By the end of the 1950s Rory Storm and The Hurricanes were Liverpool’s top band.
The great peculiarity of Storm’s character was that he spoke with a
severe stammer, which always disappeared when he was performing. A flamboyant Teddy Boy, he had a vast blond quiff that he would
ostentatiously comb on stage: in old black-and-white photographs he seems to be built entirely of silver. He was an athletic man, a natural extrovert, given to daredevil stage leaps (he once broke a leg jumping from a balcony for a photograph). He’d wave the mike stand around and, strangely, pour lemonade over himself.
I’m told he was once apprehended by a railway porter on Bootle station for writing ‘I Love Rory’ on a wall. The other groups worshipped him; George Harrison longed to join the Hurricanes but was told he was too young.
Rory found a local drummer, another refugee from skiffle, called
Richard Starkey. He lured the boy with promises of a summer season at Butlins holiday camp in Pwllheli, where each week brought a fresh
coach-load of excitable girls. In line with the Hurricanes’ big-thinking
policies the drummer was allocated a new name, Ringo Starr. (This era would be lovingly re-created in a 1973 him featuring Ringo with Billy Fury and David Essex, That’ll Be the Day.) Starr’s reputation grew so fast in his time with Rory, that he was eventually poached by the Beatles to replace Pete Best.
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Gerry Marsden, like Ringo, came from the docklands of Dingle. He got a job on the railways, he played skiffle and then got himself a beat group, the Pacemakers, who served their time in Hamburg. They were game entertainers, these boys, who could play anything in that week’s Hit Parade if it’s what the crowd wanted. Having a piano-player made them a bit different, too, and offered them some range. Gerry had a funny way of holding his guitar high on his chest: it was so he could see his fingers.
Brian Epsten watched them in action at the Cavern, and saw in Gerry
something of the same star potential he perceived in the Beatles and
Cilia Black. He brought George Martin to see them play in Birkenhead, and they were duly signed to an EMI label, Columbia.
Once in the studio they were more compliant than Lennon and McCartney, and readily agreed to cover the song, ‘How Do You Do It?’, that the Beatles had rejected. Good thing, too. It got them to Number 1 straight out of the traps, and a month before the Beatles at that.
Paul McCartney would recall much later: ‘The hrsj: really senous threat to us that we felt was Gerry and the Pacemakers. When it came time for Mersey Beat to have a poll as to who was the most popular group we certainly bought and filled in a lot of forms, with very funny names , . . I’m not saying it was a fix, but it was a high-selling issue, that.’
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…Cilia’s first job in show business was to make the tea in the
Cavern office. She was in fact the quintessential Scouser: a docker’s
daughter from the Catholic enclave Scotland Road. In the family parlour stood a piano from the Epsteins’ North End Music Stores, just up the road.
When the 60s started she was a typist in town who spent her
lunch hours watching the beat groups at the Cavern, where she picked up some spare-time work. Soon she was to be found on stage as well, performing guest spots with Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, the Big Three and Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. (Sometimes she would duet with Ringo on his big number ‘Boys’, but turned down a chance to go with the band to Hamburg.)
One night at the Iron Door her girlfriends urged the Beatles to give Cilia a go. ‘OK Cyril,’ John Lennon said. ‘Just to shut your mates up.’ She sang Sam Cooke’s version of ‘Summertime’, and her career was on its way.
It was Lennon who recommended ‘Cyril’ to Epstein.
‘I fancied Brian like mad,’ she recalled. ‘He was gorgeous. He had the Cary Grant kind of charisma, incredibly charming and shy. He always wore a navy-blue cashmere overcoat and a navy spotted cravat. I know now it was a Hermes but then I still knew it was expensive.’ She failed an early audition for him, backed by the Beatles, but he saw her again at the Blue Angel and changed his mind.
(Liverpool - Wondrous Place by Paul Du Noyer, 2002)
Part (I), (II), (III), (IV), (V), (VI), (VII), (VIII), (IX), (X), (XI), (XII), (XIII), (XIV), (XV), (XVI), (XVII), (XVIII), (XIX), (XX), (XXI), (XXII)
