Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
In 1960, the Beatles arrived in Hamburg, Germany. Ignorant, passionate and – in George Harrison’s case – young, they were at the beginning of two years that would become an important part of Beatles lore, a time when the band developed their skills by entertaining train crews.
The Hamburg stint, during which the band played over 250 gigs between 1960 and 1962, is the focus of the new album. BBC drama, Hamburg Days, which will tell how the group was beaten in appearance by singing near the famous Reeperbahn.
Jamie Carragher, who wrote the script for six episodes, told the Guardian that it will have an often overlooked aspect: the role of. Lord WoodbineThe team’s first manager and mentor will be Sherwood player Jorden Myrie.
“He is widely represented as a friend and colleague of Allan Williams,” says Carragher, referring to the club’s first manager. “Woodbine was bigger than the Beatles, and he played his own music. He knew music.”
Woodbine, real name Harold Adolphus Phillips, was a Trinidadian calypso singer whose connection is Liverpool he started when he came to Britain in 1943, during World War II, serving as a pilot in the Royal Air Force.
After the war he returned to the Caribbean before returning to the UK on the Empire Windrush; Phillips stood next to Lord Kitchener in the famous calypsonian music video London Is The Place For Me at Tilbury Dock.
“McCartney and Lennon respected him when he sang,” says Carragher. “There weren’t many people in their lives at this time who wrote their own music, and Lord Woodbine did it through the calypso tradition.”
While Kitchener went to Moss Side in Manchester, Phillips returned to Liverpool to look for his war lover, with whom he started a family in Toxteth.
Scholar and author Malik Al Nasir researched Phillips at the British Library’s After the Bassline showand show how he – and to add to the influence of black Liverpool on the team – was “removed” from history.
Phillips managed the Jacaranda club and, along with Williams, became the Beatles’ co-manager early in their career. “They used to come over to clean and collect Woodbine glasses,” Al Nasir says of Lennon and McCartney. “In return, Woodbine feeds them and helps them by teaching them music.”
One of the first songs John Lennon wrote was called Calypso Rock.
Phillips worked in construction and landscaping around Merseyside, and looked after Liverpool’s 8 clubs – a postcode that was home to the country’s oldest black community.
Some history says that Phillips initiated the move to Hamburg, driving the Beatles Germany in a battered Volkswagen. “I don’t know if Woodbine had a relationship with the Beatles,” Al Nasir said. But he carried them without anyone else; he took them to Hamburg, a place that no one expected.
When the band began to be managed by Brian Epstein, his influence and legacy were left in Beatles history. He appeared briefly in the 1994 Channel 4 pay-per-view film Backbeat, starring Charlie Caine.
In 1992, while attending a Beatles-themed concert in Liverpool, Phillips saw a photo of the band being used on stage during a tour in Hamburg but it was removed. “When I saw that it hurt me,” he said in 2000. “That was the end of the Beatles memory for me.”
Phillips died in a house fire, aged 72, in 2000. Last summer, his family unveiled a plaque from the Windrush Foundation dedicated to him. outside of Jacaranda in Liverpool, which recognized its nature.
The BBC film, which is being shot in Liverpool and Germany, was inspired by the memories of Klaus Voormann, who met the band in Hamburg as a young artist and eventually created the cover of their seventh album, Revolver, released in 1966.
Four Sam Mendes Beatles biopics are also expected in 2028, each film dedicated to a different member: Paul Mescal will play Paul McCartney, Harris Dickinson will play John Lennon, Joseph Quinn will play George Harrison and Barry Keoghan will play Ringo Starr.
