Liverpool<\/a> city region combined authority and the Hamburg senate, said: \u201cIt\u2019s fascinating, because they [give] you so many secrets about them as they are developing.\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cIt was quite extraordinary, because our kid is just saying what\u2019s happening there in a foreign land, over the water. And it was a very important stage in their development,\u201d Mike told the Guardian.<\/p>\n
The letters, also gathered from The Cavern Club and the Liverpool Beatles Museum, reveal the thoughts of Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, as well as those of the original bassist, Stuart Sutcliffe, who died shortly after the Hamburg period from a brain haemorrhage at the age of 21, and the original drummer, Pete Best, who was hired specifically for their first visit to Hamburg.<\/p>\n
In a letter from Best to his mother, he recalls how he, Lennon and McCartney felt like stars boarding their plane, having been interviewed by a member of the press about them being voted Liverpool\u2019s number one band.<\/p>\n
Photographs taken by Sutcliffe, who was instrumental in the band\u2019s style \u2013 and was the first to have the band\u2019s moptop hairstyle, given to him by his fiancee, Astrid Kirchherr \u2013 also feature in the exhibition. He decided to stay in Hamburg with Kirchherr while the other bandmates returned to Liverpool, and he was replaced by Ringo Starr.<\/p>\n
Mike McCartney said the Beatles did shows \u201cnon-stop\u201d during their time in Hamburg, famously performing for eight hours some evenings. \u201cThey were on all these pills to keep them going, uppers and downers,\u201d he said. When Paul returned from Hamburg, he was noticeably thinner, Mike said, but it was clear the band had gone to the next level.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe music when they then played around Liverpool \u2013 by god, could you hear the professionalism. The difference was that they had come out of Hamburg, done the hard work \u2013 I mean, more than hard work. It was like they were like chalk and cheese when they came back to Liverpool. And they were just out and out the top group in Liverpool, because they were so together, so united, so different.\u201d<\/p>\n
One letter from Paul to Mike, written in May 1962, gives an insight into Hamburg\u2019s flourishing live music scene, with Paul revealing how they had been told that the American rock\u2019n\u2019roll legends Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis could soon be visiting the city, and how Paul hoped the Beatles could perform with Berry.<\/p>\n
It also features a lengthy passage from Lennon, dictated to his bandmate, which starts with a whimsical poem about keeping your chin up and commiserates with Mike for not getting a job as a hairdresser, without knowing if he actually got it or not, and goes on for several pages, with characters such as Jesus and the F1 driver Stirling Moss all making an appearance.<\/p>\n
Liverpool Combined Authority said it was potentially looking at bringing the exhibition home in the future, after a BBC six-part series being filmed in Hamburg looking at the Beatles\u2019 early days.<\/p>\n
Mike said he had not kept the letters for any particular reason initially, and that he \u201cdidn\u2019t even realise their significance\u201d until very recently. His wife had called him a hoarder for keeping these items for more than 60 years, he said. \u201cBut I\u2019m glad that I did, to a certain extent. Because if I hadn\u2019t hoarded, then you wouldn\u2019t have these unique letters.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mike was also a musician, in the band the Scaffold, which has a box set of singles and albums available, and he was a photographer, taking pictures of the Beatles in their early days, which later were collected into the book Mike McCartney\u2019s Early Liverpool.<\/p>\n
He said he and his brother had moved on from using letters to communicate. \u201cNow he does FaceTime, looking like a scruffy get,\u201d Mike said. \u201cHe never shaves. I always say \u2018you scruffy bugger\u2019. We just talk about nothing \u2026 and everything.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A rare set of letters and photos from the early days of the Beatles, in which they write…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":932706,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-932705","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116504545916542292","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=932705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932705\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/932706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=932705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=932705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=932705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}