Like most people my age outside of Liverpool, I had no real inkling of The Beatles until Love Me Do, by which time they had, to some degree, been sanitised by their traditionally showbiz-minded manager, Brian Epstein. No doubt he thought it necessary to help the band get gigs, to get a record deal, and those first few hits were what you might call pretty songs. From Me To You, I Want To Hold Your Hand; it was all very innocent.
As their fame grew, however, and the back story of their earliest days became more widely known, we cottoned on that this wasn’t how they started. We learned about the Cavern Club, and then we learned about their excursions to the seedy nightspots of Germany [in the early 60s]. With hindsight, you could say Hamburg was The Beatles’ punk period, their edgy and dangerous days that were hard to square away with the almost chocolate-box pop proposition they became.
