DRUMMING UP A BRUSH WITH FAME
Sunday Mail
Liverpool, England, is famously the home of the Beatles and the headbutt or Liverpool kiss. The travel industry has been slow to embrace the headbutt, but tour companies carry thousands of pilgrims every year to Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields and various significant sites in the lives of Lennon and McCartney.
Liverpool is important to me because it's the place my dad was born. He was a proud Scouser, and I remember him singing The Beatles' She Loves You as I curled in his lap.
I'd been before, of course, but this time I wanted see the city from a Beatles point of view, and only Liverpool Beatles Tours (LBT) offered private itineraries built around the lives of the individuals: John, Paul, George, Ringo and Pete.
Pete Best, of course, was the spurned fifth Beatle. Not famous tragic fifth Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe, the bassist who died from a brain haemorrhage in 1962. Instead, Pete Best was the drummer who was sacked and replaced by Ringo that same year.
Best was a Beatle for only two years and played on none of their hit records, so I'm keen to learn what sort of person might book a Pete Best tour. The answer is nobody. LBT manager Ian Crabtree says: "We've had it for five years, but no one's ever done it."
He is affably baffled as to why someone would come all the way from Australia to pay homage to Best's short career.
"Some people have waited all their lives to get here," says Crabtree. "We've had people in tears outside Strawberry Fields. No one has waited all their life to see Pete Best's house."
Best is still alive and living in Liverpool. He tours the world with the Pete Best Band, a Beatles-style group that puts Best-family percussion firmly at the centre of the Merseybeat sound.
Mathew St, in the city centre district of Liverpool, is crowded with Beatles-themed businesses, assembled around the Cavern Club: not the famous Cavern Club where the Beatles (with Best) first played in 1961, but the lesser-known New Cavern Club, built on the original site with many of the same bricks.
Crabtree says there would have been 600 people in the audience when the Beatles performed at lunchtime here. Well, not exactly here.
The new stage is the same size as the old one, but not in the same place. "It was filled in," says Crabtree, to make way for the Merseyrail underground in 1973.
"So, anyway," says Crabtree, "Pete got the sack, and when he got the sack, he wandered around to this pub for a drink. And that was it. He never asked why he got the sack. He doesn't know."
We stop outside The Grapes in Mathew St. "So this is the pub where he drowned his sorrows," says Crabtree. "And there's a picture in there of... ?"
"Not Pete Best, but...
"Someone else?"
"The other three sitting there," says Crabtree. "Because, obviously, he'd been sacked."
In fact, there are several pictures of Best at The Grapes.
Did Best continue to play music after he left the Beatles?
Crabtree consults his notes. It has become obvious he did most of his Pete Best reading the night before. "Pete joined Lee Curtis & the All Stars," he recites, mechanically. "Lee Curtis is sill performing in Liverpool today.
"So next time we'll do a Lee Curtis tour," says Crabtree, caustically. "I'll see what I can make up there."
After he left the music industry, Best worked in a job centre, "giving advice", says Crabtree.
Surely, careers advice was not his forte.
"No, probably not," he agrees.
One of Best's former colleagues at the job centre once phoned LBT. She said: "The day he got the job, we were all called in and told never to mention the Beatles, and nobody ever did."
Best went to school at the Liverpool College in Shaw St, which has been converted into luxury apartments.
"It was a good school in them days," says Crabtree. Incredibly, Crabtree was educated there, too. "It wasn't a good school when I went to it," he says. "It was a school for lunatics."
Were there any mementos of Pete at Liverpool College? "Nothing at all," he says.
In West Derby, about 8km from the centre of Liverpool, is the mansion that was the Best family's Casbah Coffee Club. The Beatles performed at the Casbah for about 18 months, before moving to the Cavern in 1962.
The rooms where the Bests lived are now offices, a recording studio and apartments. The garden where teenage girls once camped all night to catch a glimpse of Best in the morning is overgrown and scattered with junk. A newish sign says, "Casbah Coffee Club, Birthplace of the Beatles", its authenticity guaranteed by a plaque unveiled in 1999 by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool and Pete Best, "the Original Beatle". Both men have their titles capitalised, as if they were equally official.
Tours of the Casbah which operated in the basement are conducted by Pete's nuggetty younger brother, Rory, who speaks at a swift, practised pace.
There is "the original mike stand as used by Paul on the opening night", and one of the original speakers, too. Facing the club doorway is a dragon painted by Pete and his mother, Mona.
"It supposedly wards off evil spirits and brings good luck in," says Rory. "Well, it certainly brought good luck to the Beatles, that's for sure."
But not specifically to Pete?
"Ah, well. I think all the Beatles... er... it didn't work for Pete, no."
Mona owned and ran the Casbah.
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"There's no doubt about it: if Mo hadn't given them the bookings when she did, they would've disbanded and that would've been the end of them. They would never have re-formed," says Rory, with bewildering authority.
Rory remembers the glory days, when crowds of 1500 would turn up at the little club to watch the Beatles, with hundreds left listening in the garden, and fainting girls carried out over the heads of the crowd, for Rory to revive outside.
"It was a tough job... " says Rory.
Stacked near the door is a collection of facsimile street signs named after John, Paul, George and Ringo.
"I did have the papers on about somebody who was trying to name a road after our Pete," Rory says.
What road was it?
"Pete Best Ave, or something."
No, I meant… never mind.
"But the council turned it down," he says.
In January 1962, Brian Epstein became manager of the band and introduced them to producer George Martin, who liked the group but not Pete's drumming.
Epstein told Best he was out of the band on August 16, but did not say why.
"Some people said Pete was too good-looking," says Rory, "or he was the Beatles, which is probably my opinion. I think Pete was too popular and the other Beatles were jealous."
All of Rory's stories have Pete at the centre of Beatles history. It is all pretty funny, until I ask Rory what happened after Pete was sacked.
"He was devastated," says Rory. He never spoke to any of the Beatles again. "And he tried to commit suicide. He tried to gas himself. He barricaded himself in his bedroom.
"I managed to break the door down. He had a wardrobe wedged against it. I managed to squeeze into the room. His head was by the gas fire.
"I switched the gas fire off and Pete made to dive through the window. I stopped him. It then became the fight of my life."
I feel ashamed of my cheap shots.
Pete rebuilt his life around Collegiate Old Boys rugby and worked at the job centre. For years, he refused to talk publicly about the Beatles. He gradually softened, and when the CD of out-takes and rarities Beatles Anthology 1 was released, it included 10 tracks on which he played, earning him royalties of more than $1 million.
These days, when organised tours from the US come to the Casbah, Pete sometimes meets them for a chat.
When Pete retired in 1998, he formed the Pete Best Band. In 2008, they released an album, entitled Haymans Green, and it's not too bad. Nostalgic and unapologetically Scouse, it reminds me a bit of my dad.