Editor's Note:
Bill Harry
attended the Liverpool College of Art with John Lennon, and founded the
seminal music paper Mersey Beat in London that helped launch the
Beatles in the early sixties. He has been the publicist for a host of
groups and artists, including Pink Floyd, the Beach Boys, Led Zepplin,
Jethro Tull, and David Bowie. He is the author of thirteen books on the
Beatles, and has compiled an archive on the Beatles that spans more than
thirty years. He lives in London and is a regular contributor to psst!
magazine.
When
Brian Epstein felt he'd at last secured a recording contract for the
Beatles, he sent out two telegrams, one to the Beatles and one to me.
The one I received read: HAVE SECURED
CONTRACT FOR BEATLES TO RECORD FOR EMI
ON PARLOPHONE LABEL 1ST RECORDING DATE SET FOR JUNE 6TH BRIAN EPSTEIN.
At the time I was producing my own
newspaper, founded in June 1961, which
I'd called Mersey Beat, after coining the phrase.
I'd been the first person from the local
music scene to make contact with Epstein when I walked into his NEMS
(North End Music Stores) record shop with copies of the first issue.
He agreed to stock it and with issue No.
2 ordered 12 dozen copies an issue. The entire front cover of issue
No. 2 was taken up with the headline 'Beatles Record In Hamburg'. It
featured the first published photograph by Astrid Kirchherr (the
German girl they met in Hamburg who fell in love with their bass
guitarist Stuart Sutcliffe: their love story became the basis of the
film 'Backbeat') and the story of the Beatles recording for Bert
Kaempfert in Germany.
Brian asked if he could become my record
reviewer and his reviews appeared from issue No. 3. He also began to
take out advertisements, which I placed on the same pages as articles
on the Beatles.
HAVE SECURED
CONTRACT FOR BEATLES TO RECORD FOR EMI
ON PARLOPHONE LABEL 1ST RECORDING DATE SET FOR JUNE 6TH BRIAN
Each time I dropped copies into NEMS, he
would ask to see me and quiz me about the local music scene. He was
amazed that such an active musical phenomenon was occurring in
Liverpool.
As the Beatles were the group I promoted
most, he asked if I could arrange for him to see them and I fixed it
up with Cavern owner Ray McFall for Epstein to visit a lunchtime
session.
Initially, the only record company he
could interest in the group was Decca, and they turned the Beatles
down following an audition. EMI wrote to Epstein saying they did not
want them, as did Pye, Phillips and virtually every label in London.
In Liverpool fans were joking that he'd end up signing them to the
Woolworth's label.
Decca had given Epstein the tapes of the
failed recording audition and in April 1962 he took them to London
hoping to find some record company who might be interested.
He bumped into Paul Murphy, a former
singer with Liverpool group Rory Storm & the Hurricanes, who told
him that no recording manager would listen to the tapes in the style
they were in and suggested he have acetates made. Paul then took him
to the HMV Shop in Oxford Street to have the acetates cut.
It was this piece of luck, which
eventually led to the Beatles signing with Parlophone.
Epstein met up with Ken Boast, an
executive at the HMV retail store and asked for the tapes to be
transferred to acetate. The man transferring the tapes was engineer
Ted Huntley.
Huntley noticed that a number of the
songs were originals and commented, "I don't think these are at
all bad." He told Boast who asked Epstein if he would be
interested in meeting Sid Coleman, manager of EMI's publishing company
Ardmore & Beechwood, who had an office on the top floor of the HMV
building.
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