Liverpool’s City Engineer’s Department were called out at 3.00am and worked through the day, trying to keep the city’s streets and pavements safe. Some 1,000 men, including parks and gardens staff, cleared the pavements, while 400 men and 26 gritters saw that the roads could be driven on. With Les Hurst unavailable, a still-sick Aspinall hauled himself out of bed for the group’s Cavern Club performance in the evening, heading a bill which also featured Pete Hartigan’s Jazzmen, the Dennisons (residents at the Jive Hive in Crosby every Wednesday), the Merseybeats and the Bluegenes. Aspinall recalled, “I don’t remember much of that night. I was all feverish, sweating and a sort of funny yellow colour.” He informed Epstein that he would be unable to drive the group down to London the following day, but then bumped into GPO telephone engineer Mal Evans, a regular at the Cavern, and asked him, “Mal, can you run the boys to London and back for me?” To which Evans replied, “Yeah. O.K.”
The Cavern had been founded as a traditional jazz venue in January 1957. The Beatles had first played there on February 9th, 1961 and it was exactly nine months later that Brian Epstein first saw them. Gerry Marsden later said the venue “stank of disinfectant and stale onions. It was hot, sweaty and oppressive. It was a nightmare to get in and out of; struggling down the stairs from Mathew Street to the cellar with all our gear was tough, but it was the only entrance because there was no backstage - and no backstage toilet, either. I shudder to think of the effect of a fire down there, had there ever been one.” Paid £20 for their appearance three days earlier, the Beatles earned £45 for this one.
“We played the Sunday lunchtime sessions regularly at the Cavern but I don’t think we realised that the session in January 1963 would be one of the last times the Beatles played there at lunchtime. We often shared the same gear with them. When we played night-time shows with them we usually went on after them because the Cavern closed about eleven o’clock, and by the time everyone got out, you’d missed your bus or train or ferry. So if you were on that last spot from half ten to half eleven, people would have to leave in the middle of your set. So top of the bill didn’t want to be on stage when people were leaving. Consequently, if we were on before the Beatles, they would use our equipment. If it was the other way round, we would use theirs. We’d get it back to each other the next day.
During one lunchtime session at the Cavern I went there to see Bob Wooler, just me and Bob going through the diary - and believe it or not, I’ve still got the diary - with Bob’s initials in. ‘BE,’ which of course referred to Brian Epstein, was written on quite a lot of the pages. So when I went in for this meeting before one of the lunchtime sessions, a friend of mine, Chris Wharton, came with me. He was also a friend of Epstein’s. His Dad had a coach spraying business. John’s beloved Rickenbacker was looking very tarnished, and Chris said to John, ‘I could have it sprayed black for you.’ So John had said, ‘Oh great, yeah.’ Chris walked in and I noticed the guitar case was old and tattered, black, ripped a bit, and had Star-Club stickers all over it. So I knew it was either the Beatles’ or the Big Three’s. I had a good look at it, and it was the Beatles. I asked, ‘What’s this?’ Chris said, ‘It’s John’s Rickenbacker, it’s been sprayed black.’ I said, ‘Can I have a look?’ It was on a bench, so I just played the strings. I said, ‘It’s slightly flat toppy.’ He asked me if I could tune it. I was engrossed, absolutely engrossed. The Beatles were doing the lunchtime session that day, and we heard someone coming down the steps, and it was George and John. They said, ‘Oh is this the guitar?’ They opened it up, and it was like Christmas morning. John was like a ten-year old. He thought it looked great. I’ll never forget that.
The name Kinsley comes originally from Ireland, a derivation of the name Kinsella. My Dad was a pub pianist, one of the generation where they crossed their arms to play the piano. We'd have parties in our street, and the piano, which was in my aunt's house four doors away, would have to be wheeled down the street to the next parlour where we would be having a little sing-a-long, and that’s how it was. I was fourteen when I joined the Rankin Boys Club in Anfield where I played two games of football on a Saturday. I was super fit and used to train every single night and, besides sport, I was well into music - Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, early Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry. It was the end of 1961 when I formed this little group called the Mavericks, and we played on a Friday night for the club members. The boss of the club said, ‘Well, we should start a club on a Saturday or Sunday, which we did, and in the meantime I’d met Tony Crane. One of the guys, Andy, was working at the Royal Liver Buildings Royal Life Insurance with him. So that’s how I got to know Tony. He walked in one night when we were playing snooker, and I just said ‘Hello’ to him and carried on playing. He must have thought I was very rude, but we all thought he was another guy, the spitting image of one of the club’s football seniors. We have a laugh about it now, but it must have seemed so rude. He was eighteen months older than me, and still is. The reason he was there was because Andy brought him in because we were looking for a lead guitarist. We had a little jamming session together and that was it, the Mavericks were formed.
We first played at the Cavern as the Mavericks in early ’62. We got the name from the television show ‘Maverick,’ but Bob Wooler thought the name sounded too country. So we became the Pacifics - Tony, myself, Dave Elias and Frank Sloane. One of the places where all the groups, including the Beatles, used to play was the Aintree Institute. We played three weeks in a row - the first week we were the Mavericks, the second the Pacifics and by the third we were the Merseybeats. All these people coming thinking they were seeing a different group, and it was all the same one! I’d left school by then. I had a day job for three months in the Tower Building, which is immediately opposite the Liver Building. It was a shipping company. My cousin was married to a ‘Cunard Yank’, one of the sailors who went back and forth to America and would bring back rock and roll records.
In May of 1963, we took part in the Lancashire and Cheshire Beat Group Contest. They had all the groups on, then they voted, and the ten best groups did the second half. There must have been about twenty or twenty-five groups. So we were in the top ten, and we went on to do the second half, and we were going to do the same two songs, as we had just gone down an absolute storm. Everyone was saying, ‘Oh they’re gonna win it, they’re gonna win it.’ Then the Escorts went on and did one of the songs that we had just done! We thought we can’t do it again. They were so-called mates, they still are actually. Luckily we had a big repertoire, so we had no problem doing another song. They won and we came second. George and Ringo gave the awards out. I think we got a very little cup. The winner was going to win a recording contract with Decca. Actually it didn’t work out, and they ended up on the same label as us, Fontana.
On the August Bank Holiday 1963, if you recall it always used to fall at the beginning of the month, and it was the last time the Beatles played the Cavern. We were going to go on immediately before them and it was roasting hot outside. The Cavern never bothered to count how many people came in, it was just so cramped it wasn’t true. There were just so many people in there, there wasn’t room to dance. The condensation was running down the walls. There was only one socket on the stage at the Cavern - a five-amp socket, just the one, that’s all, so the plug boards would go into the one socket. So we went on immediately before the Beatles, and when we came off, we were absolutely saturated. There was only one little band room at the side, and they were waiting for us. We all had a chat, and Paul was pretty cheesed off. The power had gone off because of the damp. The conditions really were horrendous. There was just one light on the stage and all the power was off.
Eventually they went on stage, went into their show, and all the girls were screaming. To be honest, we hadn’t seen girls screaming before, but of course they had been touring by then and the screaming had started. It was unbearable. I was standing at the back just wanting to go home. Me, the biggest Beatles fan you will find in the world, and I just thought ‘I can’t watch this.’ It was awful and embarrassing.
The power went off completely after they had done about three or four songs, the amplification went off, and the Beatles being the Beatles, improvised. Paul went over to the upright piano, John picked up his acoustic which you could hear, but that’s all, and Paul went into an old-fashioned song that no one had ever heard. It sounded like a song from the 1920s, one that his Dad would have played in the Jim Mac band. I will never ever forget seeing that.
In 1967, when ‘Sgt. Pepper’ came out, there was a song on it - ‘When I’m Sixty-Four.’ It was the song he had played on the piano that night when the power went out. I could not believe it. I thought, ‘I’ve heard this song before!’ Paul said he wrote the song when he was fourteen. The Cavern sounds awful, the heat and the sweat and the smell, but it was great!
We used to hang out at the Blue Angel a lot. A friend of Cilla’s called Pat was a barmaid there, and she had strict instructions not to give me any alcohol as I was only sixteen. It didn’t matter to me because I didn’t drink anyway, but I used to walk in, and everybody used to look at Pat, and look at me, and everyone would look at me because I had a pint of milk in my hand from one of these spinning machines, and they’d all have a pint!
We signed with Fontana in 1963. Our big hit was ‘I Think Of You’ with me singing and playing bass. I left the group for a short time because I was only a kid and no one took any notice of me. I knew that our manager was ripping us off. I was the one who would get the money at the end of the gigs and I’d share it out evenly, between us and the road manager, and if we had any agent to pay, I'd put that away as well. I was methodical in doing that and glad to do it. But all of a sudden we had a Manchester agent. He ripped us off - good style! I was telling the others and they wouldn’t listen to me, so I became fed up and we were all broke. We had more money before we had this manager and so I left. They didn’t believe that I was going to leave but I did. It was only for six months until Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp took over our management in 1965.
The following year Kit and Chris asked us to go and see them. Apparently Tony had already spoken to them but I didn’t know what it was all about. They only wanted to speak to Tony and I, and I said look, ‘We can’t carry on, the other two are crazy,’ which they were. They went through a bad drinking stage and they let us down on a few gigs; they just didn’t turn up. We forgave them but Kit and Chris didn’t. They gave us an ultimatum - get rid of them or we can’t manage you. We said we would have to get another bassist in and another drummer, and they said, ‘No, you two will go out front, like the Walker Brothers, and have a backing group.’ So we decided to try it, and we got a group from Liverpool who were mates of ours called the Fruit Eating Bears.
We became the Merseys. The B side of the McCoys version of ‘Fever’, which was the follow up to ‘Hang On Sloopy’, was a little country number called ‘Sorrow.’ We rearranged the vocal - ‘With your long blonde hair and your eyes of blue’ - I basically nicked off ‘Help,’ that type of singing. I used to do it in school, you know, singing in a round. It worked. When the Beatles heard it, they freaked and told us they loved it. Some later at the end of a session, George came over to us and said, ‘It’s weird seeing you in here today because I’ve just nicked one or your songs.’ We couldn’t understand what he was talking about and it wasn’t until another year or two later when ‘Yellow Submarine’ came out, and with it George’s song ‘It’s All Too Much.’ The song is similar to ‘Sorrow’ and near the end George sings ‘With your long blonde hair and your eyes of blue.’ We were all knocked out with that.
After we broke up, Tony spent some time playing as Tony Crane and the Merseybeats, and I formed Liverpool Express. A few months ago, a surgeon in Liverpool who was going to operate on my knee looked at my form, which said ‘William Ellis Kinsley - Musician,’ and the nurse said, ‘Oh, are you in a band? I said, ‘Yeah, I'm in the Merseybeats,’ and the surgeon looked at me, and looked at my name and said, ‘And Liverpool Express!’ It turns out that he’s Egyptian, and when he was in college in Cairo he and his buddies loved Liverpool Express. We were big everywhere, but we never got any royalties. Prince Charles requested us to play when he was attending a Liverpool Council event. We played three numbers. We got told we were meeting him after the show, so when we did the show we just wore our usual stage gear, but in the line-up afterwards we had to have dinner suits on with dicky bows. So we hired them from a friend of mine, a tailor in Liverpool, got measured up, and got changed. When we were standing in line, he said to us, ‘Well I think you should have bloody well not bothered!’ You know, getting changed. I said, ‘I wish you’d have told us that earlier, it would have saved us twenty guineas each’, and he laughed.
I have a photograph of us all laughing together. My Mum and Dad were there, and that was one of the highlights of their lives. They were from the generation who really respected the Royal Family, and they saw me singing to the future King. I'm still gigging with the Merseybeats and Liverpool Express, and there’s a brand-new boxed set of the best of Liverpool Express that has just come out, three CDs in one. Buy it now!”
BILLY KINSLEY, MUSICIAN, SINGER, LIVERPOOL, MERSEYSIDE