Echoes of the Beatles in Hamburg<subtitle>The telling of the origin story</subtitle>

Abstract

The Beatles’ Hamburg period is important for the group’s early career in particular, and is among the most rewritten periods, not least after the group split in 1970. The aim of this article is to identify the original British Hamburg narrative from the 1960s, both its sources and changes in the stories during the decade. For this purpose, a broad review has been made of existing media material from the period. The result shows the existence of extensive 1960s source material and several contemporary narratives of the period, divided here into three categories: the ‘Liverpool narrative’, the ‘national narrative’ and the ‘official narratives’. The most primary is the Liverpool material; the most diverse is the national material; and the one with the greatest impact both in the 1960s and later is the official publications. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0.

Keywords

• the Beatles
• Hamburg
• Star Club
• Kaiserkeller
• Indra Club
• Top Ten Club