The Rolls-Royce was covered with girls, crawling all over it, trying to get a hand through a window to touch John Lennon. "This is the life," said his friend, Pete Shotton, sitting inside next to the Beatle. "No it’s not," said John. "One of these days one of these fucking maniacs is going to get hold of me and tear me to death."
It was the end of 1963, the year the Beatles conquered Britain. John had invited Pete - his "best mate" since they were six years old - down to London from Liverpool to share the experience of being a star. "I knew from the old days that John didn’t actually like physical contact, even from his family and close friends," Pete remembers. "Most of all he hated strangers touching him - yet here he was, surrounded by thousands wanting to get at him."
The Beatles were in their first Christmas show at the Astoria, in Finsbury Park, north London. Each evening, after running the gauntlet of girls at the end of the performance, Pete and John would go round the clubs till the early hours. "About four o’clock one morning we were desperate for an early breakfast. The only caff we could find was one at Kensington air terminal, quite near his flat. We had eggs and bacon as we watched all the travellers arrive to fly off somewhere.
"’Let’s get on a plane,’ said John, ‘the first one that we can get on.’ I said: ’Don’t be daft, John. You’ve got a concert tonight.’ ’Fuck the concert,’ said John. ’Let’s just fly off to the Canaries for the day, have a couple of hours’ sun, then fly back.’ It was the sort of daft idea he’d always had, but now he could fulfill his daftest fantasies. So I thought, why not? John told his chauffeur to take us out to London airport. When we got there, we asked what was the first plane out - and it was Manchester." They went home to bed.
Pete returned to Liverpool after this amazing holiday but, as the Beatles collected more fame and fortune, he was drawn deeply into his friend’s new world. As boys and teenagers they had been inseparable. Pete had been one of the first Quarrymen, John’s first group. Over the coming years, John grew depressed about his international fame and became increasingly dependent emotionally on his childhood confidant.
In 1965, John generously set Pete up in business in a small supermarket on Hayling Island, near the Isle of Wight. It cost £20,000 - perhaps equal to about £200,000 today. The arrangement was that John owned it, but took no share of the profits, no rent and no interest (much later Pete paid him back the full amount). Having moved south, Pete spent many weekends with John at Kenwood, his mock-Tudor mansion on a private estate in Weybridge, Surrey. Ringo was just down the hill. George was not far away.
John preferred it when Pete visited without his wife, Beth. "We don’t want the women hanging around," he would say. One of his favourite phrases was that "women should be obscene and not heard."
"He liked to stay up late while Cyn, his wife, liked to go to bed early," said Pete. "By 1965 their marriage had settled into a state of peaceful coexistence. They had little in common, but at that stage I wouldn’t have said their marriage was unhappy. The only row I remember between them was when Cyn wanted to buy a Porsche and John was against her having such a fast car. In the end he relented.
"John didn’t do much with Julian, their son. He spoilt him with expensive toys, but he had a low tolerance level. He’d put Julian out of the room and say he was working or ’talking to Pete.’
"During my visits I got to know the other Beatles, as well. I grew very fond of George. In fact he originally wanted to put money into my supermarket, but John did it on his own. The one I found hardest to really know was Paul. He was always friendly and charming with strangers, but he played his cards close to his chest. Paul was the one Beatle who posed any challenge to John’s authority in the group. John did see him as a more or less equal. He admired and respected him for his self-discipline and all-round musical facilities - which John thought he was relatively lacking.
"But John never forgot that the Beatles had started out as his band. Sometimes it irritated him when Paul appeared to imagine otherwise. But until about 1968, I never witnessed or heard about any serious disagreement between them."
By the end of 1966, John was becoming less interested in going out. "He immersed himself in books about Christianity or the dead or Tibet or Freud, looking for new ideas and philosophies all the time. He was really bored, that was the main thing. He thought he’d become Nowhere Man, which was why he wrote the song.
"Just for amusement, for something to do, he wanted me to commit a robbery with him. He knew the Beatles could now enter any building in the world, just walk in and be welcomed. So he thought he’d steal the crown jewels. Just walk into the Tower of London and take them. ’Nobody would ever suspect the Beatles, Pete,’ he said. ’We are allowed in anywhere.’ "
One escape from the boredom of being a Beatle was drugs. "I associated drugs only with low life, not with wealthy, clever people. But after about a year, John finally talked me into it," said Pete. "After that, John and I tripped together regularly. He used to appear in my bedroom in the morning with a tray containing a cup of tea and a tab of acid. John saw acid as a godsend - a magical key to the uncharted regions of his mind. It did bring enthusiasm back into his life and inspired him to write some of his most brilliant songs."
One afternoon, Pete was idly going through one of the sacks of fan mail, which were delivered most days and generally left unread till they were chucked out. "I dipped into a sack that had just arrived and pulled out a letter which happened to be from our old school, from a pupil at Quarry Bank. He said his English teacher was getting them to read and analyse Beatles lyrics, find out the hidden meanings, what they were really all about. This started John off remembering lines we used to recite when we were at school. ’How did that dead dog’s eye song go, Pete?’ I thought for a while and remembered bits of it - about yellow matter custard, green slop pie, all mixed together with a dead dog’s eye. ’That’s it,’ said John, and he started scribbling: ’Yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye.’ And it went into I Am The Walrus. He threw in semolina, thinking of how we were forced to eat it as kids and hated it, and pilchards. When he finished, he turned to me and said: ’Let the fuckers work that one out, Pete.’ "
You can take your pick on when and why the Beatles gave up being Beatles. You could say it all began to change and go wrong when Apple first came along - when the Beatles got it into their heads that they could move on from singing and playing to changing the world. The origins were cynical and accountancy-led, a strategy dreamt up by men in suits who pointed out that the Beatles had approximately £3m lying around that was about to go in tax unless it was otherwise spent. Tax in those days was up to 90%.
But the Beatles were also thinking and believing altruistically. They wanted to make it easier for people like themselves, who had no formal training, but had natural talent and unusual ideas that should be given a chance. The first visible manifestation of the Apple concept was the Apple Boutique, which opened in Baker Street at the end of 1967. Who better to run it than Pete?
"Just pack your stuff and move to London at once," John said. But Pete didn’t really know whether he wanted to. "I loved all the toys that went with knowing John, but I liked my ordinary life in Hayling Island as well, with Beth and our son, Matthew. The Beatles were really alien to my world. I remember once they had this idea of all moving to a Greek island, along with all their friends, such as me, our wives and children. We’d live in a commune, in interconnecting houses. John drew me the plans for it. They did look at an island and might even have bought it, I can’t remember where, but the commune idea never happened."
The Beatles broke down his resistance about running the shop. His first task was to get Apple Boutique ready for opening. "It was total madness. I had four bosses for a start, giving different orders. Paul would come to the shop and tell me where he wanted a partition. Almost as soon as we had done it, John would arrive and say: ’What the fuck’s going on here?’ He’d then want the partition taken down.
"There was so much back-stabbing and status-seeking as Apple took on more and more people, often just people they’d met in a club or a gallery. Then there were the suits, pushing around their bits of paper, sending memos. Most of them didn’t have a clue. I’d come from running a little supermarket to find I was supposed to organise something that was taking on the size and complexity of ICI.
"The Beatles wanted the shop to be a beautiful place where beautiful people could buy beautiful things. They also wanted everything to be for sale. So if a customer fancied a light fitting or display case, that was for sale as well. Imagine trying to stock for that. The Beatles thought they could do anything and everything. They saw things in black and white. All very simplistic."
At the opening party, there were so many special guests and assorted gatecrashers that half the goods in the shop were trampled underfoot. The boutique was packed over Christmas. "Things were flying off the shelves as fast as we could replenish our stock. The trouble was that a lot of it was flying off without the benefit of a cash transaction. Our tuned-in, turned-on staff were loath to apprehend shoplifters - and they also had few scruples about helping themselves to stuff that caught their fancy."
After seven months, Pete had had enough. Shortly before Apple Boutique closed down, he became John’s personal assistant. His duties included driving John around, sorting his post and paying his bills, but most of all it meant being his companion.
"One night, after a few joints, a bit of LSD, we were sitting around at Kenwood playing tapes when John suddenly said: ’Pete, I think I’m Jesus Christ.’ ’You what?’ I said. ’I’m Jesus Christ. I’m back again.’ ’Oh yeah,’ I said. ’What are you going to do about it?’ ’I’ve got to tell the world who I am.’ ’They’ll kill you.’ ’That can’t be helped,’ said John. ’How old was Jesus when they killed him?’ ’I reckon about 32.’ ’Then I’ve got at least four years to go,’ said John. ’First thing tomorrow morning, we’ll go into Apple and tell the others.’ "
Next morning, Pete contacted Apple to arrange an emergency board meeting. All four Beatles turned up, plus Neil Aspinall (once the Beatles’ roadie, later Apple’s managing director) and Derek Taylor, their press officer. "Right," said John, sitting behind his desk. "I’ve something very important to tell you all. I am...Jesus Christ. I have come back again. This is my thing."
The Beatles looked rather stunned, but said nothing. "It was totally surreal," says Pete. "But nobody cross-examined him. No plans were made to announce the Messiah’s arrival. There was a bit of muttering, then silence, till somebody suggested the meeting was adjourned for lunch. "In the restaurant over lunch a man came up to John and said: ’Really nice to meet you, how are you?’ ’Actually,’ said John, ’I’m Jesus Christ.’ ’Oh, really,’ said the man. ’Well, I liked your last record.’ "
