“THEY STRUM too much.” This was the damning verdict on the first performance exactly 50 years ago in Hamburg of an unknown Liverpool five-piece combo called The Silver Beetles.
The venue: a joyless strip and pick-up club called Indra near the infamous Reeperbahn, the kind of place where the drunken sailors in the audience were more interested in the prostitutes than the musical entertainment.
“I saw five men on the stage, one with his back to the audience and such a load of old strumming,” recalled Horst Fascher, a first-night audience member.
He was speaking on the 50th anniversary of the first ever gig by The Beatles, in Hamburg, the city in which the band completed an exhausting apprenticeship – performing 281 concerts over 2½ years.
The musical impression the then five-man act made on Mr Fascher, he described as Geschrammel, a sound that was difficult to translate but instantly familiar to anyone who has ever spent a Saturday afternoon in a music shop’s guitar section.
“After about 20 minutes I told my friends, they strum too much for my taste,” Mr Fascher told German radio yesterday.
No one knew it but the band – booked as fourth choice by the club owner – would later become the most famous band, ever. The five-man Indra combo still included Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe, but John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison were there too on the first of five Hamburg trips. Of the experience, Lennon later confessed: “I was born in Liverpool but I grew up in Hamburg.”
Their contract saw them living in two squalid, windowless rooms in a local cinema, Bambi Kino.
When the Indra was closed by the city authorities in October, the band moved to the more central Kaiserkeller as warm-up act for
the better-known Rory Storm and The Hurricanes – Ringo Starr’s band. It was there the band came into its own, playing in their underpants, wearing toilet seats or greeting audience members with “Heil Hitler”.
Mr Fascher’s opinion softened over time and he booked the band in 1962 for his own Star club, six months before their breakthrough. He remembers Lennon as “the cheeky one”, McCartney “the charming boy” and Harrison as “shy, always hiding behind his guitar”.
Last night in Hamburg the band Bambi Kino, including members Moby and Nada Surf, replayed the set-list from the first concert when five young men strummed too much.