Pete Best ---The Man With The Knife In His Back (Daily Mail, 2007)

For over forty years the name Pete Best has been virtually synonymous with the notion of the man who so nearly had it all. One day he was the drummer with the Beatles; the next he wasn’t. On the very brink of fame the other three Beatles ditched him. And he never saw it coming.
And yet as we talked this week, surrounded by drums and recording equipment, and with a photograph of John Lennon staring down at us from a wall, there was not one trace of bitterness.
“What’s the point in saying I should have been this or I could have been that,” he says simply. “That’s yesterday. Forty years ago. What’s important is what’s happening today and tomorrow. When you realise that you get on with it.” 
          All of which is true, of course. Understandably, however, it took him quite a little time to realise it and “get on with it”.
          The moment Best’s life changed was when coming off stage at Liverpool’s Cavern Club on the night of August 15, 1962, the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein asked him to pop into his office the following morning. The drummer naturally assumed the meeting would be to talk about some business matter. After all, the group was on the cusp of stardom, a fame which had already begun on Merseyside.
          For two years he’d been playing with the Beatles as they’d perfected their early sound in the clubs of Hamburg, where they’d shared bedrooms, girls and squalor, and now he was seeing their fame exploding in Liverpool. They were almost there. He and they were living in a cloud of euphoria.
          He’d first met John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison three years earlier at the teenage night club, the Casbah, a place his mother, Mona, had opened in the basement of the vast Best family home in the West Derby suburb of Liverpool, and where he and I met this week. Mona had seen the future in rock music, encouraging local groups to perform there.
          And although the Cavern would later become world famous as the nursery of what was then called the Mersey Sound, Best argues, with some reason, that the Casbah was its original breeding ground. Lennon and McCartney not only played there, they decorated the ceilings, too. And when the Beatles needed a new drummer to go with them to Germany it was Best to whom they turned.
          Now, at last, in the summer of 1962 the Beatles had been offered a recording contract by EMI. Later that week they would be filmed for television for the first time, and within a month they would make their first record, Love Me Do. The world was opening its door to them.
But when he arrived for the meeting with Epstein, Best quickly saw that the manager was nervous. Finally Epstein came to the point. The other Beatles had decided that they no longer wanted him in their band. He was being sacked. Ringo Starr was to replace him.
          In a moment all Best’s dreams disappeared. He was cast out. In total shock and bewilderment, he went home and cried. From that day to this not one of the other Beatles ever contacted him again. Nor has he tried to contact them.  “We were cowards,” John Lennon would say many years later. “We got Epstein to do the dirty work for us.”
          To be pushed out of any job is painful. But this wasn’t any job. Best then had to watch from Liverpool as the Beatles became the biggest show business attraction the world has ever known, while his career with his own new little group went in ever decreasing circles.
          By the mid-Sixties he was so low he tried to commit suicide by gassing himself, only to be saved by his mother and brother Rory. “They gave me the most sensible talking to I’ve ever had in my life,” he remembers. “They asked me what the hell I thought I was doing, saying that committing suicide was what people would expect me to do because of what had happened.  But I had a beautiful wife and daughter to consider. Was I going to leave my daughter without a father?
“When I came to my senses I wasn’t so much ashamed of what I’d done, but of the fact that the full reality of what it would do to my family hadn’t hit me. And I vowed I’d never do anything like that ever again.”
          Already the roots of his life without the Beatles had been sown, not least by his wife Kathy whom he’d met at an early Beatles gig in Aintree. From behind his drums he’d watched her dancing and admired her from afar. They got together at the Beatles first fan club party at the Cavern in 1962. That was, he says, the best day of his life.
          “If she hadn’t been the type of person I thought she was she could have walked away from me when I wasn’t a Beatle anymore,” he says. “But she just said, ‘Pete, it’s you I want. Not a Beatle.”
They married the following summer when She Loves You was topping the charts, and are still happily together nearly forty four years on, and now with five grandchildren.
Shortly after his suicide attempt he decided to turn over a new leaf and give up on his stumbling career in show-business. But although he’d got good O-levels at school, and had once considered a career as a teacher, he now found he couldn’t get a job.
          “Prospective employers always thought that, once bitten by show-business, I’d be off again when some manager with a big cigar and cheque book turned up. They wouldn’t give me a chance.”
So in 1968, the year when the Beatles were dallying in the Himalayas with meditation and the Maharishi at the very peak of their fame, with the world of music and the arts genuflecting before them, their former friend and drummer found himself doing shift work in a bread factory, filling vans with sliced bread.
          “It didn’t worry me in the least,” he chuckles. “I wasn’t at all ashamed. It was good, wholesome, manual work. I was providing for my family and their security. That was all that mattered.”
A year later fancying a change he went to the employment exchange and ended up being given a job----in the employment exchange! “When I got home I told Kathy I was going to become a civil servant.”
          “You’d better buy a suit then, hadn’t you,” was her response.
He would stay a civil servant for twenty years, rising steadily through the promotional system, doing a steady nine to five job. “I was very proud of myself. I achieved success in a different channel, helping people get jobs and then being in charge of retraining programmes.”
          All the time he stayed away from his drums. One day his two daughters came home from school and said: “Dad, there’s a girl at school who says her mum told her you used to be a Beatle. Is that true?” Intent on living his new life, he’d never told them.
                    Soon he was taking up sport again which he’d loved as a boy, but neglected since he’d been a musician. While John Lennon was falling in love with Yoko Ono and climbing in and out of bags as a conceptual artist, Best was playing rugby again for Liverpool Collegiate Old Boys.  
He’s a quietly spoken, friendly guy, a Liverpool man’s man, if you like. While the other Beatles dabbled with pep pills in Germany, he never touched drugs, nor ever has, still preferring a pint in the pub with his friends and brothers.
          Central to his life has been the support of his family, and it’s an interesting one. His father came from a well known Liverpool clan of boxing promoters and met his mother, Mona, while serving in the Army in India in World War II.
Mona had been born in India, as was Pete, and when the family returned to Britain after the war she wanted a large house rather than the usual semi of the Liverpool suburbs.  One day on his way home from school her second son Rory spotted a For Sale sign in large grey detached house in a very smart, leafy road.
          “She had to have it,” says Pete. “But my dad wasn’t interested. So, unknown to any of us, she pawned all her jewellery and put it on a horse in the Derby which was being ridden by a young jockey called Lester Piggott. It was a rank outsider called Never Say Die. And it won at 33-1. With the winnings she had enough to put down a deposit and get a mortgage.
          “She was a strong, matriarchal woman, full of ambition. She made the Casbah club famous in Liverpool, and even after what had happened to me she never turned her back in the Beatles. She’d once shown John Lennon her father’s war medals, and in 1967  he got in touch with her, wondering if he could wear them for the photograph on the front of the Sergeant Pepper album. She let him have them.” 
          By 1988 Best’s Beatle past was twenty five years behind him when some old pals persuaded him to come out of retirement for a Sixties concert at Liverpool’s Adelphi Hotel. “They’d tried for years to get me back on stage,” he says, “saying there were thousands of people who came to Liverpool and wondered whatever had happened to Pete Best. But I’d always found an excuse not to do it. This time, however, I ran out of excuses and put together a little band, with my youngest brother Roag playing drums alongside me.”
The show was a huge success. “And it was nice for Mona to see her eldest boy and her youngest playing together on stage for the first time. Tragically she died of a heart attack a couple of weeks later.”
          Inevitably he was now tempted back to rock music. Where once Beatle fans hadn’t wanted to know about the Beatle who was kicked out when they could have those who were still playing, he was now an international curiosity. Taking early retirement from the Civil Service he picked up his drum sticks again and began to make records and tour, not so much in the UK, but in Germany, where he will be this weekend, Australia and America, with his “Best of the Beatles” stage show. (John Lennon would have liked that little pun.)
          “We do a lot of Sixties stuff, and, of course, Beatle songs. I don’t have a problem with that. I didn’t buy their first record, Love Me Do, but I got later ones, because, quite honestly, they were so good, so different, so brave. And their songs have stood the test of time.” 
          Piece by piece it all began to come right for him again. The Best family had always kept the big home which had housed the Casbah where it all began, and when the club was opened to the public again as a museum in 1999 three thousand people turned up to take a look. It’s now been given English Heritage status, where groups of tourists can visit on appointment, to see the John Lennon’s ceiling decorations, and the old Dansette record player the kids used to dance to.
          His biggest surprise must, though, have been the release of the Beatles Anthology CDs in 1995, when early demo recordings made by the group, with Best on drums, went on sale for the first time. Suddenly forty years on he was eligible for royalties. Exactly how much he received he won’t say, but it was a lot. When I ask him if he’s rich, he agrees. “In many ways. But I had a comfortable life before that happened. I always provided and I brought up my family safe and secure.”
He’s very happy with his life, and has good reason to be. Quite apart from the touring, with part of the house which holds the Casbah now turned into a recording studio he records local Liverpool talent and his own CDs, has a busy website to which hundreds of fans write all the time, and does a nice sideline in Casbah and Pete Best Band merchandising.
          And how does he now feel about the Beatles who hurt him so much so long ago? “Some people expect me to be cynical and bitter and twisted, but I’m not. I feel very fortunate in my life.  God knows what strains and stresses the Beatles must have been under. They became a public commodity. And John paid for that with his life, which was a big price to pay.
“I feel lucky to have known another side of John, the softer side, not the sarcastic, sardonic one he put on when he went outside the front door that the public saw. He was great when he died and if it hadn’t been for that bloody idiot Mark Chapman who shot him he’d still be alive today, and maybe even greater.
          “And you know the truth is when I was kicked out of the Beatles none of us knew what was going to happen, or how big they would become. I know we went about saying we were going to be bigger than Elvis, but I didn’t believe it and I don’t think the others did either.
“There are always changes in bands, and drummers and guitarists get pushed out and changed all the time. If the Beatles had never become what they did they may have changed their drummer again and again and again.”
          Now only Paul of the three Beatles who sacked him is still alive. Does he regret the decades of silence between them? “Well, we’re not getting any younger. We know what we’ve done and we’re not going to think any worse of each other if we had a chat now. God bless us, it was all forty odd years ago.”
          Quite why Pete Best was pushed out of the Beatles has never been fully explained. At the time some people thought it was because the others in the group were jealous of his good looks---and he’s still a handsome man. While others suspected that he was too quiet and a bit moody.
I don’t believe either story. In many ways, with his interest in sport, he was different from them. But basically my bet is it was all to do with the ruthless ambition that John Lennon would sometimes talk about later in life, the drive that got the Beatles to the peak of fame.
          Ringo may or may not have been a better drummer than Best technically. It’s a matter of opinion. But I suspect the other Beatles, always musical perfectionists, heard something in the way Ringo played that Best wasn’t giving them. They were the kings of Liverpool. But with their first recording session coming up they didn’t want to take any chances.
          And, as Best says, none of them knew where that session would take them.

Daily Mail:  April, 2007

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