Germany: Hamburg remembers its fab past

The Indra club, where the Beatles played during their stint in Hamburg. Photo / Creative Commons image by Wimimedia user Raymond Arritt

The site of Hamburg's legendary Star Club, where the Beatles started their rise to fame, is today occupied by a Chinese takeaway, but around midnight it can still rock to Twist and Shout - even if it is played on a ukulele.

The twangy music and German-accented lyrics come from busker Stefanie Hempel, a self-confessed Fab Four fanatic who has started taking tourists on a warts-and-all Beatles tour of the city's red light district.

On her late night excursions of the Reeperbahn, she explains that when the lads from Liverpool briefly lived here in the early 1960s, they used to urinate from balconies and pump themselves full of amphetamine-based slimming pills to cope with their punishing routine of all-night gigs.

Visitors are taken to the site of the former Bambi cinema off the Reeperbahn's main street, where the Beatles slept behind the screen in bunk beds and had to wash in sinks in the ladies' toilets.

"One night Paul and John nailed a condom to the wall of the cinema where they had been given accommodation. Then they set fire to it," Hempel explains. "They got deported after that."

The 32-year-old's offbeat and irreverent look at the group's lesser-known days in Hamburg - when they dressed as leather-jacketed rockers with greased-back hair and "ducktails" rather than as mop-haired mods in collarless "Beatle Suits"- is part of Hamburg's drive to re-invent itself as a Beatles city.

Almost half a century after the band began playing its mixture of skiffle and rock 'n' roll as a minor support group at the Reeperbahn's Kaiser Keller, with Pete Best on drums and Stu Sutcliffe on bass, the city has finally discovered its Beatles past.

Ulf Kruger, a 63-year-old musician and friend of the Beatles, has been trying for decades to get the city to promote its links with the group.

"We have been very late on the uptake. But better late than never," he says.

To make amends for 50 years of Beatles amnesia, a €2.5 million ($5.3 million) permanent "Beatlemania" exhibition has opened on the Reeperbahn.

The project has been funded by the German music industry but has the full backing of the city government.

It is not hard to understand why. The famous Reeperbahn has been in decline for decades.

Sex is no longer a big earner, and there are 2000 fewer prostitutes in Hamburg than there were 10 years ago.

The industry blames the rise of internet porn and sex chat forums for the decline.

"The Reeperbahn is having to change the emphasis of what it offers to visitors," said Guido Neumann, from Hamburg Marketing.

"The place no longer attracts sailors from the port because container shipping means they spend hardly any time in harbour."

Hamburg's "Beatlemania" tells the story of how the band decided to come to the city because the pubs and clubs in their native Liverpool closed so early.

"I was born in Liverpool but grew up in Hamburg," was how John Lennon put it.

At the Indra club and Kaiser Keller, they worked up to 48 nights in a row, drank, took amphetamines and had sex with girls who, as Paul McCartney put it, "didn't all wear girdles" like they did back home.

Sutcliffe fell in love with the photographer and art student Astrid Kirchherr, but died of a brain haemorrhage three days before the band was to start at the Star Club.

And after Brian Epstein took over as manager, Ringo Starr replaced Pete Best.

The exhibition features bedrooms of 1960s teenagers, decked out with Beatle dresses, badges and posters.

Visitors can even record themselves singing a Beatles song.

Bernd Zerbin, one of the principal organisers, said it was important to reflect the whole of Beatles history and not just concentrate on Hamburg.

Paul and Ringo had been invited to visit but he had not replied.

"I don't think their managers even allowed them to see the invitation," Zerbin said.

"But it would be great if they showed up one day."

- INDEPENDENT