Howie Casey, Hamburg & The Beatles Pt 1

Howie Casey is a name every Beatles fan should know. He was right there at the start of it all, honking his sax as rhythm & blues got a grip on Merseyside and elbowed skiffle out of the way. It's not that The Beatles wouldn't have existed without Howie, but they would have sounded a lot different.
Howie has lived in Bournemouth since the late 1970s and shares his story in Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth.

It's adapted here and the first part goes a bit like this...

John Lennon famously said although he was born in Liverpool he grew up in Hamburg, but if one of Merseybeat’s unsung heroes had his way Lennon and his Beatles running mates may not have even made it to Hamburg.

The first Liverpool band to make the trek to the bright lights and fleshpots of Hamburg was a rockin’ R&B outfit by the name of Howie Casey & the Seniors.

Led by the imposing sax man Howie Casey, who’d honed his instrumental skills in the late-50s during three years in khaki in the King’s Regiment, the Seniors got together in 1958 united behind Howie’s love of sax-driven R&B as practiced by the likes of Little Richard, Lloyd Price and Fats Domino.

By 1960 the band featured vocalists Derry Wilkie and one Freddy Fowell, later to achieve huge fame and no small degree of notoriety as Freddie Starr, and landed a booking to replace singer Tony Sheridan at the Kaiserkeller club in Hamburg, playing at least five sets a day – 45 minutes on, 15 off – six days a week and living in filthy unlit digs behind the stage.

“We were having the time of our lives,” says Howie. “As band leader I had the only bed and slept under an old Union Jack flag I found, like I was lying in state. The other lads had to go top-to-toe on a settee and armchair pushed together. We washed in the only hand basin in the club’s ladies loo. But it was a great place for a young musician.”

Earlier that year The Seniors had auditioned with a host of other Liverpool bands for a summer season in Blackpool promoted by Larry Parnes, the manager who christened Merseybeat’s original hero, Billy Fury. Among the other acts at the audition were The Silver Beetles – the first time the word ‘Beetles’ had appeared – and Howie was unimpressed.

“Their drummer [Tommy Moore] hadn’t shown up so they asked Johnny Hutch [Hutchinson, from Cass & the Casanovas] to sit in with them. This is where the famous story comes from, that I was the man who tried to stop The Beatles being sent to Hamburg. That story has haunted me ever since. As I said, we were having a great time in Hamburg and didn’t want anyone to spoil the party. When I heard that Allan Williams had booked The Beatles I wrote to him begging him not to in case they blew it for the rest of us.

“And ever since I’ve been telling people that when I saw them again in Hamburg they were a different band – a huge improvement. I was asked about it at a Beatles festival in Liverpool recently and I jokingly said: ‘I never said that.’ Then there was a cry from the back of the hall, ‘Yes you did!’ It was Allan Williams – and I just said: ‘There speaks the voice of veracity.’ Some things you just can’t escape!”

:: Emile Ford had a number one hit with What Do You Want To Make

Those Eyes At Me For? in 1959 and was still a top draw when The Beatles supported him in 1962 just before their season at the Star Club, Hamburg. Howie and the Seniors were also on the bill

:: Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth can be ordered here at the special price of £14.95.

Tea and biscuits with Mimi

Above: Mimi at Harbour's Edge; and (below) in the lounge with John

Retired policeman Clive Garland was on duty the night Beatlemania gripped Bournemouth like a vice – 16 November 1963.

He was part of the squad detailed to escort The Beatles from Madeira Road police station to the Winter Gardens in a Black Maria police van.

Clive was simply doing his duty amid the mayhem that night - rubbing shoulders with hysterical teenagers and bewildered pop stars was all in a night’s work.

Events moved fast and as soon as the tidal wave of Beatlemania had broken on Bournemouth, the next morning it was gone.

However, Clive had not long joined the Bournemouth Borough Police Life Saving Team – and before long he was to again enter the orbit of The Beatles.

“We trained at Stokewood Road swimming baths every week and taught life saving in Schools throughout the Borough,” he remembers.

“We would train in the River Stour, at what was then Pontins holiday camp, and Bryanston School for competitions all over the south of England.

“On a couple of occasions in 1966 we were taken to Harbour’s Edge, the bungalow that John Lennon bought for his aunt Mimi in Panorama Road. We swam off the steps in Poole Harbour, which meant swimming constantly against the out-going tide, so as not to be washed out to sea.

“PC George Ferneyhough was our trainer. The team members included David Bradley, Bill Stevenson, Peter Owen, Tom Morgan, Richard Thomas, Charlie Case, John Howes and myself.

“Aunt Mimi would bring out tea and biscuits after we had finished.”

:: For the full story of The Beatles at the Winter Gardens in Bournemouth and more about how Aunt Mimi came to live by the sea at Sandbanks, see Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth. Copies available to order here at the special price of £14.95.

Yoghurt fights with The Beatles!

Photo by Harry Taylor, copyright Dave Robinson

Anglo-French singer Louise Cordet, a god-daughter of Prince Philip, toured with The Beatles, Roy Orbison and Gerry and the Pacemakers in the spring of 1963, playing the Southampton Gaumont on 20 May where the Bournemouth Times team of reporter Tony Crawley and photographer Harry Taylor caught up with her on assignment for Cinémonde magazine.

The Beatles’ star was very much in the ascendant and the tour programme had been hastily rewritten to take account of their higher profile so that they were billed as co-headliners with Orbison.

Louise remembers the tour well and shares a series of anecdotes in Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth. 

“They were really very sweet to me and we were always larking around. I would write something like ‘Fish Face’ on their mirror and they would hide from me around a corner then leap out and shower me with water. We had yoghurt fights, that kind of thing. But I had no clue who they were before I met them as I’d been on tour in France with Johnny Hallyday – who wasn’t terribly nice – and The Beatles hadn’t yet made much impact outside of the UK. So as far as I was concerned they were just another group, not at all starry, very humble. Nothing I’d seen could have prepared me for the reception given to The Beatles. I think they were a bit overwhelmed by it all.

“I had a chaperone with me because I was very young, just 18, and although they were obviously quite worldly by then after being through Hamburg and what have you, they were always very protective of me. I’m not sure why, maybe they saw I was a bit vulnerable.

“I remember sitting with John once and I don’t know that he opened up to me, but he told me about Hamburg saying people kept trying to push these substances on them but he wasn’t interested. Well, I swallowed all that in my innocence!

“He spoke about his aunt Mimi as well, saying how close he was to her and how she’d brought him up.

“I saw them a few times after the tour. I took a friend with me to see them north of London once and they asked us backstage. I saw them in Paris and Paul came to my 
brother’s 21st birthday with Jane Asher, but we sort of lost touch after that.”

:: The full interview - and many others - can be found in Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth, available to order here.