The Times October 27, 2008

The lost Beatle: John, Paul, George ... and Pete

He was sacked from the Beatles in 1962 but Pete Best remains a hero in Liverpool

Pete Paphides

 

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00419/best385_419921a.jpg

 

Before you even see the sign that tells you this is The Cavern, you can hear Please Please Me rattling out from downstairs. Across the road the Beatles peer down from a wall, seeking to scoop up off-season holidaymakers and ferry them from one “fab” haunt to another. Only when you see Pete Best waiting outside do you realise that, as insensitive meeting places go, this ranks alongside morning coffee in Beirut with Terry Waite.

 

Had the Beatles not returned from their EMI audition and replaced him with Ringo Starr in the summer of 1962, he almost certainly wouldn't look the way he does this afternoon. Today, the 66-year-old looks like any of the grey-haired Italian hairdressers who have worked in Soho over the past four decades. But back in 1964, when panellists on the US game show I've Got A Secret had to guess who he was, they figured it out in seconds. He was the drummer kicked out of the biggest pop band in the world.

 

There are now only two survivors from the original Beatles line-up. Best was behind the kit for two gruelling years - spanning the Hamburg sojourns that transformed the band into peerlessly savage rock'n'roll players. Yet you suspect that the “moodiness” cited by Paul McCartney as a primary reason for his departure may just be shyness.

 

“You had such strong personalities that it was a pleasure to sit back and watch,” he smiles, sounding more like a spectator than a participant. “The only exception I remember was a time when John and I got it into our heads that we needed to get some extra money, cause back then it was, like, you got paid and the next day you were broke. So we decided we'd try to mug someone. Paul and George initially thought they might help, too. But by the time we saw this sailor and jumped him, they were nowhere to be seen. He gave as good as he got, and when the deed was done we legged it. I looked at John and said, 'Have you got the wallet?' And he said, 'No, I thought you had it.' So that was our life of crime over as soon as it had begun.”

 

There's little to alert you to the fact, but the real Cavern - not this artfully distressed facsimile - was filled in 35 years ago as part of construction work on the Merseyrail Underground rail loop. There are few untouched Beatles landmarks remaining in the city that spawned them. Paul McCartney and John Lennon's birthplaces have been acquired by the National Trust (the latter after Yoko Ono purchased and donated it) and made over to look as they might have done in their childhoods. One place that the Beatles tourist trail rarely includes is the Casbah Coffee Club - the basement of the sprawling townhouse bought by Pete's mother, Mona Best, after she pawned all her jewellery and gambled the proceeds on a 33-1 outsider called Never Say Die, ridden by Lester Piggott.

 

Seeing it today, you understand immediately why John Best tried to dissuade his wife from splashing her winnings on what, at first sight, he termed “a white elephant”. “She wouldn't be told,” remembers Best. “She saw the changes that were happening, the music me and my friends were listening to. And the Casbah was her attempt to create a place where people could meet, play and listen to this music.”

 

If the building, still owned by the family, seems a little unloved on the outside, that merely accentuates the unadorned allure of what awaits inside. No restoration needed here. The first thing you spot as you descend the stone steps is the word “John” deeply inscribed on the black cement wall. “Mona was furious about that,” says Best - although there is little evidence that the Best matriarch was hidebound by any other conventions. One low ceiling is daubed with faux-Aztec motifs sloppily applied by Lennon. In the room where Best and his band rehearse is a spider's web drawn by a teenage Paul McCartney. The improvised decor, the smell, the cold, propels you to a place where rock'n'roll, still staggering uncertainly from its egg, must have appeared a world away from the buttoned-up postwar propriety of the surrounding streets. This was where Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, albeit as the Quarrymen, first played together - and where Mona, still spending her winnings, accelerated the tempo of Merseybeat by installing one of Liverpool's first espresso machines.

 

Somehow Best's mother still seems key to the way her son has adjusted to the past 46 years. It was Indian-born Mona - to whom he refers not as “mum” but by her name - who bought him a drum kit, and Mona to whom Best came home and cried when told that he was fired from the band. Best doesn't appear to have a pushy bone in his body. But then, with a mother like Mona, perhaps he didn't need to.

 

Interviewed on television in 1963 about his sacking from the Beatles, Best was either reluctant to speak or unable to get a word in as his mother explained: “It was the way it happened that upset us.” John Lennon later admitted his guilt at the way Brian Epstein was given the job of telling Best that he was no longer a Beatle. He described the act as “cowardly”.

 

Best formed another band, but its name, Pete Best & the All Stars, merely drew attention to the infamy that had befallen him. On November 22, 1963 - the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated - the Beatles were recording in Abbey Road. Best, meanwhile, was playing a gig. In Bootle.

 

For a while, the increasing tinnitus din of what might have been threatened to consume him. Coming home from a US tour in 1965, he locked himself in the front room of the family house and attempted to gas himself. “It was one of those stupid things,” he says with mild embarrassment. “I wish I could turn around and say that I'd had a drink, but that didn't even come into it. The memory of doing it is eclipsed by the dressing down I got from my mother and [brother] Rory after they smashed the door down. They told me that my wife and baby daughter deserved better - and they were right.”

 

Indeed, it was out of commitment to his wife Kathy - the girl who had jumped on stage at the Cavern and danced beside him, and to whom he is still married - that Best put music behind him in 1968. He got a job loading pallets of sliced bread into vans.

 

The Seventies must have come as a huge relief to him. For a time it seemed that Liverpool, along with Best, wanted to put the Beatles behind it. But on December 8, 1980, that all changed. He was in the bathroom, shaving, when his wife interrupted him: “She said, ‘Pete, you'd better come down and listen to this. John has been murdered.' I said, ‘John who?' He was so far from my thoughts. And she was, like, ‘You know - John who you used to be friends with. John who was in the Beatles.'

 

“I've always said that out of all the Beatles I had more time for John. Seeing both sides of him made him a complete man. He wasn't what the world saw. That sardonic, wicked-humoured side - I think we all know now that it was just a defence mechanism.”

 

Those were important years for Best, by then an employment officer. Working in recession-hit Liverpool, he says, he felt lucky to have a job at all. He remembers a steady stream of real-life Yosser Hughes types imploring him to give them jobs. The most he could do, he recalls, was to offer to retrain them in other fields “which was an emotional issue for people who had done one kind of work all their lives”.

 

The Liverpool musician Pete Wylie explains: “It matters a lot to people here that Pete stayed. To a lot of folk that puts him head and shoulders above Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, who detached themselves from Liverpool. Even ordinary people were leaving Liverpool at this point because the situation was so bad. This perception that people have of Pete is ‘the Beatle who lost out'. In Liverpool, he's celebrated.”

 

Indeed, it was pressure from Best's old peers that prompted him, 20 years ago, to get back behind the kit for a show of Sixties standards at the Adelphi hotel in Liverpool. Playing alongside him on a second kit was his brother Roag, born in 1962 after Mona had an affair with the Beatles' driver and long-time confidant Neil Aspinall.

 

This afternoon, the only time that the usually phlegmatic Best stumbles on his words is when talk turns to his mother, who was seriously ill at the time of his return to live performance. Her death two weeks later effectively switched the tracks of her sons' paths in life, prompting them to form the Pete Best Band.

 

On the November night in 1995 when the TV documentary The Beatles Anthology was screened, the preceding commercial break featured Pete Best throwing away his drumsticks for a pint of Carlsberg, as the caption at the bottom of the screen flashed “Probably the Pete Best lager in the world”. His presence in the documentary was minimal. Although the release of ten Best-era tracks on an album accompanying the series resulted in a windfall for the drummer, the sleeve bore another indignity. It featured an early publicity picture of the group, but Best's head had been torn from the top right-hand corner - the space filled with a smiling Ringo instead. By way of riposte, Haymans Green, the album that the Pete Best Band release today, features the ripped-out visage of the smouldering drummer, against a black backdrop.

 

There are, of course, people who will suggest that it's just another attempt to cash in on his past. Pete Wylie suggests that detractors might care to put themselves in Best's shoes: “The man's life reads like some Greek mythological torture! It's like the punishment meted out to Tantalus, who had to stand in a pool of water under a fruit tree, and when he went to get the fruit, the branches lifted it out of his reach. Then, when he bent down to have a drink, the water disappeared. And yet Pete has found a way to be happy, and people love him for it.”

 

It seems that they really do. Back in town, one middle-aged woman spots Best and exclaims, “It's you!” She turns to her daughter: “He was in them, you know!” No need to explain who “them” are. He tells the pair that he has a new album out, then asks me what I think of it. I say it's the best album I've heard this year by someone who used to drum for the Beatles. Having also heard the dismal expat platitudes of Ringo Starr's Liverpool 8 album, Best, who says that he enjoys signing autographs, can't help but echo the sentiment: “I wasn't impressed, to be honest. If you take any song from our album and put Liverpool 8 next to it, I'm certain that 99.9 per cent of people would prefer Haymans Green.”

 

The back of the CD features what amounts to a rather lovely epilogue to Best's story: an EMI logo. “Funny, isn't it?” says Best. “It should go in The Guinness Book of Records for the longest gap between joke and punchline.”

 

And Paul McCartney? What would Best do if Macca finally grabbed the phone and broke a 46-year silence by suggesting that Best should guest on his next tour? Surely that would amount to a sort of closure? “There's nothing to close,” insists Best. “I'd say thanks but no thanks. After all, I'd be doing to my band what I'd had done to me all those years ago.”

 

Haymans Green is released this week on Lightyear/EMI Records

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Any thoughts about Pete Best?

Well I have always believed they got rid of him because he wasn't the best drummer in the world. Mind you having said that, they used to say Ringo wasn't the best drummer in the Beatles. :)

 

Possibly they felt he didn't fit, as their fame was taking off. I think its a shame they never got back in touch, sounds like they felt guilty, even to this day.

Well I have always believed they got rid of him because he wasn't the best drummer in the world. Mind you having said that, they used to say Ringo wasn't the best drummer in the Beatles. :)

 

Possibly they felt he didn't fit, as their fame was taking off. I think its a shame they never got back in touch, sounds like they felt guilty, even to this day.

 

Listening to the Anthology 1 tracks featuring Pete, his drumming does jar a little. So musically they appear to have made the correct decision.

 

However I do think it is sad that after all this time the other Beatles never reconciled with him, probably as you say to a mixture of embarrassment and guilt.

I wonder how well it would go down with Beatle fans if Paul asked Pete to play on one of his tours, for say even a couple of Beatle tracks. Can't see it happening ,but it would generate a lot of publicity.