Darlington Derek Taylor For Your Radioactive Children

Days In The Life Of The Beatles' Spin Doctor
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-78952-607-3
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Derek Taylor lived a charmed life. It started on Saturday, 7 May 1932, in the Liverpool 17 suburb of Toxteth Park South, and it saw him become a writer best known as the press agent for the Beatles. He became the band's friend and intimate across thirty years. Indeed, there are no shortage of claimants to the 'honorary' or 'fifth Beatle' status, but Derek's claim is more valid than most. Indeed, his urbane charm, his easy intelligence and the value of his contribution to the Beatles' collective story are beyond dispute. He put spin on stories decades before the term 'spin doctor' was concocted, with his droll, idiosyncratic way of speaking.
It all began in 1964, when he co-wrote A Cellarful Of Noise, the best-selling autobiography of Brian Epstein. Soon after, he became Epstein's personal assistant and The Beatles' press agent. In 1965 he moved to Los Angeles, where he started his own public relations company working for bands like Paul Revere And The Raiders, The Byrds and The Beach Boys, and also co-created the historic Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. Brian Wilson called him a 'PR whiz' and 'a colourful, slick-talking Brit'. Later, he returned to England to work for the Beatles again as the press officer for the newly created Apple Corps.
This is the definitive biography of a man that was at the heart of the music world of the 1960s and 1970s. It is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the Beatles of course, but also to anyone yearning for a deep dive into the colourful world of a man who helped define an era.

Andrew Darlington has walked the magma crust of the Nisyros volcano. James Lowe of the Electric Prunes is his Facebook friend and Dave Davies of The Kink answered his Tweet. He writes about music for R'N'R (Rock 'n' Reel), and counter-culture for IT: International Times. His science fiction has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine and in his own parallel universe collection Saucerful Of Secrets. His latest poetry collection is Tweak Vision: The Word-Play Solution To Modern-Angst Confusion and his Science Fiction Novel In The Time Of The Breaking are both from Alien Buddha Press, USA. His writing can be found at Eight Miles Higher: andrewdarlington.blogspot.co.uk. He lives in Ossett, West Yorkshire, UK.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Darlington, Andrew

Leseproben

Chapter 2

1961: Those Savage Young Beatles

It did happen. The whole wonderful thing did happen, A long time ago, on the Mersey…

Derek Taylor notes to The Beatles Anthology: 1

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… in 1959

(Patti Smith)

Within months of joining the group, Paul was linking his friend George Harrison into The Quarrymen. George had also attended Dovedale Road Infants and Junior School, a place so Dickensian that Dickens himself had once taught there, before going up to Liverpool Institute For Boys from 1954-1959. His bus from Speke estate to the ‘Big School’ took an hour – an hour there, and an hour back. And it was on the bus along Dovedale Road, near Penny Lane that he met Paul. Although he was a year older, Paul had stayed at school longer to get better qualified. They wore the same uniform and were travelling the same route. So they started hanging out together.

Around the same time, Derek was going through that different set of complicated social rituals known as ‘courting’. According to poet Philip Larkin, ‘sexual intercourse’ began in 1963, between the end of the Lady Chatterley ban, and The Beatles’ first LP. He was wrong, of course. It happens in every life around the time raging hormones go into meltdown. And for Derek, it arrived a little earlier than Larkin’s estimation. Although ‘rationed by the purse’, Derek ‘drank only at weekends, strictly beer, and I made a lot of friends of all ages, felt more at home with girls, discovered the joys of pubs and pub people.’ It was at the Riverside Restaurant – a ‘raffish and quite smart hangout’ in New Brighton, that he met the ‘slim, tall and beautiful’ Joan Doughty, who would become his life-partner. It was 1956. She was a clerk at the Prudential Assurance Company office on North John Street, her hair immobilised by aerosol spray. In her words, ‘when I was seventeen, I fell in love, at first sight, with the man who became my husband.’

He was a twenty-three-year-old Wirral Reporter who had graduated by a ‘logical progression’ in January 1955 to the Liverpool Echo and Daily Post (circulation 350,000 a day), and doing well. The ‘wonderful rosy glow’ of good draught bitter lubricated his sociability in every sphere and his pleasurable consumption escalated. To Joan, ‘in the early years of our relationship, it was fun to be around him. He was full of good-humoured energy, and I enjoyed going to pubs and parties with him.’ She ensured that wherever they went together, his pockets were ‘bulging with a couple of hundred old pennies in readiness for my calls via old-fashioned coinbox telephone’ with last-minute stories to Welsh news editor W. Glyn Rees about ‘fires, lifeboat rescues, heads stuck in railings.’

Although she was still underage for drinking, by a few months, one of the places the couple discovered, ‘after trial and error in the lanes and byways of Drinker’s Liverpool,’ was the Basnett Bar. A ‘snug and slim… little jewel of a place’ in Liverpool’s Basnett Street, it was ‘an extremely pleasant pub, long and narrow with a marble counter’ downstairs, and a small restaurant above that served a decent plate of seafood or beef grills, chops or ham-and-eggs for a shilling or two. A special place with an Edwardian feel that fitted the couple like a glove, they soon became familiar figures to barmaids Ada and Barbara, sharing time there until it became their ‘second home’. Together they were earning £1,000 a year, and ‘heaven was the Basnett Bar with Joan on paynight.’ Frequented by pressmen, critics, show-offs and wits, oddly, there were other significant habitués. In fact, it was ‘a glue-pot for people whose lives would become inextricably intertwined.’ George Melly was a cheery visitor. Because it was ‘a stage-whisper away from the Liverpool Playhouse’, a dapper Brian Epstein called in ‘to hang out with young actors, to talk business or pleasure.’ As a furniture-salesman in the family business, it was at the Basnett Bar that Brian first blurted out his theatrical ambitions, to actor Brian Bedford who suggested he apply to RADA. Peter Brown, ‘a pink-faced young shop assistant’, was there too. While a ‘brisk and amiable’ Neil Aspinall, fresh out of Liverpool Institute, even audited the books. Of course, they were all unknown to each other. Related maybe, by sight and habit. Small world.

As the gregariously classless clients emerged from the Basnett, they found themselves facing fashionable Bon Marché and the wide windows of the great department store George Henry Lees, where soon Derek and Joan were buying things for their ‘bottomdrawer’. Looking back on their ‘Panglossian optimism’ Derek concedes that ‘the passage of years may have lent those days a serenity they didn’t possess, but it was certainly wonderful… and things were getting better all the time.’ Engaged on St David’s Day, 1 March 1957, they married exactly one year later. Joan resumes ‘we married when I was twenty’, at St. Andrew’s Church in Bebington, the Wirral. The newly-weds honeymooned at the Bell Inn in Aston Clinton, then moved into a West Kirby ground floor flat, close by the promenade, owned by landlords Pip and Paddy Rae. ‘Our first child was born a year later,’ with Timothy arriving 28 February 1959.

One night they’d gone over to Hilbre Island with a group of ‘pop’ fans and heard ‘All Shook Up’ being played on a portable record player as they shared a sleeping bag. Joan loved the music, ‘but it made me uneasy,’ adding ‘I was so much older then – I’m younger than that now…’ pop music was still ‘Cool For Cats’, and the cultivated tones of David Jacobs introducing BBC TV’s Juke Box Jury. At the time, Derek never got to hear – and David Jacobs certainly never got to play – The Quarrymen’s privately-recorded one-off ‘vanity-disc’ version of ‘That’ll Be the Day’ c/w ‘In Spite of All the Danger’. Elvis Presley had famously kick-started his career by privately paying to record a version of ‘My Happiness’ as a gift for his mother. In much the same way, one day in spring, or perhaps it was the summer of 1958, memories are understandably blurred, The Quarrymen decided to do the same. Percy F. Phillips had a small monophonic recording and mastering facility set-up in the front room of his Victorian terraced house at Number 38 Kensington. A modest affair, even by the standards of his Memphis name-alike, Sam Phillips’ Sun Studio.

Around the same time – in May 1958 – a young Ronald Wycherley from Dingle (later Billy Fury) used the same Liverpool address to record a set of early demos, including his versions of ‘Playing for Keeps’, ‘Have I Told You Lately’, and his own self-penned ‘Love’s A-Callin’’. Then The Quarrymen scraped together the 17s 6d fee necessary. Eric Griffith had joined the Merchant Navy soon after George phased himself into the group around February 1958, which meant that John, Paul – who had replaced Rod Davis – and George, all played guitars. There was also John Charles ‘Duff’ Lowe who played piano. Drummer Colin Hanton on drums did not participate. They all took their cramped places in Phillips Sound Recording Service, around the single microphone, and they played. Many years later, Derek would be instrumental in assembling the first The Beatles Anthology CD-set which would digitally-enhance, clean-up the crackles, and bring this long-lost single-sided ten-inch 78rpm track onto the market.

They’d seen Buddy Holly on Sunday Night at the London Palladium on 2 March, during his 1958 tour. ‘We were all learning guitar on the back of the skiffle craze’, explained Paul, ‘so the fact that Buddy played, stood up and played, and sang was a major factor.’ They learned the song from a record by the Crickets on the black Coral label, its title inspired by a quote from John Wayne in his Western movie The Searchers (1956) – which also provides another Liverpool band with its name. The Crickets’ record had entered the UK charts on 28 September 1957, and by 2 November it had risen to hold the no.1 spot for three weeks, keeping Elvis Presley’s ‘Party’ off the top position. It soon became part of The Quarrymen’s set. ‘We picked apart his records’, continued Paul, ‘it took us ages to get the opening riff of “That’ll Be the Day’”, but when we cracked it, it was like the bush drums. “I’ve got it, I’ve got it”. “He’s got it! He’s got it!”’ It became the first of a clutch of Buddy Holly songs they would record, including ‘Words of Love’ and ‘Crying Waiting Hoping’. But ‘That’ll Be the Day’ marks the first-ever real audio evidence of the group that would change the sound of the world. As track three on CD1, the spectral echo and eerily ragged harmonies of that proto-Beatles ‘That’ll Be the Day’, warping in and out of focus through tape-hiss, seem to be tuning in through some space-time distortion from another distant age. It forms a direct bridge from 1958 to 1995, to now. While, although John and Paul had begun to write songs together, ‘In Spite of All the Danger’ is a Paul and George composition.

Although the group nucleus was now essentially intact, and all they needed was a drummer, everything was not well with the proto-Beatles. By this time, the other members of...