The Beatle Who Got Away
Revisiting Stuart Sutcliffe’s role in the band’s breakthrough. 27, 2022
In August 17, 1960, five young Britons were approaching the stage of a small night club in Hamburg, about to play music in that city for the first time. To reach the stage, they had come an almost unimaginable distance. From their home, in Liverpool, they had driven in a cream-and-green minibus to the port of Harwich. The bus, teetering under the weight of amplifiers and instruments, had been lifted onto a ferry by a crane. At first, the stevedores had refused to handle such a precarious load; a photograph captured the moment just after they changed their minds, with the sixties hanging in the balance.
The musicians slept on benches as the ferry churned across the North Sea toward the Hook of Holland. From there, they drove to the West German border, where they told officials that they were students, bringing their guitars for “sing-songs” with friends. They were young enough to encourage the ruse—during the long ride, their manager had recited “The Wind in the Willows” to entertain them. Four of the five were teen-agers: John Lennon, nineteen; Paul McCartney and Pete Best, eighteen; George Harrison, seventeen. The fifth, Stuart Sutcliffe, was twenty, barely.
But they were growing up fast, and the road offered its own form of instruction. Entering a roundabout, they turned in the wrong direction, and found a gigantic truck bearing down on them. When the bus’s tires became caught in streetcar tracks, its passengers avoided colliding with a tram, but only at the last second. Finally, as they pulled into Hamburg, they rammed into a car.
Eventually, the minibus found its way to the Reeperbahn, the main avenue of Hamburg’s sin district, then turned into Grosse Freiheit, a small street named after the “great freedom” offered by a local count, around 1610, when he established a set of economic and religious reforms. The band set up their gear in a tiny club, at No. 64, that offered a “daily international program” with lingerie shows. Its marquee included a name, Indra, that came from a Hindu deity, a friend to weary travellers and poets. That seemed appropriate. John Lennon took out a pen and crossed out the word “Silver” from the band’s name. From now on, they were simply Beatles.
The Beatles at the Indra, August 17, 1960.Photographer unknown
On their first night in Hamburg, the band members posed for a photograph, as if to prove that they had survived the crossing. In light blazers, dark pants, and tan cowboy boots, they had not yet settled on their look, and were staring in different directions. But, on the right, the bassist was locked in, radiating an attitude of pure rock and roll. Stuart Sutcliffe’s pose might have amused the others; he had been playing bass for only seven months, and was distinctly less virtuosic than the three guitarists. Yet he had done a great deal to propel this journey across the North Sea, into the slipstream of history.
Sutcliffe remains a spectral presence in Beatles lore, obscured by our knowledge that the band was destined to become a quartet. He joined early in 1960, and his departure, in 1961, forced Paul McCartney to pick up the bass, the instrument that God clearly wanted him to play. No band needs three guitarists.
Yet Sutcliffe has come out of the shadows in recent years, thanks especially to the British writer Mark Lewisohn, who has been laboring for decades, like a medieval scribe, on what is sure to be the most detailed history of the Beatles ever written. “Tune In,” the first volume of an expected trilogy, appeared in 2013, and devoted nine hundred and forty-four pages to their beginnings, through 1962. Among other breakthroughs, Lewisohn has shown how pivotal Sutcliffe was during the Wunderjahr of 1960. At the end of 1959, the band was an iffy proposition, changing its name every few months. Like Spinal Tap, they suffered from a chronic shortage of drummers, and they collectively owned a single amp. So dim were the group’s prospects that George Harrison joined a band with steadier gigs.
But Sutcliffe’s arrival was galvanic. Lennon, energized by his friendship with a brilliant painter, began to hear his own muse. Together, they came up with the perfect band name, and Sutcliffe’s charisma kept opening doors. His search for his voice guided theirs, and even after he left—and even after he died, in 1962, of a mysterious brain injury—he continued to speak to them.
I encountered that voice three years ago, on an arctic day, in a basement on Long Island. A friend had alerted me to a cache of art, letters, journals, and photographs by Sutcliffe, which were held in the house of his sister Pauline near a street named Blue Jay Way. The Beatles’ creation story is deeply entrenched, and teleological: it is simply inevitable that Lennon will meet McCartney, that their genius will conquer the world. But Pauline’s archive suggests that, without Sutcliffe’s arrival, they might never have found their way to the ferry. To elevate his role in the story doesn’t detract from his bandmates’ achievement. On the contrary, it forces new amazement that they made it out of Liverpool at all.
Born in 1940, the eldest child of his family, Sutcliffe grew up with a father at sea, and filled the void with reading, writing, and drawing in his sketchbooks. “We young artists are like young sailors,” he wrote in a notebook. “Unless we encounter rough seas and are buffeted by the winds, we’ll not become real sailors.” It was as if the North Sea were already beckoning.
The story has been told of Liverpool’s openness to American music, but it was also a city teeming with literary ideas—in the coffee bars near the Liverpool College of Art, where beatniks gathered to shout poems at one another, and in the garrets where they chattered late into the night. Sutcliffe entered the college in 1956, and quickly established himself as a star painter, splashing his canvases with a riot of color, like the artists he loved: Serge Poliakoff, Nicolas de Staël. When he met another student, John Lennon, a spark was kindled.
Cynthia Powell, a fellow-student and the woman who would become Lennon’s first wife, wrote about these years in her memoirs, and dwelled at length on the friendship between the two nearsighted artists, who tried so hard to see what the world had to offer. Patiently, Sutcliffe taught Lennon how to think through the act of composition, planning a painting so that it would create a rich universe of its own. Less patiently, Lennon expanded Sutcliffe’s sense of sound, raving about the latest singles from across the Atlantic.
They shared a love of words, too. In his youth, Lennon had created a mock newspaper, the Daily Howl, which he wrote out at home, by hand. Sutcliffe read everything he could get his hands on, from Kant and Spinoza to Kerouac, Dostoyevsky, and Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher who counselled his readers to set aside intellectual concerns and “leap.”
The first leap came soon enough. At the end of 1959, Sutcliffe was selected for a prestigious art exhibition, and sold a painting. Suddenly, he had ninety pounds burning a hole in his pocket. Lennon, who had been playing skiffly rock and roll with McCartney, Harrison, and an assortment of drummers, pressed Sutcliffe to convert his capital gain into a new bass. On January 21, 1960, Sutcliffe bought a Hofner 333, and soon joined the combo.
From that moment, the story accelerates. Sutcliffe was not a natural musician, but he practiced until his fingers bled, and helped in other ways to fill out the picture. (Harrison would remember him as the band’s “Art Director” in those years.) He helped scare up a second amplifier from the college, and the band’s sound grew richer. They needed connections, too, and when a new café and venue, the Jacaranda, opened nearby, Sutcliffe was ready. The café’s owner—a plumber named Allan Williams—wanted someone to paint over graffiti in the women’s bathroom. Sutcliffe delivered a series of murals of, as Williams later put it in his memoir, “Rock n’ Roll Scenes.” Williams was delighted.
Sutcliffe had begun living in an artist’s loft, across the street from the Anglican cathedral that towered over Liverpool. Lennon immediately moved in, and Harrison and McCartney were a constant presence, eager to escape parental supervision. McCartney later remembered it as a magical place (“Very studenty!”), where they could stay up all night, playing the latest records from America, until the sun shone on the cathedral.
But, even as they cohered, the band lacked a name. (They had outgrown options like the Quarrymen, and Johnny and the Moondogs.) Sutcliffe kept long vocabulary lists—gregarious, ascetic, sublimate—and one night, in April, he and Lennon concocted a pun that nodded at once to the Beat Generation and to one of their favorite acts, the Crickets, the band led by Buddy Holly. McCartney later remembered the exact moment when his friends, walking along the cathedral, announced, “Hey, we want to call the band the Beatles.” Harrison gave the credit to “Sutcliffe/Lennon.”
In the weeks that followed, the Beatles rehearsed in Sutcliffe’s rooms. Williams, enchanted by their style, and by Sutcliffe’s artistic disposition, began to take an interest. In late May, he booked the group on a tour of a windswept stretch of the Scottish coast, backing a teen-idol type, Johnny Gentle. When the group returned, they were granted a regular spot playing gigs at the Jacaranda. But the big break came in August, when Williams got a call from a German club owner who needed five English musicians to perform in Hamburg.
Here was a second leap of faith, especially for Sutcliffe, who would need to pause his promising art career, and had more to lose than the others. But he finally agreed. The decision was made easier when a newspaper article about beatniks identified his building as a foul nest of this invasive species. On August 15th, he and Lennon were evicted. The next day, the band made it onto the ferry.
In eight months, they had come a long way, thanks in no small part to the bookish young man who kept painting new doorways for them to walk through. Sutcliffe still wrestled with his instrument, but he had earned his place in the Beatles, finding them a name, a place to grow, and a chance to soar. In a notepad, he wrote a list of aphorisms. “History is my father and tomorrow is my son,” one reads. Another: “Now I am young I have strong wings I can fly high. I will.”
From the moment the Beatles arrived in Hamburg, their immersion was total. Between August 17th and October 3rd, they played forty-eight sets at the Indra, each roughly six or eight hours long—far more than they had ever played in England. After an elderly lodger complained about the noise, they moved to the Kaiserkeller, a nearby sailor bar. On their first night at the new venue, at a tense moment in the Cold War, the U.S.S. Antares and the U.S.S. Fiske sailed into Hamburg. Suddenly, hundreds of Navy men needed entertaining.
The Beatles played fifty-eight more sets between October 4th and November 30th. Under pressure to mach schau, or “make show”—the phrase that had been yelled at them by the Indra’s manager—they became more extroverted, stomping and screaming to get attention. In mid-October, Sutcliffe wrote home to Pauline, “We have improved a thousandfold since our arrival.” His confidence was burgeoning during this trial by fire. At the Kaiserkeller and the Indra, women swooned over the intense young man, as did the gay clientele, especially when Sutcliffe came forward to sing the Elvis ballad “Love Me Tender.” In a letter home to his sister, Sutcliffe wrote, “I’ve become very popular both with girls and homosexuals, who tell me I’m the sweetest, most beautiful boy.”
The next night, Voormann came back with his girlfriend, Astrid Kirchherr, and another friend, Jürgen Vollmer. They became regulars, and Voormann shyly introduced himself to Lennon, who told him to find Sutcliffe, “the arty one.” “We started talking, and it was like the world was on fire,” Voormann said.
The intimacy between Sutcliffe and Kirchherr also caused tension. According to Pauline, McCartney later confessed that it “peeved the rest of us like mad, that she hadn’t fallen in love with any of us,” and he seemed to feel that the plonk of Sutcliffe’s bass playing was holding the band back. Voormann, for his part, maintains that “the Beatles were best when Stuart was still in the band,” and that Sutcliffe had “great feeling.” Pete Best, who had a front-row seat, agreed that Sutcliffe got the hang of his instrument.
By early December, most of the group was ordered back to England after disputes with the Kaiserkeller’s owner and the local police. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Best limped back to Liverpool, but Sutcliffe lingered in Hamburg, hesitant to return to a city that he likened in his letters to a “brass coffin.” When he finally returned for a set of gigs in late January, he received a savage beating after being cornered by a group of Teddy Boys. Lennon and Best broke up the fight, but not before Sutcliffe was kicked in the head. Two weeks later, the Beatles began playing at the Cavern Club. (A grainy photograph shows Lennon playing guitar with a splint on his finger. Behind him, Sutcliffe’s bass can be seen, but not his face, as though he were easing out of the picture.)
The Beatles journeyed back to Hamburg, and played ninety-two shows between April 1st and July 1st. In photographs, Sutcliffe appears fully engaged, but he was spending more and more time with Kirchherr, and was increasingly drawn to his passion for art. (As Cynthia Lennon wrote, “He was not the type of person to fool himself.”) In late June, the Beatles recorded their first professional tracks; Sutcliffe, though there to cheer on his friends, didn’t play. The band backed another singer, Tony Sheridan, for five songs, then worked out two on their own. One was an instrumental titled “Cry for a Shadow.” The only song credited to John Lennon and George Harrison, it seemed to describe the Beatle who was both present and not.
Sutcliffe in his studio, around 1961.Courtesy Stuart Sutcliffe Estate
Aweek later, the break was complete. The Beatles returned to Liverpool for the next phase of their launch, and Sutcliffe began painting with a fury, selling his Hofner to Voormann and using the cash for paints and canvases. He had also found the perfect instructor: Eduardo Paolozzi, a fellow-Brit, who happened to be teaching at a Hamburg art school. Like Sutcliffe, Paolozzi was entranced by American pop culture. In 1947, he created a collage titled “I Was a Rich Man’s Plaything,” which featured an airplane, a bottle of Coca-Cola, and a gun with the word “pop” near the barrel. Many believe that Pop Art was born in that moment.
With a sculptor’s eye, Paolozzi roamed the scrap lots and ship-salvage yards of Hamburg, looking for bits of metal. Sutcliffe followed him, eager to experiment with new media. Paolozzi began work on a thirteen-minute movie; Sutcliffe, according to his letters, started making short films. The art was flowing out of him: life studies, collages, canvases as tall as he was. “If he’d lived, he could easily have been the Beatle,” Paolozzi later said. “He was imaginative, ultra-intelligent, and he was open to everything.” In at least one edition of “Tune In,” Lewisohn includes a photograph from February 3, 1962, full of that sense of possibility. Voormann wears a Baroque ruff, as if impersonating a Rembrandt portrait; Kirchherr and Sutcliffe wear matching leather pants.
To judge from the swagger, Sutcliffe was the picture of good health. In fact, he had been suffering from a range of medical complaints. The issues began early in 1961, when he was still with the band, and when he started experiencing mysterious pains. In July, he wrote his mother that he had “a shadow” on his lungs, gastritis, and an appendix that needed removal. Near the end of January, he suffered a convulsive fit, and couldn’t attend classes. Still, he kept painting at a frantic pace.
When Sutcliffe returned to Liverpool, in the third week of February, he began to worry friends. He confessed to Lennon that he sometimes thought about jumping out of a window, and his mother later described his pain as “a bomb going off in his head.” In March, the Beatles played on the radio for the first time, and Sutcliffe soon returned to Hamburg, where the headaches got worse. They stopped on April 10, 1962, when he slipped into a coma and died in Kirchherr’s arms, on the way to the hospital.
The Beatles learned the news not long after, from Kirchherr, at the Hamburg airport, where they had landed to begin a new residency. “John went into hysterics,” she later recalled. “We couldn’t make out . . . whether he was laughing or crying because he did everything at once. I remember him sitting on a bench, huddled over, and he was shaking, rocking backward and forward.” Losing his best friend was an inexpressible loss, but there was little time to grieve. Once again, the Beatles needed to mach schau.
Three days later, on April 13th, the Beatles played an extraordinary show at the Star Club, a huge theatre with a mural of the New York skyline. Voormann witnessed a tragicomic scene as John, dressed as a cleaning woman and knocking over mike stands, worked through his grief. “It gave me shivers to watch it, but this is what clowns do, bring humor to tragedy,” he told Lewisohn decades later. “It was hilarious.”
At first, the official cause of Sutcliffe’s death was “cerebral paralysis due to bleeding into the right ventricle of the brain.” One doctor told Kirchherr that Sutcliffe’s brain had been pressing against his cranium as it grew. Later, pathologists discovered a tumor caused by a small depression in Sutcliffe’s skull, suggesting that his suffering stemmed from an act of violence.
Whatever the reason, Lennon was plunged into grief. He began picking fights and drinking too much, and for a time even lost his voice. He told Kirchherr that he wished he could have died in Sutcliffe’s place. One day, he showed Kirchherr the room where he was staying, and she described it, in her rudimentary English, in a letter to Sutcliffe’s mother: “Every piece of paper from Stuart he have stick on the wall and big photographs by his bed.” At times, Lennon swallowed his anguish and expressed a hard-bitten perspective. Trying to comfort Kirchherr, he told her, “Make up your mind, you either live or you die.”
The Beatles continued their ascent, but Sutcliffe cast a long shadow. He would appear, ghostlike, on their album covers: on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” Sutcliffe is among the scores of pictured faces, and, when Lennon released “Rock ’n’ Roll,” in 1975, he used an old photograph from Hamburg, in which his friend appears as a blur from the spirit world. Yoko Ono later told the journalist Larry Kane that “there was not a period in our lives” during which Lennon didn’t mention Sutcliffe, and that he considered them to be “soul mates.”
Even the other Beatles felt Sutcliffe’s presence. McCartney remembered that the band had a pact. “If one of us were to die, he’d come back and let the others know if there was another side,” he said. “So as Stuart was the first one to go, we did half expect him to show up. Any pans that rattled in the night could be him.”
If pans did rattle, it would go some distance toward explaining just how good the Beatles became. Their songs embraced life, but they also dared to contemplate death, and what lies beyond. “It is not dying,” Lennon insists in “Tomorrow Never Knows.” In just a few years, Sutcliffe had given a great deal to his friends—but in death he reminded them of life’s transience, and of the urgency of being true to oneself. “He would walk down the street, anywhere, and see something beautiful—the sky, a bird, anything,” Voormann said. “He was the most inspiring person I have met in all my life.”
Sutcliffe’s aura was palpable on the day that I met his sister on Long Island. The sunshine was streaming through generous skylights, and Pauline sat in a room that brimmed with her brother’s art. There seemed to be hundreds of pieces: some large, stretching from floor to ceiling, while others were small collages, with bits of Hamburg newspapers pasted throughout. In a corner, one canvas commanded special attention. At the bottom, there was a single word, “Stuart,” and below it two shapes resembling question marks. Pauline told me they were added at the last minute, as the paint was drying, by John Lennon.
Pauline invited me to visit several times, and encouraged me to go through the archive of writings in her basement. (Some of them have been reproduced by biographers, including Pauline herself, in her 2001 book “The Beatles’ Shadow.”) It was impossible not to feel Sutcliffe’s life force; it was radiating from the canvases, and the letters, and from Pauline’s face, which lit up every time she said his name. In the fall of 2019, she died, and my visits stopped. Still, she had given a great gift, by granting a backstage pass into the story. Throughout the desolation of the pandemic, it helped to play the Beatles, especially with a deeper understanding of just how close we came to never hearing them at all. If Harrison had immigrated to Australia, as he wished; if McCartney had kept his job as a coil-winder, as he nearly did; or, if Lennon and Sutcliffe had not recognized something profound in one another, this would have been a different story.
One of Sutcliffe’s mixed-media collages. Courtesy Stuart Sutcliffe Estate
A self-portrait by Sutcliffe, circa 1960.Courtesy Stuart Sutcliffe Estate
Such sadness, he was such a talent and he enabled John Lennon to bloom. His death was such a loss. Imagine what he would have done. DAF
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