On a magical mystery tour

The Beatles did their best work in London. Now tourists can cross the street to see where, writes MARK GRAHAM.

When Richard Porter goes to work, he tramps London's streets with a ghettoblaster set at "window-rattling" volume. Following behind, in a noisy and colourful cavalcade, are people of differing nationalities, ages and professions.

The group have one shared interest: a fascination with the most enduring pop group the world has known. Some 30 years after their first hit, the allure and charm of the Beatles lives on, undiminished by subsequent musical fads and fashions which have come and gone.

Stories surrounding the Fab Four also survive, relayed by Porter on his twice-weekly walking tours of the London pubs, clubs, houses and recording studios associated with the group from Liverpool.

Porter, president of the London Beatles Fan Club, began pottering around the sites as a hobby, showing friends and visiting Beatles aficionados the art gallery where John Lennon met Yoko Ono and the register office where Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman.

When numbers began to grow, he began charging for the walkabouts, quit his bank job and now enjoys a comfortable living from the hobby-cum-career.

So vast is the fan's store of knowledge that he has out-smarted scores of other similarly trivia-minded fans to take the title of Beatles Brain of Britain. But even his memory is fallible when it comes to more obscure facts: he could not name the date John Lennon passed his driving test.

"I do all the research for the tours myself," says Porter. "I've got hundreds of Beatles books, videos, records and CDs. Compared to working in a bank it is interesting. I try to change the tours and tell different stories to keep it interesting for me as well.

"I first became interested in the Beatles when EMI re-released all their singles at the same time in 1976. I thought it was better than the music at the time; I had just been through a glam rock phase. I bought the earlier music - I Wanna Hold Your Hand and She Loves You - and then went on to the more mature music. I matured like the Beatles did."

The interest developed into a quest for more information on the personal history of John, Paul, George and Ringo. Books and magazines are stacked in every spare space in the guide's two-bedroomed apartment.

On a sunny day, up to 40 people gather for a stroll down musical memory lane, starting and finishing at strategic Beatles-related points. The mid-week tour starts at Baker St tube station, departure point for the ill-fated Magical Mystery Tour some three decades earlier.

The Mystery Tour was a barmy scheme even in the drug-induced daftness of the 60s. The bus taking the Beatles and assorted hangers-on turned up late - it was still having its psychedelic paint-job - which proved to be merely a harbinger of the disaster to come. Critics gave acid-penned reviews to the subsequent movie of the tour, a mind-numbingly boring series of self-indulgent vignettes.

Porter admits as much, but is not one to stay too long on the denigration trail. After pointing out Madame Tussaud's (with its waxwork dummies of the Beatles), it is off to the scene of an earlier Beatles movie triumph, Marylebone Station, where the opening sequence for A Hard Day's Night was filmed. The suburb is a fertile area for students of Beatle stories and anecdotes - a nearby court is where John Lennon earned his troublesome drugs conviction.

Remarkably few buildings have changed, including the genteel townhouse where John Lennon and Yoko Ono posed naked in the window for an album-cover shot. Residents of this house, and other landmarks along the way, seem indifferent to the attentions of passing tourists. Maybe they were Rolling Stones fans at the time.

To pass away the longer walking stretches, Porter switches on the portable sounds, playing snippets of rare, often bootlegged, material from the Liverpool lads.

Nuggets of information about those crazy and creative early years comes in fast and furious spurts from Porter. He talks so much during the first part of the stroll through Beatle-land that a parched-throat refreshment stop is essential. Where else but the Devonshire Arms, the pub where the pop stars downed their favourite tipple of scotch and coke?

Suitably refreshed, the guide begins a question-and-answer session with his tourist charges. A typical group would have a teenage Japanese student, a middle-aged German couple, an Australian backpacker, an American working in London and Brits from the provinces.

It was through a similar tour that Porter met his wife, American Esther Shafer who comes from Texas.

"She was the third member of the fan club, and the first overseas member," Porter says proudly. "We now have 550 in the club from all over the world - 30 different countries - ranging in age from 8 to the mid-40s."

"When I first started doing the tours, I had a group of East Germans who had spent all their life-savings to come and visit Beatles sites. This is before the Berlin Wall came down. When they saw Abbey Rd, they burst into tears."