Your week in Beatles: Hamburg, “Cake” and The Fool On The Hill

How should you listen to the Beatles? However you like, and as often you can. But faced with all that material, how – to coin a phrase – do you do it? In the aim of offering something like a benign, George Martin-style guiding hand, we’ve put together this series to put Beatles songs in your weekly calendar – hopefully bringing some fresh takes on their music, and on the hectic nature of their lives and creative development along the way.

The week of October 19th contains many of the different colours in the Beatle spectrum. In 1966, this is the week that George Harrison returns from India, where he has been taking a sitar course with Ravi Shankar. Today in 1968 is the day that John and Yoko are in court after a drugs bust. At the start of the career, however, the autumn is a time for harder work: a date at the Pavilion Gardens, Buxton (October 19th, 1963), and in 1964, where they enter the Scottish phase of their UK tour, with dates in Edinburgh, Dundee and Glasgow.

In Dundee they are interviewed for Scottish TV. “Where are we now?” someone asks. In the face of weariness, John Lennon enters the mildly surreal by way of reply.

“Cake,” he says.

Even the interviewer is puzzled.

“I Saw Her Standing There”
October 20th, 1963. It’s a Sunday morning three months after “She Loves You” came out and a BBC Beatles session recorded in front of a studio audience four days earlier is blasting out of your transistor radio. First up? The opening track of their debut album.

It’s now almost exactly a year since The Beatles became a chart phenomenon. In a couple of weeks’ time, they will release a stop gap 7” EP – or “extended play” – called No 1 whose title (we think, though no one makes the reason completely clear) commemorates that anniversary, and bridges the unbearably long wait for fans hungry for new material.

“I Saw Her Standing There” (presumably because it deserves to be recognised as more than just an album track) will be the lead-off track of the new EP, and this succinct Beatles show in fact is almost like an EP itself, comprising this track, followed by a run-through of the group’s story so far: “Love Me Do”, “Please Please Me”, “From Me To You” and “She Loves You”.

There would be more BBC radio sessions to follow but those hoping to witness The Beatles live in a small London theatre as part of a BBC studio audience were soon dashed. Brian Epstein had concerns for the Beatles’ safety in such a small space, and decreed that this would be their last such show – a booking for December 4th was cancelled.

“How Do You Do It?”
The Beatles had kindred spirits on Merseyside, and on October 21st 1961, they combined to play with one of them. By this time veterans of both Hamburg rock ‘n’ roll clubs and the Merseyside beat scene, The Beatles were happy to combine informally with Gerry and the Pacemakers for a date at Litherland Town Hall, a venue which the Beatles played more than any other excepting the Cavern and Aintree Institute. The name of this supergroup? The Beatmakers!

Source: uncut.co.uk/John Robinson

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