It was 60 years ago today
It was 60 years ago today
Remembering the days when Beatlemania came to Edinburgh
“I didn’t hear anything, but I saw them.”
Mary Allan was a devoted 19-year-old Beatles fan when she watched, a few rows from the front, as the four lads from Liverpool took to the stage of the ABC Cinema on Lothian Road, writes Euan McGrory.
She was one of the lucky ones. Some had camped overnight on the street to get their hands on tickets.
Three weeks earlier, within days of tickets going on sale for the two Edinburgh gigs, The Beatles had done something unthinkable.
Five of their singles - Can’t Buy Me Love, Twist and Shout, She Loves You, I Want to Hold Your Hand, Please Please Me - took the top five spots in the American Billboard Hot 100 chart. No one had done it before, and no one has done it since.
Just weeks before, their now legendary appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show attracted a then-record 73 million viewers.
They were, quite suddenly, among the most famous faces on the planet. Eighteen months after no one had heard of them, they were a band in the eye of a storm of adulation.
Ticket scramble and a city at standstill
The press were waiting when they flew into Turnhouse (now Edinburgh International) Airport, but that was nothing to what awaited them in the city centre. With large crowds expected in the hope of catching sight of their heroes, the city police chief was taking no chances. Lothian Road, then as now one of the Capital’s busiest routes, had been closed to traffic and bus services diverted. Leave was cancelled for all officers to ensure enough hands on deck to maintain order around the Wednesday evening concerts.
By mid-afternoon, it standing room only on Lothian Road, as thousands of teenagers converged on every square inch outside the ABC in the sunshine. The pavements were packed shoulder to shoulder, the window ledges of the shops behind were taken too, with some taking the precaution of boarding up their windows just in case.
As the crowd spread across the temporarily traffic-free road, the police protected the remaining few feet of clear tarmac as a through route for the car which would, incredibly, bring the band straight to front door of the cinema. The excitement was palpable, the anticipation huge.
“It was a huge deal for me because I was a big fan. I liked it at when they were at the beginning and they were kind of unpolished,” says Mary, who recalls with a laugh how she landed one of the best seats in the house.
“It was my friend’s boyfriend’s sister who worked in a travel agent in Falkirk. They were allocated so many tickets, so all of us at work got the tickets, there were about 30 of us.
“There were other concerts (in Edinburgh at the time). During the Festival at the Palais, you could see the groups of the day like the Swinging Blue Jeans and Kenny Ball’s jazz band. But this was much bigger.
“I remember queuing up and the queue went all along Earl Grey Street, but we were quite near the front because you were allocated your seats.”
Like electricity in the air
“You knew it was something special. The excitement was tangible. You could actually feel it in the air like electricity,” recalls Marilyn Leishman, then aged 13, in Ken McNab’s excellent book The Beatles in Scotland.
“On the day of the concert it was just mayhem. I think the police had stopped the traffic in Lothian Road. It was mass hysteria, if you think about it now. Everybody was outside milling around, girls and guys. The Beatles always had amazing crossover appeal. We couldn’t believe that we were actually going to see them, that they would be right in front of us.”
Among those who had initially missed out in the scramble were two 17-year-olds, Trinity Academy students Pat Conner and Eileen Oliver, who had collected 8000 signatures on a petition calling on the Fab Four to visit the city. They had gone around factories, schools, the ice rink and Princes Street Gardens drumming up support after the band’s previous tours had visited Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen and Kirkcaldy, but not Scotland’s Capital.
The pair were rescued from their misery by two young men with spare tickets who read about their plight in the Daily Express.
Sell your chains, Lord Provost
Amid a cacophony of screams and a surge of bodies, the specially beefed-up security team at the ABC had to manhandle the Fab Four through a scrum of fans, until they could bundle them into the safety of the foyer. With considerable effort, the doors were unlocked, forced open and then locked again, before the whole exercise had to be repeated upon discovering the band’s manager Brian Epstein had been locked outside in the crush.
Now trapped inside, the Fab Four had to while away the hours until their first show, at 6.30pm, before a repeat performance at 8.50pm. For the two shows, they were reportedly paid £850.
This was becoming a routine for the young Liverpudlians, who were not much older than most of their fans. Paul and George were just 21, while John and Ringo were two years older.
Perhaps the boredom was a factor in what happened next.
Among a series of interviews and ‘meet and greets’ lined up for them in the foyer of the ABC, they were presented to Edinburgh’s Lord Provost Duncan Weatherstone. The boys were happy to ham it up for the photographers, grinning and larking around with the civic leader in his sober business suit and heavy gold chains of office.
But when Councillor Weatherstone, encouraged by reports of the Beatles new-found wealth and fame, asked about the possibility of a £100,000 donation to support the perennially cash-strapped Festival, the class warrior in Lennon rose to the fore.
In an echo of his appeal to the well-heeled audience at the Royal Variety Performance the previous November (“The people in the cheap seats, clap your hands. The rest of you, just rattle your jewellery”), Lennon’s response was priceless: “Why don’t you pawn your gold chain?”
Shake it up baby
When the band finally took to the stage, the moment was entirely surreal.
In their trademark, thin-lapelled Beatles suits and famous mop top haircuts, they walked on and immediately struck up the opening chords of their recent hit single Twist and Shout.
“Well shake it up baby now…” belted out John Lennon, but few apart from the band on stage and crew backstage could hear above the deafening sound of fans screaming.
Among those who were at the concerts, 5,400 in total across the two shows, many vividly recall how they saw the band without actually hearing them.
“I can't remember who the backup were, but when The Beatles came on I couldn't hear a thing,” Mary recalls. “I didn't hear any music, because everybody was screaming. I remember there were girls crying.
“I think I was a bit annoyed that I couldn’t hear. It was all pretty basic, just them and their instruments. They didn’t have the sort of sound systems you would have today.
“They were just starting out really.”
Looking at photographs of the night through today’s eyes, the band and in particular George Harrison, who had celebrated his 21st birthday two months earlier, look almost impossibly young.
‘We couldn’t fathom the girls behaviour at all’
Young female fans can be seen screaming, their heads thrown back, eyes shut tight and arms outstretched as if towards the almighty, or clutching their head in seeming disbelief, but still sitting dutifully in their seats.
It was the reaction of the crowd that made the biggest impression on John Gibson, then showbusiness reporter at the Edinburgh Evening News.
“You think it looked bad outside the ABC last night? You should have been INSIDE! With your earplugs, tranquilisers and sedatives, for this was Edinburgh’s craziest, noisiest audience ever,” he reported in the next day’s edition.
“Midway through, the makeshift casualty station took on a quite realistic look as four first-aid women and a man pinned down one weeping, hysterical girl. The ambulance men handed over to the police two girls who couldn’t be calmed. They were taken to a restaurant for coffee.
“When the father of one of the girls turned up to collect his daughter, both girls locked themselves in the restaurant toilet.
“Midway through the Beatles’ second performance, two elderly ladies left their seats 16 rows from the front and walked out. Said one: “The Beatles seem nice boys but we couldn’t hear them. They’d have been as well miming to their record. We couldn’t fathom the girls behaviour at all.”
The Edinburgh shows were the first of three consecutive nights in Scotland. Their hectic schedule compounded by the fact they had only finished filming on their Hard Day’s Night movie five days before.
A repeat performance
The Beatles would return to the same venue six months later for another two shows, one of which Mary also attended. Her parents, she says, didn’t have any strong opinion on The Beatles. “They thought it was a fad.”
It is interesting with historical perspective to read newspaper reports at the time of the second concerts expressing surprise that all those months on the ‘mania’ for the band had not started to dwindle.
Some rare footage shot from backstage in October shows John trying to banter with the crowd and appearing to enjoy performing as the hysteria unfolded in front of him.
In contrast to the three-and-a-half hour, 44-song set Taylor Swift brought to Murrayfield this year for her blockbuster Eras tour, the Beatles played for less than an hour. Their 10-song set being typical of touring bands at the time. It was greeted with the same screaming and hysteria as their earlier visit. Those concerts would be the last time The Beatles played in the city.
The songs most of the audience didn’t hear that night included many numbers that remain Beatles classics: A Hard Day’s Night; Can’t Buy Me Love; I Should Have Known Better; I Want to be Your Man; I’m Happy Just to Dance With You; If I Fell; Long, Tall Sally; Money, That’s What I Want; Things we Said Today; Twist and Shout.
The corner shop in Currie
There is an entertaining postscript to The Beatles first visit to Edinburgh. While Paul, George and Ringo, were driven after their last show of the night to the Roman Camp Hotel in Callander as they continued their relentless touring schedule, John stayed with his cousin Stan Parkes in Bryce Crescent, Currie, on the edge of the city. In the morning he went to the local RS McColl to buy a packet of Rothmans cigarettes, when she looked up from the counter and saw who she was serving the girl behind the counter apparently almost fainted.
