The Beatles - take them off your hands for less than a tenner

25th Oct 2011

The Beatles first manager dropped the band....for £9

Those poor old Beatles fellas. On November 15th Christies will auction a letter penned by Paul McCartney in 1960, hoping to find a drummer for his then-new band. Sometime after that, in that most famous a&r decision, 'the man from Decca' refused to sign them, figuring that guitar music had had its day. Now, to add to the glut of contrary revisionism that seems to surround the popular beat combo, their first manager has admitted that he considered them to be a bunch of untrustworthy layabouts.

"Don't touch them with a fucking bargepole, they will let you down",

is what Allan Williams told Brian Epstein, when the latter approached him in the hopes of taking over The Beatles' management. Eventually, as history records, Epstein did become their manager, on the understanding that he pay Williams the £9 in commission he was owed by the mop-tops.

Williams told Scottish newspaper The Sunday Mail: "I still lose sleep over it 50 years later. No one could have guessed The Beatles would become so famous. At that time, there were 300 groups in Liverpool who were as good or better than The Beatles. And I didn't even get my £9!"

Allan Williams tells of his decision to sell his contract with the band to Brian Epstein for £9 in a new biography by Colin MacFarlane, entitled Love Me Do.

Source: CMU Daily