Thursday 25th April 1963
“Lots of fun, I mainly held coats.”
From Me To You jumped to number 2 in the Disc chart, unable to topple How Do You Do It?, enjoying its fourth week at the top. Please Please Me finally dropped out of the Top 30. The paper’s back page, headlined “The truth about that Beatles hair style!” reported on the group’s forthcoming holiday. Interviewed by Chris Hutchins, they told of previous holidays they had enjoyed and gave more than one version of how the Beatle haircut came about.
John said that he and Paul had “set off on a hitch-hike to Paris. Well, it was going to be a hitch hike but we ended up in taking the train all the way - sheer laziness. Anyway, we bumped into a photographer we had met in Germany and he had a flattened-down hair style with a fringe in the front which we rather took to. We went over to his place and there and then he cut - hacked would be a better word - our hair into the same style.”
In the New Record Mirror, From Me To You jumped twenty places to number 3, while Please Please Me dropped to number 30. The paper reported that touts in some Manchester clubs were selling the single 2/- over the retail price - and not for the first time. In the LP chart Please Please Me climbed one place to number 2. Asked what he thought of the Beatles, Cliff Richard described them as “fabulous,” revealing that he and the Shadows had bought three copies of their LP, although not making it clear whether they had bought three copies each or that two of the Shadows hadn’t bought any.
The group went to Boyfriend’s offices in Regent Street to meet with journalist Maureen O’Grady, who had seen them the night before at the Majestic Ballroom. She then took them to Fiona Adams’ photographic studio at 21, Kingly Street. After taking a series of shots, Adams, O’Grady and the group piled into a taxi and drove to the crossroads of Gower Street and Euston Road, which was in the process of being widened. Using war-time demolition as her background, Adams shot a further three rolls of film. (One of the images ended up as the cover for the Twist And Shout EP.) She later recalled, “I had been keen at that time to break away from the conventional Hollywood-style of stage and studio shot. To this end, I would ride around on the top deck of London buses to search out possible locations. An abandoned area had caught my eye at the crossroads of Euston and Gower Street. This was still a London blitzed in parts and awaiting rebuilding. I climbed down the rubble into a bombed-out cellar, open to the sky, and had a wonderful session with the Beatles lined up on the wall above who couldn’t have been more co-operative.” O’Grady also interviewed the group - the story appearing in the magazine’s July 13th edition. Her recollection of the day? “Lots of fun, I mainly held coats.”
In the evening the “Mersey Beat Showcase” caravan gave two performances at 5.30pm and 8.00pm in the Concert Hall at the Fairfield Halls in Croydon, promoted by John Smith. John Leyton, who had been booked a guest star, pulled out through illness on the day. Fans cheered the news. Ringo used Tony Mansfield of the Dakotas’ drum kit. Mayor Councillor John Aston and Jane Asher were both at the show. The Croydon Advertiser reviewer, unhappy that actor and comedian Vic Oliver, who appeared in his own “A Night In Vienna” show two days later, walked through the crowd unnoticed, wrote, “that ushers deployed themselves in a serried rank to guard the stage from the teenage mob, gives you some idea what kind of an evening it was. Either you like beat, or you don’t. I don’t.”
Richard Green felt differently in the Times-Herald. “To say that the Beatles were terrific would be an understatement. They projected an electric wave of excitement which gripped every single person at the concert and earned them the kind of reception usually reserved for Royal occasions.”
“I was a pupil at Woodcote Secondary School in Coulsdon in Surrey, and a keen amateur photographer. I had a pre-war Rolleiflex camera - a neighbour had found it in their loft and didn’t want it, so my mother lent me the £10 to buy it from him. I also bought a professional electronic flash unit, a Mecablitz 502, which had a lead you plugged into the camera. When you pressed the shutter, the flash would go off. I’d already been processing my own films, with a much lesser quality camera, in a little dark room I had a constructed in the corner of my bedroom.
At the Fairfield Halls in nearby Croydon, they ran a thing called the Corps of Stewards. It basically meant they got people in who they didn’t pay to show people to their seats. In return, they would get to see the shows. My father John was one of those, and as a lover of classical music, got to see lots of concerts. The manager of the hall was a chap called Colonel Piper, and my father asked the Colonel if I would be able to go backstage to take photographs of the various acts appearing at the venue. I was only 15 at the time, and as I wanted to work in photography, it was a great opportunity. To be honest, I was more of an Elvis Presley fan. The first record I ever bought was ‘All Shook Up.’
I was probably a bit awestruck but the Beatles had not attained their real fame and there was no real Beatlemania. To me, they were just a group playing at a venue in the town where I lived. On this particular evening there was a ‘Mersey Beat Showcase’, with various groups from the Liverpool area, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, and the Beatles.
I arrived in time for the second show, and said at the door, ‘Colonel Piper has said I can go backstage and take some photographs’ and was waved through. There was no security in those days! I wandered backstage and managed to get a few photographs. I took one of Ringo and John being interviewed by a lady called Mrs. Kirby, who was from a local hospital radio station and had a tape recorder and microphone with her, and then went out into the hall.
I enjoyed the show and took a few pictures of the group on stage. I went backstage again afterwards and took a photograph of the Beatles sitting under a line of coat hooks. They seemed knackered but were very pleasant and helpful to me. I only had twelve pictures on my roll of film. Film was expensive back then. The backstage photo I took was the last shot I had. I went home on the bus, developed the film, and proudly took the prints into school with me the next day.
Everyone wanted to see them, I was very popular that day, rather showing off a little! At home, I got into terrible trouble - when I got home the night before, I’d put the flash gun down on the sofa, and headed up to my ‘darkroom’ to develop the pictures. The flash had a little battery in it that was like a mini car battery, and you had to top it up with distilled water, and it was acid. It had leaked out onto my mother’s sofa, and it had to be re-covered! However, I couldn’t have taken the photograph of the Beatles backstage without it. I bought the ‘Please Please Me’ LP shortly after, and still have it full of scratches in the loft!
There were other times when I was allowed in to take photographs, including ones of Shirley Bassey, Matt Monro and Leslie Phillips, who’d all appeared at the Halls earlier that month. I left school and had a job for a while with a local photo agency based in Croydon. Shortly after, I applied to the Surrey Mirror in Redhill, and joined them as a trainee photographer. I was there for a few years, and then they transferred me to Crawley, after buying a new newspaper there, the Crawley Advertiser. I was the only photographer on the paper, and it was quite exciting.
Crawley was a new town with a lot of industry, totally different from the very middle-class Redhill and Reigate. In the late ’60s I was offered a job by the Luton News, and moved up to Hertfordshire, where I live to this day. I was headhunted to work on a new newspaper in St Albans and was there until it was taken over in the nineties and was made redundant along with everyone else. For the past 20 years I have been self-employed, doing a lot of work for the County Council and other local authorities, although these days with modern technology, they take a lot of their own photographs now. It suits me as a pension top up, and now I’m semi-retired, I can pick and choose when I work. I still have the Rollie camera I took the pictures of the Beatles with.”
ANDY WRIGHT, PHOTOGRAPHER, CODICOTE, HERTFORDSHIRE