John Lennon's face told viewers, sorry girls, he's married. During Till There Was You, each Beatle's name appeared on screen. John's came with the extra line, Many American fans had no idea he had a wife.[1]
• Road manager Neil Aspinall stood in for George at the first Ed Sullivan rehearsal. George was in bed with strep throat and a fever before the February 1964 broadcast. Aspinall and a show staffer took turns filling his spot during rehearsals. Being told to rest his voice also helped earn George his nickname, the quiet Beatle.[1] [2]
• A session drummer called Jimmie Nicol briefly replaced Ringo on the 1964 world tour. Ringo fell ill with tonsillitis just before the tour. Jimmie Nicol, then twenty four, played five concerts until Ringo rejoined in Melbourne. Ringo later said he feared being replaced for good.[1]
• An estimated three hundred thousand people greeted the Beatles in Adelaide in 1964. That was roughly half the city and twice the crowd that had welcomed Queen Elizabeth there the year before. It was called the largest gathering of Australians in one place.[1]
• In Sydney, fans pelted the Beatles with Jelly Babies because George had said he liked them. The sweets rained down so hard that the band twice stopped the show. Paul said it was like bullets coming from every direction.[1]
• The melody of Yesterday came to Paul in a dream, and its working title was Scrambled Eggs. Paul woke with the tune and rushed to a piano. Unsure of the words, he sang placeholder lyrics about scrambled eggs. The real lyrics came later.[1]
• George Martin recorded the piano solo on In My Life at half speed. The baroque solo was too tricky to play at full tempo, so Martin played it slower and an octave down. Played back at normal speed, it sounded almost like a harpsichord.[1] [2]
• The stretched faces on the Rubber Soul cover came from an accident with a projector. Photographer Robert Freeman was projecting shots onto a card the size of an album when it tipped back, stretching the image. The band loved it and asked him to keep the effect.[1] [2]
• Revolver was almost called Abracadabra. The band dropped the title when they found another act had used it. Other ideas included Four Sides to the Circle, and Ringo joked about After Geography.[1]
• An EMI engineer invented automatic double tracking for Revolver, partly because John hated singing his vocals twice. Ken Townsend linked two tape machines to double a voice automatically. The Beatles loved it, and it soon became standard studio practice around the world.[1]
• Sgt. Pepper ends with a high pitched tone that dogs can hear but most people cannot. The tone was added at John's suggestion. It is followed by snatches of laughter and gibberish pressed into the record's final groove.[1]
• EMI refused to let the Sgt. Pepper cover include Hitler, Jesus or Gandhi. John and George had suggested them, but the label feared controversy. The finished cover cost nearly three thousand pounds, when a typical sleeve cost around fifty.[1]
• Ringo's personal copy of the White Album, number one, sold for 790 thousand dollars in 2015. Early White Album sleeves carried serial numbers, and the first copies went to the band. Ringo kept his in a bank vault for decades, and it set a world auction record for a record.[1] [2]
• The White Album's working title was A Doll's House. The band dropped it after the group Family released an album called Music in a Doll's House earlier in 1968. The plain white sleeve came instead.[1]
• Yoko Ono's line on The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill is the only female lead vocal on a Beatles record. Yoko sang one line of the White Album track. She also added backing vocals to Birthday.[1]
• Engineers wrapped the rooftop concert microphones in women's stockings to block the wind. Glyn Johns sent his assistant Alan Parsons to a nearby Marks and Spencer to buy them. Parsons later joked the staff must have thought he was a bank robber.[1] [2]
• In The End, Paul, George and John trade guitar solos, two bars at a time. The solos were cut live in one take, in the order Paul, George, John, three times round. The song also has Ringo's only drum solo on a Beatles record.[1]
• John officially added Ono to his name in a ceremony on the Apple rooftop in April 1969. The deed poll ceremony took place on the roof of the Apple building. The Beatles had played their last concert there three months earlier.[1]
• Saturday Night Live once offered the Beatles three thousand dollars to reunite on the show. Lorne Michaels made the joke offer in April 1976. John and Paul were watching together and briefly considered going to the studio. They stayed home.[1] [2]
• Now and Then set a record for the longest gap between an act's first and last UK number one. It topped the chart in November 2023, fifty four years after The Ballad of John and Yoko. Their first UK number one had come some sixty years earlier.[1] [2]
• The Beatles cartoon series was the first weekly TV show to feature animated versions of real living people. The American Saturday morning show launched in September 1965. Its slapstick style echoed A Hard Day's Night, and its original run lasted two years.[1]
• During the 1966 Memphis show, a firecracker thrown onstage made the Beatles think they were being shot at. The Ku Klux Klan had picketed the concert amid the Jesus controversy, and the city council had voted to cancel it. The shows went ahead, but the bang on stage terrified the band.[1]
• A Texas station burned Beatles records in 1966, and lightning struck its transmitter the next day. Station KLUE held a big Beatles bonfire over John's Jesus remark. The following day a lightning bolt hit its tower and briefly knocked it off the air.[1]
• Hours before he killed John Lennon, Mark David Chapman got John's autograph on a copy of Double Fantasy. John signed the album as he and Yoko left the Dakota for a recording session that afternoon. Chapman was still waiting outside when they returned that night.[1]
• After being stabbed in 1999, George joked that his attacker was not auditioning for the Traveling Wilburys. George survived repeated stab wounds and a punctured lung. His wife Olivia had fought off the intruder with a fireplace poker and a lamp.[1] [2]
• Mal Evans had been made an honorary sheriff of Los Angeles County before police shot him dead in 1976. Despite that honour, a Los Angeles newspaper described him after his death as a jobless former road manager for the Beatles. George Martin and Neil Aspinall attended his funeral.[1]
• Lennon's 1968 cannabis conviction in London was used in an attempt to deport him from the United States. Deportation proceedings began in 1972. In October 1975 an appeals court blocked them, saying it would not condone deportation based on secret political grounds.[1]
• Brian Epstein's final visit to a Beatles session came four days before his death. On the twenty third of August 1967, he dropped in at Chappell studios in London. The band were recording music for Magical Mystery Tour.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.